Chapter Text
Thawdale was a small village far out in the north, and what it lacked in location it made up for in people.
Scott had worked that out within his first week. The village sat at the end of a road the rest of the kingdom had forgotten, ringed by pines and nestled amongst the mountains, and nobody ever came to help. So the people of Thawdale had learned to help each other. They shared firewood in the dark months and carried each other's grain, and when a roof caved in, forty pairs of hands were on the rafters before the dust settled.
Then the Queen had stamped a scroll and written Boralith beside Thawdale, and suddenly there was one more pair of hands. They were very large hands.
He fixed the well first. It had been broken for three years, and the women had been hauling water up from the stream in a line of buckets. Scott climbed down the shaft in the grey of a morning, braced his boots against the stones and set the cracked ring right, muttering to himself the whole time. When he came back up with ice crusted down his sleeves, the baker was waiting with a loaf and a look of deep suspicion.
"What do you want for it?" she asked.
"What?"
"The well. What do you want?"
Scott blinked at her. His lilac eyes were very wide, and snowflakes were drifting lazily around his head the way they did when he wasn't paying attention. "Nothing," he said. "It was broken."
She looked at him for a long moment, then put the loaf in his hands and walked away without a word. It was the nicest thing anyone had done for him in weeks.
He rebuilt the Harrow family's wall. He re-thatched the Whitlock roof and taught the miller's boys to skate on the frozen millpond, and in the evenings, when the children gathered outside the inn, he would sit on a stump with his palms open and let the frost bloom up out of them: ice swans, ice dragons, a little ice castle with every turret in place. Then he would pinch the winter between his fingers and hand out ice cream that tasted of blueberries. The children screamed with delight and the adults pretended not to want any.
He never asked for a thing in return. Even after the Queen gave him the title of Stalwart, which was spoken in the capital with the kind of reverence usually kept for war heroes, Scott kept right on fixing wells.
That should have been the whole of it. A kind man in a quiet town, doing quite good.
But Thawdale had eyes, and it was a village where nobody had ever learned to look away from a neighbour's trouble.
~~~~~~~
The trouble began as soon as Pyro was thrown in prison, on the same day as Scott received his title.
Scott did not talk about it. He did not talk about anything, really, but the village could read the shape of the silence. Every few days he would leave before dawn, Aurora wheeling overhead, and come back at night grey faced with a smear of jail cell damp on his cloak. He had gone to visit his best friend. He never said how that went. He just worked. He worked as though the work were a wall he could build between himself and the thing in his chest, hauling stone and splitting wood and repairing fences that did not need repairing, and he would have gone on that way until his bones gave out.
And slowly, politely, without ever saying why, he stopped coming close.
He stopped sitting at the long table in the inn. He stopped taking the loaf from the baker's hand and brushing flour off her sleeve, and he stopped letting the children climb on his shoulders. When someone reached for his arm he stepped back, smiling wide and apologetic, and put the whole of the street between them. Nobody in Thawdale understood it. They only knew that a man who used to fill the whole village with his warmth was getting colder by the day, and that it had nothing to do with the weather.
The baker was the one who finally cornered him. She was a stubborn woman who had buried a husband and two winters' worth of neighbours, and she did not intend to be avoided by a boy half her age. She found him behind the smithy, hauling a sack of coal he could easily have left for someone else, and she planted herself in front of him with her arms crossed.
"Whatever it is," she said, "it's too heavy to carry alone."
"I'm okay."
"You are not." She put a hand on his forearm.
Scott flinched. The cold went through the baker's fingers like a spike.
It wasn't an attack. It was worse than that, because he hadn't meant it at all. His grief had simply spilled out of him through his skin, and it ran up her wrist and spread through her sleeve in a rime of white, and her breath went out of her in a startled little cloud. She was shivering before she could pull away. Frost clung to her eyebrows.
"Oh, gods," Scott whispered. "Oh gods, I'm so sorry, I didn't…"
He fled. He didn't even take the coal.
The baker sat by her own oven for an hour afterward with a blanket round her shoulders and her fingers slowly thawing, and she did not tell a soul why. But she had seen his face, and that was the thing she couldn't stop thinking about. It had not been the face of a man who had hurt someone. It had been the face of a man who had been hurting for a very long time, and had just found out it could hurt other people too.
His magic had always followed his feelings. That was nothing new. But before, it had been small things: snowflakes on a happy day, frost on a windowpane after a nightmare. Now it was surging. It lashed out. It was reacting to emotions Scott could not bring himself to have, because he had spent weeks pushing them down and down into the dark, and magic doesn't care about what you refuse to feel. The cold had to go somewhere.
It went into the cup of tea Scott was holding when Pyro's name came up. It went across the floor of his cottage in the night. It went into the shivering shoulders of Duke Foltrum, who came striding up the road one afternoon with a smirk and a cluster of guards, to taunt the Stalwart about his imprisoned friend.
"Tell me, Ice Boy," the Duke said, circling him. "Do you ever wonder what your friend told the interrogators? Do you think he would.."
The temperature fell. Not gradually, it dropped like a stone. The Duke's breath puffed in front of his face, and a creeping frost spread out across the road from beneath Scott's boots, tracing the cobbles in white fractal lines, climbing the Duke's polished shoes and the hem of his cloak. Scott hadn't moved a muscle. He wasn't even scowling. He just stood there looking quietly, terribly tired, and said, "I'd like you to leave."
The villagers peering from their windows saw a shivering duke making a very hasty retreat.
They did not cheer. They just looked at each other, and then at the big, sad, figure in the road, and a decision settled over Thawdale without anyone ever voting on it. Whatever this was, they were going to see him through it.
~~~~~~~
Pyro was declared innocent.
Scott heard it from the back of the hall and quietly made his escape back to Thawdale and collapsed at his doorway, he sat there and did not move for a long time. When he finally stood, there was a perfect ring of unmelted frost around him, and it had been laid down so gently, with such control, that the baker, watching from her doorway, understood something had changed.
It was good news, and it did help. His magic settled. The lashing, flinching, sudden cold went out of him, and he could take a loaf from a hand again without the whole street going white. But the villagers noticed what the Stalwart himself seemed not to, it had not gone back to what it was before. His magic was stronger now. Contained, yes. Controlled, absolutely. But there was a depth under it, like the black water beneath the ice of the northern lake, and when it moved you felt it in your teeth.
And no one came.
That was the other thing the villagers noticed, slowly, in the way that you notice a missing step on a stair. In all those months, not one dragon rider had set foot in Thawdale to see their Stalwart. Not one. The Duke had come, multiple times, if you counted contempt as a social call. But the riders, who were supposed to be Scott's own, never did.
"They're busy," Scott said, when old Marrow at the inn finally asked. He said it with a smile that had too many teeth in it. "It's a long way. They've got their own towns."
Marrow had been a soldier. He knew the sound of a man lying to himself. He poured Scott another mug of something hot and said nothing at all.