Chapter Eight
He really wished that there was a good explanation for it. The only one that he could give was that it was right, that he just wasn’t made to kill, but he suspected that wasn’t what Astrid meant.
“Is that my shirt?” said Astrid, now looking more pointedly at Elsa. “Is that what happened to the stuff we gave to the smithy?”
“Not all of it,” said Hiccup quickly.
Elsa looked questioning. “It is yours? I did not know, I am sorry.” And, Thor help him, she went as if she was going to take it off in the middle of the cove and Hiccup lunged forwards to grab her hand.
“No! No, that’s not necessary! I’m sure Astrid’s fine with you having it, aren’t you Astrid?”
He looked at Astrid almost desperately, and couldn’t even find words for his relief when she nodded as well. Elsa relaxed, and Hiccup took his hand away, discreetly flexing his fingers to get sensation back into them.
“All right. Let’s go with nobody attacking anybody else, shall we?” He was very firmly trying to ignore the dragon eggs and hope that Astrid hadn’t caught the mention that he had made of them. That really would be the last straw. Hiccup stepped carefully so that he was between the three of them, in the centre of the triangle, and after a moment’s pause turned so that he was facing Astrid. Toothless was a skulking black shape in his peripheral vision, but his wings were folded down again.
“I’m serious, Hiccup,” said Astrid, and if he wasn’t mistaken then there was the slightest hint of a tremble in her voice. “I should be telling your father about this and I really need a reason not to right now.”
“Elsa is just a person!” It came out heavy with exasperation, with a half-furious gesture. “She gathers her food and she lives in the wildlands and she’s been by herself since she was eleven years old, and when I found her she had a broken ankle... and it was my fault.”
Even Elsa looked surprised by that. Hiccup couldn’t bring himself to face her fully, feeling a weight settle on him again as he admitted it.
“That night that Elsa was in Berk? I had a net made of trollwort. It blocks magic. Only Elsa got caught in it and fell and broke her ankle, and that’s what I was doing out that night.”
Elsa looked a lot healthier now than she had then, he had to say. She was cleaner, better-clothed, with less hollowness to her cheeks though no less wariness in her eyes. Most of her weight was on her uninjured leg, but it seemed to be doing better all the same. Perhaps Astrid would see her as a threat; Hiccup didn’t know. True, her magic was dangerous. But her magic wasn’t the same as her, and Hiccup had little doubt that if she had wanted to kill him, he would be dead already.
He sighed. “I couldn’t do it, Astrid. I couldn’t kill someone just because they didn’t come from Berk, just because they’re a wildling.”
Though her fingers curled into a fist and out again, searching for the hilt of a weapon that wasn’t there, Astrid stood confidently as she faced Elsa. “You have a name.”
“My name is Elsa,” the older girl said.
“You have magic. How?”
Elsa frowned slightly. “I have always. Since I was young.”
“She was born with it,” put in Hiccup. That much, again, he had gathered as they spoke.
Astrid glanced to him for a moment, but her eyes did not settle there. He could not say that he blamed her. “You come from the wildlands.”
This part they had managed to talk through. “I was from Arendelle,” said Elsa. “When I was eight, I was sent to wildlands.”
“Arendelle doesn’t have anything to do with the wildlings,” said Astrid, shaking her head, but her voice had slowed.
“The Silver Priests are lying,” said Hiccup. “Wildlings are from Arendelle, at least some of them are. We think we understand the world, but there’s so much more, Astrid.”
For a moment, Astrid said nothing, her gaze locked with Elsa’s and an almost calculating glint in her eye. She shifted her weight, crossed her arms, and then looked over Hiccup’s other shoulder to where Toothless still stood, wings down but back arched, in a way that Hiccup knew meant curiosity and wariness but which was probably hard to read if you hadn’t had a few weeks experience with dragons.
“And what about that?” Astrid said. “What is there missing about dragons?”
He thought of Toothless’s saddle, safely stowed in the caves, and smiled. “Let me show you.”
“You’re mad,” said Astrid flatly, as Hiccup climbed into the saddle and held out his hand to help her up as well. “You’re absolutely mad.”
“He has practised,” said Elsa. The trollwort bracelet was back on her wrist, though neither she nor Hiccup had commented to Astrid on the significance of that, and she was standing at a respectful distance as Toothless wriggled his shoulders and flicked his tail back and forth, getting settled again and impatient to fly. “He falls off less.”
“That doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence,” said Astrid flatly. “Do you...” she gestured in the general direction of Toothless. Maybe it just felt too ridiculous to ask ‘do you fly on the back of a dragon’ with a straight face, and Hiccup could acknowledge that not all that long ago, he would have thought the same thing.
Elsa shook her head. “The ground is enough for me.”
“Well, yes, maybe I’m just being greedy about my elements,” said Hiccup. “Come on. You asked what was missing. The fact that Toothless,” he used the name deliberately, “is calmly standing here with us around? That’s just the start.”
Finally, still frowning, Astrid walked up to Toothless’s side. She slapped aside Hiccup’s extended hand, grabbed hold of the saddle and pulled herself up, using the pedal attached to the connecting rod for leverage. As she slid into place, Hiccup couldn’t help getting the feeling that she was doing her best not to actually touch him, sitting as far back in the saddle as she could.
Toothless rumbled and shifted slightly, and he felt Astrid stiffen. “It’s all right. He’s just getting used to two people. You ready, bud?” He patted Toothless’s neck, slipped his foot into the pedal, and opened up the tail to the best angle for taking off. “Then let’s go.”
Huge black wings spread on either side of them, and there was something about that which never lost its shine. The breathless moment, the anticipation as Toothless bent his legs and the muscles of his back shifted and readied to-
Take off. They shot into the air harder than ever, so hard that Hiccup felt air forced into his lungs and his eyes begin to water. “Toothless!” he tried to shout, but it was difficult to do much more than get a mouthful of bugs. Behind him, Astrid screamed and grabbed him tightly around the waist, and he really couldn’t blame her as he took hold of the ring that anchored him to Toothless and clung tightly with his legs and the world around them dropped away.
They were still accelerating as they hit the clouds, a cold damp layer that soaked them through in seconds and made even Hiccup close his eyes. Astrid was still screaming; he wasn’t sure that she’d even paused to take a breath. Toothless banked sideways, Hiccup shifting the tail in response to the tilt of his head and the muscles in his back, so smoothly that it was automatic now, and then with a leathery snap his wings spread to a gliding position, and Hiccup dared to open his eyes once again.
He’d never been this high before, except for the first ride when everything had gone so wrong and had nearly ended flying altogether for both of them. The air actually felt thin, they were so high up, the clouds below them and the sun beaming, if not exactly blazing, down. Through the gaps between the clouds he could see the blue-grey of the sea, the hulking black and white masses of the mountains giving way to the forests east and west, the village to the North. They could even see the city of Arendelle enclosed in its wall to the south, wrapped around its harbour like a pair of encircling arms.
Astrid had stopped screaming and started panting, which was probably at least something of an improvement, and her death-grip on Hiccup’s waist slackened slightly. He finally dared to look over his shoulder to see her looking down at the world below, eyes wide and jaw slack.
“Is that...”
“Berk? Yep. And those are the fylgja;” he pointed out the great carved stones that surrounded the village, fires burning from their mouths. They had been made when Berk was first settled, before the war with the dragons grew so great that it ate up all of their time and effort. “The mountains; the forests. It’s all here.”
Toothless gave a single smooth stroke of his wings to keep them high, banking gently again. Every shift of his muscles was like a sign to Hiccup now, as easy as walking over uneven ground. It might have been raining below them, but it was always clear if you went high enough, so far up that the mountains were like hills and the forest was like grass. There was always a place that you could see everything.
Behind him, he felt Astrid relax, her weight shifting more towards the centre of the saddle where she rested behind Hiccup rather than clinging to him. One of her arms remained around his waist, more lightly than before, and the other came to rest against his leg. He told himself not to read too much into it. For all that he’d flushed around Astrid, regarded her with awe - the greatest fighter of their age, a sharp mind, beautiful and strong together - it wasn’t really as if riding a dragon was normal for anyone. Not even him, yet.
“Is it always like this?” she said, more softly.
Hiccup couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah. Every time.”
Flying was like being released from a tight hold, and being able to breathe again. The sky darkened around them, stars emerging in the darkness as the sunset painted the horizon pink and yellow. The lines between them blurred, Hiccup moving as Toothless flew, Astrid learning quickly how to move her weight with them on each turn and roll. The moon rose, just past full and brighter up here than it ever was from the ground, and even when Astrid grew bold enough to release her hold on Hiccup and raised her hands into the air to trail through wisps of cloud, he did not care at all. Even without words, he could feel how easily she took to flight, the feeling of rushing air and the ground a far-off painting below them.
As the clouds thinned, they flew lower, until they could even see the great bonfires that had been lit outside the great hall, and when the wind was right catch snatches of songs and shouting.
“Shouldn’t you be down there?” said Hiccup.
Astrid punched him in the upper arm. “Shouldn’t you?”
“You’re supposed to be the guest of honour.” He remembered last year’s celebration, with Lars Thorston the lucky trainee. There had been no shortage of free drinks for him, songs made up on the spot, people hoisting him onto their shoulders to parade him around the hall.
He felt Astrid shrug. “It turned into more of a celebration for the boats. And the start of a wake.”
For those who came back from the boats, and those who did not. “Sorry,” said Hiccup.
Astrid’s arms slid around his waist again, and squeezed just a little, and he was trying to not read too much into that either. “Don’t be. I wouldn’t have seen this otherwise.”
The chill of the night couldn’t dampen the warmth that spread through him at her words. “Come on, bud,” said Hiccup, scratching Toothless just behind his flaps. “Let’s get you back to the cove. Elsa’ll be wondering where we’ve gone.”
They landed a lot more smoothly than they had taken off, though they did end up right on the edge of the water. Hiccup wondered whether Toothless was teasing them. He let Astrid climb down first, muttering beneath her breath, then got down himself. The backs of his legs still ached sometimes when he went flying, but today it was not so bad, and he just gave each foot a shake and stretched his shoulders from leaning forwards the whole time.
Elsa had lit a fire as she waited, and got to her feet with a fish in her hand as Toothless trotted over and butted her side. She gave him the fish, then ran her hand over his forehead, and he rubbed against her hip with a chirp. “Did you enjoy your flight?”
“Eh,” said Hiccup, swinging his arms and trying to act nonchalant. “It wasn’t bad.” It earnt him another punch on the arm from Astrid, this one a little harder than before. “Hey!”
“You’re a terrible liar,” said Astrid, and Elsa laughed. She looked round towards the wildling girl, less cautiously now. “I’m sorry about earlier. Hiccup’s... Hiccup is right.”
Elsa gave a thin smile. “It is fine. It is better than many have been.”
There was an uncomfortable moment, then Toothless bounded over and butted his head against Hiccup so hard that they both went staggering sideways. “Hey! Wow, is there anyone who isn’t going to hit me today?” he bopped the dragon on the nose, then set to scratching his neck. “Huh? You just joining in pushing me around? Is that it?”
Toothless made his low rumbling, arching his neck into Hiccup’s hands and patting at the ground with his front paws. His eyes dipped slightly closed, and the more that Hiccup scratched the more that they did, until finally with a great chuff he flopped to the ground and rolled onto his back, sending Hiccup hopping out of the way to avoid being knocked over.
“Did you just make a Night Fury fall over?” said Astrid incredulously. Hiccup looked up to see that both of the girls were watching him intently, Elsa with a smile, Astrid with her eyebrows raised. He wasn’t quite sure how to react to having the attention of multiple people on him.
“It works with Nadders as well?” he offered. “Though not so much with the Zipplebacks. Unless you can get both heads at once. They get jealous.”
That particular discovery had nearly involved getting his hair set on fire. Elsa was trying to hide laughter behind her hand as Astrid just stared. “How... how much do you know?”
“Hardly anything,” he said. “There’s so much. They-”
Toothless rolled to his feet, walked over to beside Astrid, and sat on his hindquarters with a huff. He was a lot taller than any of them when he did so, and Hiccup saw Astrid draw back slightly from the towering bulk of Night Fury.
“They like to copy,” he explained. “Well, some of them do, at least. Others, not so much.” He didn’t really want to think of it as an intelligence thing - perhaps it was just personality - but some of the dragons had definitely seemed to watch him more closely and copy his movements more willingly.
With a thrust of his throat, Toothless started to make a hawking sound, jaws opening. Oh Thor, Hiccup knew exactly what was coming now. Astrid backed away a step, but no further, right as Toothless opened his mouth and spat out half of the fish which Elsa had just given him, now considerably slimier and with some of the scales missing.
“And then they do that,” said Hiccup with a sigh. “Well, at least that means he likes you. Er, he’s probably not going to leave you alone until...”
No, he couldn’t say it. He couldn’t tell Astrid to eat half a fish that had just been thrown up by a Night Fury that, earlier that night, had been quite willing to attack her for daring to hold an axe to Hiccup’s throat. Putting his hand over his eyes, Hiccup wished once again for the ground to open up and swallow him, or at least for dragons to be a bit more suited to company.
“Does he want me to pick it up?” said Astrid carefully. Hiccup peeked out between his fingers just in time for her to give Elsa a glance as well. Apparently trusting the dragon and the wildling came just about hand-in-hand, or maybe it was just easier to trust Elsa in comparison to something that could bite your head off in one go.
“No,” he said finally. “Well, yes, for a start. And then he wants you to eat it.”
“What?” It came out as a deadpan of which Hiccup himself would have been proud, and Astrid narrowed her eyes at him. To be fair, if someone said that to him then he would probably think that they were winding him up, as well.
There was probably going to be only one way to handle this. Giving up, Hiccup crossed to beside Astrid and picked up the fish from the ground himself. Sadly, he had to hold it tight to stop it from slipping out of his fingers again. Night Fury spit was slippery stuff, as well as absolutely foul-tasting. And he really wished that he couldn’t say that with such authority.
Toothless growled a warning, deep in his chest, and Hiccup looked at him disapprovingly. “Bud, quit it. I’m going to share.”
All right, so maybe some of Astrid’s disbelieving expression was to do with the fact that he was talking to a Night Fury in a manner not dissimilar to how Fishlegs talked to his younger siblings. But still. Hiccup raised the fish in both hands, to show it both to Toothless and Astrid, and discreetly tried to rub as much Night Fury saliva as possible off a small patch near the edge.
“I think it’s a trust thing,” he said to Astrid. “Or maybe he thinks he’s being generous. I don’t know. But, hey.”
It got a little bit easier at time, but it didn’t really make it any less disgusting. Hiccup raised the fish to his mouth and talk a small, careful bite of the flesh. The raw fish itself wasn’t really the bad part, although Hiccup was waiting for the day that it managed to make him ill, but the spit was. It was oily, and tasted a little bit like the small of the really strong poteen that Gobber had made until Stoick had banned him from doing so.
He had learnt, however, that swallowing the fish as quickly as possible helped to stop the taste from lingering. Hiccup did so, to a huff of approval from Toothless, and handed the fish over to Astrid.
She didn’t look like she particularly wanted to take it. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“You asked what more there was,” said Hiccup. He decided not to mention that Elsa had been far more willing to first eat the fish than he had, and to be fair still was. Apparently food was food. “And whatever this is... it’s not what we thought.”
Astrid looked at the fish, then at Hiccup, then at Toothless. The Night Fury cocked his head to the side and licked his lips encouragingly, which was sort of cute once you knew that he wasn’t doing it because he was thinking about how tasty you looked.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she muttered. Then, visibly steeling herself, she bought the fish to her lips and took a bite. Her eyes closed as she chewed - probably a mistake, but Hiccup wasn’t going to point that out right now - and then swallowed with only the slightest of shudders, before she looked back up to Toothless and raised her eyebrows pointedly. “So, do I pass?”
Toothless curled up the corners of his mouth and showed his gums, which was almost certainly his attempt to copy the smiles which Hiccup and Elsa gave him. Whether or not Astrid understood it, she held out the rest of the fish, and Toothless dropped down to all fours again to pad forwards and gulp it down.
“Looks like,” said Hiccup.
With the fish gone, Astrid flicked Night Fury spit off her hands. “Urgh, I’m going to need to wash this off. Though I suppose... I suppose that a bit of raw fish isn’t a bad exchange for not killing each other.”
Not killing each other, Hiccup almost commented, was only the start. But he was pretty sure that Astrid was getting the idea.
They trudged back to the village together, in silence after Hiccup admitted that they probably weren’t going to be getting Astrid’s axe back from the bottom of the pool too easily. He wasn’t quite sure whether he dared call it sulking or not, but had it been anyone other than Astrid he might have been tempted to.
They were within sight of Berk, raucous laughter and out-of-tune singing filtering through the trees, when Astrid stopped in her tracks. It was so abrupt that Hiccup took three more steps before he even realised that she was not alongside him.
“I don’t think I can do it,” she said as he turned around.
He sighed. “Look, Astrid, I can make you a replacement axe, just let-”
“No,” she said sharply. “I mean, the Monstrous Nightmare. I don’t think I can kill it. Not after tonight.”
She probably didn’t mean for the words to make Hiccup feel as elated as they did. He also felt guilty for doing so, but it didn’t manage to quash the feeling. Just that day - well, probably yesterday, by now - he had watched her knock out a Zippleback as she fought for the honour of killing the Nightmare.
“Don’t worry. You won’t have to.”
“Oh, what, so I just turn down the biggest honour for anyone our age? There’s no way that won’t be suspicious!”
“What? No!” All right, Hiccup realised, he probably could have done with an explanation. “No, I mean that I’ll make sure you don’t have to.”
She folded her arms and shook her head at him. “And how exactly are you planning to do that? You can’t win everyone round with rides on a Night Fury.”
“I’m going to give my Dad something bigger, something he’s been after a long time,” said Hiccup. “I’m going to find the nest.”
“What? But you just said-”
“If I find the nest, he’ll call off the killing of the Nightmare so he can scramble a crew and get out there. But once he gets out there, I can show him that there’s so much more to dragons than killing them.”
It had worked with Astrid. It had to work with his father. Astrid was still looking at him dubiously, but Hiccup knew his father, and knew that the best chance he could have would be to prove that dragons were not what they had always thought they were. Stoick believed in what he could see, not just what he was told.
Astrid opened her mouth, but didn’t get as far as speaking as voices, rather clearer than before, rolled around the corner of the nearest house.
“-Can you tie them in a knot? Can you tie them in a bow? Can you toss them over your shoulder like a hairy Outcast soldier? Do your baaaaaalls hang low?”
“That would be Ruffnut,” said Hiccup, wincing at the notes which the other girl was able to hit.
“Earlier than usual for her to be escorting Tuffnut home,” Astrid commented.
Hiccup shook his head. “You should get going. I’ll see you come the morning, hopefully.”
“Hopefully?” she said, suspicion creeping in.
“I’m going to grab some dark clothes,” he said. “Hopefully being with Toothless will stop any other dragons taking an interest, but...”
“You do seem to get their attention a lot.”
“Even before the dragon nip.”
He could see the question in her eyes, but was cut off by a holler from Ruffnut of: “One more time! Do you balls hang low, do they-”
There was a crash, which might have been Tuffnut throwing something at her. Not that such an occurrence was necessarily a comment on her singing ability. It could have been a compliment, coming from the twins.
Hiccup shook his head. “That sounded nearer. You should go; don’t want the twins getting the wrong idea.”
For a moment Astrid stood in the moonlight, smiling just faintly in a way that he absolutely could not guess the reason for. Then she reached out and punched him very lightly in the centre of his chest. “Who says it’s the wrong idea?”
He was about to say that this was Ruffnut they were talking about, of course she would get the wrong idea, but before he could manage it Astrid grabbed the front of his shirt to hold him still, and leant in to kiss him on the cheek. It was over in an instant, then - still smiling - she turned and ran into the village, and Hiccup raised his hand to his cheek in bemusement.
“Please, Sjöfn, let this not be a dream,” he muttered to himself. Then he gathered together what he was actually there for, and turned to head towards his own house.
His leggings and boots were dark already, but he swapped out his green shirt for a dark grey one that he occasionally wore at the smithy, and grabbed a scarf to wrap around his face and neck. He rumpled his bedclothes and bundled up the blankets a bit in case Stoick stuck his head around the door to make it look as if the bed had been slept in, but it was pretty unlikely. Gobber could hold his ale as well as the next Viking, but that didn’t stop him from being able to drink enough to get absolutely plastered. Hiccup had learnt some interesting songs that way.
The moon was high in the sky by the time that he got back to the cove again. Elsa looked surprised to see him, and even more surprised when he went straight for the saddle that she must have taken off Toothless in his absence.
“You are flying again?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got something I need to find.”
She frowned as he swung himself into the saddle and started to wrap the scarf around his head. It would get humid beneath it, but should stop him from standing out so much against the night sky. “Be careful,” she said, and he couldn’t remember when he taught her that phrase either but they’d exchanged a lot of words these past couple of months. She crossed to where he sat and put a hand on his, just for a moment, then stepped back to look Toothless in the eye instead. “Take care of him.”
“When are we not careful?” said Hiccup. He opened up Toothless’s tail, and Elsa stepped back as the dragon spread his wings.
A pointed look. “You ride a dragon.”
“That... is not the point,” said Hiccup. He tried to look confident, then realised there wasn’t much point from behind the scarf, and turned his attention to the sky instead. “Come on, bud. Let’s find your home.”
He was aware from the beginning that his plan - if it could even be called such - had a few issues. There had to be a nest, Vikings had been sure of that from the beginning, but Hiccup was finding that assumptions like that were getting somewhat questionable nowadays. As for the rest of it, he could only hope that Toothless, as a Night Fury, shared the same nest as the rest of them; that he would still want to return there, after two months living among humans; that he would be willing to take Hiccup there.
But it was the best plan that he had right now.
Usually when they flew, he let Toothless take the lead, reacting to his movements rather than trying to control him. But this time he shifted his weight to feel Toothless react in the air, gently banking left or right as Hiccup leant that way, speeding up as Hiccup settled down in the seat to become more streamlined. Having a human on his back probably made him slower, but it was still fast enough for the wind to sting Hiccup’s eyes and his hands to ache with the cold.
“Come on, buddy,” he said, muffled by the scarf. “Let’s visit your home.”
The boats always said to the north-west, and that was the direction that Hiccup headed. Above the clouds, it was easy to see the lode-star to the very north, and as the clouds gave way to the dense fog that always stopped the Vikings from finding Dragon Island he kept an eye on it still.
It was the fog that stopped them. There was something in the islands, or in the land beneath the sea, that baffled their compasses; the currents were unpredictable; and the fog blocked out the stars that Hiccup now used to find his way. Gobber had confessed to Hiccup - because Stoick never would - that often the expeditions would find themselves landing on the same islands multiple times. That, as much as the dragons, had prevented them from reaching Dragon Island.
Up here, though, Hiccup had the stars and a dragon. He lay almost flat against Toothless’s back, both hands on the dragon’s shoulders and his head dipped against the cold wind. “Take us home, Toothless,” he said, almost like a mantra. “Take us home.”
They dipped and soared through the tops of the clouds, sometimes dipping into them so that before too long Hiccup was soaked through and fighting not to shiver. His hands were going numb against Toothless’s back, and he was getting stiff from the fixed position and the beating movement of the muscles beneath him. His cheeks grew damp with his breath, and the air around his face grew stuffy, but it was better than the chill outside. By the movement of the stars, he knew that time was passing, but it was difficult to tell how much.
Then, out of the darkness, a mountain loomed up on the horizon. Hiccup’s breath caught in his throat, gut roiling as he realised that they were heading straight for it, and the sensation only got worse when he realised that the speaks in the air around it were dragons.
Hundreds of them.
“Oh Thor,” he breathed. “Oh Thor and Odin and Máni, some help here would be deeply appreciated.”
Toothless slowed, but did not stop, and headed straight into the depths of the dragon cloud. Hiccup could see Nadders, Gronckles, Zipplebacks, Nightmares, even something that might have been a Whispering Death in the far distance. In patches of thinner fog, he could see something moving through the water far below, but couldn’t tell what it was.
Perhaps this had been a bad idea.
He pressed his cheek against Toothless’s back, breathing in the scent of leather and sweat and dragon, until his heart stopped pounding enough for him to look up at the mountain-island again. The fog seemed thinner around it, though the swarm of dragons seemed thicker, and Hiccup swallowed back a scream as Toothless tucked his wings in and shot towards the mountain. Foot moving almost of its own accord, Hiccup shifted Toothless’s tail to a diving position, and in a gulp of blackness they plunged down a narrow, rocky tunnel.
He heard, rather than saw, Toothless’s wings open to slow them again as the tunnel widened up, and the walls grew red with firelight. From the cold air outside, it was suddenly stifling hot, sweat beading on Hiccup’s skin and his mouth going dry. His eyes prickled, and as Toothless settled down onto a rocky ledge he reached up to unravel the scarf from around his head and try to gulp in some air. Sadly, it didn’t help much, being just as hot and even drier than before.
“Is this it?” he muttered to himself. He looked around, eyes adjusting to the strange light, and realised that what he had originally taken to be rocky walls were, largely, dragons. Dragons everywhere. On ledges, clinging to the walls, slung beneath overhangs. Huddled together, largely, and almost trying to hide behind pillars. “What in Helheim...”
Something growled. Deep and long and so loud that it felt like the whole mountain was growling instead. Hiccup felt it in his chest, and grabbed at the saddle to steady himself. He couldn’t even ask aloud what had happened, as in the sucking silence afterwards even the dragons tried to shy away from the ledges on which they stood.
Far below them, rocks crashed and boomed in the dim red light. Toothless looked round to Hiccup and chirped something deep in his chest, but Hiccup had to take a few deep breaths before he nodded and gave a nudge with his knees to send Toothless forwards towards the edge. Reluctantly, Toothless did so, creeping to the front of the ledge and pausing only to growl menacingly at a Nadder that crept a little close.
As they reached the edge, Hiccup kept a tight hold on the ring and leant out. Warm air rushed up into his hot face, sulphurous and thick, and he would have been fighting not to gag had he not been distracted by the fact that a shadow, huge and dark, was shifting down in the steam and curls of mist.
For a second, he blinked down, wondering if his eyes were playing tricks. Then there was another great growl that made the rocks around them shudder, and made Toothless stagger with the force of it. Another blast of hot air rose upwards, this one foul with the smell of rotting flesh, and Hiccup put his hand to his mouth as a snout, wider than anything he had ever seen before, emerged from the mist, and nostrils wide enough for him to fall into flared. Teeth glinted in the darkness, an impossible number each as large as a man.
“Oh gods,” Hiccup breathed, drawing back again. Toothless hurried back from the edge as soon as he felt Hiccup’s weight shift. He ran a shaking hand over his face and tried not to envisage the size of the creature to which that snout would be attached.
Another rumble ran through the mountain, this one so low that Hiccup could not even hear it, only feel it in the depths of his chest. Wings snapped overhead, and a Monstrous Nightmare pulled in through the same tunnel that Toothless had used, a sheep clutched in its huge claws. As it passed by Hiccup, it turned to face him, and a chill ran through him at the fact that its eyes were dark from edge to edge. The sheep thrashed as the red light washed over it, and slipped out of the Nightmare’s claws into the shadows below with a terrified bleat.
The Nightmare tried to dive after it, fire flaring into life along its back, but the sheep tumbled away too quickly and the Nightmare had to pull up where rocks protruded from the wall. It hung there for a moment, wings pounding the air, then with a great lunge the snout of the creature far below protruded again, mouth opening in a black cavern with swirling greenish gas deep inside.
Snap. The teeth slammed closed again, and Hiccup reared back. It wasn’t quick enough, though, to miss the moment that the Nightmare was gulped down, wings bitten through and left to flutter away through the darkness.
He bent down low to Toothless’s neck. “Bud, we got to get out of here.” He had been wrong. He had been so wrong. Hiccup’s hands were shaking and he was quite sure that he was going to be sick, and he tried opening Toothless’s tail to the right position but the dragon huffed and reared up below him.
“Toothless! Stop that!” he hissed, but Toothless flared his flaps and turned, bounding across the ledge and leaping down to the next one lining the walls. There was a snort from the creature in the shadows, and Hiccup almost bit his tongue for fear that it could hear him among the clatter of rocks and the sounds of dragons forming the background rumblings of the cavern.
His knuckles turned white as he clung to the saddle, and his legs ached from clinging on as Toothless leapt from ledge to ledge, winding ever deeper into the mountain. The rotting smell grew stronger, and Hiccup buried his nose in his shoulder to try to block it out, but there was nothing he could do about the heat that grew stronger with each ledge, making his eyes ache and his mouth throb. As they went down, the dragons grew fewer and fewer, until they were moving along empty ledges and clinging to bits of rock that seemed to barely be there, let alone wide enough for Toothless to cling to.
Death by Gronckle might have been an embarrassing prospect, but surely it could not be worse than this. Sweat ran down his back and dripped into his eyes, made him slip in the saddle as Toothless jumped down again and again. Had he made a mistake in all of this? There were stories from when he was young and the dragon attacks had been bad, of babies snatched from their cradles in the night or children gone missing. On one very dark night, when Stoick had been out to see the boats come in and Gobber had been overseeing the people sheltering in the Great Hall, Gobber had admitted to Hiccup that it might have been true. That there had been a dragon in Hiccup’s room, the night that his mother had been taken instead.
Perhaps Night Furies were just patient, and humans were considered a great treat.
Toothless leapt to another outcrop, and clung right to the edge, looking down into the glowing-red depths. He rumbled, so low it was inaudible but Hiccup could feel it running through his thighs. Slowly, Hiccup leant forwards in the saddle so that he was looking down into the pit as well.
For a moment, he once again could not even fathom what he was seeing. Something that must have been the tail of the great creature loomed out of the mist, knobbly and thick with armour, curling around what he thought for a moment where great oval rocks. Then it hit him like a blow to his stomach.
They were eggs.
Eggs as large as a house, grey with red light glowing out through them, patches of thinner shells which showed something moving inside. The tail wrapped around the eggs a little more tightly, then lashed away and slammed against the wall. Toothless almost stumbled forwards, and Hiccup had to grab the saddle to avoid falling, as rocks crashed down from the wall again. A boulder bounced down not three feet from Hiccup, and he clung to Toothless with his legs as he offered a prayer to any god that was listening to not fall, to not have the huge dragon see him.
Something cracked, and brighter red-orange light cut across the wall beside them. Hiccup looked down again and realised that a great line had appeared across one of the eggs below.
It took a moment, and then he knew. “The eggs explode,” he whispered.
Another crack, and Toothless jumped back from the edge and turned away, bounding from ledge to ledge so fast that it made Hiccup’s stomach jolt and the world whirl around him.
Below them, there was a hollow boom, and bright light flashed around them. The dragons parted for Toothless to run through them, and as soon as a faint breeze of cool air came through he turned and ducked into the narrow tunnel to the outside of the mountain. His wings folded in so tightly that they brushed against Hiccup, who lay down and pressed his cheek to Toothless’s back again as the rock walls came closer and closer around them, Toothless’s nails clacking against the floor.
They burst out into the air, and Hiccup hit Toothless’s tail just as his wings opened around them and pounded against the air. From behind them, there was a great whoosh like the air was being drawn away, and Hiccup looked over his shoulder to see the mountain fast retreating and fire billowing out from the tunnel.
“This is bad,” he muttered. “This is really, really bad.”
And it was about to get worse. Because there was already a streaming cloud of dragons heading the same way that they were - straight towards Berk.
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