piteously shrieking voice was coming from.
‘Help! Help! Help!’ screamed the voice, and
now they could see the little flaring light of a campfire,
burning deep in the woods, flickering
on and off like a firefly, or the
flickering of your curiosity.
No wonder Hiccup was nervous, for this was the
scorched, fire-ravaged territory of the Dragon Furious
and the Dragon Rebellion, and the Dragon Furious was
hunting more than anything for Hiccup, and Hiccup
alone. The Dragon Furious had made a solemn pledge
to turn this world to ashes looking for him.
34
He had sworn that no rock, no island, no cave nor
cliff would be a safe hiding-place for the boy. The
results of the Dragon Furious’s crazed lunatic hunt lay
in the melted, mutilated landscape around them, the
ragged corpses of the trees, the burnt remains of the
smashed-up cliffs.
‘Oh for Thor’s sake,’ whispered Hiccup’s best
friend Fishlegs, who was sitting behind him on the
Deadly Shadow.
Fishlegs was, if anything, even skinnier and more
ragged than Hiccup. His smashed glasses were perched
perilously on the end of his nose. ‘We could be torn
to pieces by the Dragon Rebellion! Your mother said
ON NO ACCOUNT TO LEAVE THE HIDEOUT,’
protested Fishlegs. ‘We just need to stay in hiding for
two more days, until Doomsday Eve, when we meet
the rest of the Dragonmarkers at the Singing Sands
of the Ferryman’s Gift. That’s ALL we need to do.
Your mother said she would take care of everything
else…’
‘But what if it were one of us
all alone out there in that forest?’
Hiccup argued.
‘You’re right,’ said Fishlegs, getting a good
trembling grip on his sword. ‘I know you’re right… It’s
just that it’s so scary…’
Hiccup and his two human friends were as white
as grubs, having not seen daylight for a month. This
was the first time they had been outside in all that time.
Their dragons had taken it in turns to venture out and
collect food and firewood. Now the Ten Companions
of the Dragonmark had crept out of the safety of their
hideout, at the sound of that distant, terrified human
voice.
As they swooped nearer to the little light, the
desperate sound of the human voice came closer and
closer, and it was impossible not to respond to the fear
in that voice. What could be happening to that human
to make them scream like that?
‘Help! Help! Help!’
A human calling out to another human cannot be
ignored.
Hiccup swallowed, looking down at the trees
below him. This was once a living breathing forest.
Now it was as still as death, scorched and burnt and
wasted by the intensity of the Dragon
Furious’s anger.
The third human on the Deadly Shadow’s back
was a small, fierce little Bog-Burglar called Camicazi.
Her hair looked like a family of over-excitable squirrels
had been having an all-night party in the back of it.
‘Oh come on, Fishlegs,’ whispered Camicazi,
whistling happily. ‘You know we have to do this.
Besides, I feel like a bit of exercise, we’ve been cooped
up in that hideout for way too long.’
Frankly, at this point, Camicazi had grown so fed
up that if Hiccup had suggested hang-gliding off the
toe-talons of the Dragon Furious she’d have been up
for it.
‘A bit of exercise?’
blustered Fishlegs. ‘A bit
of exercise? This is not
some kind of Viking
version of Girls Keep
Fit!’
Three little
hunting-dragons and
one riding-dragon
were flying just
above the Deadly
Shadow. Two of
the hunting-dragons
belonged to Hiccup: a
very old one, the Wodensfang,
with wings all tattered and torn, and a very young one,
Toothless, the smallest, naughtiest hunting-dragon
in the Archipelago. The third hunting-dragon was a
golden chameleon Mood-Dragon called Stormfly, and
she belonged to Camicazi.
The riding-dragon, the Windwalker, was a
long-limbed, gentle, raggedy creature. He wagged his
flag of a tail, hopefully waiting for everyone else to
decide what to do.
‘L-l-lets go home…’ wept Toothless, in
40
Dragonese, the language that dragons speak to one
another. Only Hiccup could understand him, for
Hiccup was a dragon-whisperer.
Toothless’s huge greengage eyes were
bulging wide in terror. He didn’t really care about
stranger-humans who didn’t belong to him. He just
wanted to go home, but he didn’t want to admit it in
front of Stormfly. Toothless was rather in love with
Stormfly, so tended to show off in her company.
‘Is too ch-ch-chilly to b-b-be outside…’ wept
Toothless.
Toothless had a stammer, but this was even more
pronounced because he was shivering so hard.
‘Well, I told you to wear your coat, Toothless,
didn’t I?’ Hiccup countered. ‘I told you, and told you!
But you said, oh no, you’d be too hot in your coat…’
‘That c-c-coat is s-s-sissy…’ Toothless objected.
‘And actually T-t-toothless n-n-not cold after all…
T-t-toothless very w-w-warm… but may be a little
t-t-too warm… Toothless needs to go back to the
hideout so he can c-c-cool down...’
The too-warm Toothless was in fact so cold he
had turned almost blue.
‘Is not because T-t-toothless scared of the
Dragon Rebellion dragons,’ huffed Toothless. ‘No
no NO. Toothless can fight Dragon Rebellion
dragons with one wing tied behind his back, yes I
can, Stormfly,’ he bragged. ‘Can’t I, Wodensfang?
And Toothless once b-b-bit the Dragon Furious SO
HARD on the bottom that he cried… But Toothless a
little bit hot and he’s got iffy wings… LOOK…’
Toothless held out his wing and made the end of
it go all floppy.
‘Flippy-floppy, flippy-floppy…’ cooed Toothless,
42
in a tone of tender self-consolation.
‘Yes, I’ve got a kind of tickly feeling in the back
of my throat myself,’ hissed Stormfly, batting her
naughty eyes. Stormfly spoke in Norse, for she was one
of the very rare dragons who could speak the human
tongue. ‘Maybe we should go back and have a little lie
down… maybe I should go back and get Toothless’s
coat… I think you look quite cute in your coat,
Toothless.’
‘Ooh, do you?’ said Toothless, re-thinking the
coat.
‘Nonsense, you’ll feel all the better for some nice
night air,’ scolded Camicazi. ‘It’s probably indigestion
in your case, Stormfly. You’ve got to sto
p swallowing
those squirrels whole.’
‘INDIGESTION?’ huffed Stormfly, outraged.
Her beautiful serpentine body was currently purple
(the colour she turned when she lied), but as she grew
43
angry, a haze of black mist fanned outwards from her
heart, like a cloud of ink slowly spreading through
water. ‘INDIGESTION? I am an artist, a free spirit…
I go where the wind takes me… Free spirits do not get
indigestion…’
‘I think I should warn you that this might be
a trap, set for you by Alvin and his followers the
Alvinsmen,’ warned the Wodensfang in a wheezy
whisper.
The Wodensfang was a wrinkled brown leaf of a
dragon who looked a little like a decrepit, droopy little
dachshund that had shrivelled like a raisin. His ears
had gone purple and were shivering, which was what
always happened when DANGER was near.
‘Take the advice of my
thousand years, Hiccup,’ said
Wodensfang. ‘That light is
behaving very strangely if it
is a campfire. I’ve never seen
a campfire that moves… not
in a thousand years
I haven’t.’
The Wodensfang was right.
The campfire was moving, slowly, slowly, down
the length of the valley. Sometimes it was extinguished
entirely by the heavy, shifting fog, or snuffed out by the
denseness of the thickets of trees. But then it would
flicker into life again, slow-ly and steadily, just a lit-tle
bit further down.
A campfire that moved?
Surely that was impossible!
The human voice had stopped shouting now.
Somehow that was even more petrifying. Had its owner
been snuffed out and swallowed by whatever terrors
might lurk in this still, scarred landscape?
They were catching up with the light; it was
bigger and brighter and stronger, and Hiccup could
catch that distinctive smell of campfire in his nostrils.
They were now following the river that wound its
way like a sinister sleeping snake through the centre of
the gorge.
The river turned a corner. And there it was…
A campfire, burning on an island of ice that was
moving swiftly in the current in the centre of the river.
Lying on his front on the island of ice was
a human, chained to a sleeping riding-dragon, a
Hurricane, with scars and whip marks all along its side.
45
Hiccup could see immediately why this human
had been screaming. Running along the riverbanks,
flitting through the trees, were the dark shapes of a
gigantic pack of Wolf-fangs. The human must have
been camping on some frozen lake upriver, and the
ice had broken up in the night, and carried him on
his little raft downstream, where his scent was picked
up by Wolf-fangs. Wolf-fangs were neutral dragons,
thank Thor, not part of the Rebellion. They
were wingless, but persistent killers
nonetheless.
Some of them were already in the water, silently
trying to climb on the raft, evil tongues hanging out,
and the human was desperately knocking them back
with his sword.
Well, that explained why the human had been
screaming.
But why had he stopped screaming?
And why were those Wolf-fangs, scrabbling to
get on board that ice-raft, pursuing their prey without
howling, without making a sound?
Oh for Thor’s sake, oh for Thor’s sake…
The human had stopped screaming because
there was Something Else camped out overnight along
the riverbank, a lot of Something Elses that were still
sleeping there, and these Something Elses were much
worse than the Wolf-fangs.
With a sort of horror, Hiccup realised that what
he thought had been fallen tree trunks lying just below
the waterline in the rushes, in the shallows, weren’t tree
trunks at all.
They were Razorwings and Tonguetwisters,
Brainpickers and Savagers, some of the scariest dragon
species of the Dragon Rebellion.
And there weren’t just a few of them, either.
There were Dragon Rebellion dragons submerged all
along the riverbanks as far as the eye could see.
48
All around, in the shallows, were the still,
sleeping, panther-like shapes of the dragons cooling
their furnace-like bodies in the ice-cold currents of the
river. A sickly, sulphurous yellowy-green mist curled its
way up from their bodies as the heat of their scales met
the chill of the water.
One huge Savager was gnawing at the ragged
remains of a gigantic tree in his sleep, a tree torn
violently and entirely out of the ground, its poor
tender roots spilled out like a desecration. Another, a
Brainpicker, was holding the pathetic remnants of a
bloodied human coat that Hiccup sincerely hoped did
not belong to a Dragonmarker.
Their dark sinister shapes oozed with menace and
fear.
Hiccup urged the Deadly Shadow downwards,
trying to catch up with the poor terrified human on the
ice-raft moving swiftly down the river below them.
Three pairs of human eyes and seven pairs of
dragon eyes squinted down through the mist to look
at the human laid out full length on his stomach on
the moving island of ice, bashing away at the noses of
Wolf-fangs trying to climb on board his raft and drag
him under.
It was a man. A young man.
49
A young man who had lost hope that anyone
would rescue him now, and you could see from his
defeated, terrified face that he thought he was about to
die.
Hiccup caught his breath in shock as he
recognised the human.
It was Snotlout.
2. ‘WE WERE JUST
WONDERING WHOSE SIDE
YOU ARE ON?’
Hiccup was as shocked to see Snotlout there as
if someone had hit him suddenly in the stomach.
Snotlout was Hiccup’s cousin, and he had been
Hiccup’s enemy ever since Hiccup had been born.
When they last saw Snotlout on the battlefield
back in the Amber Slavelands, Snotlout was trying to
decide whether to be on on their side, or the side of
Alvin and the witch. So which side had he chosen?
It appeared that Camicazi and Fishlegs thought
they knew the answer to that question already.
‘Let’s get back to the hideout,’ whispered
Camicazi in disgust.
Fishlegs sighed. ‘I’m afraid I agree.’
‘Hang on a second!’ whispered Hiccup. ‘We can’t
just GO HOME and leave Snotlout here!’
Fishlegs looked at Hiccup with the hollow eyes
of someone who has been on the run from the Dragon
Rebellion for too long.
‘Hiccup,’ said Fishlegs, ‘I don’t think that
Snotlout will have chosen to be on the Dragonmarker
51
side
. He is a lying, two-faced, treacherous villain who
has betrayed you more times than I can remember, and
he is almost certainly working for the Alvinsmen.’
‘People can change!’ said Hiccup, his eyes lit up
with enthusiasm. ‘You have to believe in people and
then maybe they can change!’
Fishlegs kept count on his fingers. ‘Let’s see.
He tried to kill you back in that Swordfighting at Sea
lesson. He tried to kill you when we were on Hysteria
that time. He threw the stone that revealed you had
the Slavemark back in the School of Swordfighting…
He just keeps betraying you again and again.’
‘This time it’s going to be different,’ whispered
Hiccup optimistically. ‘This time I’m sure he’s
changed… I’m convinced of it.’
‘If you try and save Snotlout,’ warned the
Wodensfang, looking very nervous, ‘you will put us
all in peril. By being kind to Snotlout, you may be
endangering the lives of those who are loyal to you,
who have never betrayed you. Sometimes kindness
can be cruelty. These are the kind of difficult
decisions that a Leader has to make.’
Oh, thank you Wodensfang. Very helpful. I may
have mentioned this before, but: Most of us are lucky
not to be Kings and Heroes, because we do not have to
make the choices that Kings and Heroes have to make.
52
~ STATISTICS ~
FEAR FACTOR: ..................... 9
ATTACK: .............................. 8
SPEED: ................................ 8
SIZE: ................................... 7
DISOBEDIENCE: ................... 7
These are very unpleasant dragons with
wings so razor-sharp they can decapitate
their victims in a heartbeat. Razorwings can
turn themselves as flat as a spinning blade,
and for good measure, they are also armed
with darts that are mildly poisonous.
~ STATISTICS ~
FEAR FACTOR: ..................... 0
ATTACK: .............................. 1
How To Train Your Dragon: How to Betray a Dragon's Hero Page 2