Frozen/HTTYD Chapter Six
Chapter Six
He probably should have anticipated that he would find Elsa digging what was probably a fire pit while the Night Fury sat not all that far away and watched curiously. She had her knife in one hand and a sort of scoop made out of ice in the other, and though she ducked the ice out of sight when Hiccup first slid down into the cove, she relaxed again a moment later.
“Afternoon,” he said. The grass was damp against his legs, but the weather was holding off for the day. “Has everything been...” he nodded to the dragon. “All right?”
Elsa looked round at the Night Fury, who cocked his head and rumbled something. “He doesn’t like nekillos,” she replied, gesturing to the pot beside her. As Hiccup got closer, he glanced in to see that it was full of mushrooms. “But fish, he likes them.”
“You, er, want a hand with that?” He gestured to the half-dug pit. It was still only a hollow in the ground, really. Elsa glanced across it, then gave him a hopeful smile and offered him the ice scoop. It was cold, but not really painful, and was a good fit for his hand as he knelt down next to her and started digging out the soil. “So everything is really all right?”
“Yes,” said Elsa, and he wondered if the surprise in her voice was because he had asked. “The wound does not bleed now.”
“Well, at least I only maimed a dragon, rather than killing it.” He sighed. “You know that - that hand thing? It’s not just him.”
Elsa looked round, frowning. To be fair, it had been a particularly bad explanation. Hiccup got to his feet again and crossed to the Night Fury, who grumbled something deep in his chest and flared his wings slightly.
“Oh yeah, knife.” Hiccup took his knife from his belt and tossed it in Elsa’s vague direction. “There we go, see? No weapons.” As the Night Fury settled down a little again, he turned so that he was slightly sideways on, and raised his hand again. “There was a Nadder, in the arena, and I did this, and...”
The Night Fury regarded him for a moment, then stretched out his neck and nudged Hiccup’s hand with his nose.
“You see?” It felt like a rush, as if there was some sort of energy flowing into him whenever the Night Fury touched his hand. Might just have been a sort of dimmed terror, though. “And the Nadder did the same thing. It’s not just Night Furies. It’s not just him.”
He pointed at the Night Fury in what was probably a slightly over-dramatic gesture. The dragon made a sound that could only be described as a chirp, and this time it was Hiccup’s turn to look round in bewilderment. Rumbling and roaring and growling he had expected, but not a sound like that.
“I mean, are they all like this?” The words burst out of him. At first sight, yes, the Night Fury had been frightening, but it was harder to be terrified of something when you had washed blood and dirt from a wound you inflicted on it. Besides the fact that it was currently sniffing his boots. The Deady Nadder, in the arena, had been just the same - he had been wondering what he was doing, certainly, but he wasn’t deathly afraid or anything of that sort. “Are they all so, so...”
He looked at Elsa helplessly, not sure that he could even find the words. Her expression indicated that she wasn’t sure what he was talking about either. To be frank, the dragon seemed the least bewildered of the three of them, as he turned and walked over to the pool again, tail swishing behind him.
Elsa set aside her knife and got to her feet, brushing soil off her hands. This time, she left the cane behind her, and limped but did not wince as she walked up beside Hiccup. “I think he likes to watch fish.”
“Or he’s thinking about dinner,” said Hiccup. The Night Fury batted at the surface of the water with one paw, then held still to examine its own reflection. The sway of its tail bought its injured fin painfully into Hiccup’s attention. “Gods, I wish I could do something about that. But it’s like with the Terrors... they clip the wings so that they can’t escape. I just...” he shook his head, looked down at the ground, and let his eyes trail across to Elsa’s feet - one bare, one still in the cast. “How’s your ankle doing?”
“More good,” she said, then paused and tried: “Better?” When Hiccup nodded, a smile flickered across her face. “It hurts me less.”
And that, as well. He’d always wanted to be like the other members of his tribe - now he found himself almost wanting to want to be like them. To want to kill dragons and trap wildlings and carouse and hold funerals and wakes for the dead. To skin dragon carcasses and burn the rest on the beach. To continue the search for Dragon Island. But it was getting harder and harder to even want those things at all.
“I wish I could do something about his tail,” sighed Hiccup. “But it’s not like bones would grow back.” And dragons were grounded without tails. He watched the way that the remaining fin moved, flaring outwards and closing again, on five slender bones like the fingers of his hand. The muscles on the other side of his tail twitched at the same time, enough to make light catch on the ice sealing the wound. “And I wish I could just ask someone about some of this stuff. I mean, I can’t even ask Gobber...”
A pause. A blink. A rush of thoughts in his head, all at once.
Gobber had once said that Hiccup talked so much because he had to get ideas out of his head to make room for new ones. He might have been right. Mind suddenly soaring, Hiccup looked down at his left hand, curling and extending his fingers, and thinking of all of the times at the forge that he had needed to change over Gobber’s hands. The wooden one that could have a glove over it, the hammer, the bludgeon, the tongs that acted better than hands in a forge because they were so manoeuvrable.
“Prosthetic,” he said aloud. Elsa once again gave him that look which said that he was speaking nonsense. “He can’t use the muscles with it... but it would be a start. It could work.”
A smile spread across his face, and by the time he turned to Elsa it had become a look of manic glee.
“That’s it! I can’t fix his tail, but I can replace it... I need to get to the forge. I’m sorry, that probably didn’t even make sense.” Resisting the urge to give a triumphant whoop - it would probably not do to startle either a Night Fury or someone who could produce ice by magic - he grabbed his knife from the ground, almost tripped over his feet straightening up again, and started towards the exit. “I’ll be back! Maybe tonight, or tomorrow. I’ll be back.”
As he left, he glanced back just long enough to see Elsa exchange a glance with the Night Fury and shrug. Then he almost knocked his head on the tunnel on the way out, and decided that perhaps it would be better to concentrate on where he was going instead.
Dogsbreath had left the forge, and his brother was more than happy to let Hiccup in for the evening as long as he promised to finish the clearing up afterwards. He had a small slate set up with a design sketched out within minutes, and was rooting through the scrap metal almost immediately afterwards. The clanging was probably what attracted Gobber, who leant through the door just as Hiccup was trying to extract some scrap from the bottom of the pile.
“Hiccup? What’re you doing in there!”
“I - argh!” Hiccup straightened up, metal in hand, and managed to knock his head on the wooden shelf above. One of the hammers slipped over the edge, and he lunged to catch it before it hit the ground. “Just working on something. Got some inspiration.”
“Huh.” Gobber looked as if he was absolutely done with the day. “Somehow those five lunatics took longer to clean up that arena than you do by yourself. I’m going to go see if there’s any blocks of ice left in the house...”
“All right!” called Hiccup, but Gobber was already going. The twins must have been in fine form this evening to be that annoying. “I’ll see you... later.”
He waited, holding his breath, to see if Gobber would return to ask questions about what he was actually doing with scrap metal and some old rags. But mercifully, he did not, and Hiccup gave a sigh of relief and returned to rooting around for something that could easily be drawn out into a rod.
He wasn’t involved in the shipbuilding side of things, beyond helping to make the nails and rivets, but he knew a little bit about how sails were held taut. Rope wouldn’t do for this one, though - it would have to rely on the Night Fury itself. That part was a work in progress. But at least he could actually get something that looked like a tail - metal rods instead of bones, wool instead of membrane. The Gronckle iron was lighter, but he didn’t trust it enough to work with it just yet.
Drawing out to the length that he needed was harder than just making nails. Hiccup was working on the central spoke, the longest, when there was a knock at the door that almost made him drop the rod into the fire altogether.
“Sorry! Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Hiccup blinked in surprise, and withdrew the rod before it got overheated. “Fishlegs? What are you doing here? Are you looking for Gobber?”
“No, actually, he told me that you’d be here,” said Fishlegs. He had a fabric bundle in his hands, and Hiccup wondered whether this was just a particularly oddly-timed delivery of rags again. “I went looking for you at the house. I wanted to say thank you for today.”
Hiccup really didn’t have a response to that. He wasn’t sure that he could remember the last time that he had been thanked - other than by his father or Gobber - that hadn’t been sarcastic. Well, maybe Elsa, come to think of it, but that was a different situation.
“I, it, it’s nothing,” he managed to say, even if the words didn’t really want to string together. He shrugged. “Anyone would have done it, Fishlegs. Can’t have the students getting eaten!”
Once again, he aimed for jovial, but wasn’t quite sure that he hit it. Fishlegs gave him a nervous smile. “Well, anyone didn’t. You did. Here.”
He unwrapped the bundle and held it out and oh, all right, not clothes at all then. Gobber got plenty of food in exchange for his blacksmithing, and Hiccup occasionally got remembered as having done some of the work as well, but he had definitely never been presented with food in his own right before.
Carefully, he laid the cooling rod down on the anvil and slipped off his leather gloves. “You didn’t have to do this!”
Fishlegs just sort of shrugged awkwardly and proffered the food again. “They’re crabcakes,” he said. “My mother has this special recipe, she won’t even tell me, and, well, yes.”
Mrs. Ingerman also had three children to feed, although she was benefitting as much as anyone else from having the fishing catches split between fewer people. And with Fishlegs at the arena training, he couldn’t even be at the farm as much as usual to help her. It was gratifying, but a little awkward, that she had taken the time to make fishcakes over Hiccup... well, jumping in front of a Deadly Nadder, which even in hindsight was a really stupid thing to do.
“Thank you,” said Hiccup softly.
“Oh, and you can keep the basket as well,” added Fishlegs. “Frog’s getting a lot better at them.”
“Your sister made this?” Hiccup’s eyebrows shot up as he looked at the neatly-made basket, perfectly round and tightly woven. Froglegs was only eleven, though she sometimes seemed a lot older than that.
Fishlegs smiled proudly. “Yeah. She’s getting really good. Pig keeps trying to copy her and just making... well, they sort of look like spiders’ webs, really.”
“Hey, that’s about the level of my basketry,” said Hiccup. Beneath the gloves, his hands had been kept fairly clean, and he didn’t get sick as he had when he was a kid any more. Deciding that it would be worth risking it, he picked out one of the crabcakes and took a bite. The flavour didn’t so much explode across his tongue as seep, and his eyes went wide. “Wow,” he mumbled, still around the mouthful. “Those are amazing.”
“My Mom will be glad to hear that. She is pretty proud of them.”
“With good reason.” He swallowed. “You’re sure there aren’t sacrifices to Andhrímnir involved?” As Fishlegs laughed, Hiccup nudged the edge of the bowl back towards him. “Go on, have one.”
“Oh, no, they were for you.”
Hiccup shrugged. “If they’re mine, I can do what I want with them. Including offer them to people. Go on.”
With a smile, Fishlegs put down the bowl on the table beside them, and picked up one of the crabcakes for himself. If things had been a little different - if Hiccup had been stronger, and less prone to having things destroy themselves around him - they might have been friends, but Fishlegs was taller and bigger and just in pretty much every way a better Viking than Hiccup was. Even after years in the smithy, Hiccup couldn’t match him for strength.
“So,” Hiccup continued, groping for something to talk about being crabcakes. There was only ever so much to talk about on Berk, and he didn’t particularly want to fall back on the old favourite of the weather. “Training. At the arena. You think you’ve got a shot at the Monstrous Nightmare?”
Fishlegs gave a slightly derisive snort. “Oh, come on. Everyone knows that’s going to be Astrid. Besides, I’m just glad to be learning how to actually fight them. I don’t think I want to go out on the ships.”
“Well, we need to keep some people in Berk. Otherwise we’ll come back and the yaks will have taken over the place.”
“I suppose.” Fishlegs finished off his own crabcake, then rubbed his fingers together, looking at the crumbs almost thoughtfully. When he turned to Hiccup again, his brow was furrowed, and he spoke almost disbelievingly. “How do you do it, though? Being Gobber’s apprentice?”
The words took him by surprise. “Well, I just do what he tells me and try to not get hooked.”
“No, I mean... how do you do it? Be around the dragons all the time? Not even armed.”
There wasn’t really a person on Berk who hadn’t lost someone to the dragons. Hiccup’s mouth abruptly started feeling too dry to take another bite. “It’s... an occupational hazard,” he said. He couldn’t bring himself to make it a joke in the way that other things had been. “Besides, the dragons are there. All we can do is learn about them.”
“And learn to fight them,” said Fishlegs earnestly.
“Well, yes. Obviously.”
Things got weirder.
If he wasn’t feeding and mucking out the dragons early in the morning, he was sitting in on the lessons that Gobber gave in between letting the teens throw axes at the dragons. If it wasn’t that, it was eating lunch with Fishlegs - his mother always sent him with some food or another, and he was more than happy to let Hiccup have a slice of pie or a chunk of cheese as, more often than not, they tried to borrow Gobber’s copy of the Book of Dragons and go through what his family had added over the years. Or it was working with Gobber to design new levers, new doors, new trapdoors, new anything and everything for the arena as the ideas kept tumbling out of him for how to improve things.
And then, of course, if it was in any way possible for him to get to the cove, he did. The odd afternoon off when Gobber was at the smithy or having to help in town, but more often the evenings when he scrambled to finish early at the arena and head off. It took him two days to make a new tail fin for the Night Fury, and three hours waiting for it to fall asleep so that he could put the prosthetic on while it woke up and looked around groggily.
Then there was a brief moment when he was in the air, clinging to the Night Fury’s tail and trying to hold the prosthetic open, and it was all rushing air and wind and oh gods, either this was going to be amazing or he was going to die, and the next thing that he knew he was in the water and spitting out starwort. An offended shriek behind him was probably the Night Fury, and he was going to have to deal with that in a minute, but he was more concerned with coughing up water as Elsa splashed out to him as best she could and helped pull him to his feet again.
“Kelaa aj atvaas,” she said, cold hands on his arms and her eyes wide, but part of Hiccup was still in the air with the dragon and he was just grinning like an idiot. “All right? You are all right?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine!” He threw his arms wide to demonstrate, shaking some of the muck off his arms as he did so. Turning, he saw the Night Fury shaking its tail with grunts of frustration, the fabric and metal flapping about. “All right, bud, all right. We gotta... rope.” Like hauling out the sails. “You can’t fly with me on your tail, can you?”
He went to splash back out of the water again, then remembered Elsa. The wildling girl was still looking at him with concern on her face, thin sheets of ice forming and cracking on the surface of the water around her. Hiccup held out his hand.
“Look, I’m not hurt. We’ve just got... a bit of a language barrier, that’s all.”
Though she shook her head, Elsa reached out and took his hand. “You are strange, Hiccup.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
When you fall off, you have to get back on the horse. Or, in this case, the dragon. Night after night, Hiccup snuck out to the cove, usually with whatever fish he could lay his hands on, and worked on getting the Night Fury to fly again before sitting at the campfire with Elsa and talking excitedly about what he had seen from the air. She had more words by then, and less fear, and would talk in reply about what it was like to live as a wildling. The food they ate, the villages they would settle for a year or two, if the Vikings did not find them, the tents they carried the rest of the time.
“Most of the wildlings live in villages,” she said. It was so late at night that it was probably becoming early again, clouds overhead but not really raining. “Some, not, but most. It is safer. Easier to hunt boar, to not have wolves.”
“You’ve hunted boar?” Hiccup’s eyes widened. He’d been on a hunt or two himself, before his father had deemed that to also be too dangerous and relegated Hiccup to the village instead.
But Elsa shook her head. “No. But they do.” How she managed to find all of the food that she did, Hiccup did not know, but she always seemed to have fat hen and orache, bistort and sorrel, besides mushrooms. Gathering also seemed to make her more willing to accept some food from Hiccup - fish, usually, especially any eel since the Night Fury refused to eat it - but also bread and cheese, or dried meat. It had been over a month since the boats went out, and Hiccup was starting to fear but not allowing himself to admit it. “I am - I was too young, when I was in village.”
“How old were you?” said Hiccup. Elsa cocked her head. “When you left?”
He had pieced that much together from her words - she had lived in the village only until her magic had been revealed or had grown so strong that even the wildlings would not tolerate it. For a moment before she replied, Elsa picked at the rope of trollwort which she had removed from Hiccup’s net and now wore around her waist like a talisman. “I am eleven years old when ice...”
Even once he was done choking on the water he had been trying to drink, Hiccup was speechless. Eleven was still a child, even in Berk where dragons in the air and wildlings to the south made you grow up hardened and quickly. In Arendelle, they allowed children to be children for longer still. “Seven years?” he finally said, incredulously. Elsa looked up through her lashes, and he saw her lips twitch as they did when she was translating words. “Seven years... alone?”
“What does it mean, ‘alone’?”
“Oh, Thor,” muttered Hiccup. He didn’t realise that they hadn’t hit on that one. “One person is... alone. Two people are not alone. Alone is...” a vague wave of his hand. “No other people.”
Of course, it meant something a little more than that, a little more than just the physical lack of people around, but he figured that Elsa probably knew that better than anyone. She paused, then her brow furrowed and she nodded. “Then, yes. Seven years alone.”
There wasn’t really a good response to that, at least that Hiccup could think of. He wasn’t sure whether Elsa noticed as she turned to throw a scrap of fish to the dragon, who caught it out of the air and made a sort of chuffing noise as he swallowed it.
“Well, you aren’t alone any more,” he said finally.
“I have you,” replied Elsa. She gave him a very fragile smile. Behind her, the Night Fury huffed again. “And Toothless.”
“Toothless?” He hadn’t meant it in quite that way. Hiccup looked over to the dragon, who had rolled over onto his side and was squirming against a rock, probably in an attempt to scratch an itch on his back, and shrugged. “All right, sure. Toothless it is.”
Elsa didn’t remember much of her time in Arendelle, or perhaps just wasn’t willing to discuss with him everything that she did remember. She had a sister, but would not tell Hiccup said sister’s name; she did not even know the first names of her parents. Her most vivid memories were of her last couple of days in Arendelle, of ‘an accident’ about which she would not talk, of her father begging for the “trial of earth”.
That was the one day that Hiccup considered taking her to Berk and asking her to tell Gobber, anyone, what was happening in Arendelle.
They claimed not to know. Hiccup had been at the signing of the last treaty, mostly for the look of things even though he was Stoick’s son. Princess Anna of Arendelle, about a year older than him, had been expected to sit in the room and look appropriate regal as well. But both the King of Arendelle and Stoick had sworn no knowledge of wildling hideouts, or how they had originally come to the island.
“The men in silver,” Elsa said, “the... aapillen.”
“The Silver Priests?”
She nodded. “My parents took me to them. They asked them to take the magic out of me. The Silver Priests said that I would have one of the...” a frown furrowed her brow again, and ice formed on the cup in her hands. “Kotten nelaa. Four... kotten.” When Hiccup shook his head, she gave a huff of frustration. “There is kotte fire, kotte water, kotte earth, kotte air. Is as... when a person does wrong, they say to other people, the people say right or wrong...”
“A trial!” It snapped together. “When someone commits a crime, you put them in front of a jury? They decide what the punishment is?”
“Punishment,” said Elsa, and her voice was dark on it even though Hiccup was pretty sure he hadn’t said that in front of her before. Maybe that was a word that wildlings in general had picked up from Vikings. “Yes. If I was good, I would live in trial. If not, I would die.”
Her voice trembled slightly, but Hiccup could hear it even over the rain outside and the rumbling of the Night Fury as he slept.
“My father was the one who wanted the trial of earth,” she said. “I remember he said to my mother that it was the only one that I will live. The Silver Priests took us to the...” she made a gesture, both hands going from high to low in sharp lines.
“The gorge?”
Another nod. “Took us to the gorge. They said if I was good, I would come home. My father took me across the bridge, into the wildlands. I stayed there. He went back to Arendelle.”
“How did you survive?” asked Hiccup quietly.
“A woman found me. A wildling. She looked for people from Arendelle. Ones who had the trial of earth. But she could not take me home.”
That night, he stayed at the cove so late that he was running home as dawn was breaking, and fell through the window and into his bed with a thump that woke Gobber and set him grumbling downstairs. It might have been a good thing - he doubted that he would have been able to sleep anyway, with a whole new view on the Silver Priests of Arendelle whom Berk had always presumed to be politically harmless, if personally frustrating, figures .
It was no surprise, with too few hours in the day and too many bruises from trying to work out how to ride a dragon, that Hiccup often felt as if he was on the verge of falling asleep. For years, he’d actually struggled to sleep, unable to stop having ideas and thinking of things, then not being able to find clean paper on which to write them down before they fled him. Now, though, he didn’t think that would be a problem.
“I heard,” Snotlout was saying one evening, as they waited for night to fall properly so that they could look at the difference between the fires of the dragons, “that there’s this type of mushroom in the forest, and if you eat it, your spirit leaves your body and you can fly.”
“By all means,” said Astrid. “Go and try to find it.”
“Oh, oh, I got one,” said Ruffnut. “I heard that Gobber can skin a yak with his teeth in under a minute.”
“Oh yeah?” countered Tuffnut. “Well I heard that Hiccup’s got a secret wildling girlfriend that he goes sneaking out to see at night.”
Hiccup, who had at that particular moment been trying to neaten up the pile of shields in the armoury, jumped so hard that weaponry came crashing down all around him. He stormed over to the open door and looked round it to see the others looking in his direction in shock.
“What- where would you hear that?” He demanded. Tuffnut looked eminently surprised that Hiccup was even daring to talk to him, and to be fair Hiccup would probably not have done had he not had about six hours’ sleep in the previous three nights. “Who said that?”
“I dunno,” Tuffnut said, with a shrug. “I just heard it. That’s why it’s called the ‘I Heard’ game.”
And now everyone was actually paying attention to him, which was probably not a good idea in case they noticed how scratched his right arm was from where he had fallen into a holly bush two nights ago following a particularly inelegant landing. Hiccup shook his head in what he hoped was a dignified way, and went back to trying to not get himself killed by inanimate but very sharp objects.
“Wildling girlfriend,” he muttered to himself. “Yeah, right. As if my life would actually involve something other than dangerous failure right now.”
In his defence, though, he would count the fact that he managed to dodge the battleaxe that almost fell on him a moment later. Apparently his reactions were better than they used to be .
Around the time that it really became clear that Astrid was going to be the one to get to kill the Monstrous Nightmare, Hiccup became aware of just how much he was annoying her.
He wasn’t quite sure when it had started, although it might have had something to do with the way that he and Fishlegs knew the answer to just about any question that Gobber asked, and had started up an impromptu competition between themselves to see who could deliver it quicker. It might have been to do with the time that he got covered in some sort of plant, after Toothless decided to go and roll in a field full of it, and upon getting one sniff of him in the arena the Gronckle had licked his face and rolled over on its side in front of him. It wouldn’t have been so bad first thing in the morning, by himself, but no - all of the other teens were lined up behind him ready to fight the Gronckle. Which showed about as much inclination to fight anything as it did to read poetry. Hiccup had to sheepishly help Gobber roll it back into its pen, and they’d gone with the Nadder that day instead.
Then again, it might have been the time that he sort of saved her life from the Zippleback. Because, to be fair, that was probably about the worst thing that he could have done in terms of having Astrid hate him.
A stray axe from Snotlout was all that it had taken to leave Astrid on the ground with no weapons and without even the bucket of water that she had been given to soak the Zippleback’s ignition head. The damn thing hadn’t had its pen aired out in a couple of days to build up the gas, and Hiccup could see it preparing to light the gas coiling around the arena, before there was even going to be time for one of the others to throw water over the offending head. So he did the only thing that seemed appropriate at the time.
He slapped the Zippleback’s nearer tail.
The effect was more impressive than it had any right to be. Both of the Zippleback’s heads snapped round, and Hiccup had to duck as its tails lashed back and forth. As soon as they came into sight of the heads, both sets of eyes narrowed, and within seconds the Hideous Zippleback, venomous, nightmarish, Fear-Class dragon, was chasing its own tail round in circles as its gas slowly dissipated to reveal that Hiccup was the only one close to it.
Well, he had to act as if he’d learnt something from watching Toothless chase his tail, rather than just sitting with Elsa and laughing until his sides hurt.
Clearing his throat awkwardly, he sidled off and made a break for it before anybody could ask exactly what he had done. But it hadn’t been so quickly that he had missed the way that Astrid’s eyes had narrowed as well, and he knew her well enough to be concerned by that. If it had been Snotlout, that would have been one thing. But Astrid was smart enough to ask questions, and Hiccup of all people knew that was a considerably more dangerous thing.
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He probably should have anticipated that he would find Elsa digging what was probably a fire pit while the Night Fury sat not all that far away and watched curiously. She had her knife in one hand and a sort of scoop made out of ice in the other, and though she ducked the ice out of sight when Hiccup first slid down into the cove, she relaxed again a moment later.
“Afternoon,” he said. The grass was damp against his legs, but the weather was holding off for the day. “Has everything been...” he nodded to the dragon. “All right?”
Elsa looked round at the Night Fury, who cocked his head and rumbled something. “He doesn’t like nekillos,” she replied, gesturing to the pot beside her. As Hiccup got closer, he glanced in to see that it was full of mushrooms. “But fish, he likes them.”
“You, er, want a hand with that?” He gestured to the half-dug pit. It was still only a hollow in the ground, really. Elsa glanced across it, then gave him a hopeful smile and offered him the ice scoop. It was cold, but not really painful, and was a good fit for his hand as he knelt down next to her and started digging out the soil. “So everything is really all right?”
“Yes,” said Elsa, and he wondered if the surprise in her voice was because he had asked. “The wound does not bleed now.”
“Well, at least I only maimed a dragon, rather than killing it.” He sighed. “You know that - that hand thing? It’s not just him.”
Elsa looked round, frowning. To be fair, it had been a particularly bad explanation. Hiccup got to his feet again and crossed to the Night Fury, who grumbled something deep in his chest and flared his wings slightly.
“Oh yeah, knife.” Hiccup took his knife from his belt and tossed it in Elsa’s vague direction. “There we go, see? No weapons.” As the Night Fury settled down a little again, he turned so that he was slightly sideways on, and raised his hand again. “There was a Nadder, in the arena, and I did this, and...”
The Night Fury regarded him for a moment, then stretched out his neck and nudged Hiccup’s hand with his nose.
“You see?” It felt like a rush, as if there was some sort of energy flowing into him whenever the Night Fury touched his hand. Might just have been a sort of dimmed terror, though. “And the Nadder did the same thing. It’s not just Night Furies. It’s not just him.”
He pointed at the Night Fury in what was probably a slightly over-dramatic gesture. The dragon made a sound that could only be described as a chirp, and this time it was Hiccup’s turn to look round in bewilderment. Rumbling and roaring and growling he had expected, but not a sound like that.
“I mean, are they all like this?” The words burst out of him. At first sight, yes, the Night Fury had been frightening, but it was harder to be terrified of something when you had washed blood and dirt from a wound you inflicted on it. Besides the fact that it was currently sniffing his boots. The Deady Nadder, in the arena, had been just the same - he had been wondering what he was doing, certainly, but he wasn’t deathly afraid or anything of that sort. “Are they all so, so...”
He looked at Elsa helplessly, not sure that he could even find the words. Her expression indicated that she wasn’t sure what he was talking about either. To be frank, the dragon seemed the least bewildered of the three of them, as he turned and walked over to the pool again, tail swishing behind him.
Elsa set aside her knife and got to her feet, brushing soil off her hands. This time, she left the cane behind her, and limped but did not wince as she walked up beside Hiccup. “I think he likes to watch fish.”
“Or he’s thinking about dinner,” said Hiccup. The Night Fury batted at the surface of the water with one paw, then held still to examine its own reflection. The sway of its tail bought its injured fin painfully into Hiccup’s attention. “Gods, I wish I could do something about that. But it’s like with the Terrors... they clip the wings so that they can’t escape. I just...” he shook his head, looked down at the ground, and let his eyes trail across to Elsa’s feet - one bare, one still in the cast. “How’s your ankle doing?”
“More good,” she said, then paused and tried: “Better?” When Hiccup nodded, a smile flickered across her face. “It hurts me less.”
And that, as well. He’d always wanted to be like the other members of his tribe - now he found himself almost wanting to want to be like them. To want to kill dragons and trap wildlings and carouse and hold funerals and wakes for the dead. To skin dragon carcasses and burn the rest on the beach. To continue the search for Dragon Island. But it was getting harder and harder to even want those things at all.
“I wish I could do something about his tail,” sighed Hiccup. “But it’s not like bones would grow back.” And dragons were grounded without tails. He watched the way that the remaining fin moved, flaring outwards and closing again, on five slender bones like the fingers of his hand. The muscles on the other side of his tail twitched at the same time, enough to make light catch on the ice sealing the wound. “And I wish I could just ask someone about some of this stuff. I mean, I can’t even ask Gobber...”
A pause. A blink. A rush of thoughts in his head, all at once.
Gobber had once said that Hiccup talked so much because he had to get ideas out of his head to make room for new ones. He might have been right. Mind suddenly soaring, Hiccup looked down at his left hand, curling and extending his fingers, and thinking of all of the times at the forge that he had needed to change over Gobber’s hands. The wooden one that could have a glove over it, the hammer, the bludgeon, the tongs that acted better than hands in a forge because they were so manoeuvrable.
“Prosthetic,” he said aloud. Elsa once again gave him that look which said that he was speaking nonsense. “He can’t use the muscles with it... but it would be a start. It could work.”
A smile spread across his face, and by the time he turned to Elsa it had become a look of manic glee.
“That’s it! I can’t fix his tail, but I can replace it... I need to get to the forge. I’m sorry, that probably didn’t even make sense.” Resisting the urge to give a triumphant whoop - it would probably not do to startle either a Night Fury or someone who could produce ice by magic - he grabbed his knife from the ground, almost tripped over his feet straightening up again, and started towards the exit. “I’ll be back! Maybe tonight, or tomorrow. I’ll be back.”
As he left, he glanced back just long enough to see Elsa exchange a glance with the Night Fury and shrug. Then he almost knocked his head on the tunnel on the way out, and decided that perhaps it would be better to concentrate on where he was going instead.
Dogsbreath had left the forge, and his brother was more than happy to let Hiccup in for the evening as long as he promised to finish the clearing up afterwards. He had a small slate set up with a design sketched out within minutes, and was rooting through the scrap metal almost immediately afterwards. The clanging was probably what attracted Gobber, who leant through the door just as Hiccup was trying to extract some scrap from the bottom of the pile.
“Hiccup? What’re you doing in there!”
“I - argh!” Hiccup straightened up, metal in hand, and managed to knock his head on the wooden shelf above. One of the hammers slipped over the edge, and he lunged to catch it before it hit the ground. “Just working on something. Got some inspiration.”
“Huh.” Gobber looked as if he was absolutely done with the day. “Somehow those five lunatics took longer to clean up that arena than you do by yourself. I’m going to go see if there’s any blocks of ice left in the house...”
“All right!” called Hiccup, but Gobber was already going. The twins must have been in fine form this evening to be that annoying. “I’ll see you... later.”
He waited, holding his breath, to see if Gobber would return to ask questions about what he was actually doing with scrap metal and some old rags. But mercifully, he did not, and Hiccup gave a sigh of relief and returned to rooting around for something that could easily be drawn out into a rod.
He wasn’t involved in the shipbuilding side of things, beyond helping to make the nails and rivets, but he knew a little bit about how sails were held taut. Rope wouldn’t do for this one, though - it would have to rely on the Night Fury itself. That part was a work in progress. But at least he could actually get something that looked like a tail - metal rods instead of bones, wool instead of membrane. The Gronckle iron was lighter, but he didn’t trust it enough to work with it just yet.
Drawing out to the length that he needed was harder than just making nails. Hiccup was working on the central spoke, the longest, when there was a knock at the door that almost made him drop the rod into the fire altogether.
“Sorry! Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Hiccup blinked in surprise, and withdrew the rod before it got overheated. “Fishlegs? What are you doing here? Are you looking for Gobber?”
“No, actually, he told me that you’d be here,” said Fishlegs. He had a fabric bundle in his hands, and Hiccup wondered whether this was just a particularly oddly-timed delivery of rags again. “I went looking for you at the house. I wanted to say thank you for today.”
Hiccup really didn’t have a response to that. He wasn’t sure that he could remember the last time that he had been thanked - other than by his father or Gobber - that hadn’t been sarcastic. Well, maybe Elsa, come to think of it, but that was a different situation.
“I, it, it’s nothing,” he managed to say, even if the words didn’t really want to string together. He shrugged. “Anyone would have done it, Fishlegs. Can’t have the students getting eaten!”
Once again, he aimed for jovial, but wasn’t quite sure that he hit it. Fishlegs gave him a nervous smile. “Well, anyone didn’t. You did. Here.”
He unwrapped the bundle and held it out and oh, all right, not clothes at all then. Gobber got plenty of food in exchange for his blacksmithing, and Hiccup occasionally got remembered as having done some of the work as well, but he had definitely never been presented with food in his own right before.
Carefully, he laid the cooling rod down on the anvil and slipped off his leather gloves. “You didn’t have to do this!”
Fishlegs just sort of shrugged awkwardly and proffered the food again. “They’re crabcakes,” he said. “My mother has this special recipe, she won’t even tell me, and, well, yes.”
Mrs. Ingerman also had three children to feed, although she was benefitting as much as anyone else from having the fishing catches split between fewer people. And with Fishlegs at the arena training, he couldn’t even be at the farm as much as usual to help her. It was gratifying, but a little awkward, that she had taken the time to make fishcakes over Hiccup... well, jumping in front of a Deadly Nadder, which even in hindsight was a really stupid thing to do.
“Thank you,” said Hiccup softly.
“Oh, and you can keep the basket as well,” added Fishlegs. “Frog’s getting a lot better at them.”
“Your sister made this?” Hiccup’s eyebrows shot up as he looked at the neatly-made basket, perfectly round and tightly woven. Froglegs was only eleven, though she sometimes seemed a lot older than that.
Fishlegs smiled proudly. “Yeah. She’s getting really good. Pig keeps trying to copy her and just making... well, they sort of look like spiders’ webs, really.”
“Hey, that’s about the level of my basketry,” said Hiccup. Beneath the gloves, his hands had been kept fairly clean, and he didn’t get sick as he had when he was a kid any more. Deciding that it would be worth risking it, he picked out one of the crabcakes and took a bite. The flavour didn’t so much explode across his tongue as seep, and his eyes went wide. “Wow,” he mumbled, still around the mouthful. “Those are amazing.”
“My Mom will be glad to hear that. She is pretty proud of them.”
“With good reason.” He swallowed. “You’re sure there aren’t sacrifices to Andhrímnir involved?” As Fishlegs laughed, Hiccup nudged the edge of the bowl back towards him. “Go on, have one.”
“Oh, no, they were for you.”
Hiccup shrugged. “If they’re mine, I can do what I want with them. Including offer them to people. Go on.”
With a smile, Fishlegs put down the bowl on the table beside them, and picked up one of the crabcakes for himself. If things had been a little different - if Hiccup had been stronger, and less prone to having things destroy themselves around him - they might have been friends, but Fishlegs was taller and bigger and just in pretty much every way a better Viking than Hiccup was. Even after years in the smithy, Hiccup couldn’t match him for strength.
“So,” Hiccup continued, groping for something to talk about being crabcakes. There was only ever so much to talk about on Berk, and he didn’t particularly want to fall back on the old favourite of the weather. “Training. At the arena. You think you’ve got a shot at the Monstrous Nightmare?”
Fishlegs gave a slightly derisive snort. “Oh, come on. Everyone knows that’s going to be Astrid. Besides, I’m just glad to be learning how to actually fight them. I don’t think I want to go out on the ships.”
“Well, we need to keep some people in Berk. Otherwise we’ll come back and the yaks will have taken over the place.”
“I suppose.” Fishlegs finished off his own crabcake, then rubbed his fingers together, looking at the crumbs almost thoughtfully. When he turned to Hiccup again, his brow was furrowed, and he spoke almost disbelievingly. “How do you do it, though? Being Gobber’s apprentice?”
The words took him by surprise. “Well, I just do what he tells me and try to not get hooked.”
“No, I mean... how do you do it? Be around the dragons all the time? Not even armed.”
There wasn’t really a person on Berk who hadn’t lost someone to the dragons. Hiccup’s mouth abruptly started feeling too dry to take another bite. “It’s... an occupational hazard,” he said. He couldn’t bring himself to make it a joke in the way that other things had been. “Besides, the dragons are there. All we can do is learn about them.”
“And learn to fight them,” said Fishlegs earnestly.
“Well, yes. Obviously.”
Things got weirder.
If he wasn’t feeding and mucking out the dragons early in the morning, he was sitting in on the lessons that Gobber gave in between letting the teens throw axes at the dragons. If it wasn’t that, it was eating lunch with Fishlegs - his mother always sent him with some food or another, and he was more than happy to let Hiccup have a slice of pie or a chunk of cheese as, more often than not, they tried to borrow Gobber’s copy of the Book of Dragons and go through what his family had added over the years. Or it was working with Gobber to design new levers, new doors, new trapdoors, new anything and everything for the arena as the ideas kept tumbling out of him for how to improve things.
And then, of course, if it was in any way possible for him to get to the cove, he did. The odd afternoon off when Gobber was at the smithy or having to help in town, but more often the evenings when he scrambled to finish early at the arena and head off. It took him two days to make a new tail fin for the Night Fury, and three hours waiting for it to fall asleep so that he could put the prosthetic on while it woke up and looked around groggily.
Then there was a brief moment when he was in the air, clinging to the Night Fury’s tail and trying to hold the prosthetic open, and it was all rushing air and wind and oh gods, either this was going to be amazing or he was going to die, and the next thing that he knew he was in the water and spitting out starwort. An offended shriek behind him was probably the Night Fury, and he was going to have to deal with that in a minute, but he was more concerned with coughing up water as Elsa splashed out to him as best she could and helped pull him to his feet again.
“Kelaa aj atvaas,” she said, cold hands on his arms and her eyes wide, but part of Hiccup was still in the air with the dragon and he was just grinning like an idiot. “All right? You are all right?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine!” He threw his arms wide to demonstrate, shaking some of the muck off his arms as he did so. Turning, he saw the Night Fury shaking its tail with grunts of frustration, the fabric and metal flapping about. “All right, bud, all right. We gotta... rope.” Like hauling out the sails. “You can’t fly with me on your tail, can you?”
He went to splash back out of the water again, then remembered Elsa. The wildling girl was still looking at him with concern on her face, thin sheets of ice forming and cracking on the surface of the water around her. Hiccup held out his hand.
“Look, I’m not hurt. We’ve just got... a bit of a language barrier, that’s all.”
Though she shook her head, Elsa reached out and took his hand. “You are strange, Hiccup.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
When you fall off, you have to get back on the horse. Or, in this case, the dragon. Night after night, Hiccup snuck out to the cove, usually with whatever fish he could lay his hands on, and worked on getting the Night Fury to fly again before sitting at the campfire with Elsa and talking excitedly about what he had seen from the air. She had more words by then, and less fear, and would talk in reply about what it was like to live as a wildling. The food they ate, the villages they would settle for a year or two, if the Vikings did not find them, the tents they carried the rest of the time.
“Most of the wildlings live in villages,” she said. It was so late at night that it was probably becoming early again, clouds overhead but not really raining. “Some, not, but most. It is safer. Easier to hunt boar, to not have wolves.”
“You’ve hunted boar?” Hiccup’s eyes widened. He’d been on a hunt or two himself, before his father had deemed that to also be too dangerous and relegated Hiccup to the village instead.
But Elsa shook her head. “No. But they do.” How she managed to find all of the food that she did, Hiccup did not know, but she always seemed to have fat hen and orache, bistort and sorrel, besides mushrooms. Gathering also seemed to make her more willing to accept some food from Hiccup - fish, usually, especially any eel since the Night Fury refused to eat it - but also bread and cheese, or dried meat. It had been over a month since the boats went out, and Hiccup was starting to fear but not allowing himself to admit it. “I am - I was too young, when I was in village.”
“How old were you?” said Hiccup. Elsa cocked her head. “When you left?”
He had pieced that much together from her words - she had lived in the village only until her magic had been revealed or had grown so strong that even the wildlings would not tolerate it. For a moment before she replied, Elsa picked at the rope of trollwort which she had removed from Hiccup’s net and now wore around her waist like a talisman. “I am eleven years old when ice...”
Even once he was done choking on the water he had been trying to drink, Hiccup was speechless. Eleven was still a child, even in Berk where dragons in the air and wildlings to the south made you grow up hardened and quickly. In Arendelle, they allowed children to be children for longer still. “Seven years?” he finally said, incredulously. Elsa looked up through her lashes, and he saw her lips twitch as they did when she was translating words. “Seven years... alone?”
“What does it mean, ‘alone’?”
“Oh, Thor,” muttered Hiccup. He didn’t realise that they hadn’t hit on that one. “One person is... alone. Two people are not alone. Alone is...” a vague wave of his hand. “No other people.”
Of course, it meant something a little more than that, a little more than just the physical lack of people around, but he figured that Elsa probably knew that better than anyone. She paused, then her brow furrowed and she nodded. “Then, yes. Seven years alone.”
There wasn’t really a good response to that, at least that Hiccup could think of. He wasn’t sure whether Elsa noticed as she turned to throw a scrap of fish to the dragon, who caught it out of the air and made a sort of chuffing noise as he swallowed it.
“Well, you aren’t alone any more,” he said finally.
“I have you,” replied Elsa. She gave him a very fragile smile. Behind her, the Night Fury huffed again. “And Toothless.”
“Toothless?” He hadn’t meant it in quite that way. Hiccup looked over to the dragon, who had rolled over onto his side and was squirming against a rock, probably in an attempt to scratch an itch on his back, and shrugged. “All right, sure. Toothless it is.”
Elsa didn’t remember much of her time in Arendelle, or perhaps just wasn’t willing to discuss with him everything that she did remember. She had a sister, but would not tell Hiccup said sister’s name; she did not even know the first names of her parents. Her most vivid memories were of her last couple of days in Arendelle, of ‘an accident’ about which she would not talk, of her father begging for the “trial of earth”.
That was the one day that Hiccup considered taking her to Berk and asking her to tell Gobber, anyone, what was happening in Arendelle.
They claimed not to know. Hiccup had been at the signing of the last treaty, mostly for the look of things even though he was Stoick’s son. Princess Anna of Arendelle, about a year older than him, had been expected to sit in the room and look appropriate regal as well. But both the King of Arendelle and Stoick had sworn no knowledge of wildling hideouts, or how they had originally come to the island.
“The men in silver,” Elsa said, “the... aapillen.”
“The Silver Priests?”
She nodded. “My parents took me to them. They asked them to take the magic out of me. The Silver Priests said that I would have one of the...” a frown furrowed her brow again, and ice formed on the cup in her hands. “Kotten nelaa. Four... kotten.” When Hiccup shook his head, she gave a huff of frustration. “There is kotte fire, kotte water, kotte earth, kotte air. Is as... when a person does wrong, they say to other people, the people say right or wrong...”
“A trial!” It snapped together. “When someone commits a crime, you put them in front of a jury? They decide what the punishment is?”
“Punishment,” said Elsa, and her voice was dark on it even though Hiccup was pretty sure he hadn’t said that in front of her before. Maybe that was a word that wildlings in general had picked up from Vikings. “Yes. If I was good, I would live in trial. If not, I would die.”
Her voice trembled slightly, but Hiccup could hear it even over the rain outside and the rumbling of the Night Fury as he slept.
“My father was the one who wanted the trial of earth,” she said. “I remember he said to my mother that it was the only one that I will live. The Silver Priests took us to the...” she made a gesture, both hands going from high to low in sharp lines.
“The gorge?”
Another nod. “Took us to the gorge. They said if I was good, I would come home. My father took me across the bridge, into the wildlands. I stayed there. He went back to Arendelle.”
“How did you survive?” asked Hiccup quietly.
“A woman found me. A wildling. She looked for people from Arendelle. Ones who had the trial of earth. But she could not take me home.”
That night, he stayed at the cove so late that he was running home as dawn was breaking, and fell through the window and into his bed with a thump that woke Gobber and set him grumbling downstairs. It might have been a good thing - he doubted that he would have been able to sleep anyway, with a whole new view on the Silver Priests of Arendelle whom Berk had always presumed to be politically harmless, if personally frustrating, figures .
It was no surprise, with too few hours in the day and too many bruises from trying to work out how to ride a dragon, that Hiccup often felt as if he was on the verge of falling asleep. For years, he’d actually struggled to sleep, unable to stop having ideas and thinking of things, then not being able to find clean paper on which to write them down before they fled him. Now, though, he didn’t think that would be a problem.
“I heard,” Snotlout was saying one evening, as they waited for night to fall properly so that they could look at the difference between the fires of the dragons, “that there’s this type of mushroom in the forest, and if you eat it, your spirit leaves your body and you can fly.”
“By all means,” said Astrid. “Go and try to find it.”
“Oh, oh, I got one,” said Ruffnut. “I heard that Gobber can skin a yak with his teeth in under a minute.”
“Oh yeah?” countered Tuffnut. “Well I heard that Hiccup’s got a secret wildling girlfriend that he goes sneaking out to see at night.”
Hiccup, who had at that particular moment been trying to neaten up the pile of shields in the armoury, jumped so hard that weaponry came crashing down all around him. He stormed over to the open door and looked round it to see the others looking in his direction in shock.
“What- where would you hear that?” He demanded. Tuffnut looked eminently surprised that Hiccup was even daring to talk to him, and to be fair Hiccup would probably not have done had he not had about six hours’ sleep in the previous three nights. “Who said that?”
“I dunno,” Tuffnut said, with a shrug. “I just heard it. That’s why it’s called the ‘I Heard’ game.”
And now everyone was actually paying attention to him, which was probably not a good idea in case they noticed how scratched his right arm was from where he had fallen into a holly bush two nights ago following a particularly inelegant landing. Hiccup shook his head in what he hoped was a dignified way, and went back to trying to not get himself killed by inanimate but very sharp objects.
“Wildling girlfriend,” he muttered to himself. “Yeah, right. As if my life would actually involve something other than dangerous failure right now.”
In his defence, though, he would count the fact that he managed to dodge the battleaxe that almost fell on him a moment later. Apparently his reactions were better than they used to be .
Around the time that it really became clear that Astrid was going to be the one to get to kill the Monstrous Nightmare, Hiccup became aware of just how much he was annoying her.
He wasn’t quite sure when it had started, although it might have had something to do with the way that he and Fishlegs knew the answer to just about any question that Gobber asked, and had started up an impromptu competition between themselves to see who could deliver it quicker. It might have been to do with the time that he got covered in some sort of plant, after Toothless decided to go and roll in a field full of it, and upon getting one sniff of him in the arena the Gronckle had licked his face and rolled over on its side in front of him. It wouldn’t have been so bad first thing in the morning, by himself, but no - all of the other teens were lined up behind him ready to fight the Gronckle. Which showed about as much inclination to fight anything as it did to read poetry. Hiccup had to sheepishly help Gobber roll it back into its pen, and they’d gone with the Nadder that day instead.
Then again, it might have been the time that he sort of saved her life from the Zippleback. Because, to be fair, that was probably about the worst thing that he could have done in terms of having Astrid hate him.
A stray axe from Snotlout was all that it had taken to leave Astrid on the ground with no weapons and without even the bucket of water that she had been given to soak the Zippleback’s ignition head. The damn thing hadn’t had its pen aired out in a couple of days to build up the gas, and Hiccup could see it preparing to light the gas coiling around the arena, before there was even going to be time for one of the others to throw water over the offending head. So he did the only thing that seemed appropriate at the time.
He slapped the Zippleback’s nearer tail.
The effect was more impressive than it had any right to be. Both of the Zippleback’s heads snapped round, and Hiccup had to duck as its tails lashed back and forth. As soon as they came into sight of the heads, both sets of eyes narrowed, and within seconds the Hideous Zippleback, venomous, nightmarish, Fear-Class dragon, was chasing its own tail round in circles as its gas slowly dissipated to reveal that Hiccup was the only one close to it.
Well, he had to act as if he’d learnt something from watching Toothless chase his tail, rather than just sitting with Elsa and laughing until his sides hurt.
Clearing his throat awkwardly, he sidled off and made a break for it before anybody could ask exactly what he had done. But it hadn’t been so quickly that he had missed the way that Astrid’s eyes had narrowed as well, and he knew her well enough to be concerned by that. If it had been Snotlout, that would have been one thing. But Astrid was smart enough to ask questions, and Hiccup of all people knew that was a considerably more dangerous thing.
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