knew I never liked that helmet.
‘And we have also recently discovered a secret
door that opens on to a drainage tunnel that leads
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directly into the prison from outside…’
Hang on, thought Hiccup. That wasn’t me, it was
the Bog-Burglar Escape Artists! They must have left the
door open…
‘Which means,’ said the witch silkily, ‘that
somehow that tricksy little Traitor of the Wilderwest
has sneaked into this prison – the impostor – and he
will be somewhere here among you slaves.’
Sensation in the courtyard, with everyone looking
at one another, and wondering who the Traitor was.
‘Of course,’ purred the witch, ‘we could get
everyone to try on the helmet, and see who it fits…’
In which case I’ll be fine, thought Hiccup, slightly
hysterically, because quite apart from being horribly itchy,
that helmet never fitted.
‘But I,’ smiled Alvin, ‘have thought of a far neater
plan. You see,’ said Alvin, ‘the reason that this Traitor-
boy Hiccup can never be a King like me, is that to be a
King you have to be strong and make tough decisions.
Hiccup is weak,’ sneered Alvin. ‘He is too soft to be a
King.
‘HICCUP HORRENDOUS HADDOCK
THE THIRD!’ cried Alvin the Treacherous. ‘GIVE
YOURSELF UP, OR I SHALL KILL…
THIS BOY.’
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Alvin the Treacherous
reached out with one arm
and grabbed the nearest
member of the Hooligan
Tribe that he could see,
and held his wicked hook
to that boy’s throat.
Now, the boy he
grabbed happened to be Snotlout.
Alvin, you see, had forgotten
that Hiccup and Snotlout were sworn enemies. He just
knew that Hiccup was a member of the Hooligan Tribe
and therefore would be sentimental about Hooligans
and therefore grabbed the closest Hooligan he could
find.
‘Here I say,’ objected Snotlout in astonishment,
‘I’m not a slave, I’m a Warrior! And I’m your loyal
subject, King Alvin. I was the one who told your
mother about Hiccup having the Slavemark…’
Snotlout had already had a very difficult twenty-
four hours. His ego had taken quite a bashing out there
on the sands yesterday.
But you see, Alvin the Treacherous did not have a
grateful nature.
Alvin ignored this, and if anything, held the hook
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a little closer, so that blood dropped down from
Snotlout’s throat.
‘YOU BETTER BE QUICK!’ screamed Alvin.
‘THIS HOOK IS HUNGRY!’
Now, this is what you might call a ‘moral
dilemma’.
Snotlout had been mean to Hiccup all his life.
He was a bully and a thoroughly bad lot. He
was indeed the one who had thrown the stone that
revealed Hiccup as having the Slavemark, when
Hiccup had been about to be crowned Champion
of Champions and King of the Wilderwest in the
Flashburn School of Swordfighting.
But how could Hiccup, in cold blood, let Alvin
the Treacherous kill Snotlout?
Snotlout was his cousin and a fellow human
being.
And maybe, just maybe, very, very deep down
indeed, there was some good in Snotlout after
all. And possibly there was some way out of this
completely packed courtyard, so he could escape
even after he’d given himself up?
Hiccup sighed. Maybe Alvin is right, maybe I am
too weak to be a king… I can’t believe I’m doing this
for Snotlout of all people…
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And then he put up his hand and shouted:
‘OK, I give myself up. I am Hiccup Horrendous
Haddock the Third. I am the Outcast.’ After six
months on the run, it felt pretty scary to be finally
revealing himself.
‘Aha!’ said Alvin in satisfaction, and he dropped
a highly relieved Snotlout and looked out eagerly at
the crowd of slaves. ‘I knew it!’ crowed Alvin.
Three rows back into the crowd, Stoick the Vast
gasped in amazement, and tried to peer round to see
where his son might be. ‘Whiffy McSmelly! Surely…
surely you cannot be Hiccup!’
‘Yes,’ Hiccup shouted up through the large
people who were boxing him in. ‘It is me!’
‘But this is wonderful!’ cried Stoick joyfully,
jumping up and down, trying to look over people’s
heads. ‘Hiccup! You’re alive! I can’t tell you how
relieved I am, my boy… I… I… I’m so sorry I didn’t
recognise you… I can’t believe I didn’t recognise
you…’
‘Well, I was wearing my disguise,’ Hiccup
shouted back, to make him feel better. He took off his
Really-Not-Very-Cunning-Disguise of the eye patch,
and wiped off the remains of the dirt with the end of
his sleeve. He couldn’t remove the smell of course.
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‘And I changed a bit because I got a little older… I
came to see if I could help…’
‘Less talking!’ yelled Alvin. ‘Don’t let the little
rat talk, he’s always talking his way out of trouble. Pass
him up to the front, there!’
The crowd around Hiccup picked him up and,
hand to hand, passed him over everyone’s heads, up to
the front where the witch and Alvin were standing.
‘Ah yes, Hiccup,’ said Stoick, trying not to
breathe in as he passed over his head. ‘You’re looking
well, but adolescence has hit you hard, my poor boy.
The body odour can be bad in the teenage years…’
‘Stinkdragon,’ Hiccup explained, shaking his
father’s happy hand as he went by. ‘So you wouldn’t
look at me too carefully.’
‘Oh, that’s a relief,’ rattled Stoick, so off his
balance that he did not know what he
was saying, ‘otherwise you’d
have terrible trouble
getting a girlfriend.
But why are you here, Hiccup?’
The Visithug at the front of the crowd put
Hiccup down gently in front of Alvin and the witch.
‘I came to see if I could help,’ said Hiccup. ‘I
came to see if I could rescue you.’
‘Well done, Hiccup!’ boomed Gobber, giving a
supportive thumbs-up from the crowd. ‘Very brave,
coming here to rescue us!’
‘Yes,’ cried Stoick. ‘Well done, son! I’m
proud of you!’
‘SHUDDUP!’ screamed the witch.
‘Rescue you? How could a little rat this
small rescue you? Search him!’ she
screeched.
‘Uh-oh,’ Toothless
whispered to the Wodensfang, as the two little dragons
crouched at the crack of Hiccup’s waistcoat. ‘We gotta
go, W-w-wodensfang the Desperado… We’re
c-c-cornered…’
‘Fly!’ whispered Hiccup in Dragonese, and the
Wodensfang and Toothless burst out of Hiccup’s
/>
waistcoat like twin humming-birds, Toothless giving
out little bursts of fire, pe-ow pe-ow pe-ow, like he was
trying to shoot his way out.
But the Hairy Scary Librarian was standing just
next to Hiccup, and he was just as fast with his left
hand as he was with his right. He drew those amber-
nets from his belt quick as lightning, just as
he used to draw his Heart-Slicer swords. (He used to
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use swords, but nets were his new thing.)
Flick flick, went the Hairy Scary Librarian’s
amber-nets, and he caught the Wodensfang with his
left net and Toothless with his right, tied the ends of
the nets up nice and tight and presented them to Alvin
with a low cringing bow.
Toothless and the Wodensfang howled in horror,
for dragons are wild creatures, and nothing upsets
them more than being trapped.
And then the Librarian turned to Hiccup and
narrowed his eyes. ‘Never cross a Librarian,’ spat
the Hairy Scary Librarian with venom, his voice like
broken glass. ‘For Librarians are patient, and they can
wait for their revenge…’
‘Dragons!’ screeched the witch triumphantly,
pointing a dramatic finger at the Wodensfang and
Toothless, all tangled
and desperately
struggling in
the Librarian’s
amber-nets.
‘I smell
dragons, see!
We are at war
with the entire
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dragon race, they have reduced our villages to black
dust, and yet the Traitor carries dragons on him!’
The Warriors of the Wilderwest did not like that,
under attack as they were every night by dragons, and
they roared in fury.
‘Don’t worry, Mother!’ said Alvin in delight. ‘I’ll
just squash them with my foot!’ He flung Toothless on
the ground and lifted his metal foot.
‘Noooooooo!’ shrieked the witch. ‘The toothless
dragon is a Lost Thing, remember? We need him so
you can be crowned King of the Wilderwest!’
‘Curses!’ swore Alvin the Treacherous. ‘But I can
still kill the other one!’
He flung the Wodensfang on the
ground, all tangled still in the net.
‘Noooooo!’ shrieked Hiccup,
thinking very speedily. ‘I don’t know
which one is the Lost Thing, for they
both have no teeth!’
(Quick as a wink, the
Wodensfang sucked in his teeth.)
‘Double curses!’ swore Alvin
the Treacherous, looking down at the
supposedly-toothless Wodensfang in a
baffled sort of way.
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‘But I can kill something, surely? I can kill
Hiccup,’ said Alvin, cheering up. ‘Please, let me kill
Hiccup, Mother. He’s not a Lost Thing.’
‘He’s the finder of the King’s Lost Things,
though,’ said the witch. ‘Of course you can kill
Hiccup, Alvin, my darling, and you’ll do a lovely
creative job
of it, I know. But you’ll just have to postpone that
pleasure until he’s found us the last Lost Thing,
the Jewel…
‘The little rat draws the Lost Things to him like
he’s a little Lost-Thing magnet, rot him… We just have
to motivate him properly, and luckily I am very good at
motivating children.’
Ooh dear, shivered Hiccup, now completely
petrified. This doesn’t sound too great…
The Hairy Scary Librarian interrupted with an
apologetic cough, cringing before the witch, and wiping
his mouth with the end of his beard.
‘Talking of motivation, I believe you offered
freedom to any slave who brought you the little
thieving magpie who is the Traitor of the Wilderwest.
My Library is waiting for me, I’ve have been gone
from it too long. Freedom, witch, freedom. I claim my
freedom.’ Freedom.
Again, it was pathetic to see how the crowds
of slaves leaned forward eagerly. ‘Freedom…’ they
crooned after the Librarian longingly. ‘Freedom…’
Freedom to the Librarian meant being back in
his Library, lurking through the passages, guarding his
precious books, and in his mind he was already there,
wandering the labyrinth, happy in that darkness.
But…
If there was anyone on this good green earth
who was even less grateful than Alvin himself, it was
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Alvin’s mother Excellinor.
Now she had Hiccup to find her the Jewel, she
no longer needed to motivate either the slaves or this
Librarian.
‘Freedom?’ laughed the witch in surprise. ‘What
is this nonsense about freedom? Slaves can never
be freed! The Slavemark is a Mark that can never be
removed.’
‘But,’ sputtered the Librarian, ‘you said it could
be burnt off… You promised it could be burnt off…’
‘I may have said a little white lie, but only
because I care so much about winning this war for all
of us,’ lied the witch. ‘Throw this Librarian back into
the crowd!’
The Hairy Scary Librarian learnt the hard way,
just exactly how empty is the promise of a witch.
‘Now,’ said the witch, bounding forward and
crouching down to Hiccup’s level. ‘I am going to
give you a very clear goal, Mister Clever-Clogs Lost-
Thing Finder. I want you to find us the Dragon Jewel
in… Oh…’ The witch searched her mind for a good
number and settled on three. ‘In exactly three hours
or I won’t just kill the boy with the unfeasibly large
nostrils, I’ll kill everybody. I’ll set the ticking-thing…’
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
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‘Three hours?’ said Alvin in bewilderment,
looking out through the open door at the end of the
courtyard at the vast expanse of red sands, stretching
out as far as the eye could see. ‘You want him to
find the Dragon Jewel in three hours? Um, Mother,
these sands have been scoured by the amber-nets of
thousands and thousands of slaves. If they haven’t
found the Jewel, how is Hiccup going to find it in
just three hours? And Mother… there are those that
think that maybe the Jewel is not here. Grimbeard
had a terrible sense of humour, you know…’ Alvin
gestured to his hook. ‘Look at my hand and the
coffin-lid…’
‘Hiccup is the Jewel-Finder!’ shrieked the witch.
‘He found the Crown of the Wilderwest in just three
hours didn’t he? When Flashburn had been looking
for it for twenty years!
‘Trust me, he’s the kind of boy who needs a
deadline.’
Oh for Thor’s sake, she’d gone bananas.
‘I wish you’d let me deal with him right now,
instead,’ grumbled Alvin. ‘He’s slipped through my
hook so many times. Look what happened in the
Flashburn School of Swordfighting, and in the forest
of B
erserk.’
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‘We won’t make that mistake again,’ said the
witch. ‘I’ve learnt my lesson. Last time I let him go
down into the tunnels and the Fire Pit on his own.
This time, we will not let the little rat out of our sight,
for even one single second…
‘Give the little horror the map!’ screamed the
witch. ‘Get the little worm his sand-yacht! Get his
nets! Get his poles! Put on his helmet—’
‘I don’t need the helmet,’ Hiccup interrupted
hastily, but the witch ignored him.
‘Give the little nightmare all the equipment he
needs!’
So the Warriors rushed around finding Hiccup
his equipment, and kitting him out for the Seeking,
and five minutes later Hiccup found himself standing
on the slightly wobbly platform of The Hopeful
Puffin 2, holding his amber-net in one shaking hand
and Grimbeard the Ghastly’s map of the Amber
Slavelands in the other, and the horrible itchy helmet
back, still not fitting, on his head.
Poor old Toothless and the Wodensfang, still
in the Librarian’s Heart-Slicer amber-nets, were now
hanging from the end of the royal sand-boat, and
they peered sadly through the nets at Hiccup.
And huddled around Hiccup in a circle was a
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crowd of Warriors and slaves of the Wilderwest,
hundreds and hundreds deep, all on their sand-yachts,
all heavily armed with knives and swords and daggers,
and axes and long-bows and clubs, and all of these
weapons were pointed directly at Hiccup.
The witch wasn’t taking any chances.
One big guy was even aiming one of those
massive rocket launcher Thingummies at Hiccup.
Not to mention a whole row of soldiers with their
machines that threw five spears at once, and bows
that launched twenty arrows simultaneously. Alvin
alone could have overtaken Hiccup in three strokes of
a heartbeat on his massive royal sand-yacht with the
cutting edges, poled by Gumboil and at least three
others, and he had screwed the Stormblade into his
arm-attachment, just in case.
‘Now…’ hissed the witch. ‘No sudden
movements, you little reptile, or we’ll blast you to
How to Train Your Dragon: How to Seize a Dragon's Jewel Page 11