Frozen/HTTYD Chapter Twelve

[afterandalasia]

Chapter Twelve

“Is it weird that I find this interesting?”

Hiccup tried to look closer to see what Gothi was actually doing, and earnt himself a rap on the forehead for his trouble.

“She says to stay still,” said Gobber, as if that wasn’t already apparent. “And would probably add that it was easier while you were still unconscious, if her hands weren’t busy.”

The fact that Gothi didn’t rap Gobber over the head for his addition meant that she agreed with it. Hiccup bit the inside of his cheek and made himself sit still as Gothi changed the heavy bandages around the stump of his left leg. For the first couple of days, he had not been able to bring himself to look while it was happening, as if unmentionable horrors were going to spill forth, or his knee was suddenly going to produce a fountain of blood. The truth was that it was just... skin. Stitched in a sort of star pattern to cover up the stump, sure, but skin all the same. A little bit underwhelming after all the build-up.

Gothi bandaged up again with practiced movements, despite her age and her swollen finger-joints. She had seen the aftermaths of so many amputations that probably even she had lost count of them, and this was second nature by now. Every family was missing at least one limb.

Maybe that could change now. Toothless was watching from the foot of the bed, flaps up and an outright curious expression on his face, and Fishlegs was making a habit of bringing round the Gronckle hatchlings every day. Drawings of them were building up on the table beside Hiccup’s bed.

“Thanks, Gothi,” he said. She nodded, and traced a few lines across the floor with her staff, followed by a few sharp taps.

“She says you’d best be doing it yourself before too long,” said Gobber, and Hiccup chuckled. Well, at least it would give him something to do. He was already getting bored, with only talking to people to fill up his days. He’d even joked with Fishlegs that he and Pig should have another go at their basketry together. “It’s been seven days, and you’ll have to learn sooner or later.”

“Then can I get crutches?”

His father had said no. Then he had said no again, and louder, when Hiccup kept asking just to be allowed to get out of his bed and sit at his desk for a while instead. It was difficult to even draw when he didn’t have two good knees to balance a board on. He was getting more and more sick of his bed with each day.

Gobber just gave him the well-practiced look which meant that it was up to Stoick, and not Gobber, what went on in this household. Groaning, Hiccup went to flop backwards onto the bed, but managed to stop as he heard Elsa politely excuse herself as she entered the room.

Being indoors agreed with her. Hiccup wasn’t sure that he would actually recognise her as the wildling from the sinkhole any more, even if various attempts to get her to put boots on had met with resistance.

Gothi paused, gesturing with her staff and pointing to Elsa’s foot. Elsa looked over at Hiccup, who could only shrug, then turned an increasingly uncertain gaze on Gobber.

“How’s your foot doing?” he translated.

“Ah.” Elsa smiled, and turned back to Gothi to give her answer. It had taken Hiccup a lot longer to get the hang of that when he was a child, talking to one person and hearing their answers from another. “It is well, thank you.”

With another few sweeps and taps of her staff, and a gesture to Hiccup, Gothi turned and left, with Elsa still looking faintly bewildered in her wake.

“And she says you did a bloody good job on that foot, considering you hadn’t a clue what you were doing,” said Gobber. When Hiccup looked vaguely sceptical, he shrugged. “All right, that was the gist of it, at least.”

For a moment, Elsa looked down the stairs after Gothi, then the front door closed and she shook her head before turning back towards the bed. She had a tray of food in her hands, which Hiccup had come to consider the norm both because he was constantly hungry and because Elsa was apparently astonished by how much food was always available in the village. There were no leftovers around her, Gobber had commented. Elsa went to sit on the bed by Hiccup’s good leg, but Gobber quickly moved round the smaller chair so that it was closer to her. She looked in surprise from it, to him, and back again.

“Thank you.”

“No problem,” said Gobber cheerily.

Hiccup peered over at the tray in interest as Elsa sat down, unsurprised by the cheese and bread, but frowning at the sight of the sealed pottery vessel on it. Picking it up, he turned it over in his hands until he found the neatly-written label. “No way,” he said. “That is not the Holsens’ quince preserve.” There was always an outbreak of people trying to trade for that over the winter, and they never made enough for everyone to get hold of some. This would have to be the last jar or so of the previous year’s.

“Do I get to at least try that?” asked Gobber.

Startled from his astonishment, Hiccup laughed and nodded. “Well, I wasn’t planning to eat the whole jar myself. We should probably save some for Dad, though.”

“You could always hold it hostage for your crutches,” said Gobber.

“Might be good enough to work,” said Hiccup, grabbing the knife before anyone else got to it, and putting it between his teeth while he wrestled the lid off the jar. “Gobber,” he said as he started spreading the preserve, “I’m sorry about the bars. I’m pretty sure I said I’d fix them.”

“Aye, and you’re in the perfect condition to do that,” said Gobber, with a gesture to his leg. “If anyone needs locking up, I’ll just put them in the arena for now. If they get really bad, I might put the dragons back in with them.”

Well, that would certainly make for a deterrent, Hiccup had to admit.

“Anyway,” Gobber continued, “what I need your brains for is figuring out how to remake the tail for that one.”

“Really?” He almost dropped cheese down his front in astonishment.

“Well, none of those scribbles you left in your workshop made too much sense.”

Hiccup shook his head. “No, I mean, you’ll really help me remake Toothless’s tail?” Toothless, who had been busy trying to put his head in Elsa’s lap and looking adoringly in her direction, looked round again at the sound of his name. “But... why?”

“Hiccup,” sighed Gobber, “by the time that we’ve got a dragon sharing your room with you, I don’t think that fixing its tail is going to be too much of a stretch.”

It was true that Hiccup had been altering Toothless’s tail as he went along and not bothering to actually mark the changes that he had made on his sketches. After all, they were only for his own notes. “If you get me some fresh paper, I can write...” he remembered Elsa on the other side of him and looked around with an apologetic smile. “We must be boring you.”

“I am listening to the words,” said Elsa patiently.

Well, if she was comfortable with it. Hiccup shrugged to himself and leant over to push Toothless’s snout away from the tray. “Oh no you don’t. No tail for you if you keep eating our food.”

He pretended not to see Elsa sneak Toothless a sliver of cheese as soon as he went to turn away.

“I can write up the changes I made. Wouldn’t that be good, bud? Get you up in the air again?”

Toothless snorted and butted Hiccup’s elbow. It sent pain jarring up his side, but he just chuckled through gritted teeth and scratched the dragon behind the ears in return.

“Yeah, I figure we can work on that.”

The Gronckle hatchlings were trying to fly by now. They could only get off the bed for a few seconds, legs flailing and eyes wide with glee or terror, before they flopped back down again, but their mother mad encouraging grunts from the window and Fishlegs was beside himself with delight. “They’re growing up so fast!” he declared, as the purple one tried to pounce on its sibling and failed terribly. “At this rate they’ll be able to fly solo within a few more days!”

“Maybe it would have worked,” said Hiccup. “Though with how well my plans have gone this summer, I really can’t swear to that.”

“I think Fishlegs is better with them than I am,” said Elsa, currently standing at the foot of Hiccup’s bed, watching the Gronckles with a faint smile.

“I don’t think anyone is an expert in raising dragons,” said Fishlegs. “Well, except dragons. But they throw up less than my little sisters did.”

Hiccup and Astrid were odd among the village for being only children, and Hiccup knew that there had been attempts over the years to get his father to remarry. Even after it had become clear that he was happy with Gobber and their comfortable situation. As for Astrid’s family, it was an open secret that her parents had wanted more children but been unable to have them. She was still better around children than Hiccup was, though, because children tended to think that it was cool if you could put your axe through a bullseye ten yards away.

“Well, at least we’ve got Meatlug to show us what to do, huh Meatlug?” Hiccup craned his neck upwards to where Meatlug was in her usual spot. Her ears waggled and she leaned down as if she was about to lick him, but mercifully she couldn’t reach. “And you get to keep your little ones.”

“My Mom keeps offering to send more fishcakes,” said Fishlegs, shaking his head. “She seems to have decided that you’d like to live off them.”

“From what I hear, we’ve got enough pie downstairs to feed a small army,” replied Hiccup. “And if the dragons don’t have to feed the Red Death, they shouldn’t be stealing our food anymore. Hopefully that’ll placate my Dad some, at least.”

“I wonder whether that was what made them so bad when we were small,” said Fishlegs quietly.

Hiccup saw the curious tilt of Elsa’s head, the way that she looked between the two boys. “Fifteen, twenty years ago,” he said, “there were a lot of dragon attacks. It’s all in my mother’s journal, actually - I have to show you those,” he added to Fishlegs. “Mine too. It’s got information about the dragon attacks going back years. But anyway, they were taking more food, more sheep, more fish,” he took a deep breath; “some people say that children got taken. It passed, in time, but people still remember it.”

“It was before me,” said Elsa, shaking her head. “Or when I am - I was in Arendelle.”

Stoick still hadn’t spoken to Hiccup about that. People were getting less wary of Elsa, apparently, as she went on without using her magic, but she was uncomfortable being stared at and was spending more and more time in Stoick’s house instead. Hiccup understood, but it didn’t stop him from being a little bit jealous when the bruises on his legs were still dark because he wasn’t able to move around and get his weight off them.

“It was mostly before us as well,” he said. “A lot of people left Berk around them.”

Not everyone. Stubbornness seemed to be a Viking trait. Hiccup supposed that even he, making friends with a wildling and climbing on the back of a dragon, had more than a little of it.

“But there’ll be no more of that,” he said firmly. Things were already changing. He was going to see to it that they changed further, he was already determined of that. He had shown Gobber how he had made Toothless’s tail, and Gobber had promised that, in between the hundreds of nails he was producing and other work he needed to do, he would get a replacement made. Apparently, many people had been taking down the dragon heads or other trophies that they had, and a bonfire on the beach had been burning for a couple of days now to dispose of them.

Of course, it was just as he was making that confident exclamation that the shouting outside started up.

“If anyone wants to go near this dragon, they’ll have to go through me!”

“Oh Hel,” said Hiccup, “that’s Astrid.” He’d heard snippets of a few other arguments over time, but usually his father had gone in to stop it. Stoick was currently down at the docks, though, talking to the shipwrights about what could be done before winter set in, and what would have to wait until summer. “I have to see this.”

“Hiccup!” Fishlegs protested, but Hiccup squirmed his good leg up and got it against the bed.

“Look, just help me stand up, will you?” He could see out of the window if Meatlug would move out of his way; Astrid sounded like she was close, maybe within sight. He tried to stand up, but couldn’t get the leverage until Elsa stepped forwards and put a hand under his shoulder to help. With a nod of thanks, he managed to get himself upright and grab hold of the windowsill for support, coming face to face with Meatlug. “Come on, girl, let me see.” He put a hand on her snout to steer her out of the way, and wobbled but managed to stay standing to look outside.

The Nadder - Stormfly, that was why Astrid had called her - was standing in front of the Hofferson’s house, wings flared and tail arched above her back in defence. Worse than that, Astrid was standing in front of her with axe in hand and a grim expression, and a good eight or ten men and women were arrayed opposite her with weapons in their hands.

“She helped save you all,” shouted Astrid. “And I, for one, remember it.”

“All dragons are killers,” replied one of the men. From here, Hiccup could not see who it was, nor recognise the voice. “That one as well. They should all be killed.”

“I need to get down there,” said Hiccup. He tried to turn around, got his foot twisted in his bedclothes, and would have fallen to the floor had Fishlegs not caught him on the way down. Even so, there was a terrible moment where he was in the air, arms pinwheeling, and it felt so familiar that bile rose in his throat. He clutched Fishlegs’s shoulder, and Toothless almost leapt over to his other side. “I need to help Astrid.”

“You stay here,” said Fishlegs. “We’ll go.”

“You’ve adopted dragons as well,” said Hiccup, “and people still call Elsa a wildling. If they won’t listen to Astrid, are they going to listen to you?”

It came out sharp, perhaps from the ache in his head or the way that his lower left leg, the part that wasn’t even there any more, felt like it was being crushed to nothing. But Fishlegs paused for a moment, and didn’t argue. “There’s some crutches downstairs,” he said instead. “I saw Gobber put them by the door. But how-”

The stairs didn’t feel like the hard bit. Hiccup put one hand on Toothless’s head to steady himself, then swung his bad leg over and slid into place on Toothless’s back. It was strange to not have a saddle, the scales more slippery beneath his legs, but at the same time more natural.

“There we go, bud,” he said. “Nice and steady now.”

He did not feel like compounding his injuries by going head-first down the stairs. Elsa and Fishlegs exchanged a glance with each other, then Fishlegs shrugged and let Hiccup get on with it. For which Hiccup was particularly grateful right now.

Toothless took a cautious few steps, wriggling his shoulders slightly to help Hiccup settle into place, then started down the stairs. At first Hiccup almost lurched off face-first, but he managed to get his balance back and tucked his foot back behind Toothless’s legs to help keep his balance. At least he could see the crutches, right next to the front door and tantalising. As soon as they were in reach, Hiccup grabbed hold of them and nudged Toothless with his foot to stop him.

“Thanks, Toothless. Right, now then...” he slid his good foot back to the floor again, wrangled the crutches into place, and stood up on them. The others hurried down the stairs behind him.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” said Fishlegs. He had one Gronckle on each shoulder again.

“Nope.” Hiccup leant against the doorframe and hauled the door open. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”

After all, it wasn’t as if something being a bad idea had stopped him recently. He’d used crutches once before, years ago, when he had badly sprained one ankle and needed them for a week or so. It wasn’t too difficult to use them again, although he wobbled a bit on his first few steps and his shoulders complained at the sudden weight on them.

“There’s plenty of missing legs around here,” he muttered to himself. “Not so many dragons.” Surely building a friendship with a dragon had to be the harder part. From down here, the argument was clearer, and he turned himself towards it. His steps might have been frustratingly slow, but at least for the first time in a week he was moving.

“You stand there,” Astrid was saying, “acting like you’re the brave ones? Oh yes, because it’s so brave for nine of you to come after one dragon.”

“And one Hofferson brat,” said one of the women, and Astrid’s eyes narrowed dangerously. Oh, Thor. Hiccup increased his pace a bit.

“If you say one thing about my family,” growled Astrid.

Before it got completely out of control, Hiccup spoke up. “You’ll have to say it in front of me as well,” he said. Not his best line, but it at least got people looking round to him. He stopped, figuring that it would be easier to stand still on the crutches than it would be to try to get any closer to Astrid. “What’s going on here?”

“Hiccup? What are you doing up?” said Astrid.

“Surprised the boy’s alive,” one of the men muttered. Hiccup didn’t see which one of them it was, the sun just a little too bright for comfort.

“Hoark?” he said, “Bloodbeard, Lugstick?” Strange to think that he knew them all, even if he did know everyone on Berk. “Azora, Mudbreath? What are you doing here?”

“The dragons are a danger,” said Lugstick, who was standing at the front with a sword in his hand. “They shouldn’t be on Berk.”

“Yes,” said Hiccup, “because you were doing so well against the Red Death before we and the dragons arrived.” It was slowly coming back to him now, and he remembered enough to be confident in his words there. “Tell me, how many people did it kill?”

Brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, shield partners and friends. The Red Death had been killing before Hiccup arrived, and even now there were people far worse injured them him, still trying to drag themselves from the claws of death.

But Lugstick scowled. “Aye, and that thing was the one that led us there.”

He gestured with the sword towards Toothless, who growled. Hiccup held out a hand placatingly to Toothless, not even expecting for him to come and nudge against Hiccup once again. “Toothless helped me to kill it. It would still be there if it weren’t for him.”

“That doesn’t mean that they should stay,” said Azora angrily. “If they helped, then all the good to them, but they shouldn’t still be on Berk.”

“Well frankly,” said Hiccup flatly, “if you don’t want to be around dragons, then Berk was never the most sensible of places to live, was it?” They had been fighting them for three hundred years. Nothing stopped people from moving to other islands to join other villages, or even from joining Berk. It was just that people who did the latter, like Gobber, were much rarer. “Because I am not going to let you harm these dragons.”

Someone snorted, failing to cover up the sound of laughter in it. Hiccup did not rise to the bait.

“Oh, really?” said Lugstick. “And how is a boy with half a leg going to stop us?”

“The son of the chief is going to stop you,” he replied.

That actually made them pause. It was strange - people knew that Hiccup was Stoick’s son, but they didn’t always seem to make the connection that he was the son of the chief. It was like Stoick had two roles to fill, and a son like Hiccup could only feature in one of them. Well, it was about time he stepped into the other as well.

“If you have a problem with the dragons, it should be bought up at the village council on the new moon, not by waving axes around in the middle of the street.” Hiccup had the strangest feeling that some of them, at least, were looking at him with respect in their eyes. Neutral attention had been strange enough; positive was practically alien. “Until then, the dragons are doing us no harm. It is not right for us to do harm to them.”

Toothless was glaring at the men, but he tried not to think about that part too much. Or about the fact that his leggings were pinned to the back of his leg to keep them out the way, or the scabs still on his face. That probably wasn’t exactly helping the air of authority.

Swords were sheathed, and some of the people slunk away immediately, leaving only Lugstick and Azora trying to stare Hiccup down. He broke the gaze first, but only to make his way over to Astrid and Stormfly, and get his balance well enough to stroke the Nadder’s back. Her tail came down, and her wings relaxed. “You see, Stormfly?” he said, loud enough to be heard. “I’m not going to let them hurt you.”

He resolutely did not look back over his shoulder to the men behind him, keeping his eyes on Stormfly and on Astrid. Only when Astrid lower her axe did Hiccup dare to look back over his shoulder again, his legs starting to shake. He grabbed at his crutches to keep himself upright.

“What are you doing up?” said Astrid again, looking at him in disbelief.

Hiccup tried to shrug, then realised that was a very bad idea as he almost lost his grip on the crutches. “You know. Got bored, came to see if there was anything going on.”

“You’re mad,” said Fishlegs, but he sounded a little bit impressed. “You just told nine armed Vikings to go away!”

“They might have swords,” said Hiccup, “but I do have a dragon.” He went to turn around, only for the end of his crutch to slip on a patch of mud and for him to slide sideways. Toothless caught him with an unimpressed huff.

“Apparently that is a good thing,” said Elsa.

“Yes, it does seem so, doesn’t it?”

Which was about the time that he heard his father shouting, “Hiccup!”

It turned out to be one of those very rare occasion that Hiccup had any success in changing the subject. Mostly because this time he opened with, “You know what, Dad? I think I’m well enough to talk about the Silver Priests now.”

Apparently that was enough to get Stoick’s attention. Although he was pointed back in the direction of the house, he was allowed to make his way there under his own power rather than being bodily lifted up in a way that Stoick was definitely both willing to and capable of doing. It felt fantastic to sit on one of the benches around the fire while Toothless wandered around the room sniffing things and nudging them with his nose.

“I think you should head home, Fishlegs,” said Stoick to the taller boy, stopping him with an arm across the doorway. Fishlegs nodded, blurted something in Hiccup’s vague direction, and fled. There was a thunk as Meatlug took off from the roof to follow him. Closing the door carefully enough for it to be unusual, Stoick turned back to Hiccup and Elsa, and gestured down to the bench. “Sit down, Elsa. We’re not doing to hurt you.”

Hiccup shuffled along a little on the bench, so that she could sit on the end closer to the door. Slowly, Elsa lowered herself down, all the while not taking her eyes off Stoick.

“Now, I know that you told Spitelout what had happened to you,” said Stoick gently, sitting down in his great chair, “and I’m sorry that I made you wait before telling me, but I had other worries.” Hiccup felt heat rise in his cheeks. “I needed to hear this with a clear head, I’ll wager. Now, if you wouldn’t mind... tell me where you came from.”

Elsa’s eyes were wide. Hiccup reached over to touch her hand, but she jumped at the touch and almost shied away before gathering herself and taking a deep breath. “I was born in Arendelle,” she said. Her words were still a little slow, and very carefully spoken, but her accent was muted and easily understandable. “I am eighteen now. I think. I had mother, father and smaller sister. And from when...” she glanced over at Hiccup.

“From when you were born,” he supplied.

“From when I was born, I have magic. Ice.” Her fingers twisted into the trollwort around her wrist, the bracelet started to fray now. Perhaps they would have to find more plants for her. “When I was young, I did not know that I needed to hide magic, but my parents hid it. When I was eight, there was an accident. The Silver Priests found me.”

Stoick just nodded slowly, encouraging. His gaze was steady, something dark in his eyes not aimed at either of them but turned inwards.

“They have four trials. The trial of earth, the trial of fire, the trial of water, the trial of air. My father begged for the trial of earth. They took me to Maruloet... to the Wildlands, over the gorge. If I was innocent, I would be taken back to Arendelle. But I had magic. I was guilty.

“They went back. A woman found me there, a wildling. She looked for those who had the trial of earth. She took me to a village, and I hid my magic, until I was eleven. Then people found out. I left. Since I was eleven, I am...” she glanced over at Hiccup again, just for a moment. “Alone.”

“You were the one taking food from the village?” said Stoick, after a moment. His voice was still level, not accusing, but Hiccup could almost feel how on-edge Elsa was as she nodded. “Why?”

“The rain in the summer made it hard to find food,” she said. The cove had been better for that, though she had still said that she was almost sick of mushrooms. “I am sorry for taking the food, but I needed it.”

Stoick nodded. “And then you met Hiccup.”

A nervous laugh escaped Hiccup as Elsa looked over to him in clear expectation that he would be explaining this part. “You, ah, remember the night Gobber put me in the woodshed?” Again, Stoick just nodded. “The trollwort net worked. It’s this.” He reached over to indicate the bracelets that Elsa wore. “It stops the magic. But, when I hit Elsa with the net, she fell down one of the sinkholes. When I went to find the net, I found her as well.”

“Hmm. And you spoke Northur?” said Stoick, specifically to Elsa.

But she shook her head. “No. I spoke... Marulosen. The Wildlands-language. Hiccup taught me.”

“I’ve never met a wildling who could speak Northur before,” said Stoick frankly. He folded his hands on his knees, the scars on his knuckles pale in the firelight. “I’ve never heard this. You said that you come from Arendelle?”

Elsa nodded.

“Arendelle claims to know nothing of wildlings. Do you know how big an accusation this is?” he said, each word careful.

A frown crossed Elsa’s features, and she looked round to Hiccup again. “I don’t understand,” she said quietly.

“He just wants to be sure you’re telling the truth,” Hiccup said.

Elsa’s gaze hardened slightly as she turned back to Stoick. “I do not lie.”

For a long moment, Stoick regarded her, then he put his hand to his mouth and sighed heavily. Hiccup could almost see the weight that settled on his shoulders, the heavy fur cloak that was far more than a cloak, that marked him as chief. He put his hand over Elsa’s for reassurance - whose, he wasn’t so sure about - until Toothless came up and shoved his head between the two of them with a rumble, almost toppling Hiccup sideways.

The door opened again and Gobber walked in, whistling and with an a cloth-wrapped bundle. He stopped as he saw them sitting around the fireplace, and cleared his throat awkwardly. “Am I interrupting?”

“Chiefing stuff,” said Stoick.

“Ah,” said Gobber. He crossed to Hiccup, and put down the bundle beside him. “Right, well, this is for you. Well, for the dragon. Hopefully it’ll fit as it did last time.”

“Oh, Gobber, thanks,” Hiccup replied, grabbing at the bundle and pulling it onto his lap. It felt the same weight, although this time the wool was lighter and dyed bright red. Toothless sniffed at it from his other side. “Look at this, huh, bud? We’ll get you up in the air again soon.”

“Those trap lines we set up last week need checking,” Gobber was saying. “I’ll grab a couple of folks and head out.”

“Good idea,” said Stoick. “Elsa, did you want to go with them?”

All right, that was starting to sound a little ominous. Gobber was one of the people who had been ‘escorting’ Elsa whenever she was outside the house, and Hiccup supposed that he had also joined that number when he had gone out to shout at the people threatening Stormfly with axes. He still wasn’t sure how much of that his father had heard.

Whatever Elsa made of Stoick’s suggestion, she nodded and got to her feet. “You’re welcome. No,” she caught herself. “Thank you.”

Hiccup waited for her to pass and leave, Gobber closing the door behind them, then picked up his crutches and tried to figure out the best way to get to his feet from what suddenly felt like quite a low bench. “All right, Dad, I’ll leave you too it. Do you think someone could bring Toothless’s tail up later?” He nodded to the tail beside him.

“No, Hiccup, stay,” said Stoick, taking him by surprise. “Like I said, this is chiefing.”

He wasn’t sure at what point losing part of his leg had actually qualified him for this sort of thing, but perhaps he was just considered more of a Viking now. Or perhaps - though he wasn’t sure that he wanted to consider this alternative too much - even his father realised that Hiccup knew something about dragons, and wildlings, that nobody else had seen. Running a hand over Toothless’s head, he waited for Stoick to continue.

“If what she says is true, then you know what this means for our peace with Arendelle.”

A treaty signed every three years; Hiccup had even been there for the last couple of signings, with his father sitting opposite the King and Queen of Arendelle in their great castle. Of course, it would be the Queen Apparent doing the signing next, in the coming summer. But part of the treaty had always been that both sides would stand firm against the wildlings at the centre of the island, the menace that they both in theory shared even if Arendelle had the gorge and the mountains to protect it from most wildling incursion.

“I really think that she’s telling the truth, Dad,” said Hiccup, defence springing to his lips.

He did not expect Stoick to nod firmly. “I do as well. It’s the same as she told Spitelout, and I see no reason she’d have to lie, no reason for her to talk against Arendelle. She spoke not a word of Northur when you found her?”

“No,” said Hiccup, feeling his cheeks grow hot again. “I was just trying to tell her my name, at first. But she’s a fast learner.”

“Aye, Gobber’s said the same. Say a new word once, and she’ll remember it. This language of hers... what did she call the Wildlands? Marulen?”

“Marulosen was the language, I think. The place was Maruloet.”

Stoick’s frown deepened. “In Arendelle, they call them Maalurose. More different than our Northur is from the Berserkers’, certainly, but not all that far. And closer than Arendellen is to Coronan.”

This wasn’t the sort of conversation to be having in the middle of the day, Hiccup found himself thinking. It should be a dark, thundery night, with lightning striking the mountain tops and everyone huddling inside from the rain. Instead, there was sunlight around the edge of the door, and it was actually pleasantly warm for a change. One last good week before fall really got a hold on them. “You think that the Wildlings’ language comes from Arendellen.”

“Oh, I do. And I think that the wildlings, or at least a good number of them, come from there as well. Have done for a long time, most likely. The question is what we do with that information.”

It changed things. Perhaps as much as the dragons had, but perhaps more, because that had been finding what they hadn’t known before rather than coming across an outright lie. “You aren’t thinking of fighting Arendelle over it, are you?”

“No,” said Stoick, immediately. Hiccup felt a rush of relief. “We don’t know enough to justify something like that. She said that it was the Silver Priests who sent her into the Wildlands, but we know that the Silver Priests are advisors to the crown.”

“You don’t think that the King and Queen would do something like this? Elsa was only a child!” He couldn’t help the horror in his voice, the thought of leaving a child in the Wildlands to, frankly, die. It was said that not all that long ago, there had been a Viking tradition of leaving newborns to die if they seemed unlikely to live for long, but with so many people lost to dragons and to battles it seemed unfair to not give a child a chance at living. Hiccup was particularly grateful for the change. “By Thor, didn’t they lose their own daughter?”

“A kidnapping, yes,” said Stoick. “And they would know the pain of losing a child. But if the Silver Priests... if their hold on Arendelle is stronger than we thought...”

He didn’t need to finish the sentence. If the Silver Priests were the ones in power, not the King or Queen... well, Berk had been making its deals with the wrong people for the last century and more. “Do you really think they could do that? Keep it a secret for so long?”

“Arendelle is an isolated place. Their last King and Queen hardly left, nor had other powers visit, and the one before was hardly any better to hear my father tell it. Even in the times of the Hamishes, they weren’t friendly folk. We visit them once every three years, and that only for a few days. If they wanted enough to keep it a secret, yes, I think they could.”

The words weighed heavily in the air between them. Hiccup had never thought of helping Elsa as some sort of political act, just that she had needed helping, but it started to sink in now that it was something far more. In much the same way that not killing a dragon had been. “How is the village taking it?”

Stoick shook his head. “Some of them haven’t had time to think on it yet. The funeral boats are done, though Odin knows some of them weren’t much more than rafts by the time we were done. But people are still mourning. There were losses to that fight, as there have been before.”

“But they’re going to stop now,” said Hiccup, earnestly. His hand, resting on Toothless’s head, slid round so that he drew the Night Fury closer to him. Toothless complied with a huff until his jaw was almost pressed against Hiccup’s thigh. “We got rid of it. The dragons won’t need to fight us any more.”

“There’s still hundreds of dragons out there that know to fight us, Hiccup,” his father said. “The other tribes will still be fighting any that come near, and there are people here whose first instinct will be to grab a weapon when they see a dragon near.”

“Then I’ll change their minds,” said Hiccup. He had seen it with Astrid, when they flew; with Fishlegs, as he watched the Gronckle hatchlings rolling around. Once people looked, once they saw the dragon and not just the fire, things would change. They had to. His arms threatened to tangle in his crutches as he tried to get to his feet again. “I will make them see, in the Shivering Shores or Arendelle or - damn it!”

His leg and arms between them refused to cooperate, or perhaps it was the blurring around the edges of his vision that stopped him from being able to get defiantly to his feet as he wanted. Hiccup slammed down his crutches onto the bench in frustration, making Toothless jump away, and had to close his eyes just for a moment.

A hand came to rest on his shoulder, and when he looked up his father was kneeling beside him. “How about we start with Berk, before you make plans for the rest of the world?”

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