Chapter 58: Master Swordsman III

Haaland blinked.

"What?"

"Teach me."

He said it again, and it came out flat and certain and without any of the theatre of a boy asking a favour.

"Properly. The way you teach them. From the beginning, the little steps, all of it, every morning."

A beat.

"I have been standing over there for two years thinking I did not need it. Today I found out how wrong I was. I would rather find that out here than on the day one of your two men steps off a boat."

In all the years he had spent putting frightened boys in the dirt, Haaland had been asked a great many things by people he had just beaten.

For a rematch. For an excuse. For it to be explained to everybody watching that it had not really counted.

Not once had anybody asked to be beaten again, more thoroughly and more often, starting immediately.

He looked at him a very long moment.

Then he bent, picked the other half of his broken sword up out of the dirt, and tucked both pieces under his arm.

"Be here tomorrow when the sun breaks," he said. "Do not be late."

And he walked off up the hill without another word, bleeding into his collar, and left a hundred people standing on the stones with nothing left to do.

He barely slept, and he did not much mind.

His neck had come up in the night.

That was the part he kept returning to, and it had very little to do with the pain.

He did not bruise.

Two years on this island of rock and ice and falls that ought to have broken something out of him, and he had come away from every one of them unmarked. Haaland had stood in front of a hundred people not six hours ago and said so out loud. I could stand here and hit you until my arms came off and you would bruise about as much as that wall.

He put two fingers to it, walking down through the dark.

The whole left side of his throat was thick and hot under the skin, a hand's width of it running down from under his ear, and when he pressed on the place the ache went up into his jaw and stayed there.

It will be purple by full light.

And there is nowhere on a man to hide a thing like that.

He found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he did not particularly want to.

Toothless watched him go from the wall and did not come down, which was itself a statement, and had been a statement since yesterday afternoon.

He came down through the dark streets a good while before there was any light in the sky, and the whole way down he was running the fight again.

Not the ending. The beginning.

The wide swing. He had left his entire right side hanging open on that first attack and had not even known he was doing it. Haaland had seen it. The only reason the whole thing had not finished there was that the man had been forced to spend his two feet on not getting his skull opened.

I would have died.

Against anybody good I would have died inside the first second, and I would not have understood why.

The training ground was empty when he got there. He was the first.

He went to the rack Haaland kept against the wall and took a wooden sword off it. And then, after a moment, one of the little round shields the children used.

Then he crouched down on the cold paving with the sword across his knees and stayed there a while.

I grew arrogant.

It was not a comfortable thought and he made himself hold on to it anyway.

Two years of nothing on this island being able to hurt him. Two years of every problem in front of him being a thing he could lift, or outrun, or simply tear apart, until somewhere along the way he had stopped noticing that he had quietly begun to think of himself as the strongest man alive.

I thought myself the strongest man alive.

And a man with grey in his beard and a stick took me to pieces in under ten seconds without once having to hurry.

So I was wrong.

He turned that over.

And the strange thing, the thing that surprised him, was that underneath the sting of it there was something that felt almost like relief.

Because if he had been wrong about that, then there was room. There was a great deal of room above where he was standing, and somebody had just shown him the exact shape of it.

He gripped the sword.

Then how much better can I get?

He stood up.

There was something in his face that had not been there the morning before, and it was not anger and it was not pride. It was humility, and it had teeth in it.

He set his feet the way he had watched two dozen children set theirs.

And he started on the cuts. The same four, over and over, badly, alone in the dark.

Haaland came through the archway exactly as the first light hit the top of the wall, punctual as he had been every morning for months.

He stopped when he saw him.

He took in the sword, and the shield, and the four bad cuts, and said nothing at all for a while.

The silence between them was not the silence of the day before. They had forgiven each other. That did not mean it was gone.

Hiccup stopped mid-cut.

"You do not carry a shield," he said.

Silence.

Haaland walked past him to the rack, set his own sword down on it, and took his time about doing it.

"I have not carried a shield in many years."

That was all. He did not offer why.

Hiccup lowered the wooden blade.

"Should I?"

Haaland looked at him a long moment, and what came out was not flattery, and it was not the warmth of the man who used to elbow him at the fire.

It was the flat professional observation of somebody who had spent nine seconds reading him like a page.

"No."

He came over and scuffed a short line in the dust with the side of his boot.

"Everything you did yesterday was forward. Attack, attack, over-commit, attack. And when that ran out of road you threw the blade, because throwing the blade was still forward."

He looked up.

"Not once did you defend. Not for a heartbeat. And with what you are, you may genuinely never need to. A shield is for a man who expects to be hit and expects it to hurt. Neither of those is true of you."

He shrugged. It was not a friendly shrug.

"So do not fight your nature. Arm it."

He held up two fingers.

"Two blades. No shield. No guard you are never going to use. Nothing held back. Everything forward, in both hands, which is what you were going to do anyway."

He lowered them.

"We teach technique to your instinct, instead of teaching your instinct to sit down and behave. It will take years, and you are going to hate most of them."

Hiccup looked at the two fingers.

He tried, with genuine effort, to keep his face professional and neutral. The face of a serious young man weighing a serious tactical recommendation.

He failed completely.

The grin got out before he could stop it. Wide and delighted and eighteen years old. The grin of a boy who has just been handed a second sword and told that yes, he is allowed to use both at once.

Haaland saw it.

Something in his shoulders came down about half an inch, which on that man was practically an embrace, and he let out the sigh of somebody who suspects he has just made his own life considerably harder.

"Every morning," he said. "From now on. Dawn, here, with the children. And you will do the little steps like everybody else, giant."

He knocked the dust off his hands.

"And you will keep losing to me for a good long while yet. Get comfortable with it."

He was right about that.

It would still be true in a year. It would still be Haaland putting him in the dirt long after Hiccup could have flattened him with a shoulder, because strength was not the thing being taught, and both of them understood that now.

What neither of them knew yet, standing on cold paving with the fog burning off the plaza around them, was that the morning they had just agreed on would still be running three years later.

Except that by then it would take Haaland and five of his best men. Six blades against Hiccup's two, every single dawn, just to give him a real fight.

That was a long way off.

For now there was a stick, and a line scuffed in the dust, and the beginning of it.

The rest of them came in not long after, in ones and twos out of the grey, rubbing their hands and stamping the cold out of their boots.

Then they saw who was standing in the back row with a wooden sword in his hand, and the whole line went quiet.

And then it did not.

They swung their swords for hours that morning.

Word of the duel had gone through the settlement overnight the way only that kind of word travels, and every person who turned up had heard it and half of them had seen it, and not one of them needed telling twice to keep a guard up.

Children who had spent the last month inventing reasons to be somewhere else were in the front row with their jaws set.

By the middle of the morning some of the smaller ones could not lift their arms above their shoulders.

And Hiccup did not stop.

That was the part they all noticed. He did not tire, so he had no reason to stop, so he simply did not. When the lesson broke up and the line scattered he was still out on the paving doing the same four cuts he had started at dawn.

Badly at first. Then less badly.

Some of them stayed to watch.

A few of them, without saying anything about it to anybody, picked their swords back up.

Emerald caught up with him afterward, on the path back up toward the hall, and fell into step beside him with her hands clasped behind her back and an expression of enormous innocence.

"Hey. That whole business yesterday." She trailed off. "That was so stupid of you."

Her eyes had gone to his neck before she said a word of it.

They had gone there the moment she fell into step with him, and they went back twice more while she was busy examining the path, because the mark had come up the colour of a storm coming in and it sat on him like something that had no business being there.

She had watched a hundred men get hit and heal in the yards of a dozen owners.

She had never once seen a bruise on him.

She did not ask about it. Asking about it would have meant saying out loud that she had been afraid, standing seven paces away with her arms uncrossed, and she was not going to be doing that today.

Wonderful. She has come all this way. Not to ask whether I am hurt. Not to say anything about the fight. Only to enjoy herself.

He rolled his eyes.

"I meant the falling over," she went on. "You did that beautifully. Very fast. I have never seen anybody lose so athletically."

"He is good," Hiccup said, with a dignity he did not entirely possess. "He is properly good. You should be proud to have a teacher like that."

"Mm."

She walked a few steps. The corner of her mouth was doing something dangerous.

"And here I was thinking the whole point was that the little steps don't help. That we've got a Night Fury, and we've got you."

"I may," Hiccup allowed, "have overstated my position."

"You may have."

She let a silence go by, unhurried, savouring it.

"You know, for a man who thinks the training ground is pointless, you picked a strange moment to want to prove yourself. Right there. In front of everyone."

A beat.

"In front of the first row."

Hiccup's mouth opened.

"Because I could have sworn," Emerald went on, gently, mercilessly, examining her fingernails, "that before all the athletic falling, there was a moment where you looked at me. And you did not look at my face."

The path was suddenly very interesting.

The stones of it. The little weeds between the stones.

A truly fascinating stretch of paving.

He did not have an answer.

Which was, of course, the entire answer, and she knew it, and she was enjoying it more than any person has ever enjoyed anything.

Fine. Two can play at that.

So he did the only thing available to a man in that position, which was to stop trying to win the argument he was losing and start a completely different one.

"Thank you. Emi."

He said it flatly, without looking at her.

Emerald stopped walking altogether. Her eyes went wide for a heartbeat.

Then an evil smile.

"Is that my new name, you dragon-hearted bastard? What is this, have you fallen for me already?"

She laughed.

He frowned, and kept looking straight ahead.

"Yes."

The laugh cut off.

"You have not asked yet," he went on, in the calm voice of a man reading out a list of stores, "but yes. I will marry you. Children, the lot of it."

And then he turned and looked her straight in those green eyes.

"However many you want, my darling."

Ah.

Somewhere in the middle of all that they had both stopped walking, and he had been too caught up in her eyes to notice how little space was left between their faces.

Close enough to count the freckles across her nose. Close enough that he could hear her heart going, and it was going like something small and cornered.

Her whole face had gone red, and it was going redder. He had seen drunk men less red.

Wait. Did I overdo it?

Emerald opened her mouth.

Nothing whatsoever came out of it.

She shut it again, turned on her heel, and set off up the hill at a pace that was not quite running.

Hiccup fell in beside her.

Neither of them said one single word the rest of the way up. It was the longest and most excruciating stretch of path either of them had ever walked, and somewhere around the halfway point Hiccup realised he was grinning like an idiot and could not make himself stop.

He had lost a fight. He had been struck across the neck hard enough to see white. He had been beaten thoroughly and publicly in front of the entire island, and promised two swords for his trouble.

He found that he did not mind nearly as much as he had expected to.