Chapter 57: Master Swordsman II

Seven paces of open stone. A hundred people not making a sound.

There was no step.

That was the part people argued about afterward, and they were right. There was no step.

He went from standing perfectly still to being in the air, knees tucked up under him, the whole distance eaten in one go, and the sword came round in a wide flat arc with everything he had behind it.

Haaland moved at the last possible instant.

Not far. A hand's width, perhaps two, his head going back off the line of it, and the wooden edge went past his face close enough to catch him across the forehead.

Hiccup landed hard and the stone cracked under his heel.

And when he came round, the thing on Haaland's face was not fear.

It was surprise. Plain, honest, professional surprise. The look of a man who has taken a careful measurement and just found out he took it wrong.

He read that. He read it perfectly and he still barely made it.

He did not give him the second one.

He knew he was overextended. His whole right side was hanging open and any competent swordsman would have put a blade through it. But Haaland had spent two feet of ground on not getting his skull opened, and two feet was two feet.

By the time the man could use the opening, there was no opening.

Hiccup came off the landing straight back into him. Five cuts, as fast as he could make his arm travel, faster than anything on that island had ever moved in daylight.

The first was met.

So was the second, and the third, and by the fourth he understood something he did not like at all.

The sword was not arriving to meet him. It was already there. It got where it was going before he did, every single time, sitting in the path and waiting for him like a man holding a door.

He broke off and took three steps back.

His chest was not even moving. That was not the problem.

Technique.

That was the whole of it.

Not strength, not speed, not any of the things he had been quietly leaning on since he came up out of that tree. The man's craft was of such a level that anything Hiccup did with a blade was going to be answered before he had finished doing it.

The quicker I finish this, the better.

Because that was the other half. Every second this went on was another second of Haaland learning him.

So I have to do something the technique does not teach.

He dropped.

Low, almost down to the stone, weight forward over the front foot, sword pulled back and lying flat along his waist. Every line of him said exactly what the first attack had said.

Here it comes again. The big one.

Haaland read it the way he was supposed to and gave ground, sliding back out of range, resetting his guard high.

And Hiccup slashed anyway.

From five paces away. At nothing.

For about a quarter of a heartbeat the sellsword's face went completely blank.

Why is he cutting? I am nowhere near him.

Then the sword left Hiccup's hand.

It crossed the ring as a smear. There was no arc to follow and nothing to track. Only a line of noise, and a weight arriving at the height of a man's chest with everything an inhuman arm could put behind it.

And the one thing in the world quick enough to answer it was a lifetime of somebody else's instinct.

Haaland's blade came up.

The sound went off the walls of the plaza like a tree hitting the ground. Somebody screamed. The thrown sword bounced off the parry and went up end over end, high, turning in the light.

Hiccup was already under it. He put a hand out as it came down and the grip slapped into his palm.

And for a moment he simply stood there, astonished.

He blocked that.

How did he block that?

The answer was that Haaland had not blocked it and stopped.

He had blocked it and come.

He was inside the distance before Hiccup's fingers had finished closing.

And here is the thing about a man who has done one motion ten thousand times.

It does not look fast. It looks early.

Every cut was clean and small and arrived out of somewhere Hiccup was not covering. The feet never crossed and never scrambled, and the whole weight of the man went down into the stone and came back up through the blade, so that the blows landing on Hiccup's guard had no business at all coming off a man that size.

They hit like his own.

Parry. Parry. Parry.

Step back. Step back.

He was not thinking any more. He was reacting, and his reactions were the fastest thing on that island, and they were barely, barely keeping up.

He got half a beat of room and decided to take distance, because distance was his, because nothing alive could stay with him if he simply left.

Haaland's eyes flashed.

The last cut came in high on his left and Hiccup moved to cover it and it was not there. It had never been going there.

The blade turned over somewhere in the middle of its own travel, went round the outside of his guard, and arrived on the other side of his neck.

He never saw it.

That was the whole reason it hurt.

Nothing in him was set. Nothing was tensed. None of the hard thing he did without ever being able to ask for it had been done at all, because he had been busy defending a cut that did not exist.

The noise was enormous.

It was not the noise of a stick hitting a person. It was the flat splitting crack of a tree going over, and it went out across the lower plaza and came back off the far wall, and Haaland's sword broke in his hands and half of it spun away into the crowd.

Hiccup's vision went white, and then grey, and then came back.

He was still standing. He had not moved his feet.

And Haaland was two steps away, heaving, holding a hand's length of splintered wood, with blood running out of his hairline and down along the side of his nose.

Up on the roof of the old halls, the black shape came off the stone.

Teeth already out. Nothing decided about it and nothing thought through, only a thing moving very fast toward the man who had just struck the other half of itself.

It did not get further than the parapet.

Hiccup lifted one hand behind him, palm flat, the way you quiet a dog at a door. He did not turn round to do it. He did not look up.

Toothless stopped.

Then he lay down on the parapet the way a dog lies down when it has been told to and does not agree, front paws over the edge, every line of him saying that this was noted and would be returned to later.

Half the crowd had turned to look up at him by then. What they saw was a dragon settling on a roof.

They had missed the other thing entirely.

Nobody made a sound.

All around the edge of the ring there were people standing with both hands clapped over their mouths who did not appear to know they had put them there. A woman near the front had picked her child up off the ground at some point without once looking away.

Emerald had not moved at all.

She had seen him fight before. Once. Only once, on a beach at night, in the middle of screaming and torchlight and running, where she could not have said what was happening even if she had wanted to look at it.

And afterward she had told herself she understood what he was.

She had not understood anything.

Because this was full daylight, seven paces in front of her, and she had watched every part of it and caught perhaps half.

It was not that he was fast. She had known he was fast. Everybody knew he was fast.

It was that both of them had been thinking at that speed.

Somewhere inside those few seconds a man had lied to another man with his shoulders and been believed, and had been lied to in return, and had answered it, and every one of those decisions had been made and acted on in less time than it takes to say a single word out loud.

Her arms had come uncrossed. She did not remember doing it.

That is what he is, she thought.

And then, immediately behind it, with a thump under her ribs that she was going to be extremely cross about later:

And he still lost.

Afterward, when people argued about it, and they argued about it for weeks, the only thing they all agreed on was the count.

From the moment Hiccup left the ground to the moment Haaland's sword broke, the whole of it had not lasted ten seconds.

The training ground did not cheer.

By then it was not only the training ground. Word had gone up the hill the instant that first sword landed at his feet, and the steps and the terrace walls above the plaza had filled while nobody was watching them, and not one of them made a sound either.

Hiccup's eyes were streaming.

He could not help it and he did not try to hide it. The whole left side of his neck had gone numb and hot at the same time and the pain was arriving behind that in slow waves, and his eyes watered the way anybody's eyes water when they are hit hard enough in the wrong place.

He let the wooden sword drop out of his hand. It clattered on the stone.

Then he raised both arms, open handed, and held them there.

No sulking. No second attempt.

He stepped back out of the ring, and the crowd very quietly rearranged itself around him.

Haaland spat on the ground.

It landed close. Closer than a man spits by accident.

He did not say anything for a moment. He looked down at the broken half of the sword still in his fist, and then across at the other half of it lying on the paving where somebody had tossed it back, and he turned the stub over once in his hand.

"My whole life," he said.

His voice was not raised. That was somehow much worse than if it had been.

"My whole life I have been doing this, and no man has ever thrown his sword at me."

He wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and looked at what came off on it.

"In a lesson."

He let that sit exactly as long as he wanted to.

"You want to know if it does anything. Fine. I will tell you what I saw."

He came two steps closer.

"You are faster than me. You are stronger than me. You are tougher than me by so much that it is not a joke. I could stand here and hit you until my arms came off and you would bruise about as much as that wall."

He pointed the stub.

"All of that is true, and none of it is worth a thing, because you do not fight, boy. You maul."

Somebody in the fourth row made a strangled noise and turned it into a cough.

"You swing where a man was. You put everything you have into one blow and then you pray, and when the praying stops working you throw the blade. You have no guard. You have no idea where your own arms are from one heartbeat to the next. Half of what you did just now would have got you killed by a competent drunk."

He let that sit too.

"And it has worked. Every single time. For exactly one reason."

He looked round the ring, at all of them, and then back.

"Nothing better than you has come along yet."

He raised the broken stub again.

"That is not a compliment. That is a warning. I am a decent hand who was too stubborn to die young and that is the entire sum of what I am. I am not the best blade alive. I am not in the first hundred. There are men out there, and I have met two of them, who would take me apart the way I have just taken you apart, and they would do it slowly, to make the point of it."

He lowered his arm.

"One of those men is going to be standing across from you one day. And on that day, everything you are is going to buy you nothing but a longer time to be embarrassed in."

It was a hard thing to say to somebody who could have taken his head off with an open hand.

Hiccup did not argue.

He did not do the sullen inward thing that eighteen-year-olds do when they have just been beaten in front of a girl, either.

Mostly because Haaland was right about the sword.

That was the piece sitting in his stomach like a swallowed stone, and it was not the losing.

He had thrown a weapon, hard, at a man's chest, in a lesson, in front of children.

And if a lifetime of somebody else's instinct had been half a beat slower, he would have killed one of the four people on this island he could not do without.

Haaland turned to go.

He got about three steps. The blood had reached his jaw by then and was starting down his neck, and he was not walking the way he had walked into that plaza an hour ago.

"Haaland."

The man stopped. He did not turn round.

"I am sorry."

Something in the way it came out made half the plaza lift their heads, because it did not sound like a boy apologising to a teacher.

"The sword. I should not have thrown it. There is no version of that which was not stupid, and I could have killed you, and I would like you to forgive me."

He swallowed.

"Please."

And then Hiccup bowed. Properly. From the waist. In front of every single person on that island.

Haaland turned round.

He stood there a long time. Long enough that it grew uncomfortable, long enough that people began finding things to look at near their own feet.

And the whole while he was not looking at the bow at all.

He was looking at the boy's face.

Because the apology was nothing. He had been handed a hundred apologies in his life, most of them by frightened men who wanted something to stop.

It was that this one meant it. Completely, plainly, with no part of himself held back and nothing at all kept in reserve.

"Get up," Haaland said at last.

Hiccup straightened.

"You were fighting off instinct." The sellsword worked his jaw once. "That is not an excuse for it. It is the reason for it, and the reason is the thing that has to be fixed."

He breathed out through his nose.

"I forgive you."

Only then did Hiccup ask for the other thing.

"Teach me."