other advantage over Hiccup, which was that he was a big CHEAT.
It is not considered good sportsmanship, in Barbarian Culture, to make a huge swipe at your child-opponent with your hook while sword-fighting. Nor is it thought to be part of the Viking Code to trip the preteen up with your Sharkworm-tooth leg as he dodges out of the way.
[Image: Fighting.]
However, Alvin had never been a good sport, and
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he did both those things in quick succession, without so much as a twinge of guilt.
Hiccup sprawled onto his backside, arms and legs flailing.
With a howl of triumph, Alvin the Treacherous hauled the sword, Endeavor, out of Hiccup's hand, and threw it far out of reach.
[Image: Fighting.]
As Alvin wrenched the sword from Hiccup's hand and raised the Stormblade for the final blow, a flash of
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sunlight caught the bracelet writhing around Alvin's good arm. This would have been the end of Hiccup's Quest, had he not had the good fortune to have landed right in the middle of the spilled contents of Fishlegs's Running-Away Suitcase.
Still sprawled on his back, Hiccup grabbed hold of the nearest thing to him, which happened to be a box of Fishlegs's tooth powder, and flung the entire contents of the box up into Alvin's face.
"Yoooooooooooowwwwwwwww!!!!!!!!!!!!" screeched Alvin. Fishlegs's tooth powder was one of Old Wrinkly's most popular medicines, a mixture of extract of seaweed, gull droppings, and spearmint for the taste. I don't know what actual good it did for the teeth, but it certainly stung like crazy as it worked its way into Alvin's one good eye.
While Alvin stood there, momentarily blinded, Hiccup jumped up and pulled the bracelet off Alvin's arm. It took a few mighty tugs, for it was stuck fast to the Fire Suit, but Hiccup was desperate, and pulled with a strength he didn't know he had. He threw the bracelet up to Toothless, shouting, "Take that to Humungous!"
Toothless caught the bracelet, heavy as it was, and sank like a stone, nearly to the ground.
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Mouth full of bracelet, he began to stammer out "W-w-why???"
"JUST DO IT!!!! DON'T ARGUE FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE!" howled Hiccup. "FAST!!!"
[Image: A dragon.]
So the little dragon pointed himself down toward the tiny speck of The Peregrine Falcon floating in the bay, and shot toward it, the weight of
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the golden bracelet helping him sink through the air even faster.
Meanwhile, Alvin could now just about see out of his streaming red eye and he was after Hiccup again, as mad as a snake with a toothache.
Hiccup held up the suitcase as a shield as Alvin rained down blow after blow, finally cutting the thing practically in two. Hiccup rolled out of the way just in time.
Alvin grabbed hold of his waistcoat, and Hiccup wriggled out of it, hitting Alvin on the nose with a sightseeing book called Visiting Rome for the First Time.
"You should have learned a lesson from your silly old grandfather. He's learned not to try and interfere with Fate. And he thought he was clever enough to hold the Fire-Stone!" snarled Alvin.
"All HIS meddling, his silly Quests, achieved were to break his daughter's heart... I wish you could have seen how Valhallarama cried when I told her that Humungous was dead ... Oh, it was tragic."
"Liar! Traitor! Villain!" shouted Hiccup, dodging yet another of Alvin's lunges and looking about him for something else that could be used as a weapon.
[Image: A bottle.]
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"Oh, BOO-HOO," sneered Alvin the Treacherous, creeping forward, his eye glittering, "stop, you're going to make me CRY."
And then Hiccup threw one thing at him after another, the entire contents of Fishlegs's Running-Away Suitcase, that were now lying all around them on the mountainside.
Fishlegs's belt, whose heavy gold buckle caught Alvin full in the forehead, six pairs of clean knickers, several pairs of trousers, a bottle of asthma medicine, which made both of them sneeze, and Fishlegs's pillow, which burst on the end of the Stormblade, and showered the two of them in a rain of goose feathers.
"Ow, ow ow!" screeched Alvin, as Fishlegs's hairbrush landed bristle-side up on Alvin's sensitive chin, and one of Fishlegs's vests got caught around his ivory leg.
But although Hiccup put off his defeat for vital minutes, particularly with a spirited fight using Fishlegs's umbrella instead of a sword, the end was never really in doubt.
[Image: One of Fishlegs's vests caught around Alvin's leg.]
Alvin was determined that Hiccup was not
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going to slip out of his fingers this time. Stumbling and staggering, his eye watering, and spitting out goose feathers, he chopped the umbrella in half and finally got Hiccup in a hold he couldn't wriggle out of.
"Now!" gloated Alvin, bringing the Stormblade down to Hiccup's face. "Where is the Fire-Stone?"
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15. I DIDN'T MEAN TO COME HERE
Meanwhile, Humungous had spent an anxious half hour down on The Peregrine Falcon, shading his hands over his eyes and trying to spot the progress of the three young Vikings as they slowly climbed the Volcano Mountain.
What he discovered was that it was FAR more tense watching somebody else performing a Quest than it is to do the Quest oneself. He felt quite sick with nerves.
Most of the time he was talking to himself as he peered upward, trying to convince himself he was doing the right thing.
"Now, I was right not to tell Hiccup that Terrific Al wanted that Stone too, wasn't I? And nobody could expect me to go with them, could they? ... After fifteen years of slavery on this very island ... but I guess nobody else is going to do it, but for Thor's sake," Humungous slung his bow and arrows around his shoulders, "a guy should get to retire SOMETIME, shouldn't he? UP now, White Dragon ... I mean, why is it always ME who has to be the Hero?
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"It's ... not... my... fight..." complained Humungous, taking his foot out of the stirrup again.
He turned his face to the heavens and howled up to the uncaring sky, shaking his fist in frustration:
"WHAT...SHALL...I...DO????"
And as if in answer to his question, out of the clear blue sky, DOWN swooped an exhausted little Toothless, and dropped upon the deck a golden something.
A something that rolled around the deck in ever-decreasing circles, and came to rest with a clatter.
Humungous bent down and picked up the something.
It was the golden dragon bracelet that twisted around Alvin's good arm. He knew it well, for he had made it for Alvin himself, in the Jail-Forges when he was supposed to be making swords, as a thank-you after Alvin agreed to take the ruby heart's stone to Valhallarama many many years ago. This was the first time in a long while that he had seen it close up.
And as he picked it up, he thought, That's funny, there's something in the dragons eye. I didn't put that there when I made it...
And as he held it closer, a blast of lightning lit up
I78
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the sky, and the flash of light caught the bracelet, and the dragon's eye winked at him.
One small, sly, red wink, as if it were amused.
The dragon's eye was his ruby heart's stone.
In that single moment the Truth rushed upon Humungous all at once.
She had loved him.
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She had never got the message.
Terrific Al had never given it to her.
He had kept the ruby heart's stone ... he had even had the cheek to fit it into the bracelet that Humungous had made him, which he had then been wearing right under Humungous's nose the entire time... which made him a whole lot less Terrific than Humungous had thought.
Maybe it even made him the Treacherous Villain that Hiccup had been describing ... and perhaps throwing him to the Sharkworms was a THOROUGHLY good idea and what a shame they had only taken his leg and hadn't gotten rid of him completely.
<
br /> A fifteen-year-old memory popped into his head.
It was a memory of his Love, handing him this very stone so very many years ago.
With these words:
"When you hold this stone, you hold my heart. But if you find yourself captured or in trouble, send me this stone in the mouth of your hunting dragon, and I will come and rescue you."
Humungous gave a half laugh, half cry, as he looked first at the heart's stone, and then down at Toothless, collapsed on the deck in exhaustion.
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Isn't Fate artistic?
But what this all meant was that Hiccup was in trouble up there on the mountain, and that Hiccup had never in his life been more in need of his Bardiguard.
Humungously Hotshot the Hero pulled the bracelet onto his own left arm.
He leaped onto the back of his White Dragon, drawing his sword and shouting, "Come on, Windwalker! Hiccup needs us! This IS our fight! TO THE VOLCANO!"
"Oh, b-b-brother," moaned Toothless, sprawled on the deck, "we aren't going up again, are we?"
The Windwalker swallowed hard, and picked Toothless up in its mouth, and took off up to the Volcano after Humungously Hotshot.
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16. ANOTHER FIGHT
"AT IAST!" gloated Alvin the Treacherous, smiling down at the petrified Hiccup.
"Now, see where your precious Heroism has gotten you. DEAD before you even get your first chest hair. Where is the Fire-Stone, before you die?"
Hiccup looked straight up into Alvin the Treacherous's murderous, scarred face.
Now that he knew he was about to die he wasn't scared at all, and he wasn't going to give Alvin the satisfaction of thinking that he was frightened.
Hiccup began to sing.
And for some reason the first song that came into his head was that ridiculous song that was one of Stoick's favorites, which just happened to be the lullaby that Hiccup's mother Valhallarama used to sing to him as a baby, when she was rocking him to sleep, snuggled up to her armored breastplate.
It was a song that was said to have been made up by Great Hairybottom himself, many, many centuries before, when he first settled in the Archipelago.
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"I didn't mean to come here...
And I didn't mean to stay...
It's just where the sea wind blew me
One acci-dental day..."
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Alvin nearly dropped Hiccup, he was so surprised.
Alvin expected a person facing death to beg, cry, plead for mercy.
He didn't expect them to start singing songs as if they were casually sitting around a campfire.
"... I was on my way to America
But I took a left turn at the Pole
And I lost my shoe in a rainy hog
Where my heart got stuck in the hole
Above them the thunderclouds were so dark they were almost blue, and lightning crackled between them. Below them the Volcano rumbled ominously in reply. It was almost as if the small boy's voice was trying to placate the storm from above and the storm from below.
"What are you doing?" hissed Alvin in baffled and furious astonishment, his arm holding the Stormblade hesitating above his head. "What ARE you babbling about? You're about to DIE here, you fool..."
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Beyond Alvin's shoulder, Camicazi and Fishlegs, pinned under the swords of the Exterminator, joined in the song:
"... I've heard that the sky in America
Is a blue that you wouldn't believe
But my ship hit a rock on these boggy shores
And now I'll ne-ver leave...
Alvin began to bring the Stormblade down, furious that Hiccup was going to die while apparently happily singing and enjoying himself, rather than afraid and alone, and as his arm carrying the wickedly sharp Stormblade swung down...
...ZZZZZZZZING!!!!!!
[Image: A man and woman.]
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... out of the billowing mustard-yellow smoke belching from the Volcano behind Alvin's shoulder a white feathered arrow came singing, straight and true, toward Alvin's upper arm. The white-feathered arrow sank deeply into the weak human flesh of his bicep, and he dropped Hiccup onto the ground with a cry of agony.
The pure, clear noise of the young Vikings' singing rose up and cut through the thunder.
And then another voice joined in.
A much deeper, rather painfully LOUD voice, WILDLY out of tune, and yodeling and zigzagging up and down the scale like a gigantic crow having a fit.
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Oh dear, thought Hiccup in surprise, something terrible really did happen to Humungous s voice when he was in the Lava-Lout Jail-Forges...
That sounds terrible!
Through the smoke of the Volcano, Humungously Hotshot the Hero came riding.
He sat up straight and tall on the back of the White Dragon, putting away his bow now, and drawing his swords.
On his left arm he was wearing Alvin's bracelet, snaking brightly around his arm.
"Arm yourself, Alvin, you TREACHEROUS SNAKE!" shouted Humungously Hotshot.
Alvin whipped his head around to see Humungous riding straight for him. His great swords the Fireflash and the Mooncut were held sternly above his head.
Alvin started in horrified surprise and yelled out, "EXTERMINATOR!"
The dreadful dragon heaved his claws out of the ground around Camicazi and Fishlegs and came bounding toward his Master.
Alvin leaned down and dragged the arrow out of his arm with his teeth.
It was not, unfortunately, a deep wound, and
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although it bled quite a bit, it did not stop Alvin from leaping aboard his Exterminator's back and up into the air.
And in the swirling smoke of the Volcano, the two Warriors faced each other for the first time. Alvin pulled down the visor on his Fire-Suit. The dragons, one white, one black, wheeled around each other through the sulphurous smoke, watching for an opening, waiting for a moment to attack.
"Now, now, Humungous," Alvin wheedled. "Don't forget, I'm your old pal, Terrific Al. You wouldn't hurt an old friend like me, would you?"
But Humungous was full of righteous wrath.
"Friend? HA! You never delivered my ruby heart's stone! You kept it for yourself!"
A ray of sun poking for a moment through the rain-laden clouds bounced accusingly off the ruby in the bracelet, which was now around Humungous's arm.
Both men let out a terrible scream, simultaneously, and they leaped together, the two Warriors' swords meeting with an awful clang of metal against metal, Stormblade against Fireslash.
At exactly the same moment, there was a great CRASH of thunder, the heavens opened and it began to POUR with rain.
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Fishlegs and Camicazi ran toward Hiccup, and all three Vikings huddled together straining to see what was happening up in the sky, who was winning the Battle in the Smoke.
The Windwalker appeared out of nowhere, and dropped Toothless on top of Hiccup's helmet. Toothless looked into Hiccup's eyes upside-down, exhausted but thoroughly overexcited.
"L-l-look, I brought H-H-H umungous, Toothless saved the day, Toothless a Hero, Toothless a Hero!" chanted the little dragon jubilantly, letting out a gloating cock-a-doodle-doo of triumph.
"GUYS!" yelled down Humungous, performing the Grapple-lunge with full twist, as he fought all ten of the Exterminator's sword-claws AND the Stormblade and Alvin's hook on top, "DON'T FORGET THE QUEST!"
(This may seem like rather obvious advice, but trust me, in the heat of the moment it is quite easy to forget what you came for in the first place.)
"YOU'VE GOT TO GET THE FIRE-STONE IN THAT VOLCANO NOW, OR WE'RE ALL DONE FOR!"
"Yes, well done, Toothless, but we're not safe yet," said Hiccup shakily, trying to find where Camicazi had left her waistcoat, but it was difficult to see in this
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driving downpour. "We have to throw tie Fire-Stone in the Volcano..."
"I think I put i
t somewhere over there ..." said Camicazi, uncertainly, pointing vaguely to the right, "... or was it somewhere else ... I can't quite remember ... I mean honestly you put something down for one moment and ..."
"N-n-no, you're right!" screeched Toothless, wild with excitement, "Toothless get tie fire-Stone n-now... Toothless be tie H-H-Hero for once!"
"No, Toothless, hang on ," said Hiccup, clinging on to one of Toothless's legs. " We'll do it, Toothless, don't worry, we'll do it."
[Image: A woman.]
But the glory of Humungously Hotshot
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telling him what a great Hero he was had gone quite to Toothless's head.
"Hiccup not t-t-trust Toothless, that's it, isn't it?" squeaked Toothless huffily. "Toothless s-s-save Hiccup's life and still HICCUP want to be the big Hero all to himself... Weil Toothless a Hero now too... and Toothless can do it ALL ON HIS OWN, j-j-just you see..."
Toothless leaned down and gave Hiccup a painful little nip on the knuckle, so that Hiccup let go of his leg with a sharp cry, and Toothless spread out his wings and soared through the rain, with Hiccup running after him shouting:
"No! Toothless! Wait!"
But Toothless didn't quite catch the last bit because he was searching the ground for the Fire-Stone.
"It's here somewhere... s-s-somewhere... Aha!"
[Image: Toothless can do this all on his OWN.]]
The little dragon spotted the already sodden waistcoat with a gleam of gold in it lying sitting in what
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was now mud, not very far away, and he swooped up to it, claws outstretched.
How to Twist a Dragon's Tale (Hiccup) Page 9