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The god has been here for a long time.
He likes this cliff. It’s remote, rising high over a vast swath of sea where he can see for miles, watching his children as they swim and fly and hunt beneath the open sky.
It keeps humans at a distance too. The god doesn’t much care for humans, as a rule; there is too much of the blood of his children on their hands, too many dragons pulled from the sky by the greedy violence of human hands. Though his shape—the shape he’s wearing now, anyway—is that of a human man, he sometimes thinks he has less in common with them than his children do. His children at least see humans regularly, often in battle, too often losing their lives, though at times they part in peace. There are even some who live with humans.
The god can’t imagine living with humans.
So it’s good that this cliff, where he’s standing now, is too far, too high, for humans with their feet and sails, poor substitutes for wings. Most humans, anyway.
But not this girl.
He’s been watching her for days.
At first he thought she would turn back when she first spotted the cliff, the rain lashing against her upturned face and the thunder echoing high above her head. But she merely drew her hood farther over her face and adjusted her sail.
And she didn’t stop when she got to the shore of this island and saw the path she would have to take to get to him, steep and rocky and still slick with rain. She only dragged her boat across the rocky shore, out of reach of the tide, and slung a pack over her shoulder.
He keeps expecting her to stop, to turn back, but she doesn’t. Every time he thinks she’s about to give up on the ascent, she merely clenches her jaw or takes a drink from her waterskin (at least, the god thinks it’s water) or sits on a rock for a moment.
Now she’s getting close.
She has surprised the god. It has been a long time since a human surprised him. Or maybe not so long—he’s not terribly oriented to the pace of time, not the way humans are. And she hasn’t just surprised him in her tenacity; no, even as his children have approached her, Gronckles and Nadders and whole swarms of Terrible Terrors, she has stayed calm. Even the humans who show friendliness to dragons are usually at least a little frightened, but this girl is fearless, only reaching out with gentle hands and a soft smile on her face.
He hears footsteps behind him. He doesn’t turn. Surprising or not, she’s still a human, and hardly his concern.
She stays still for a few seconds, several yards behind him, before she walks up to stand next to him, a few feet away, looking out over the ocean below. She pulls her hood back, letting a thick golden braid fall over her shoulder. Looking at her out of the corner of his eye, the god thinks he may have misjudged when he called her a girl—there are white hairs standing out against the gold in the part of her hair and woven through her braid. But no—her face is young, too smooth for her to have so many white hairs. He was right—girl. Her eyes, the same color blue as the parts of the sea where the sun is breaking through the clouds to hit the water, are sparkling, and her cheeks are flushing pink in the chilly breeze. There is a telltale scar on the index finger of her left hand, and looking at her right hip, he sees a quiver of arrows. The bow itself is wrapped in oilskin and slung across her back, as is a shape that can only be a battle-axe.
He wonders, idly, what she will do next. The last time he was this close to a human, it was a red-headed boy whose village had left him as a sacrifice in the hopes that it would stop the dragon raids they’d learned to dread. The god is used to all kinds of behavior from humans: the stoicism and quiet, murmured prayers of the boy; weeping and terror; and silence, either from wonder or fear so terrible it’s impossible to articulate. But what he’s not used to is—
“Hi.”
The girl’s voice is soft, though he can hear that it’s suited to the fierce battle cries of her kind, and there’s a slight rasp to it. There’s a reverence in her tone, but only a casual sort of reverence, nothing like what the god usually hears from humans.
A little taken aback, the god turns and looks at her again. This time he notices the pin that fastens her rain-darkened mantle. It’s the head of a Nadder, cunningly crafted of silver. This is a surprise too; he’s seen things made by humans in the image of dragons, but never anything made with this kind of love, not just for the girl wearing it but for the dragon itself.
“That’s a nice pin. Who made it?” he asks.
Her chin wobbles slightly. “A boy.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died.”
This is obvious, thinks the god, though he refrains from saying so.
She swallows convulsively. “He was killed defending a dragon.”
Now the god has an inkling of a memory—the Night Fury’s boy, the last human who really surprised him. The one who reached out, though he’d been scared enough as he did it, and eased the Night Fury’s fear; the one who had fallen again and again. And again.
“A worthy sacrifice,” he says.
The girl doesn’t say anything, but the trembling of her chin intensifies, and liquid threatens to spill from her eyes.
“Is that why you’ve come here?” the god asks. “To beg me to give him back? That is beyond my power, and even if I could, what makes you think I would?”
“That’s not why I’m here,” she says, her voice steady. “For a long time, I stayed with—with the others. Then I heard you were here, and I... I had to come see you.”
“Then see me,” the god says.
She turns and does so. He finds he likes the feeling of her eyes on him as she examines him, dragging her eyes up and down this frame he has formed for himself, taking in the shaggy, messy mane of brown hair that’s longer even than hers, the blue tattoos on his ribs and upper arms, the fleece cape that falls to his elbows, the furs belted around his hips, the horn that can call a dragon from anywhere in the world, the moss-green eyes that burn like coals. Her mouth twists in something like disappointment when she sees his legs, though her cheeks are still flushed. He’s not sure if it’s still from the wind.
“I’ve heard it’s customary to leave a sacrifice when you come to visit your god,” he says.
“I think I’ve sacrificed enough to you,” she says. “And you’re not my god.”
He could kill her so easily, with nothing but a flap of his arms that would send her flying until her body broke against the stone or sea, or a flash of fire that would roast her where she stands. And part of him wants to, too, for this insolence and the insolence of bringing weapons into his presence. He can feel the red seeping into the roots of his hair, as it always does when he’s angry.
But something stays his hand, though he’s not sure what exactly.
“Aren’t I, though?” the god asks, smiling cruelly. “You left behind your home, and civilization, and the gods of men. And for what, grief over your lost love? You’ve turned your back on Odin, and Frigg, and Freya. Who else could claim you? Maybe the thunder, but even the lightning is partially mine. And death certainly is.”
“You’re not my god,” she snaps, louder this time, meeting his eyes with a snarl that looks more like it belongs on her face than anything he’s seen so far. As she glares at him, recognition sparks in her eyes. She sees him, somehow, in a way she didn’t before, and her face freezes, still half-angry even as shock and fresh pain widen her eyes.
It is that anger that sparks recognition in the god too, and though he doesn’t know how it works any better than she does, he knows her. He doesn’t remember everything or even most things, he doesn’t remember what is probably the most important part, but her face, her lips, her voice, her scream—this he remembers. It doesn’t shake him the way it seems to do to her, but he sees her.
Recovering herself, the girl steps back, away from him. “And now I’ve seen you. So I’ll be going.”
“Astrid,” the god says, and she stops dead in her tracks, staring at him. The tears do roll down her cheeks now, her shoulders shaking as she hears her name in his mouth. “You don’t have to go. You can stay, if you want. Just for a bit.”
Hesitantly at first, she nods, a small smile widening as her certainty grows.
“All right, then,” she says, tears still on her face even as she grins. “Just for a bit.”