Fourteen
Spring turns to summer in the blink of an eye – and much quicker than Iza anticipated things begin to change again.
As the planting season shifts into the growing season, Iza's days begin to consist mostly of learning how to deal with a growing dragon and a slave too intelligent for his own good. While Iza dedicates herself to helping Eko gain mastery over her odd abilities, Carlisle seems to dedicate himself to learning everything he can about Norse culture.
By the time Eko can command her claws into different actions, Carlisle is already able to read Iza's Eddas and cobble together stilted conversations. Iza is, frankly, beside herself – torn between pride for each of them and a sinking sense that they are outgrowing her too quickly.
She has never had this fear before. Usually Iza is the one outgrowing everyone else. To be on the other side is uncomfortable, to say the least.
And yet, both dragon and Saxon stay by her side. Eko she can understand, since they are bonded and breathe with the same lungs. It is Carlisle who causes confusion, because she is his master but he does not seem bothered by the prospect. She supposes it must be because she treats him humanely, as humanely as she treats her dragon.
She cannot fathom any other reason why he offers his help so freely.
It is a warm summer day with the sun high in the sky when Iza hears a commotion behind her. She tilts her head toward the noise, allowing a slight slack on her bow as she half-turns toward the sight behind her. Carlisle, who had been examining the plants of the forest with a sharp eye so he could once again spend the night creating pungent concoctions over the hearth, is now tutting at Eko, who has seen fit to wind herself around his legs in a playful effort to knock him over.
Iza sighs, knowing that her small prey has been scared away by the noise. Probably for the best. Lately, it's becoming harder to feed all of them on a diet of fish and rabbit. She really needs a bigger kill, but she simply can't bring herself to do it – and she could, if she wanted to, because her aim is so much better than it was, but sometimes she feels herself shy away from taking a shot that would fill all of their bellies. It's instinct, almost. A weird instinct, but an instinct all the same.
Iza resigns herself to scoping out the fishermen's haul later on since she can't manage to kill a buck.
She turns and joins Carlisle in watching Eko scale part way up a tree. Eko tries to launch herself from a branch, but her attempt to fly mostly ends up with her gliding none-too-gently right into Iza's stomach. Iza catches her with some difficulty, as Eko has now doubled in size and seems to have tripled in density – she's almost too large for Iza to carry, her size equivalent to that of a middling child. And Iza is small – shorter than many others in her village.
Eko's head turns and Iza follows the dragon's curious two-toned gaze. They both watch as Carlisle points at the branch Eko had just abandoned and then rapidly flaps his arms up and down with his eyebrows raised. Eko makes a trilling noise, her emotions flashing with a vague sense of frustration.
"She is too young, I think," Iza says to Carlisle.
"Wings," Carlisle insists stubbornly. "She can go in air."
"Fly," Iza corrects gently. "She can fly. Or she will be able to. She's only four full moons. That must be very young for dragons."
Carlisle nods, following the thread of Iza's logic as best he can. He's better at understanding what she's saying than responding in turn, which makes their conversations stilted and one-sided for the most part, but he does get more than the gist of it. He can fully understand the Norse written word. Speaking is more difficult.
"She try?" Carlisle asks, glancing back at the tree and then toward a tall boulder barely hidden in the next copse.
Eko climbs down Iza's body, claws barely prickling through her clothes, and circles around Carlisle's feet, nudging him in the direction of the boulder. Iza has the vague sense that Eko will indeed be trying to fly again as they both clamber off into the dense brush, but she pushes her awareness of Eko into the back of her mind. She takes up her bow again and eases between two trees – still within hearing distance of her companions, but not so close that game will be scared off again. She might as well try again, too.
The truth is that she might be avoiding the village. It is mid-day and there is no work that must immediately be done that the entire community must help with – and that means that where there are not busy hands, there are busy mouths. And those mouths seem to like talking about Iza now more than ever.
She is not hiding. Not truly. Let them gossip and run their mouths about her. At the end of the day, it is still Iza who Mik seeks out to deal with the Elders and it is still Iza who manages the wellbeing of the entire village. They can think her weird and too brazen all they like – Iza has long since given up on winning the approval of her peers. She has Alise and Jakob. And now she has Eko and Carlisle. The rest of the village is far less important – and for Iza, she does not need them to like her, she just needs them to respect her.
If they respect her because they are wary of her strangeness, then it is all for the better.
This is what she has been telling herself since she was a child. It still rings true.
Iza sighs, shaking her thoughts out of her head, and steadies the aim of her arrow once more. There is a shaking of a bush not too far away that Iza immediately identifies as belonging to a rabbit or perhaps some other small creature. If she can manage a rabbit, then Eko's dinner will be taken care of because Odin knows the dragon is less fond of fish.
Iza has only just drawn her elbow back to loose her arrow when there is a chorus of several yells echoing through the forest around her – two men and the unmistakable screech of Eko's fledgling dragon roar.
She is spinning on her heel and running through the underbrush before she can even process the terrible but true thought that someone had found Carlisle and Eko.
Some man had found them.
The only men around are from Forks, she knows.
A villager had found her dragon.
Iza cannot run fast enough. She knows just how eager the villagers are to kill dragons – but Eko is innocent and Eko is hers. If someone manages to harm Eko, then Iza is sure her hesitation to kill living beings will be momentarily forgotten. She thinks that, for Eko, she would be more than willing to shed blood.
Iza bursts through the twin trees just before the tall boulder and immediately sets her wide eyes on a familiar spring green that has her stomach dropping to her feet like iron.
The scene she comes to find is this – Eko perched on the tall boulder with Carlisle paused in the middle of directing the dragon on how to fly and on the other side of the small clearing is Edvard with his bow ready in his grip.
Seeing this, Iza's first instinct is to place herself in the middle of all of them and draw her own arrow. She aims the tip directly at Edvard, her aim and intent unmistakable.
Edvard's expression of agitation melts into something undiscernible, his full mouth lax and his brow smooth. But his green eyes glint with something that makes turmoil twist sharply in Iza's belly and he does not drop his bow.
The silence is thick as it stretches between them. The only sounds are that of birds chirping in the distance and Eko's faint, stuttering, infantile rumbling.
Edvard's eyes drop to the arrow pointed at him and then rise to meet Iza's steady two-toned gaze. "You would shoot me," he says.
It isn't a question, but Iza is compelled to respond anyway. "Yes."
"For a dragon," Edvard says flatly. "And for a slave who consorts with a dragon – you would shoot me."
"No," Iza counters swiftly, tilting her chin upward in challenge. "I would shoot you to protect my dragon and my friend."
And she would, she thinks. Edvard is the best hunter the village has and likely the strongest warrior. He is tall and broad and strong. He would easily best Iza in a fight if it came to that, but Iza would still try.
But Edvard is not attacking or getting angry like she imagines any other villager might. The only motion he makes is to tilt his head slightly, his eyes sliding up to where Eko stands on top of the boulder. "Your dragon?"
Iza pauses.
She does not know how to proceed. Even in her wildest imaginings of what might happen if anyone ever found out about Eko – other than Alise – she has always expected anger and violence and the very real possibility of running away to save herself and Eko from untimely demise. And she has made peace with those possibilities. She tied herself to Eko's fate the moment she found the egg, as is only right.
But she does not know what to do when confronted with Edvard's placidity. He has always been so difficult to read, quiet and stoic, but in this she would have assumed he would behave as a warrior would – kill first, ask questions later.
It seems Iza has misjudged him. She is not sure what to do about that, so she responds in the only way she can – with truth.
"I hatched her," she tells Edvard. Her aim does not waver from the center of his chest even as she watches him process this information.
"You hatched a dragon."
"Yes."
Finally, emotion cracks over Edvard's face, a slight furrow of the brow that leaves him looking utterly baffled. "Why?"
Oh, by the Norns if only Iza knew why she would do such a thing. She had wondered the same thing so she cannot fault Edvard's curiosity, but it still rankles that she ended up in this situation mostly due to chance. It all started with being hit by Thor's hammer and escalated from there…
Iza drops her aim, holding her bow and arrow in one hand while the other reaches up to pull down the high neck of her tunic. She holds Edvard's eyes as she stretches her neck to the side, exposing the upper portion of her chest and the pink scars spreading across her skin like lightning.
"Thor chose me, I think," she confesses, a conscious choice as she chooses to trust Edvard with this information. He is a sibling of sorts to Alise, she reasons, and he has somewhat proven himself to think before he acts.
Iza thinks she can trust him – it's another instinct of sorts, the same one that tells her to do what she wants and disregard the opinion of others. Courage, maybe.
"God touched," is what Edvard says in response, eyes riveted on her skin, tracing the lines of her scars with some awe.
Iza flushes and fixes her tunic, hiding her skin once again. She thinks about Edvard's wording. God touched? Loki had said something similar before – and then he had called her a Halfling and a mother to a dragon, so she is not sure how much weight any of Loki's words deserve because he speaks in half-truths with a silver tongue.
Edvard lowers his bow. "So this is why…" he says lowly, mostly to himself. He looks at her with eyes as green as a new spring leaf with an unwavering sort of attention and Iza's heart flips within her chest. "I will keep this secret for you. If the Gods have willed it, then your path should not be disturbed."
Iza's shoulders relax, tension winding out of her spine as she absorbs this declaration.
Sensing that danger has passed, Eko is quick to glide down from her high perch and walk a wide circle around Edvard. Man and dragon watch each other with some trepidation, but Edvard does not look at Eko's glossy black scales or her intelligent two-toned eyes with any negativity and Iza feels a sharp sense of relief. Eko trills at Edvard and even goes so far as to sniff once at his person before she dashes back to Iza, sitting before Iza's feet like a sentinel with her frills on full display.
Edvard merely raises a brow at the dragon and excuses himself to finish his hunt.
Iza watches him go, broad shoulders disappearing into the shadows of the trees, and feels a foreign flutter in her stomach.
She does not realize that she has been staring after Edvard for some time until Carlisle comes into view with a worried pucker on his thin face. "Is safe?" he asks.
"Yes," Iza murmurs, offering Carlisle a tiny smile of reassurance. "Yes, I think we are."
A/N: Throwback Thursday to that time like 1000 years ago when your love interest stumbled across your baby dragon and there was a super intense staring contest until you both chilled out again. Ah, good times.
No Viking things for this chapter, I don't think! But there has been some confusion about Edvard's family and age, so I'll clear that up instead. Let's see, as already stated so far, Edvard was orphaned very young and adopted by Alise and Emebor's family, who are farmers. Edvard grew up with Alise and Emebor as siblings but also with the knowledge that he would have to provide for himself once he was of age. And speaking of age, he's only a few years older than Iza. Iza is sixteen and Edvard is nineteen or twenty.
As always, be brutally honest. I can take it.
~Rae