Chapter 56: Master Swordsman I

He was crossing the lower plaza that morning to go and argue about some drawings with the master smith when he stopped at the edge of the training ground, and decided to see what all the fuss was about.

He never made it to the smith.

Up behind him, on the roof of the old halls, a long black shape settled its chin on its paws and watched the whole thing happen, which was a thing people had stopped remarking on some time ago.

Haaland ran it well. Hiccup would give him that much even from a distance.

The sellsword walked the front of the line with a wooden sword of his own resting back against his shoulder. Grey at the temples, moving upright, and with purpose.

He corrected.

He would stop at a boy, tap the inside of a wrist with two fingers until it dropped, watch the next cut, grunt, and move on.

He had made every one of those swords himself. Cut out of spare timber in the evenings, sanded down, weighted with lead in the pommel so they swung like the real thing.

Hiccup was fairly sure Haaland loved those stupid wooden swords more than he loved some people.

The lesson that day was footwork.

By which Hiccup meant that the lesson was always footwork.

They practised the same few cuts, one after another, in series of a hundred each.

It was boring.

Relentlessly boring.

And like most boring and relentless things, it was working, and Hiccup could not have said why that annoyed him.

He sat down on a stone bench.

To watch Haaland teach, he told himself.

And that was not nothing, because whatever the man had been before the collar, it was all still in him.

Twice that morning he stepped into the line to show a cut properly, and both times the whole ground stopped to look.

There was no wind-up to it. No flourish, nothing you could see coming and nothing worth watching afterward. The blade simply arrived at the exact height of a man's throat and stopped there as though it had struck something solid, and the air made a short flat sound where it had been.

Then he would go back to walking the line as though nothing had happened.

That was about half the truth of why Hiccup was sitting there.

The other half was standing in the first row with her hair tied back and a wooden sword held wrong.

He had promised himself he was not going to do this.

His eyes went to the back of Emerald's neck the way water finds the lowest point in a room. To the loose strand that had come out of the tie and stuck to her skin. To the line of her shoulders as she brought the blade up, and the shift of her hips as she stepped through the cut.

And lower than that, and he stayed there a great deal longer than a decent person would have.

Then, because he was apparently determined to make it worse, he thought about the kiss.

He had not asked for it. She had taken it off him at a ship's rail and walked away pleased with herself and had not mentioned it once since. Not in any way at all.

He had thought about it roughly every day.

His eyes went up to her mouth.

What it would be like to have that again.

He hauled himself out of it.

Stop.

And stayed longer than he meant to anyway.

The sun cleared the plaza wall. Then it cleared the roofline behind it. The lesson went from footwork to the same four cuts and back to footwork again, and he was still sitting on that bench, and the smith was still waiting.

Long enough that Haaland noticed him.

Which was the beginning of the entire disaster.

"You are welcome to join us, boy."

Haaland did not turn round when he said it.

"Gods know the back row could use the motivation."

A few of the younger ones giggled.

Emerald did not.

She turned to look, and that was somehow worse.

Hiccup should have smiled and gone on with his day. Instead the words came out of him, and they came out honestly, which was the part he would think about afterward.

He was not sneering.

It was that, after most of a morning watching them do the same four things at the same four speeds, he was genuinely and stupidly puzzled, and the question arrived in his mouth before he had any chance to inspect it.

"Does it actually help? Any of that?"

He was loud enough that the swinging stopped.

Haaland turned to look at him, and the friendliness went out of his face by degrees.

"I mean." Hiccup gestured vaguely at the rows, the sticks, the whole enterprise. "It is good. It is a fine thing. And you would put up a fight. I am sure of it. Some sort of a fight."

He was still trying to be kind. That was the worst part.

"But if anybody ever does come over that water, it is not going to be a fair fight either way. You have got a Night Fury sitting on those cliffs, and you have got me. I am only saying that nobody is ever going to have to." He waved the stick that was not in his hand. "Do very much."

The training ground went quiet.

Not the ordinary quiet of a lesson pausing.

The other kind.

The specific, total, ringing quiet of a place in which a very stupid somebody has just insulted every single person standing in it, at once.

Somewhere in the first row, Emerald's eyebrows had climbed most of the way up her forehead.

Hiccup was the last person in that plaza to hear what he had just said.

It reached him about half a second after it reached everybody else.

Oh.

Oh, that was bad.

To his enormous credit, Haaland did not take offence. Or at least did not show any.

He simply smiled.

The friendly, unbothered smile of a man who has spent a whole life dealing with remarks of that kind.

A wooden sword landed at Hiccup's feet.

Clack.

"Spar with me, then," he suggested pleasantly. "You can show us all first-hand how little the training matters."

Hiccup's first honest instinct was to say no.

I did not say training does not matter.

Haaland had bent his words. Why, though? To needle him? To push him into this?

Never mind why.

Hiccup's eyes went round the crowd that was already gathering.

Then back to Haaland.

The man was wearing a casual grin, and his stance was solid and wide, and there was no doubt anywhere in him.

Hiccup frowned.

He did not want to fight Haaland. Not because he was afraid of him. He was not.

He could overpower the man in every way that mattered and both of them knew it perfectly well.

Haaland was not a fool.

Which was exactly why he hesitated. There was no version of this that ended well. He would either lose, which was absurd, or he would beat a veteran swordsman in front of his own students, prove nothing at all, and cost one of his best allies his standing.

And then there was the other thing. The one he did not particularly want to look at directly.

He had wanted this for a while.

Not the crowd. Not the humiliation waiting on either side of it. Just the fact of it. The bare question of it.

Because in two years he had never once put himself against somebody who actually knew what they were doing. Everything he had ever fought had been slavers and pirates, men who swung wild and died surprised, and there was a question sitting underneath all of that which had gone two winters without an answer.

Not now. Not here. Not in front of every person on this island.

He opened his mouth to decline.

He had the apology half built. It was an improvised apology, but it would do the job.

Then he saw her.

Emerald, watching.

Arms crossed. Wearing that look she got, the one that was one part go on then and two parts I dare you, and no help whatsoever to a man trying to make a decision.

For a heartbeat her green eyes met his.

And Hiccup's gaze went exactly where it had been going all morning, entirely without his permission, and stayed there a beat longer than was defensible.

Damn you. Focus.

He shook his head and picked up the sword.

Let it be known, and let nobody pretend otherwise.

He did not accept out of duty, or out of any noble instinct whatsoever.

He accepted because part of him genuinely wanted to cross blades with a man who knew what he was doing, and because a much larger and much stupider part of him wanted to show off.

He was eighteen.

And the girl who had taken his first kiss off him was standing in the front row with her arms folded, watching, and he had not managed to think about anything else since the moment he sat down on that bench.

It was idiotic.

He was going to do it anyway.

He rolled the wooden sword once around his wrist, the way he had seen fighters do it, learned the weight of the thing, and stepped into the ring.

The ring made itself.

Nobody was told to do anything. The crowd simply backed off the paving until there was a rough circle of open stone, and the children got pushed to the front of it, and somewhere behind them a boy was already running up the hill to fetch people who would want to see this.

Haaland took the far side and did not settle into anything at all.

That was the first thing Hiccup noticed. The man simply stood there. Weight easy, blade held low and off to one side, for all the world like somebody waiting on a pot to boil.

Hiccup did the opposite. He got his feet under him, squared his shoulders, and tried to remember every single thing he had spent the morning watching.

"Whenever you like," said Haaland.

Neither of them moved.

The wind came across the plaza and stirred the dust in the seams of the paving. A hundred people held very still. And the pair of them looked at each other across the open stone for what felt like a great deal longer than it was.

Fine.

He had decided to play.

So he would play to win.