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lotesseyay fic!
We murmur first moonwords
How To Train Your Dragon/The Secret of Kells crossover
{unlikely friendship, secrets, and culture clash}
Summary: Brendan finds a Viking boy with a broken metal foot on his doorstep; geek solidarity conquers all.
3913 words, general
at the AO3
On a dark and gusty night, a few years after the fall of Kells, Brendan opens the door of his cell one night at the summons of a feeble knock. Lying in an ungraceful heap on the doorstep, a skinny boy of about his own age looks up through shaggy hair with grass-green eyes. The boy's right leg is made of metal, his body cut off above where the knee joint ought to be, and Brendan is no kind of metalworker but it looks to him like it's been damaged somehow, bent and twisted.
The other boy smiles up at him, a sad little half-smile. “So is there any chance I could come in from the cold for a little while?” he asks. His voice is a warm light tenor, level, with a pleasant rasp dragging at its edges. Pangur comes out of the cell and trills, happily winding around the stranger and getting cat fur up his nose. The stranger laughs and protests, trying to keep his airways clear but not throwing the animal off.
“Who are you?” Brendan asks him.
“Um,” the stranger says. “I'm not sure I ought to tell you my name. I don't think we're exactly on the same side here.”
Brendan looks at him more carefully. He seems too small to be one of the Northmen. But the knife he wears at his side, the skins bound around his narrow shoulders, the roughness in the way he says his words – yes. What a strange circumstance. One of the enemy who had burned Brendan's home and slaughtered his kin, delivered damaged to his door.
Brendan's nostrils flare. “If we're not on the same side,” he asks, fighting down his inward heat, his blooming anger, “why are you asking me for help?”
The stranger blushes, ducks his head, drops his eyes. The blush reaches down his throat, under his furs. “Because I don't mean to be your enemy,” the stranger says. “I've never – my village doesn't do this kind of – I could never kill anything. But I got separated from my – friends, and no one wants to help me because as soon as I open my mouth everyone here thinks 'Viking' and freaks out, but it's getting really cold and please, can't I just come in for one night?” It all comes out of him in a rush.
Brendan feels the fires of anger in his heart cooling under this flow of words. One of the old pages in the Book of Iona says that mercy is the greatest of all god's gifts, so he swallows and offers a hand. The Viking looks up at him with startled eyes, and then grasps it. He stumbles as he tries to get up, his metal leg unable to bear weight without buckling. Brendan catches him. “I am Brother Brendan,” he says, giving trust without having first received it, trying to be merciful. “Of course you can come into my cell.”
Inside, old Aiden sits at his desk, his careful gnarled hands mixing inks. When the two boys stumble in together, Pangur circling their legs, he looks up and smiles. “Found a stray?” he asks.
Brendan's mouth thins. “I don't know,” he answers. “It's one of the Northmen.”
“Hey,” the stranger mutters, “it's not my fault.”
In the full light, Brendan can see the bruises that track across the stranger's narrow face. Not from fighting, he doesn't think, not in that pattern. From falling down? He's a sorry sight, at any rate – ragged and battered and worn. He looks to be about the same age as Brendan: more than a child, less than an adult. His hair is reddish, too. Brendan has at least a handspan of height on him.
The stranger says little as Aiden brings him broth, guides him to a seat. Brendan pulls blankets together in a corner to serve as a makeshift pallet, and when he half-carries the Viking boy to it, he finds that his guest falls asleep almost as soon as he helps him down. “Thanks,” the boy mutters as he sinks into unconsciousness. “Nice of you. Jus' need to pass out for a while.”
He lies quiet, not stirring or murmuring, but nevertheless as Brendan goes about his evening chores he is uncomfortably aware of his presence: a bundle of fur and metal, foreign, confounding. He'd never spoken to one of the Northmen before, and something in him reels in shock at the unexpected knowledge that they could be spoken to at all.
Language – words – which have always been sacred to him – also belong to his enemies. Strange, strange.
*
Brendan rises with the sun; the stranger sleeps for some hours after dawn. Aiden goes out, looking for lichens to boil down for a new bottle of gold ink. Pangur curls up, purring, to sleep on the stranger's chest. Brendan settles at his worktable, spreading out his inks and picking up his pen. For the space of an hour Brendan is perfectly happy, the curls and whorls of his letters wrapping him in their caress. He loses himself in their shapes, joyful and unselfconscious and abstracted.
When the stranger wakes he sits up sharply in his bed, gasping. Brendan jumps and nearly blots his page. He'd almost forgotten him. Pangur, offended at being so rudely displaced from his perch on top of the boy, stalks off. “Oh Hel,” the boy says. “I'm still here.”
“Good morning,” Brendan says from behind his worktable. “There's pottage by the hearth, if you're hungry.” He feels shy, frightened, angry, and curious all at once. But the Viking boy only pulls himself up on his bad leg and limps over to the pottage pot, spooning out his breakfast into a shallow wooden bowl.
Swallowing down his confused feelings, Brendan goes back to his work, peering carefully through the Eye of Collum-Cille as he dips his pen nib into first red and then gold and then black and then blue. He does such a good job of distracting himself with writing that he doesn't notice the Viking boy coming to stand right beside him until a curious long finger reaches out to touch the crystal center of the Eye. Then he jumps again, and this time does make a blot. “Sorry,” the stranger says, trying to pull back and stumbling badly because of his broken metal leg. He regains his balance by flailing his arms wildly, but he manages to not knock anything over or breath anything. “Didn't mean to – hey, so what are you writing about? I like the drawings a lot, very cool.”
“This is the Book of Kells,” Brendan says proudly. “I am its keeper, now that Kells is gone.”
The stranger comes closer again, and reaches out that same tentative finger to trace the whirl of wind and fire and light Brendan's drawn up the margin of the verso page. “It's beautiful. What happened to Kells?”
Brendan's eyes flick sideways. “Northmen burned it down.”
The stranger closes his eyes as if in pain, swallows hard. “Sorry,” he says again, little more than a croak. “Sorry.”
Brendan's voice comes out hard and bitter. “It's what Northmen do,” he says.
The Viking boy snorts inelegantly. “Yeah, a lot of them. Sometimes Vikings can be way too big on brawn instead of brains. And they do have these, ah, pesky destructive tendencies. But,” he adds, voice going soft, picking up an undertone of longing that shoots straight to Brendan's heart, “my village never really went in for the 'going a-viking' thing.”
“So then what were you doing here, if not trying to attack us and burn our homes?”
“I never meant to end up here in the first place. I was – um, traveling – with a friend – and got caught in a storm, and - separated. And my leg got all messed up. And even if I can get back to – if I can get back, I won't be able to do anything with it like this.” He gestures down at the mangled metal, which is grotesquely bent and distorted.
Brendan looks over at him through veiled eyes. “Do you have a name?” he asks.
For no apparent reason, the stranger begins to blush, redness creeping across his cheekbones. “Ah – Hiccup. Hiccup Horrendous Haddock. Um – the Third.”
Brendan only raises an eyebrow. “Well, then, Hiccup – can you mend your leg yourself, or do we need to get you to a smith?” Brendan asks.
Hiccup waves a dismissive hand. “Yeah, no problem,” he answers. “I made it in the first place. Well, actually, Gobber made the base – but I've tinkered with it so much that it's practically a different leg.” His green eyes sharpen. “We? Since when is there a 'we' here?”
Brendan hastily waves a negatory hand. “No, no, I meant Brother Aiden and me, not -”
Hiccup smiles, dry and small. After a moment, when it becomes clear that Brendan has nothing more to say, Hiccup adds, “I could only fix my leg if I had the stuff to do it with, anyway. Bottles of ink aren't going to be much help. Maybe you do need to get me to a smith after all.” There is something heavy in his voice; Brendan wonders if he's thinking of the time that will be lost before he can go looking for his mysterious friend.
A glint of light on glass catches Brendan's eye, drawing his attention to the back of the cell, where Brother Aiden's distilling, compounding, cooking, and extraction equipment sprawled over shelves and tables in gleams of metal and glass. “Is there anything here you could use?” he asks Hiccup.
The boy looks at the array for a moment in complete silence. Then he is all motion, shifting, planning, moving, lifting, babbling like a river the whole time. “Well, yeah, if I melted down a few ballbearings first … way too delicate, have to move it all, but if I … sure, and then I can put – oh, and an anvil, great, I wasn't looking forward to coming up with ways to rig one of those ...” Slowly, Hiccup begins to transform the workspace, making what he needs of it.
Doing his best to suppress a smile, Brendan leaves him to it, returning to his worktable and his daily task: pen and ink, character and margin.
Brother Aiden returns in the early afternoon. He wraps his burden of lichen in a cloth, to be powdered and strained later, and looks in wry bemusement at the two reddish heads bent to their respective tasks. Pangur, who had been sleeping at Brendan's elbow, leaps down with a “prrt.” “Have you lunched yet, boys?” Aiden asks.
The stranger drops the cooling apparatus he'd been setting up with an instantaneous enthusiasm. “Is there lunch?” he asks hopefully, and Aiden smiles.
They sit down all three at the rickety little table by the front window, where daylight comes spilling into the cell, and eat bread and cheese and drink mellow ale. Hiccup falls to with a will, and conversation languishes for a while in favor of food.
They explain to Aiden about the leg. Hiccup apologizes for disarranging his equipment, ducking his head, but Aiden only smiles again. Aiden asks him, “Will you walk back to your ship, when your leg is mended?”
Hiccup shakes his red-brown head. “Don't have a ship.”
Brendan frowns. “Of course you have a ship,” he says mulishly. “That's how Northmen always get here, in ships that let them strike at us from the sea as well as the shore.”
Hiccup's mouth thins in obvious irritation. “Look, it's not like your people are so perfect either,” he protests. “Your one god is trying to suppress everybody else's, and, because your priests are so violent, it's working.”
Brendan thinks of Aisling, the wolves, Crom Cruach in his dark cave without any eyes at all now, and makes no retort. After a moment, though, he asks, “Our one god? Do you have others, then?”
Hiccup grins, the chance to share information wiping him clean of bad feeling. “Oh, yeah, lots of 'em. And way funnier stories, too. The time when Loki dressed Thorr up as a woman, the one where Iduna gets captured and all the gods grow old, Skadi choosing her husband from all the gods just by looking at their legs ...”
Brendan, listening, feels sometimes bubbling up inside him at the little Northman's words. It kindles like a spark: he wants to hear these stories, and know these gods, and laugh. He glances over at Brother Aiden, not at all sure how this heresy will be heard, but Aiden still says nothing, only gathers up the remnants of their lunch to be put away in the larder again.
After this, Hiccup goes back to his makeshift forge. Brendan hears the small sounds of his work all afternoon: tinking glass, chiming steel, the roar of the fire as Hiccup heaped up more and more heat, the warm smell of peat burning and the sharp hiss of hot things dropping into cool water. When Brendan finishes his page, evening is drawing in. Instead of beginning another, he corks up his inkpot and rises to go investigate.
The forge is hot and ready, but Hiccup is not standing at the anvil with makeshift hammer raised. Instead, he sits on a chair with his bad leg up across one knee, undoing a lace around the top of the metal part. He looks up, blinking, as if he's forgotten Brendan's existence all together. “Oh, um,” he says. “Um. Hi. I'm almost ready – got everything together, just need to – and I'm going to have to -” he breaks off, gesturing wordlessly at the place where his flesh ended and the prosthesis began - “and it's not exactly pretty. So you might not want to watch right now.”
“That's all right,” Brendan said. He understood about scars, a little, after living for so long with Brother Aiden, who wore his scars over his heart, in bad dreams and waking flashes of memory. “Unless you mind.”
Hiccup bites his lip; it seems to be a habit of his. “I – sure, if you really w-want to.” The usual stops and starts of his speech are augmented by a soft, unsure stammer.
Hiccup unlaces the metal leg's ties and clamps, easing it away from his body. Underneath, the stump of his leg is wrapped in undyed wool, padded and protected and kept clean, and he self-consciously tugs the leg of his breeches down over it to hide even that from view. “S-sorry,” he stammers. “Just not quite – used to that yet.” He rises unsteadily, swaying, struggling for balance. Before he can fall, Brendan quickly reaches out and puts a hand under his elbow. Hiccup throws him a grateful look, blushing a little. “Thanks. Sorry.”
Brendan help him over to the anvil, then lets go and steps back from the heat of the fire. “You don't need to be.”
As Brendan watches him work, he forgets to wonder about Hiccup's wounds. Instead he marvels at the dexterity of his hands, the intensity that lights his eyes as he heats and hammers and shapes his metal leg back into usefulness. Brendan notices that the metal grows more beautiful with each hammer blow – not ornate, but elegant and simple and clean, which he knows takes even more craftsmanship. Watching Hiccup work reminds him of the scriptorium at Kells, all his friends busy with their tasks, making useful and beautiful things. Leaning back against the wall, he listens to the rhythmic sound of Hiccup's hammer blows and thinks of things gone by. Long before Hiccup has finished, Brother Aiden calls him to sleep. The chiming blows escort Brendan into strange and beautiful dreams, and the next morning he wakes with a smile on his lips.
*
The leg, now that it's been mended, turns out to be an impressive work of engineering, giving Hiccup a great deal of control over its motions. Much better than something like a wooden peg. Hiccup looks tired, but he's smiling broadly. Somehow he seems – bigger – than he did the day before.
Over breakfast, Brother Aiden asks, “Is that why your people let you come on their ship, lad? Was not even the loss of a limb enough excuse to remove you from their wars?” His creaky old voice is bitter, and Brendan does not blame him; how horrible for something as wonderful as Hiccup's metal leg to be turned into a tool of conquest.
But Hiccup shakes his head sharply, and then hesitates, biting his lip. There was a secret to be had here – oh, how Brendan wanted it!
Hiccup draws in a deep breath. “I have to get to the shore,” he says at last, and Brendan's heart sinks as he mentally adds to rejoin my ship. He'd hoped – he hadn't wanted to believe -
“I'll take you there,” is all he says, and his voice remains satisfyingly level.
Aiden knots dried meat and fruit and waybread into a cloth, tucking it into Hiccup's knapsack. It will take them the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon to make it to the shore. Brendan wonders how long Hiccup spent wandering around in the woods with his leg in mangles, alone in the dark. Hiccup kneels to say goodbye to Pangur, who trills and falls over and lets him scratch his belly, and then they're off.
As they walk, Hiccup tells him the story of the time when Loki dressed Thorr up as a woman, keeping Brendan laughing with the exploits of his very silly gods. When Loki tells the Frost Giant that Frejya's eyes are only red from weeping, when really the trickster's face to face with a great deal of red-eyed angry thunder god, Brendan laughs so hard he ends up snorting inelegantly, and then Hiccup starts laughing too. “Wow,” he says when they both come down, “I hadn't realized how much I miss them all.”
That sobers Brendan quickly enough.
They hear the sea before they see it, roaring like a strange and distant beast, whispering like a forest or a lover, and all around them a smell like salt and green things and the passage of ages of time. When they reach the shore the sun has started to sink into the west, and filaments of red-gold light flash out across the water. Brendan's eyes are dazzled by the refracted light, and so he hears Hiccup's glad shout before he sees anything at all. “Toothless!” Hiccup is calling. “Toothless, buddy, hey! Over here!” His voice holds the sound of the greatest of all possible joys.
Brendan blinks the dazzle away just in time to see the sleek dark shape come swooping down out of the saffron-stained clouds. He thinks for a dizzy moment that he's gone mad, or fallen asleep, or is having some sort of faery vision, like Aisling's wolves, and that it is not really real. It lands on the headland, the cliff of land that overhangs the now-dark sea, and swishingly wraps its tail around itself. Its oblong eyes glitter like gems in the slanted light.
Hiccup runs to it, awkward and hobbling but fast, and throws his arms around its massive scaly neck. Brendan, watching, can't breathe. It enfolds Hiccup with a wing, and Brendan's heart is in his mouth – at any moment, he'll hear the crack and scream as the Viking boy is slain by the beast, and he can't bear it. But Hiccup only emerges smiling and tousled after a momentary eclipse. “Aw, hey, bud,” Hiccup says, soft and affectionate, “hey, I missed you too.”
The creature drops its head to sniff at the boy's metal leg, and then looks up mournfully. Hiccup smiled in return: “No, it's okay now, I fixed it, just a little banged up. Really, Toothless, it's okay!” The dragon was butting at the prosthetic, shaking Hiccup's balance so that he had to cling to it again to stay upright.
He looked up, and his eyes glinted the same jewel-green as the creature's. “Brendan,” he said. “This is my friend Toothless. Toothless, Brendan. He helped me fix my foot.”
He speaks to it like a person, Brendan thought in dazed wonder. A dragon. A real dragon.
“Come meet him properly,” Hiccup said, and so Brendan ended up holding up the bare palm of his hand in front of a dragon's face, sure it was going to be bitten off at any moment. The dragon just breathed on it, warm and wild, a gesture of cautious acknowledgement.
“He's really a dragon?” Brendan asks querulously.
“Uh-huh,” Hiccup answers, nodding. “You go far enough north, you get to the dragons. There are more and more of them the closer you go to the top of the world. They were our enemies for a long time – that's why my tribe never went out viking, we were too busy dealing with the constant fireballs and sneak divebombings.” The dragon, unbelievably, looks sheepish; Hiccup grins up at it. “We're friends now,” he explains.
Dragons. There are real true dragons in the world, more as you go north, and now Brendan had seen one.
Grasping the leather harness that encircled the dragon's neck, Hiccup pulls himself up to sit aside the beautiful thing's back. His metal foot locks neatly into place with a corresponding foothold, and the dragon spreads its black bat-wings wide, membranes trembling in the rising dusk breeze. Hiccup strokes its neck, caresses one of the strange long ears. “Time to go home,” he says to it, and it shows its teeth to him in a dragon's grin.
“Gotta go!” he calls to Brendan as the wind freshens. “It's a long way home! Thanks for all your help!” And then, in a rush of beating wings and shifting scales, and with a joyful whoop from the boy clinging to the dragon's back, they are aloft.
The dragon swoops up like a swallow into the paling sky. Brendan stands on the headland with the roar of the sea in his ears until it smalls off, vanishing in the hazy purple distance. He holds still, breathing, learning the memory by heart. A Viking who was both kind and clever, who rode across the sea on a dragon's back. Now there was something to put into his book, one of god's many miracles. The thought of Crom Cruach in his cave recurs to him. This time he feels glad that Crom is down there in the shadows, just as he feels glad that Aisling paces the halls of her forest. They are beyond his knowledge, beyond the knowledge of the church and the brotherhood, but that's all for the best. That's precisely why they're so wondrous.
He was, Brendan thinks, no longer a child, to believe that the things he feared ought to be wiped from the world. Just because he was afraid didn't lessen their magnificence.
With a world infinitely bigger than he'd dreamed of unfolding around him, Brendan uses the last of the light to leave the sea behind. He makes camp inland, and lies in his roll of bedding looking up at the stars long into the night, too heart-full to fall asleep. In his mind, he's planning out what inks to use for the dragon's eyes, how to represent the texture of its skin, the innocent playful intelligent animal quality of its face. He wonders, as he slips off into sleep after all, if anyone will ever believe him when he tells them what he's seen.
We murmur first moonwords
How To Train Your Dragon/The Secret of Kells crossover
{unlikely friendship, secrets, and culture clash}
Summary: Brendan finds a Viking boy with a broken metal foot on his doorstep; geek solidarity conquers all.
3913 words, general
at the AO3
On a dark and gusty night, a few years after the fall of Kells, Brendan opens the door of his cell one night at the summons of a feeble knock. Lying in an ungraceful heap on the doorstep, a skinny boy of about his own age looks up through shaggy hair with grass-green eyes. The boy's right leg is made of metal, his body cut off above where the knee joint ought to be, and Brendan is no kind of metalworker but it looks to him like it's been damaged somehow, bent and twisted.
The other boy smiles up at him, a sad little half-smile. “So is there any chance I could come in from the cold for a little while?” he asks. His voice is a warm light tenor, level, with a pleasant rasp dragging at its edges. Pangur comes out of the cell and trills, happily winding around the stranger and getting cat fur up his nose. The stranger laughs and protests, trying to keep his airways clear but not throwing the animal off.
“Who are you?” Brendan asks him.
“Um,” the stranger says. “I'm not sure I ought to tell you my name. I don't think we're exactly on the same side here.”
Brendan looks at him more carefully. He seems too small to be one of the Northmen. But the knife he wears at his side, the skins bound around his narrow shoulders, the roughness in the way he says his words – yes. What a strange circumstance. One of the enemy who had burned Brendan's home and slaughtered his kin, delivered damaged to his door.
Brendan's nostrils flare. “If we're not on the same side,” he asks, fighting down his inward heat, his blooming anger, “why are you asking me for help?”
The stranger blushes, ducks his head, drops his eyes. The blush reaches down his throat, under his furs. “Because I don't mean to be your enemy,” the stranger says. “I've never – my village doesn't do this kind of – I could never kill anything. But I got separated from my – friends, and no one wants to help me because as soon as I open my mouth everyone here thinks 'Viking' and freaks out, but it's getting really cold and please, can't I just come in for one night?” It all comes out of him in a rush.
Brendan feels the fires of anger in his heart cooling under this flow of words. One of the old pages in the Book of Iona says that mercy is the greatest of all god's gifts, so he swallows and offers a hand. The Viking looks up at him with startled eyes, and then grasps it. He stumbles as he tries to get up, his metal leg unable to bear weight without buckling. Brendan catches him. “I am Brother Brendan,” he says, giving trust without having first received it, trying to be merciful. “Of course you can come into my cell.”
Inside, old Aiden sits at his desk, his careful gnarled hands mixing inks. When the two boys stumble in together, Pangur circling their legs, he looks up and smiles. “Found a stray?” he asks.
Brendan's mouth thins. “I don't know,” he answers. “It's one of the Northmen.”
“Hey,” the stranger mutters, “it's not my fault.”
In the full light, Brendan can see the bruises that track across the stranger's narrow face. Not from fighting, he doesn't think, not in that pattern. From falling down? He's a sorry sight, at any rate – ragged and battered and worn. He looks to be about the same age as Brendan: more than a child, less than an adult. His hair is reddish, too. Brendan has at least a handspan of height on him.
The stranger says little as Aiden brings him broth, guides him to a seat. Brendan pulls blankets together in a corner to serve as a makeshift pallet, and when he half-carries the Viking boy to it, he finds that his guest falls asleep almost as soon as he helps him down. “Thanks,” the boy mutters as he sinks into unconsciousness. “Nice of you. Jus' need to pass out for a while.”
He lies quiet, not stirring or murmuring, but nevertheless as Brendan goes about his evening chores he is uncomfortably aware of his presence: a bundle of fur and metal, foreign, confounding. He'd never spoken to one of the Northmen before, and something in him reels in shock at the unexpected knowledge that they could be spoken to at all.
Language – words – which have always been sacred to him – also belong to his enemies. Strange, strange.
*
Brendan rises with the sun; the stranger sleeps for some hours after dawn. Aiden goes out, looking for lichens to boil down for a new bottle of gold ink. Pangur curls up, purring, to sleep on the stranger's chest. Brendan settles at his worktable, spreading out his inks and picking up his pen. For the space of an hour Brendan is perfectly happy, the curls and whorls of his letters wrapping him in their caress. He loses himself in their shapes, joyful and unselfconscious and abstracted.
When the stranger wakes he sits up sharply in his bed, gasping. Brendan jumps and nearly blots his page. He'd almost forgotten him. Pangur, offended at being so rudely displaced from his perch on top of the boy, stalks off. “Oh Hel,” the boy says. “I'm still here.”
“Good morning,” Brendan says from behind his worktable. “There's pottage by the hearth, if you're hungry.” He feels shy, frightened, angry, and curious all at once. But the Viking boy only pulls himself up on his bad leg and limps over to the pottage pot, spooning out his breakfast into a shallow wooden bowl.
Swallowing down his confused feelings, Brendan goes back to his work, peering carefully through the Eye of Collum-Cille as he dips his pen nib into first red and then gold and then black and then blue. He does such a good job of distracting himself with writing that he doesn't notice the Viking boy coming to stand right beside him until a curious long finger reaches out to touch the crystal center of the Eye. Then he jumps again, and this time does make a blot. “Sorry,” the stranger says, trying to pull back and stumbling badly because of his broken metal leg. He regains his balance by flailing his arms wildly, but he manages to not knock anything over or breath anything. “Didn't mean to – hey, so what are you writing about? I like the drawings a lot, very cool.”
“This is the Book of Kells,” Brendan says proudly. “I am its keeper, now that Kells is gone.”
The stranger comes closer again, and reaches out that same tentative finger to trace the whirl of wind and fire and light Brendan's drawn up the margin of the verso page. “It's beautiful. What happened to Kells?”
Brendan's eyes flick sideways. “Northmen burned it down.”
The stranger closes his eyes as if in pain, swallows hard. “Sorry,” he says again, little more than a croak. “Sorry.”
Brendan's voice comes out hard and bitter. “It's what Northmen do,” he says.
The Viking boy snorts inelegantly. “Yeah, a lot of them. Sometimes Vikings can be way too big on brawn instead of brains. And they do have these, ah, pesky destructive tendencies. But,” he adds, voice going soft, picking up an undertone of longing that shoots straight to Brendan's heart, “my village never really went in for the 'going a-viking' thing.”
“So then what were you doing here, if not trying to attack us and burn our homes?”
“I never meant to end up here in the first place. I was – um, traveling – with a friend – and got caught in a storm, and - separated. And my leg got all messed up. And even if I can get back to – if I can get back, I won't be able to do anything with it like this.” He gestures down at the mangled metal, which is grotesquely bent and distorted.
Brendan looks over at him through veiled eyes. “Do you have a name?” he asks.
For no apparent reason, the stranger begins to blush, redness creeping across his cheekbones. “Ah – Hiccup. Hiccup Horrendous Haddock. Um – the Third.”
Brendan only raises an eyebrow. “Well, then, Hiccup – can you mend your leg yourself, or do we need to get you to a smith?” Brendan asks.
Hiccup waves a dismissive hand. “Yeah, no problem,” he answers. “I made it in the first place. Well, actually, Gobber made the base – but I've tinkered with it so much that it's practically a different leg.” His green eyes sharpen. “We? Since when is there a 'we' here?”
Brendan hastily waves a negatory hand. “No, no, I meant Brother Aiden and me, not -”
Hiccup smiles, dry and small. After a moment, when it becomes clear that Brendan has nothing more to say, Hiccup adds, “I could only fix my leg if I had the stuff to do it with, anyway. Bottles of ink aren't going to be much help. Maybe you do need to get me to a smith after all.” There is something heavy in his voice; Brendan wonders if he's thinking of the time that will be lost before he can go looking for his mysterious friend.
A glint of light on glass catches Brendan's eye, drawing his attention to the back of the cell, where Brother Aiden's distilling, compounding, cooking, and extraction equipment sprawled over shelves and tables in gleams of metal and glass. “Is there anything here you could use?” he asks Hiccup.
The boy looks at the array for a moment in complete silence. Then he is all motion, shifting, planning, moving, lifting, babbling like a river the whole time. “Well, yeah, if I melted down a few ballbearings first … way too delicate, have to move it all, but if I … sure, and then I can put – oh, and an anvil, great, I wasn't looking forward to coming up with ways to rig one of those ...” Slowly, Hiccup begins to transform the workspace, making what he needs of it.
Doing his best to suppress a smile, Brendan leaves him to it, returning to his worktable and his daily task: pen and ink, character and margin.
Brother Aiden returns in the early afternoon. He wraps his burden of lichen in a cloth, to be powdered and strained later, and looks in wry bemusement at the two reddish heads bent to their respective tasks. Pangur, who had been sleeping at Brendan's elbow, leaps down with a “prrt.” “Have you lunched yet, boys?” Aiden asks.
The stranger drops the cooling apparatus he'd been setting up with an instantaneous enthusiasm. “Is there lunch?” he asks hopefully, and Aiden smiles.
They sit down all three at the rickety little table by the front window, where daylight comes spilling into the cell, and eat bread and cheese and drink mellow ale. Hiccup falls to with a will, and conversation languishes for a while in favor of food.
They explain to Aiden about the leg. Hiccup apologizes for disarranging his equipment, ducking his head, but Aiden only smiles again. Aiden asks him, “Will you walk back to your ship, when your leg is mended?”
Hiccup shakes his red-brown head. “Don't have a ship.”
Brendan frowns. “Of course you have a ship,” he says mulishly. “That's how Northmen always get here, in ships that let them strike at us from the sea as well as the shore.”
Hiccup's mouth thins in obvious irritation. “Look, it's not like your people are so perfect either,” he protests. “Your one god is trying to suppress everybody else's, and, because your priests are so violent, it's working.”
Brendan thinks of Aisling, the wolves, Crom Cruach in his dark cave without any eyes at all now, and makes no retort. After a moment, though, he asks, “Our one god? Do you have others, then?”
Hiccup grins, the chance to share information wiping him clean of bad feeling. “Oh, yeah, lots of 'em. And way funnier stories, too. The time when Loki dressed Thorr up as a woman, the one where Iduna gets captured and all the gods grow old, Skadi choosing her husband from all the gods just by looking at their legs ...”
Brendan, listening, feels sometimes bubbling up inside him at the little Northman's words. It kindles like a spark: he wants to hear these stories, and know these gods, and laugh. He glances over at Brother Aiden, not at all sure how this heresy will be heard, but Aiden still says nothing, only gathers up the remnants of their lunch to be put away in the larder again.
After this, Hiccup goes back to his makeshift forge. Brendan hears the small sounds of his work all afternoon: tinking glass, chiming steel, the roar of the fire as Hiccup heaped up more and more heat, the warm smell of peat burning and the sharp hiss of hot things dropping into cool water. When Brendan finishes his page, evening is drawing in. Instead of beginning another, he corks up his inkpot and rises to go investigate.
The forge is hot and ready, but Hiccup is not standing at the anvil with makeshift hammer raised. Instead, he sits on a chair with his bad leg up across one knee, undoing a lace around the top of the metal part. He looks up, blinking, as if he's forgotten Brendan's existence all together. “Oh, um,” he says. “Um. Hi. I'm almost ready – got everything together, just need to – and I'm going to have to -” he breaks off, gesturing wordlessly at the place where his flesh ended and the prosthesis began - “and it's not exactly pretty. So you might not want to watch right now.”
“That's all right,” Brendan said. He understood about scars, a little, after living for so long with Brother Aiden, who wore his scars over his heart, in bad dreams and waking flashes of memory. “Unless you mind.”
Hiccup bites his lip; it seems to be a habit of his. “I – sure, if you really w-want to.” The usual stops and starts of his speech are augmented by a soft, unsure stammer.
Hiccup unlaces the metal leg's ties and clamps, easing it away from his body. Underneath, the stump of his leg is wrapped in undyed wool, padded and protected and kept clean, and he self-consciously tugs the leg of his breeches down over it to hide even that from view. “S-sorry,” he stammers. “Just not quite – used to that yet.” He rises unsteadily, swaying, struggling for balance. Before he can fall, Brendan quickly reaches out and puts a hand under his elbow. Hiccup throws him a grateful look, blushing a little. “Thanks. Sorry.”
Brendan help him over to the anvil, then lets go and steps back from the heat of the fire. “You don't need to be.”
As Brendan watches him work, he forgets to wonder about Hiccup's wounds. Instead he marvels at the dexterity of his hands, the intensity that lights his eyes as he heats and hammers and shapes his metal leg back into usefulness. Brendan notices that the metal grows more beautiful with each hammer blow – not ornate, but elegant and simple and clean, which he knows takes even more craftsmanship. Watching Hiccup work reminds him of the scriptorium at Kells, all his friends busy with their tasks, making useful and beautiful things. Leaning back against the wall, he listens to the rhythmic sound of Hiccup's hammer blows and thinks of things gone by. Long before Hiccup has finished, Brother Aiden calls him to sleep. The chiming blows escort Brendan into strange and beautiful dreams, and the next morning he wakes with a smile on his lips.
*
The leg, now that it's been mended, turns out to be an impressive work of engineering, giving Hiccup a great deal of control over its motions. Much better than something like a wooden peg. Hiccup looks tired, but he's smiling broadly. Somehow he seems – bigger – than he did the day before.
Over breakfast, Brother Aiden asks, “Is that why your people let you come on their ship, lad? Was not even the loss of a limb enough excuse to remove you from their wars?” His creaky old voice is bitter, and Brendan does not blame him; how horrible for something as wonderful as Hiccup's metal leg to be turned into a tool of conquest.
But Hiccup shakes his head sharply, and then hesitates, biting his lip. There was a secret to be had here – oh, how Brendan wanted it!
Hiccup draws in a deep breath. “I have to get to the shore,” he says at last, and Brendan's heart sinks as he mentally adds to rejoin my ship. He'd hoped – he hadn't wanted to believe -
“I'll take you there,” is all he says, and his voice remains satisfyingly level.
Aiden knots dried meat and fruit and waybread into a cloth, tucking it into Hiccup's knapsack. It will take them the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon to make it to the shore. Brendan wonders how long Hiccup spent wandering around in the woods with his leg in mangles, alone in the dark. Hiccup kneels to say goodbye to Pangur, who trills and falls over and lets him scratch his belly, and then they're off.
As they walk, Hiccup tells him the story of the time when Loki dressed Thorr up as a woman, keeping Brendan laughing with the exploits of his very silly gods. When Loki tells the Frost Giant that Frejya's eyes are only red from weeping, when really the trickster's face to face with a great deal of red-eyed angry thunder god, Brendan laughs so hard he ends up snorting inelegantly, and then Hiccup starts laughing too. “Wow,” he says when they both come down, “I hadn't realized how much I miss them all.”
That sobers Brendan quickly enough.
They hear the sea before they see it, roaring like a strange and distant beast, whispering like a forest or a lover, and all around them a smell like salt and green things and the passage of ages of time. When they reach the shore the sun has started to sink into the west, and filaments of red-gold light flash out across the water. Brendan's eyes are dazzled by the refracted light, and so he hears Hiccup's glad shout before he sees anything at all. “Toothless!” Hiccup is calling. “Toothless, buddy, hey! Over here!” His voice holds the sound of the greatest of all possible joys.
Brendan blinks the dazzle away just in time to see the sleek dark shape come swooping down out of the saffron-stained clouds. He thinks for a dizzy moment that he's gone mad, or fallen asleep, or is having some sort of faery vision, like Aisling's wolves, and that it is not really real. It lands on the headland, the cliff of land that overhangs the now-dark sea, and swishingly wraps its tail around itself. Its oblong eyes glitter like gems in the slanted light.
Hiccup runs to it, awkward and hobbling but fast, and throws his arms around its massive scaly neck. Brendan, watching, can't breathe. It enfolds Hiccup with a wing, and Brendan's heart is in his mouth – at any moment, he'll hear the crack and scream as the Viking boy is slain by the beast, and he can't bear it. But Hiccup only emerges smiling and tousled after a momentary eclipse. “Aw, hey, bud,” Hiccup says, soft and affectionate, “hey, I missed you too.”
The creature drops its head to sniff at the boy's metal leg, and then looks up mournfully. Hiccup smiled in return: “No, it's okay now, I fixed it, just a little banged up. Really, Toothless, it's okay!” The dragon was butting at the prosthetic, shaking Hiccup's balance so that he had to cling to it again to stay upright.
He looked up, and his eyes glinted the same jewel-green as the creature's. “Brendan,” he said. “This is my friend Toothless. Toothless, Brendan. He helped me fix my foot.”
He speaks to it like a person, Brendan thought in dazed wonder. A dragon. A real dragon.
“Come meet him properly,” Hiccup said, and so Brendan ended up holding up the bare palm of his hand in front of a dragon's face, sure it was going to be bitten off at any moment. The dragon just breathed on it, warm and wild, a gesture of cautious acknowledgement.
“He's really a dragon?” Brendan asks querulously.
“Uh-huh,” Hiccup answers, nodding. “You go far enough north, you get to the dragons. There are more and more of them the closer you go to the top of the world. They were our enemies for a long time – that's why my tribe never went out viking, we were too busy dealing with the constant fireballs and sneak divebombings.” The dragon, unbelievably, looks sheepish; Hiccup grins up at it. “We're friends now,” he explains.
Dragons. There are real true dragons in the world, more as you go north, and now Brendan had seen one.
Grasping the leather harness that encircled the dragon's neck, Hiccup pulls himself up to sit aside the beautiful thing's back. His metal foot locks neatly into place with a corresponding foothold, and the dragon spreads its black bat-wings wide, membranes trembling in the rising dusk breeze. Hiccup strokes its neck, caresses one of the strange long ears. “Time to go home,” he says to it, and it shows its teeth to him in a dragon's grin.
“Gotta go!” he calls to Brendan as the wind freshens. “It's a long way home! Thanks for all your help!” And then, in a rush of beating wings and shifting scales, and with a joyful whoop from the boy clinging to the dragon's back, they are aloft.
The dragon swoops up like a swallow into the paling sky. Brendan stands on the headland with the roar of the sea in his ears until it smalls off, vanishing in the hazy purple distance. He holds still, breathing, learning the memory by heart. A Viking who was both kind and clever, who rode across the sea on a dragon's back. Now there was something to put into his book, one of god's many miracles. The thought of Crom Cruach in his cave recurs to him. This time he feels glad that Crom is down there in the shadows, just as he feels glad that Aisling paces the halls of her forest. They are beyond his knowledge, beyond the knowledge of the church and the brotherhood, but that's all for the best. That's precisely why they're so wondrous.
He was, Brendan thinks, no longer a child, to believe that the things he feared ought to be wiped from the world. Just because he was afraid didn't lessen their magnificence.
With a world infinitely bigger than he'd dreamed of unfolding around him, Brendan uses the last of the light to leave the sea behind. He makes camp inland, and lies in his roll of bedding looking up at the stars long into the night, too heart-full to fall asleep. In his mind, he's planning out what inks to use for the dragon's eyes, how to represent the texture of its skin, the innocent playful intelligent animal quality of its face. He wonders, as he slips off into sleep after all, if anyone will ever believe him when he tells them what he's seen.
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Date: 2012-04-18 04:23 pm (UTC)*goes to read*
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Date: 2012-04-18 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-19 07:36 pm (UTC)To sum it up: fantastic.
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Date: 2012-04-19 05:50 pm (UTC)(And bah, we're on DW rather than LJ so I don't have my Httyd icons or my Secret of Kells icons. Just pretend this comment has an awesome and relevant icon attached!)