AN: In honor of the new season of 'Race to the Edge' airing here in a couple of days, I've decided to go ahead and start posting this fic I've been working on! I've got about four and a half months worth of weekly updates already lined up, so look forward to it! ;D

Important Story Info, Please Read: The time-line I've decided on for this fic is that the events of Brave and How to Train Your Dragon 2 both took place at approximately the same time, with the RTTE episode "Family on the Edge" (s3ep11) occurring a year before story opens two years after Brave/HTTYD2, making it three since Dagur disappeared. Another brief note, I'm pretty sure Castle Dunbroch is technically on a lake, but for the sake of this story I decided to place it on an inlet instead.
Also, a warning in advance, it's going to be quite awhile before Merida and Hiccup actually meet, lol. I promise we'll get there eventually though!

I'm marking this story as mature, btw! There won't be much in the way of cursing and explicit situations (thus far in my writing anyways lol), but there is some fairy brutal violence later on.

Make sure to check out my side tumblr (jolieburnsinfandomhell) for news, updates, sneak peeks, and fanart!

Hope you enjoy, and please remember to leave a review! Can't write without them!

Heart of a Scot, Soul of a Dragon
Chapter One: The Princess and the Berserker

"Princess?"

Merida hummed absently to herself as she shoveled out Angus' stall, old hay and horse droppings flying over her shoulder with each pass of her pitchfork. The horse in question munched contentedly on the oats she had fetched for him after a particularly long and arduous ride that morning.

"Pardon me, Princess?" Maudie repeated as she poked her head over the top of the stall door, keeping a wary eye on the sometimes temperamental stallion as she did.

Her back to the head woman, Merida grimaced, dreading whatever task she was about to assign her on behalf of the queen.

"Aye, Maudie, what is it?" Merida asked as she continued shoveling, forcing the older woman to side-step quickly before an errant clod of dung could catch her in the face.

"It's your brothers, M'lady, the Queen is asking after them. Have you seen the princes about?"

Merida finished her shoveling and looked around at Maudie as she set aside her pitchfork and dusted her hands off on her wool skirt. "Haven't seen them since this morning," she admitted, and winced internally at the way the other woman's face fell. A pang of sympathy for Maudie's plight struck a chord with the young woman in spite of her better judgment.

The boys took particular delight in tormenting Maudie, the one woman in their life that was completely incapable of calling them to order. Elinor really was the only one who could manage it consistently in any case. Even Merida had to resort to bribery more often than not, and sometimes even that didn't work.

The princess sighed expressively before reluctantly adding, "But I'll have a look 'round for them, shall I? I'll send them on to the Queen when I find them. You head back to the kitchen, Maudie."

The look of utter relief on the head woman's face was almost painful to behold. "Bless you, Princess," she said with a grateful, almost tearful, smile before hurrying away.

Merida shared an exasperated look with Angus at the way the older woman rushed off before the redhead could change her mind.

So much for her free day.

The princess gave her horse a fond slap on the withers and ducked out of his stall to make her way across the courtyard to the narrow set of stairs that led up to the castle wall. If they were anywhere outside, she'd be able to spot them from somewhere along the battlements, surely.

As she'd predicted, it didn't take her long to catch a glimpse of three familiar heads of curly red hair sprinting down the path from the back gate that lead down to the docks.

"Och, what are you up to now, you wee devils?" she muttered to herself and skipped hurriedly down the nearest set of stairs to chase after them.

She lost sight of them as soon as she reached the path, which curved erratically down the steep slope of the hill and cut through a patch of forest. Merida cursed silently and hoped that they had actually stuck to the path lest she be forced to search among the trees and bramble for her errant siblings. Ooh they'd get such a hiding if she had to waste her afternoon chasing about after them…

Luckily for the triplets, the docks were indeed their destination, so no wild goose chase through the forest was required of their elder sister that particular sunny spring afternoon.

"And what are you lot up to now?" she asked them, only a little out of breath from her run as she finally caught up to her brothers.

All three little boys had clambered up a stack of crates, and stood watching a ship pull into dock. Men ran back and forth across its decks, furling sails and throwing down ropes to tether it in place so they could offload the day's catch.

"A fishing boat?" she mused aloud and folded her arms across her chest, deciding to humor her brothers for the moment before dragging them off to their mother.

Hubert spared her a look, grinning as he bounced on the balls of his feet and pointed expressively up to the deck of the ship.

It had been two years since the fiasco with Mor'du, and still the boys had yet to utter a word to anyone. Elinor fretted a little more with every month that passed without her sons speaking, but Fergus continually reassured her that they'd open up when they were good and ready. Merida herself was of the opinion that they already spoke plenty, but only to one another when they were certain they were alone. She would swear up and down that she heard them whispering amongst themselves sometimes, only to find them completely silent when she entered the room. She'd yet to out them to her mother, though, deciding that her father had the right of it. They would speak when they were ready.

Knowing their luck, the real trick would be to get them to stop once they'd finally begun.

Merida lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the afternoon sun as she turned her attention to the deck proper. A few men had dragged a gangplank up to the ship and dropped it into place, allowing several people to disembark while others wrestled with barrels or nets, readying them from offloading. All three boys perked up when one man in particular stepped off the boat and onto the dock.

A shock of recognition immediately shot through the princess, prompting her to grin and call, "Dagur!"

The man in question looked around in surprise, his heavily scarred face lighting up with a broad grin when he spotted the three little princes heading for him at a dead sprint while their sister approached at a more sedate pace.

Harris, Hubert, and Hamish threw themselves bodily at the man, forcing him to drop the satchel he'd slung over his shoulder before the boys did so for him.

"All Father have mercy!" Dagur cried as Hamish locked onto one of his legs and his brothers claimed an arm each, clinging tightly as the man flailed, feigning distress. "Princess, for Thor's sake, get help, the terrible terrors are swarming!"

Merida laughed, doubling over in her mirth as Dagur dropped over backwards onto the dock and the boys swarmed over his prone form. He tried to fend them off half-heartedly, mock horror quickly turning into laughter as the boys 'bit' at him with their fingers.

"Terrible terrors, huh?" Merida repeated as she fought to catch her breath and wiped away a few stray tears of amusement. "Those are the wee ones that spit fire and lick their eyeballs, are they?" she asked rhetorically as she grinned down at the pile of bodies at her feet. "Not far off, I must admit."

The triplets all pulled faces at her, but she only laughed. While they were distracted, though, Dagur took advantage and surged to his feet, seeming unhindered by the fact that all three boys still clung bodily to him.

"You remembered!" the viking said brightly and flashed the princess one of his wide, manic grins that had earned him the title 'Dagur the Mad' among the clans. Like many others, the way he smiled had once made Merida nervous, but these days she barely noticed.

Merida snorted lightly and grabbed up the man's bag for him, then started walking down the dock, Dagur in tow with his princely burden.

"As if I could forget! When you're not around to tell your wild tales, the boys make me tell them over and over and over again," she admitted with a laugh. "Apparently I'm just not as good, though," she added, and the boys nodded sagely when Dagur looked down at them.

"You probably don't do the voices right," Dagur pointed out with a laugh, then reached over and traded Harris in return for his bag.

"Och, my greatest failing," Merida said with a put upon sigh as she adjusted her grip on her little brother, who squirmed in her arms. "Oh come off it, Hamish, let the poor man walk, will you?" she chided the prince who was still latched onto Dagur's leg.

The Viking glanced down and paused in the middle of the path and gave his leg an experimental shake "Forgot he was there," he said, and Merida wasn't entirely sure he was joking. Things were often that way with Dagur, though.

If someone had told her before she'd met Dagur that a viking of all people would one day be her best friend, Merida would have called them a scabby liar to their face. Add the fact that her father, the Bear King Fergus of Dunbroch, liked him and she'd have laughed herself sick.

Three springs previous, though, the path to that fate had been laid out before them all when Maudie had found Dagur washed up on the beach below the castle while out on one of her early morning walks. Startled and thinking she had stumbled upon a corpse, the poor woman had fled back to the castle and returned with a few guards, intent on giving the body a proper burial.

The moment the men had laid hands on what they thought was a corpse, though, the viking had lashed out, confused and disoriented before fainting once more. It was so sudden that Maudie herself had sunk into a dead faint, leaving the guards to haul both Dagur and the head woman back up to the castle.

Merida, curious creature that she was, had quite firmly inserted herself into the scene by deciding she would assist the castle healer nurse the stranger back to health. Elinor, her daughter knew, had vehemently wanted to object to the princess' new project, but had finally decided to refrain. She had been trying for months to get the girl to study basic medicine with the healer (it was a princess' duty to have a working knowledge of all things going on in the castle, after all, even if she wasn't expected to put that information to use), so she decided it was better late than never.

Nursing Dagur had certainly been an educational experience for the princess. He was half dead when he arrived, and not even the healer had been sure he'd last more than a day or two. Broken ribs, severe dehydration, back flayed to ribbons, and a litany of other wounds far too long for comfort were all stacked against Dagur from the beginning.

Somehow, though, he'd pulled through. The viking had been delirious for days, muttering to himself about vikings and hunters, blood and dragons...but he had gradually come round to lucidity, and Merida had been there to gradually coax his story from him.

He was a viking as it turned out, though by that point Merida hadn't been terribly surprised. Her naturally curious disposition had made this a mere point of interest, rather than the basis of enmity. After all, their coast hadn't been plagued by his kind since she was a child. Still, she'd known her duty as princess of Dunbroch, and had been her very cleverest as she tried to hint that he might be part of some larger war party come to invade their kingdom.

Despite all her coaxing, though, Dagur seemed to have never even heard of her country, let alone been part of a tribe inclined to raiding their coastal villages. When she had shown him a map, he could not even find his home on it, implying that he was from very far away indeed.

Though Merida had maintained a healthy skepticism and wariness towards Dagur, the man had come to trust her long before he was taken off of bed rest and out from under her care. He was a strange man, and most certainly mad, but there was a kindness beneath his twitchy exterior that soon won the princess over. There was a sadness too, and a sort of worldly wisdom that implied a depth of experience that surpassed Merida's own, despite their only being a few years apart in age.

The depths of his madness soon became apparent as he spun her fantastic tales of a life spent sailing an archipelago so far to the north that it appeared on none of her father's maps. He told stories of vikings besieged by dragons for generations, of vikings that hunted dragons for profit, and best of all, stories of vikings who tamed dragons and rode them through the skies as she rode Angus through the glens of her homeland.

Merida knew they were just the ravings of a madman, but she was fascinated, particularly by Dagur's story of his rival turned brother, Hiccup Haddock the third, son of a chief, and known as the Dragon Master amongst foreign tribes. The princess wasn't sure she would ever fully grasp Dagur's peculiar relationship with the Hiccup character from his stories, though.

Their tribes had been allies once, but they had become enemies over time. Dagur was strangely upfront about this fact, often laughing at himself as he relayed old stories of the many ways he had tried to kill the heir to the Hooligan tribe. Hiccup had defeated him time and time again, and though she could sometimes sense his frustration in these stories, any enmity on Dagur's part appeared to have mostly transitioned into admiration over the years that had supposedly passed.

They seemed to have reconciled before Dagur had arrived in Scotland, though, with Hiccup supposedly teaching him the ways of a dragon rider. This was a story the ship-wrecked viking told only once, though it was certainly one of his grandest. For the sake of saving his sister from a trap that Hiccup could not see despite his warnings, Dagur had flown in head first and saved his one time enemies from the machinations of an evil dragon hunter. Though he had succeeded in destroying half of the hunter's fleet, he and his dragon had inevitably been captured and caged on the hunter's flagship.

What had happened after that, Dagur refused to say.

In the end, though, Merida supposed it didn't matter. She didn't know what had happened in Dagur's past to make him fabricate such wild tales, but it must have been something terrible for his brain to backtrack out of reality so hard that it wound up in dragon territory.

Eventually, Dagur's identity as a viking had come out to her father, and set the castle in a frenzy. Only Merida's intercession on his part saved Dagur from a hanging. The fact that he was clearly mad and utterly alone in the world went a long way to convincing Fergus, but it was the man's skill with a sword that sealed his welcome in their kingdom.

Merida had seen a great many skilled swordsmen, her father among them, but Dagur fought with a ferocity and skill that few in her father's court could match. So, in exchange for his freedom, the viking agreed to train her father's swordsmen, which he continued to do to this day. For the last two years, though, Dagur had taken to traveling between the four clans, training the chiefs' men, and taking on odd jobs in exchange for gold.

One of his favorite jobs was working as a shiphand, which didn't surprise her or anyone else that knew him. The man had been raised on the sea, and he was just as sought after by ships captains these days as he was by aspiring swordsmen. The princess wasn't sure just what he was saving all that gold he earned for, or where he was hiding it, but she figured it must be for something important. He wasn't the sort to put much stock in luxuries, after all.

"So, where are we going?" Dagur asked as he ducked down and pulled Hamish from his leg and put him up on his shoulder instead, where the little prince rode proudly. Hubert soon joined him on the opposite side, leaving Harris to clamber up onto Merida's shoulders despite her loud protests.

Once her little brother was settled, and no longer in yanking her hair out by the root, Merida replied, "Why, got someone better to spend your time with than royalty?"

The viking barked out a laugh. "Maybe. What's it to you, Princess?"

"Och, well, I was going to invite you up to the castle for dinner, but if you're gonna be like that..." Merida drawled with an expressive roll of her eyes as they strolled up the path to the castle. The boys squirmed in excitement at the prospect of dinner with Dagur, and Harris tugged at his sister's curls as though to warn her not to ruin their evening for them.

"Hey, no need to be hasty now!" the man replied hurriedly. "I was only joking! You know I'm never too busy for a free meal," he said and grinned. His expression turned canny then, and he asked, "Sure your mother will be alright with it? You're not doing this just to get under her hide, are you?"

Merida threw her head back and laughed, nearly dislodging her brother. "No, I promise I'm not just inviting you to annoy my mum," the princess reassured the man. "She'd not dare turn you away anyways, not after getting an official invitation from yours truly," she continued, then smiled mischievously and added, "It would be terribly rude, you know."

Dagur just shook his head in response, clearly amused. After a moment, he asked, "Well, what story should I tell after dinner then?"

It had become a tradition of sorts when the man came to visit, that once dinner had been eaten, but before the princes were sent off to their beds, Dagur would tell one of his many stories. Elinor had long been skeptical of Dagur and his rough ways, and especially of any influence he might have over her daughter, but even she was enchanted by his tales of the far north, fantastical though they might be.

Merida looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, "Tell the one where you and Hiccup were trapped on the island together, and you had to work together to make an antidote for Toothless."

"Sound okay to you boys?" Dagur asked, smiling around at the princes, who all nodded enthusiastically. "A fine choice, Princess," he told her brightly.

"It's one of my favorites," she admitted. "I like the stories where you work together with the riders best," the princess said, then added, "I wish you had more like that," in a subtle attempt to egg him into making up a new story. They had heard all of them many times over by now, but the viking staunchly refused to make up anything new, insisting that all his tales were true until he either lost his temper or shut down entirely. It was a subject she had long since learned not to broach directly. The last time she had, the man had disappeared and not returned to Dunbroch for three whole months.

An inexpressible sadness stole across Dagur's face and darkened his eyes as he quietly replied, "Yeah, me too."

AN: Well there we are, first chapter! Please make sure to leave a review if you enjoyed, they really do help me keep writing! As a special surprise, I've decided to post the next chapter at the same time as this first one, since they were both a little on the short side. Enjoy! ;D