Chapter 5
Astrid watched as Hiccup steadily descended the wall. He had only fifteen feet between him and the grass, and yet Astrid still hadn't detached her suddenly heavy feet from the window ledge. Her hair was completely ready, hooked above her for a pulley and behind her for a sling seat. Her satchel, frying pan tucked safely inside for now, was slung over her shoulder and resting at her hip. Physically, she was prepared. Mentally, she had thought she was prepared too.
Astrid's toes curled over the ledge. She'd never counted how many times she'd stood here, enjoying the fragment of the world that was hers to watch. Here she was, about to leave. Her stomach had never tied into knots before, but apparently there was a first time for everything. She'd imagined and conceived how to lower herself with her own hair so many times. The getting back up would be the harder part, but judging from the thug's ability to get himself up here in the first place, and that he was now climbing back down with relative ease, the climb would work for her too. Yes. She'd planned every moment of this. The thug himself was a bit of a shock…
The thug – though he barely seemed to qualify for such a frightening term – glanced up at her. "Come on, Astrid, what about that time limit of yours?"
Astrid hissed between gritted teeth. Hiccup seemed to alternate between nervous stuttering and obnoxious sarcasm. Although Astrid couldn't decide which one irked her more, she at least appreciated how obedient Hiccup became when he was stuttering.
Maybe it was her annoyance that swept her feet off the floor and tugged at her hair. She was not proud of the shriek as she zoomed down towards the ground. It was a controlled but fast drop, and her stomach seemed to be sucked back up towards the top of the tower as she soared down – a feeling which both scared and exhilarated her. As she passed Hiccup, he let out a cheeky whoop to join in her screams.
Astrid yanked at her hair, feeling the burn of the tight grip in her fingers, and she stopped just over a foot from the grass. She had imagined so much about what this moment might be like, but she never pictured the grass looking as stringy or pointy as this. Yet the wind whipped through it, sending the reflecting sunlight across the grass blades in soft swirls.
She slowly extended her feet, gasping softly as the grass threaded through her toes with a gentle welcome. Pushing farther, she pressed the bottom of her feet to the cool ground. Astrid tensed as she leaned out of her hair swing and rested her full weight on the earth below.
She stood still, eyes closed, for forever or a few seconds. Then, peeling her eyelids open, she stumbled for the creek. Even the prickle of the more ornery creek-side plants and water-logged squish of dark dirt propelled her forward to sink her knees, dress, and all, in the water. She gasped at the unfathomable fresh cold. It pirouetted around her in transparent bliss, and she sunk her whole hands in the flow.
After another moment of bliss, she pulled herself backward and onto her feet. Pivoting slowly, she saw Hiccup leaning against the tower, arms crossed, watching her with a bold grin.
"Nice weather, isn't it?" He commented. Astrid had found up in the tower that baring her teeth at him would push his mood back into jittery subservience, and she felt pride rushing through her as her discovery proved truthful now too. Trying to enjoy the grass and the world without giving Hiccup the gleeful pleasure of watching her become weak again, she straightened her satchel beside her and began striding toward the exit. Hiccup jogged to her side, still clearly jumpy for whatever reason, but still making some attempt to annoy her with obnoxious wit.
"So, any, uh, any particular reason these lanterns are on your agenda?"
"How about you shut up so that I don't have to give you a third hit with my frying pan?"
"Fair enough."
Astrid kept the satisfied smile plastered on her face as she tried to take in her surroundings as much as she could without implying any kind of weakness that Hiccup might deduce. The cave passage held soft and cool air, with dappled sunlight on the outer edges revealing that the rocks inside possessed a warm orange coloring streaked with veins of silver. A shiver of excitement cantered across her arms as she stepped into the shadows and felt the cool air heavy with water. Ahead, she saw the vine wall – a clever covering that obscured the cave passageway. Her mother had mentioned it in passing, but only as Astrid swept the vines away from her face as she slid through them did she finally comprehend how it functioned. Hiccup made grunting noises behind her as the sound of vines slapping his face echoed out of the cave. Astrid didn't have to fake a very entertained smirk, but it fell away almost immediately as her mind processed the world appearing in front of her.
Trees, with thick and knobby torsos, wound up out of the ground and around each other. Plants of all shades of green and thicknesses and textures sprouted in every which corner. The noises – animals screeching and chattering, distant water trickling, wind whipping the leaves about and pulling branches with soft groans, grass and plants rippling—
"Are- are you okay?"
Astrid's breath had shuddered into rapid and shallow spurts. Her fists were tight around clammy palms. She had never expected so much all at once.
"I get it. You've never been outside before. That's okay," Hiccup said, hovering closer to her, but still at a reasonable distance. His hands hung out in front of him, as if he had considered laying them on her shoulders but wisely reconsidered. His voice was soft and concerned, but still cautious. Something in her heart eased. His glimpse into her vulnerability had not stripped her of all control in the situation. At least he was still afraid of her.
Astrid snapped her eyes to him and snarled, "I've been outside plenty."
The troubled tilt to his eyebrows and his reply of silence made her toes mash into the dirt. She pressed her teeth together. "I'm fine." She wasn't.
He nodded emphatically and said, "I know you are." He was utterly unconvincing. Astrid pressed another slow breath out of her lungs. Hiccup's eyes darted around her face, and he slowly offered, "Do whatever you want. Doesn't really change the fact that you have the frying pan and I don't, right?"
"I can still take you down without the frying pan."
"Oh, I don't doubt that."
She huffed, twisting her face to seem more irritated and less relieved than she truly felt.
Hiccup glanced at her satchel. "But having it certainly doesn't make you any less dangerous."
Her lips twitched upward at that one. "Glad we're on the same page." The air flowed in and out of her easier now, and focusing on making sure Hiccup still saw her as a threat had pushed the noise and sight stimuli down to a more manageable level. Somehow – and she would not be admitting this to him – him talking with her had helped.
She squared her shoulders and began marching forward. Hiccup, standing still behind her a moment, sighed with what Astrid imagined might be relief. He jogged to her side and then, to her frustration, easily matched her pace with his elongated stick legs. This time, he made no bother of attempting a questioning.
They continued on in silence for a while, Astrid no longer bothering to mask her quiet enjoyment of the world around her. She started and reached for her frying pan several times at the sight of supposedly ominous rustling in bushes, only for a small, fluffy animal to peek out. Hiccup quirked his eyebrows several times at her reactions, but he always swung his head to look away pointedly when she shot a glare his way. Astrid would silently grapple with the names of the creatures, having only seen them before as illustrations on paper pages. Her mother had brought very few books into the tower, and all of them were folktales – nothing practical, nothing with detailed explanations of the world below and beyond.
The noises, textures, and images that initially overwhelmed Astrid now intrigued her. Eventually, her curiosity burned through her lips in a question:
"Do they move?"
Hiccup stiffened beside her – not that Astrid was looking at him. "Uh- what?"
She pressed her lips together, then asked, "The trees. Do they move?"
After a beat of listening to the forest around them and feeling the warm sunny breeze drift across their arms, Hiccup shook his head. "You see these wooden things that poke out of the ground a little? They're roots. They're connected to the trees, and they take nutrients out of the dirt so the trees can live."
Astrid frowned. "The trees are alive?"
"Uh… yeah." Astrid could feel his unhidden perplexed stare nailed on her. She fired a glare back and watch his eyes lift to the green canopy.
"Do they eat?"
"Yeah… I mean, sort of. They require water and sunlight for survival."
"And dirt."
"Right, and dirt."
Astrid gazed up at the canopy of green shimmering above them. "What happens when it's winter? When it's cold?"
They continued like this, Astrid grudgingly fueling her curiosity and letting Hiccup answer her questions. She occasionally threw a light punch at his arm whenever he tried to sneak a snarky joke into his explanations, but otherwise, the conversation was… oddly normal. As her questions became more complex, probing into the structural details of the world, Hiccup began swinging his hands around dramatically and wildly as he talked, which Astrid found fairly entertaining.
The questions about the world around her tumbled through her. As Hiccup eagerly answered everything, she began to slowly enjoy and appreciate his willingness to explain. If she didn't understand, he would stutter for a moment, eyebrows knitting together in thought, before carefully offering metaphors and structures and examples. Interactions with her mother had never been like this. Any rare curiosity from Astrid was met with annoyance from her mother. Even Astrid's confidence shining a bit too brightly had her mother hissing and sneering with cold words. Hiccup seemed to... more than just fear her. He respected her.
The questions that had been lodged a little deeper within her came out after a little while. Mother had told her about kidnappings where small children disappeared from their homes late into the night, never to be seen again – the night of those tales, Astrid paced the tower until morning, beating the air with practice kicks and punches. All throughout Astrid's life, Mother had brought home horrific news of murders, riots, thievery, and all manner of lawbreaking wreaking havoc in the land. Astrid tried to remember as many details of the stories as she could, and Hiccup tried to confirm some aspect of each crime that she could recall. Somehow, watching his cool and calm explanation of the event built her own confidence in herself. If he traipsed about the forest alone without fear, why should she bother?
Eventually, he couldn't supply answers.
"What do you mean, you don't know? How could you not know?"
"Okay, I've been able to answer most of your questions so far! Give me a break! So I don't know why the waves on oceans go back and forth. Sue me!"
"What you?"
"Sue me." He sighed. "It means, I guess, punish me."
"Gladly." She landed a firm hit on his forearm.
"Ow!" He massaged it. "Should have seen that one coming." She raised another fist, and Hiccup quickly said, "Hey, the royal scientists could probably answer that question."
"Explain."
"The word 'royal' or the word 'scientists'?"
Astrid groaned, "Scientists."
"Okay, well, a scientist studies all those details about how the world works."
Astrid halted for the briefest second before resuming alongside him. The word "royal" flew across her mind, an echo pulsing from memories of the storybooks she read as a little girl. "There's a king?"
"Yeah," Hiccup said, grimacing and massaging the back of his neck. "Two, actually. We call them jarls, though."
She frowned, straining to remember a single story in the childhood folktale collections that told of a land with two kings or jarls. "Two?"
"Yeah," he repeated. His tone had dropped into a place where Astrid could tell there was an abundance of history but little desire to discuss it.
Hiccup's stomach let out a resentful snarl. He looked up at Astrid, and she wrapped her fingers around her satchel. She would not be sharing her resources with him.
"We're going to have to stop in a few miles."
She rolled her fingers into a fist. "Why?"
Hiccup huffed and waved his hands around, replying, "Well, as you may or may not have noticed after you so politely knocked me unconscious and took my bag, I carried all my food in there. And, would you look at that, for whatever reason I don't have my bag with me." His eyelids drooped over his eyes to give her a dry expression. "Can you guess where I'm going with this?"
"Fine, so you're hungry."
"And tired. Were you planning on sleeping out in the open, milady? Or perhaps constructing a hammock out of your hai-" He stopped, raising his eyebrows. "That could work, actually."
Astrid's mouth opened and closed. Somehow her careful plans for the long-awaited trip had never included plans for overnight resting accommodations.
Hiccup tilted his head slightly. "I see." A spring of energy and zeal now propelling him forward, he set off at an even faster pace. Astrid growled slightly as she began to jog at his side and curse his lankiness. A grin spread across his face as he looked over his shoulders at her. "Guiding you to the lantern show, and now making sleeping arrangements? I'm really taking the brunt of the work over here-" He ducked just in time as a frying pan swiped through the space his head had just occupied. "Fair enough, fair enough."
To combat the bout of pessimistic drudgery of his adolescent years, Hiccup occasionally tried to create a mental list of positive aspects and negative aspects of a situation.
The positives? Astrid had gradually transitioned from punching him and glaring at him every two minutes to hiding behind him and clutching his arm tightly. Her grip only tightened as the noise of the bustle and the glimmer of lanterns shining through grimy windows began to more and more overcome the atmosphere of the forest. She even tied a scarf around her hair, in some weird attempt to hide it, but all her attempts to tuck her hair into the scarf were met with failure. The moment the Moldy Cabbage itself appeared as they rounded a cluster of trees, Astrid actually hissed. Even if she was brusquely killing any of his attempts at conversation or questioning, Hiccup was enjoying her touch on his arm and her abandonment of her tempestuous nature too much to crack any jokes. Also, he supposed, he felt some level of sympathy. Why Astrid had never left her tower was a mystery to him, but he could only guess from her questions about the world that her mother had told her some dark and foreboding stories about the people beyond her tower. Every gruesome crime of the nation's past two decades had not skipped past Astrid's ears. She was hyper-vigilant and cautious at even the possibility of running into murderers, assailants, thieves, con-artists, drunkards, and thugs.
The negatives of the situation? Hiccup was about to knowingly lead her straight into a den of murderers, assailants, thieves, con-artists, drunkards, and thugs.
Hiccup yanked at the rusted handle of the large circular wooden door, swinging it back towards them. Astrid barely muffled her yelp, but she kept behind him and slinked into the tavern in his footsteps.
Even if Hiccup and the owner of the Moldy Cabbage had never been on good terms, Hiccup felt some level of tense anticipation roll off his shoulders. He took a deep breath, slowly letting his chest rise and fall. The safest place in the world was on Toothless' back, streaking across billowing white clouds, free from nagging tongues and judgmental eyes. The second safest place in the world, even with the dingy reputations of the clientele, was a tavern. Maybe it was his Viking blood, but the rotten wood walls, beaten bar, raucous banter and goading, and beer that seemed to flow into every nook and cranny of the establishment seemed comfortable to Hiccup.
String bean though he might have been, he elbowed past fistfights waiting to happen and suspicious muttered dealings to the bar. A tiny old man toppled off a ragged bar-stool, and Hiccup turned to grin and gesture to the stool.
Astrid was too busy swinging her wary gaze around and holding her frying pan at the ready to bother glaring at Hiccup, and she quickly slid into the proffered seat. Hiccup leaned into his own adjacent bar-stool and perched his elbows on the rim of the bar.
"Brother!"
Hiccup grinned, knowing his slight wariness shone through. A burly young man several years Hiccup's senior, with a wild stampede of red hair, tattoos tumbling across his thick arms, and a glow of madness filling his scar-framed eyes, lunged forward from the shadows obscuring the dealings behind the bar. Dagur was insane. But he loved Hiccup.
"Dagur! How's Mildew treating you?"
Dagur slung a filthy dishtowel over his shoulder and slammed his other meaty hand onto Hiccup's shoulder. "Oh, you know, terribly as usual, brother," Dagur sighed. "Might murder him any day now." Hiccup laughed. Was Dagur serious? Hiccup never knew.
Astrid stared Dagur down, eyes narrowed, fingers white around the frying pan handle. Hiccup gave her what he hoped was a calming and reassuring smile. "Astrid, meet Dagur. Dagur, Astrid."
"Helloooo, Astrid," Dagur said. His head still pointed toward Hiccup, but his eyes snapped to look at her. Beneath the bar, Hiccup noticed her toes curling around the beams of the stool's legs and her arms tense. Dagur turned his full attention back to Hiccup after a final bored appraisal of Astrid. "Grandin Ale, Hiccup?"
Hiccup nodded. "And a turkey leg. I'm starved."
A crash of violently swung glass bottles exploded in one of the tavern's questionable corners. Dagur didn't break eye contact with Hiccup, but his eyes bulged as he spoke, a snarl building into a scream across the room: "If that happens again, I will take you down and drape your intestines from the ceiling."
Hiccup's peripheral vision showed him that Astrid was crouched and ready to sprint back through the tavern door. He offered her a feeble smile. Dagur moved back into the glinting world of bottled and barreled liquor, and Hiccup did his best to reassure Astrid.
"The thing about taverns is that if you stay quiet and keep to yourself, nobody will even care that you're here," he explained. Astrid's eyelashes framed her slit-sized gaze, and Hiccup added, "Someone's always doing something insane in here, so nobody pays attention to the normal people for long."
Calling their pair normal was admittedly, however, a generously positive term. Astrid's hair, gathered at her feet to the best of her abilities while not taking a hand off her frying pan, was drawing attention. Most people had not yet seemed to notice the beautiful young woman to whom the hair belonged – their feet and their attention were tripping over the stream of hair winding through the establishment, ending just short of the door. A few leering eyes had located Astrid. Judging by the twist in his stomach and Astrid's white knuckles, the stares were trouble. Hiccup never attracted much attention alone, but it had never previously occurred to him that women, by no fault of their own, drew many unfriendly eyes in a place like this.
The standard chaos of the Moldy Cabbage rumbled around him. Bands of hard laborers or distraction-seeking travelers downed pints in the blink of an eye, their laughter and crude jokes escalating in volume. Nervous farmers wrung their hands as hooded menaces offered them riches for a soul in shadowed booths. Prisoners both released and fugitive swapped stories as they lounged on benches sagging under their burly weights. In the nooks and crannies and along the walls were the men long past celebration, anger, or tears, bottles and mugs strewn around them.
Hiccup cast his index finger pointed upward for Astrid's suspicious viewing, and then he dove into the crowd, weaving around barmaids twirling daggers and food trays in their hands and dodging past snarling fiends looking for a nose to flatten. Approaching a tall man in the corner, snoozing happily and draped over a chair, Hiccup flicked a gold coin from his boot to the stranger's shirt. The young man then grabbed the dark cloak covering the stranger, yanked it free of the drunkard's grasp, and clutched it tight as he moved back through the din to his bar-stool. He carefully swept the cloak around Astrid's shoulders. She seemed to grasp his purpose instantly, and she quickly tugged her tresses beneath the long expanse of the cloak. She met his eye for only a moment before twisting back to the bar. Hiccup guessed she would be offering no thanks more heartfelt than that. He watched as her shoulders dropped and she laid her frying pan in her lap. Hiccup twisted his head away so she couldn't catch him smiling at her. Instead, he made eye contact with Dagur and grimaced, glancing at Astrid. Dagur nodded. They'd been friends - hopefully friends - long enough that Hiccup could understand that Dagur would watch their back if Astrid received any more unwanted attention.
Anyone initially suspicious of her hair or intrigued by her presence had already moved their attentions to more threatening uprisings or interesting topics. One man provided both, his voice building into a crescendo over those huddled around the bar.
"You'd think that Alick and Corran would actually care about justice and the good of the country for all the men they toss in prison, but – oho, what's that, kitchen thrall? Another angry spat between the high and mighty duo?" His gravely voice was met with grunts of cynical agreement and frustration reverberating across the greasy wood of the bar.
Another man, his voice slightly higher in pitch, spoke up: "Viggo to the north, dragon traders to the south, the Conquering Three from the east! And our divinely blessed leaders are sharpening axes against each other's crowns."
Dagur shoved a glass of ale Hiccup's way. He wrapped his fingers around it and gazed at its pale gold and sparkling contents.
Astrid leaned into his space, her breath dancing across his hands. "Alick and Corran?"
Hiccup huffed, his hopes that she had ignored the rising angry complaints now dashed. "Jarl Alick and Jarl Corran," he muttered to her. "The leaders of the land."
"You said there were two kings," she murmured, her voice clogged with memories of their conversation in the forest. "Why? How does it work?"
Sliding his fingers through his hair, Hiccup grimaced and replied, "Well, it doesn't work, for starters. And I said kings because that's probably what you're used to, being from this land. Jarls are different."
Astrid frowned. "From this land?" she repeated. "Aren't we all?"
Grinning, Hiccup asked, "What are your thoughts on Vikings?"
"Bloodthirsty savages."
Hiccup laughed. "So you and your mother are definitely locals."
When Astrid shook her head, confused eyes pinned on him, he shook his head and tipped the mead down his throat. "The population is comprised of two main groups," he explained. "Descendants of the Vikings who conquered this land a few hundred years ago, and descendants of the peasants they conquered." Pointing at her, Hiccup smirked. "You local, me Viking. He let her process that for a moment, and then continued. "Our- well, my ancestors conquered this land, and then some jarls had twins-" the names of the old rulers streamed through his mind, but he ignored them "-and out of great brotherly love for one another, they refused to rule unless they could rule in tandem, and yada-yada-yada, the legacy of the two jarls has lived on to this day."
"But it doesn't work." Astrid leaned in closer, chewing on her bottom lip. Which he liked. Focus, Hiccup.
Hiccup sighed and muttered, "Well, it does, but only if you're willing to blot out a few sections in the history books." He drew his glass to his lips and relished the taste as the ale slid down his throat. Gulping and smearing at his mouth with the back of his hand, Hiccup continued: "Usually in the past, the jarls have been able to move past their personal differences to work for the good of the kingdom. But-"
"Now?"
"Now…" Hiccup grimaced. "They're too different and too similar in all the worst ways. Corran just broods. He'll never tell you what's wrong or how you've insulted him. He just sits there and frowns until he explodes. And Alick is so blunt he's nearly shattered solid alliances with foreign powers. He just- he just says whatever comes to mind! No filters. "
Astrid pressed her lips together. "That's… not a good combination."
A sharp laugh crackled from Hiccup's mouth, and he continued: "But they're both stubborn, both have terrible communication skills, and both are easily irritable." He ran his thumb across the rim of his glass. "It's a terrible combination anywhere, but if you're running a country together… you're ruined."
He felt Astrid's eyes on him, not hostile but curious. "You…" she said slowly, softly, "you know a lot about them."
Nodding, Hiccup replied, "Let's just say I spent a lot of my time in the castle." He grasped his foolish hope that she would not pry further. Everyone always asked how he knew what he did, when he inevitably said too much. And the true answer, the depth of the issue, wasn't something he was keen to share.
"Why?"
He smiled tiredly at the question he knew that she would insist upon asking. Staring at the glass bottles cluttering the shelves behind the bar, Hiccup tried to find a fair answer that kept his secrets. So many secrets that he'd amassed over the years, it felt at times as if he were drowning in closed conversations and unspoken truths. "My father works there." Anticipating her thoughts, he added, "One of the guard."
They listened without speaking to the din around them. The loud critics of the kings had devolved their rants into whinnying conversations, and their audience had mentally dispersed to observe and participate in the other acts of the circus that was the Moldy Cabbage.
Astrid, for once, seemed to sense his hesitation and edge away from the shaded spots in his story. She rested her elbows on the bar and leaned forward to gaze into the depths of the shadows. "What's going to happen to the kingdom?" she asked.
Shrugging, Hiccup replied, "Well, eventually, the problem of the two jarls is going to get resolved."
Her face pinched, Astrid demanded, "What makes you so sure?"
Hiccup chuckled grimly. "For starters, there's only one heir to the throne."
"But- so they didn't both have kids?"
"Oh, they did. Alick has a son. But Corran's daughter was stolen when she was only a baby, years and years ago." He waved his fingers to the ceiling. "That's what the lanterns are for. Corran and Alyse - that's his wife - are celebrating her birthday and sending a message to the kingdom that they still believe she'll come back."
He saw the genuine sadness in Astrid's eyes as she asked, "Do they? Do they still believe that?"
All throughout his life were scattered memories that Hiccup had gathered by peeking through doors and sneaking into the jarls' quarters: memories of Corran clutching a small pink blanket and sitting quietly at the window, of Alyse staring at the empty chair across her family table in the dining hall, of both silently hiding away every year on their daughter's birthday.
"I don't know," Hiccup answered truthfully. "But they still miss her."
Astrid nodded.
The rest of the evening found Hiccup pouncing on a turkey leg with a delighted ferocity that Astrid fully matched herself, Dagur pitching a man twice his size out the front door, and the two travelers relocating repeatedly throughout the room to dodge the scenes of bar fights. Eventually, Hiccup shoved a few coins Dagur's way and asked for a room. He insisted on two beds, hoping the flickering candlelight hid his bright red ears when Dagur beamed teasingly at him.
The room was small, feeling especially crowded with the two separate beds as requested, but Hiccup's attention was drawn to the clear nervousness now unhidden on Astrid's face. He had realized too late in the evening that Astrid must have never slept anywhere else but in her tower. He hoped that the activity and excitement of the day would exhaust her enough to find the cheap straw mattress comfortable and the rickety door to their room a safe barrier.
She perched on the edge of the mattress, hands balled in fists at her sides, her frying pan inches away on the bed. Hiccup stretched out on his own bed. He crossed his arms behind his head and cast occasional concerned looks her way.
Against his better judgment, he ventured further into the territory of secrets, just to distract her from the new experience. "You said you read about kings earlier, right?"
She nodded, staring at the posts of his bed.
Behind his head, his fingers curled into his hair. "Did you read about dragons?"
"Not much," Astrid replied, eyebrows dropping as she seemed to search through memories. "I know they're evil - they prey on villages and common people." She frowned and asked, "Why?"
Hoping she didn't notice the slight shiver that tumbled through him, Hiccup replied, "Just wondering. They're… they're pretty rare now, dragons, at least in this part of the world, anyway. We get the occasional attack every once in a while but…" A quiet sigh crept out of him. "They're not really a threat."
He'd watched the jarls parade into the city after a successful hunt, in more peaceful moments of their rule, while thralls dragged scaly corpses behind them on colossal carts. It never used to bother him as a boy. As he got older, he started to hope he could one day follow them on a hunt, perhaps sneaking through the trees behind the hunting party until he could drag his own dead dragon prize into their camp and win the jarls' favor.
An image flashed in his mind – a nightmare, really – of him parading into the city with a cart behind him displaying a bloody, broken Toothless-
He shuddered and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to fill his mind with anything else but that.
Eventually, Astrid lowered herself onto her cot, and Hiccup rolled to blow out the candle on their shared bedside table. In the dark, he listened to Astrid's breathing ease into sleep and felt his heart ache from missing his dragon.