‘And also,’ he raised an eyebrow, ‘I’m going to
be wearing my cunning disguise.’
Hiccup had changed quite a bit after six months
of living as an Outcast. He was thinner, taller, and his
voice had deepened, and was unsteadily sliding all
the time between a gruff and a squeak, so that was a
disguise in itself.
Now he took off his helmet, and
brought out a rag from his rucksack
and wound it round his left eye like
an eye patch. He fixed a piece of
pink-ish candle wax right on the tip
of his nose, and it made a rather
convincing wart. And he smeared
himself with some Stinkdragon stink,
that he had been keeping in a little
pot, after carefully extracting it from a hibernating
Stinkdragon in the Flaming Forest a couple of days
earlier.
The smell would stop people coming too close.
‘How do I look?’
Toothless made his yuckiest ‘yucky’ face. ‘T-t-
toothless not want to come near you. Is very, very
yucky.’
‘Yes, well you don’t have to come, Toothless,
if you don’t want to. It may be better if you didn’t,
because it’s very dangerous for dragons in there,’
said Hiccup. ‘And I want you to be safe. You can
stay here with the Windwalker.’
The Windwalker protested, ‘What do you mean,
stay here? I’m coming too.’
But Hiccup shook his head. ‘I’m afraid
you can’t come, Windwalker. The
Wodensfang and Toothless can hide
down my waistcoat. But you’re
far too big to hide and they’ll
kill you if they spot you.’
The Windwalker
shut his eyes and put his
tail between his legs. All
of his spines drooped.
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Hiccup hugged him affectionately,
holding on to that warm shaggy familiar neck, smelling
his lovely smell as if it might be for the last time.
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The Windwalker smelled
of drinking chocolate.
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‘Now, Windwalker, you must stay here and
guard my helmet and the hide-out in the Forgotten
Forest so that nobody finds it. We’ll be back before
you know it.’
Hiccup had been dreading this moment for a
long time, because he knew that he might be about
to see his father again. For Hiccup had inadvertently
caused Stoick to be made an Outcast from his own
Tribe, and turned from a Chief respected by all, with a
comfortable life shouting out orders and eating a lot,
to a life as a slave in the Amber Slavelands.
Hiccup loved and respected his father, and it
was almost unbearable to think of Stoick the Vast
in this position, particularly when it was all Hiccup’s
fault. Had the experience of slavery changed Stoick?
What must he be thinking of Hiccup? And what about
Fishlegs? Was he all right?
Thoughts like these were a kind of torment.
But sometimes the bravest thing a Hero has to
do is not fighting monsters and cheating death and
witches. It is facing the consequences of his own
actions.
Hiccup had to do this.
‘Toothless, are you coming, or staying?’
‘Toothless will come,’ said Toothless grandly,
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pointing his wing at Hiccup, ‘because you need my
h-help and what would you do without me? C-c-can
Toothless wear an eye patch too?’
‘You don’t need to wear an eye patch, Toothless.
Nobody’s going to see you.’
‘Is quite c-c-cool
though…’
‘Toothless!’
Toothless
dived down
Hiccup’s waistcoat
with a squeal.
A slave-ship was
making its way through
the reeds, delivering fresh
slaves to the ravenous
maw of the Slavelands.
It was hurrying, for the tide was
sinking fast, and as soon as it was in,
the Dragon Rebellion would attack, and if the
ship was still there, they would all be dead men.
Hiccup took a deep breath, sank beneath the
water, and swam after the ship. It was picking its way
like a slalom through the dragon corpses.
Hiccup swam after it, the Wodensfang puffing
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into his mouth to give him oxygen every now and then.
Hiccup surfaced at the back of the ship and hitched a
lift by driving two daggers into the wooden sides.
He could hear the snap of the whips of the slave-
drivers above, the moans of the poor tired slaves as
they groaned with the weariness of the long journey,
and the splash of their oars.
The ship stopped and someone shouted up to the
tiny figures way way up on the battlements.
CRREEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAK!!!!
With a protesting shriek of wheels and pulleys,
the terrible door of Traitor’s Gate opened slowly.
Above the door, these ominous words were
carved into the stone, each letter the height of a man:
FORGET ALL THOSE WHO ENTER HERE.
The slave-driver snapped the whip again and
screamed the command to row.
Exhausted, the slaves rowed themselves through
the door, and into their own oblivion.
Slowly, and with dreadful finality, the iron door
slammed…
… shut.
The Windwalker, crouched in the reeds, let
out a whine of anxiety as he saw it. He stayed there,
shivering and alone, until a sentry on Prison Darkheart
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must have spotted him because there was a mighty
blaze from the battlements, and something huge and
heavy rocketed past the poor Windwalker’s head and
exploded into the reeds beside him.
What was that? What were these terrifying new
weapons the humans were using against the dragons?
The Windwalker did not stay to find out. With
a terrified squeal, he launched out of the rushes and
flapped for his life on sad raggedy wings, flying north
to the Forgotten Forest. He looked mournfully over his
shoulders at the horror of Prison Darkheart.
But in the fear of the moment he left the stupid
helmet with the feather on it behind in the reeds.
Many hours later, something came winding
through the melancholy cathedrals of long-dead
dragons’ bones and landed next to the helmet and
drank in the smell of it.
You couldn’t see them, but the three heads of the
camouflaged dragon smiled, and its talons sprang out
like flick-knives.
‘Hiccup…’ hissed the middle head of the dragon
with satisfaction. ‘Hiccup, Hiccup, Hiccup. He mussst
be in there.’
All three heads turned towards the Prison
Darkheart. ‘And now,’ hissed the third head, ‘now
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we have him trapped.’
‘He seems,’ said the third head, sniffing the
helmet again and wrinkling his nose in di
sgust, ‘to
have had an encounter with a Stinkdragon that is
going to make him laughably easy to track.’
The dragon took off in the direction of the
prison, slowly flapping its wings and circling it like
some greedy disguised vulture.
And we know who that dragon is, don’t we?
Because there aren’t all that many three-headed
invisibly-camouflaged dragons in the Archipelago.
It was the Deadly Shadow.
5. THE WRONG SIDE OF
THE DOOR
Hiccup’s not-so-brilliant plan went wrong right from
the beginning.
The slaves on the ship on which he had hitched
a lift were disembarking and slipping from under the
gang-plank of the boat. Hiccup intended to melt into
the shadows and explore the prison on his own. As an
Outcast, he was now an expert at this kind of sneaky
behaviour.
But as he tiptoed away, the Wodensfang sneezed
from his waistcoat. It was quite a quiet sneeze, but
unfortunately Toothless called out ‘Bliss ta!’ – which is
Dragonese for ‘Bless you!’ – very, very loudly.
And then ‘Bliss ta! Bliss ta! B-b-blissta!’ as
Wodensfang sneezed three more times.
The prison guard on the gang-plank heard the
noise and looked under the gang-plank.
‘WHERE D’YA THINK YOU’RE GOING?’
yelled the guard, assuming he was an escaping slave.
The guard gave him a crack of a whip sharper than the
bite of a Squirrel-serpent, and invited him to join the
long line of slaves sinking ankle deep into the sand as
they disembarked from the ship.
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‘Toothless,’ whispered Hiccup furiously, holding
on to his stinging shoulder as he shuffled down a
maze of corridors into the dark belly of the prison’s
central courtyard. ‘Please be quiet. Remember, we’re
Outcasts… spies…’
‘T-t-toothless was being polite!’ protested
Toothless.
‘Yes, I know, politeness is good. Politeness is
very good. I’m really impressed by your politeness,
it’s just if you could keep your politeness quite quiet
at the moment, I’d be very grateful…’
Chaos reigned in the prison courtyard.
Hiccup looked around with his mouth open. It
was as if he had stepped through the door into another,
grimmer world.
Long lines of tables with people sitting eating
at them seemed to suggest that this was some sort of
open-air dining room. The people were of all ages from
six or seven upward, and had the S of the Slavemark
on their foreheads.
But around these people eating was the manic
din of war, and the sheer mad noise of it caused ears
to ring as if an orchestra in Valhalla had turned up the
volume to ‘extra loud’.
Screaming warriors ran hither and thither,
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hammering swords and spears out of molten red-
ended metal. Above Hiccup’s head, continuous rocket
explosions sent out huge clouds of yellow smoke
that stung his eyelids and crept inside his nose like
sulphurous slugs, gagging his throat with the smell of
rotten eggs.
Lying around the place were enormous evil-
looking dragon-traps, weird crazy inventions such as
catapults that launched thirty-five spears at once, and
Northbows that did the same with arrows. It was all
so noisy you couldn’t hear yourself think.
The guard shoved them all in there, before
hurrying off, bellowing at them over his shoulder to
‘Eat well for the Seeking begins soon!’ – whatever
that might mean. To Hiccup’s horror, the courtyard
was absolutely packed to the brim with people he
knew, from Tribes all over the Archipelago, and as he
was the most Wanted person in the Wilderwest right
now, he thought it would be wise to slide away into a
side corridor.
But things really weren’t going Hiccup’s way
this morning.
‘HOY! YOU OVER THERE! SMELLY BOY!
COME AND JOIN US AT OUR TABLE!’ shouted
a large fat man from a table nearby.
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Hiccup jumped guiltily.
And then he realised, in total amazement, that
the large fat man shouting at him was in fact his own
father, Stoick the Vast.
It was the moment Hiccup had been dreading.
The wart and the eye-patch and the smell were
doing their job though, because Stoick clearly hadn’t
the faintest idea who he was.
‘HOY! SMELLY BOY!’ yelled Stoick again.
‘GET OVER HERE QUICK OR ALL THE FOOD
WILL BE GONE!’
Slowly, Hiccup walked up to the table where
Stoick was sitting.
As he sat down, all the others at the table
moved gently away from him like a sea parting, their
noses wrinkling.
This must be what it’s like to have a highly
infectious disease, thought Hiccup.
Stoick grunted and pushed a large chunk of
bread and a big handful of mussels at Hiccup, trying
not to breathe in Hiccup’s particularly ripe and
luscious stink. ‘Eat up, boy, before I change my mind.’
At least his father was looking well.
He looked a little sad around the eyes perhaps,
with a few streaks of grey in his magnificent moustache
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and he’d lost a bit of weight, but he could still be
described as ‘a hugely fat man with a beard as red and
out of control as a forest fire’.
And to Hiccup’s passionate relief, Stoick seemed
to be in some sort of position of importance and
respect among the slaves, or at least in the group
seated at this particular table.
Once a Chief, always a Chief.
‘New boy, eh?’ said Stoick, as Hiccup helped
himself. ‘What’s your name, kid?’
Hiccup forced himself to look his father right in
the eye.
This was awful.
He was in two minds about this, because he
was undercover of course, and it would be deadly
dangerous if people started recognising him, but
surely, surely, Stoick must know who he was?
Valhallarama was away questing a lot, so she
had some sort of excuse. But Stoick and Hiccup had
sat together every single day at the breakfast table
for thirteen years!
How unmemorable exactly was he? For Thor’s
sake, he knew he’d grown up a little but it wasn’t as
if he was wearing a large curly false moustache or
anything.
But no, Stoick clearly hadn’t a clue, not even
the merest smidgeon of an idea that the boy he was
sharing his supper with was his own only son.
‘My name is… Warty McSmelly,’ said Hiccup.
‘Good name,’ said Stoick approvingly. ‘What
Tribe were you, before the Slavemark?’
‘The Lost Tribe,’ said Hiccup, thinking fast.
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‘Welcome to the Company of Amber-Hunters,
Warty McStinky,’ bellowed S
toick, giving him a hearty
slap on the back.
‘McSmelly,’ Hiccup corrected him, choking
slightly on his mussel.
‘You have to belong to a group here, McSmelky.’
‘Smelly…’ Oh for Thor’s sake, his father couldn’t
even remember his fake name! He was going to forget
it himself at this rate.
‘Otherwise you won’t last a day out there on
the Sands,’ bellowed Stoick importantly. ‘We are the
Amber-Hunters. Listen up, Amber-Hunters! We have a
new boy here! This is Portly McSpelly, late of the Lost
Tribe.’
Hiccup looked at the Amber-Hunters and then
around him at the courtyard, and his heart sank right
down into his sandals.
Everything was back to front and upside down.
All the wrong people were in charge. Up at the High
Table were the Warriors of the Wilderwest, swaggering
around in their purple and yellow sashes, and amongst
them Hiccup recognised some of the more unpleasant
Hooligans from his own Tribe, the new chief, Snotface
Snotlout, and his cronies Dogsbreath the Duhbrain
and Clueless.
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And down here in the Slave-Pit were many, many
noble, respected men and women, who six months
earlier were proud Warriors of their Tribes, and were
now wearing the Slavemark.
Many were Peaceables, Grim-bods, Quiet-Lifes.
But here on Stoick’s own table, in his Company of
Amber-Hunters, among the Silents and the Bashem-
Oiks, were one or two Hooligans that Hiccup knew
well. The Vicious Twins. Hodgepodge the Loony.
And Gobber the Belch, Hiccup’s old teacher.
Gobber the Belch was a most respected Warrior
who had fought bravely for his Tribe on numerous
occasions and was, once upon a lifetime away, in
charge of the Pirate Training Programme on Berk.
Hiccup had a great lump in his throat as Gobber
looked up and wished him a kindly hello, and he saw
the horrible ‘S’ on his teacher’s forehead.
Who had done this to him? How dare they!
And to make matters worse, even Gobber didn’t
recognise him. Had he really changed that much?
Lonelier even than he had felt as an Outcast,
How to Train Your Dragon: How to Seize a Dragon's Jewel Page 4