O-O-O

The forges were loud in some ways, but curiously silent in others.

Hammer met metal, clanging and echoing through the surprisingly high-ceiling open space taking up the bowels of one of the metal-clad ships of Drago's fleet. Hot iron sizzled and crackled when it was quenched, the heady smell wafting out the slit windows guarded by metal sills and tightly-arranged bars. The snow gusting in instantly melted and sizzled on the hot surfaces.

But there were no voices; the forges were mostly empty. There were places for a dozen blacksmiths and several dozen assistants, benches and quenching barrels and hot furnaces, but only two of each were in use.

Maour had never seen such an efficiently designed forging space… nor such an empty one. His own setup back home was relatively spacious, but it had never felt so abandoned as this.

Perhaps it was more than the forges being used at only a fraction of their capacity, though. He wasn't in the best state of mind to be judging a place by how lonely it made him feel, how empty it seemed to be at the moment.

The metal rods in the fire began to glow orange, the healthy color that meant they would neither snap nor splatter when he hammered them, so he pulled them out with his tongs and hefted the hammer the workstation had come with. He tapped tentatively at them, alternating between the two rods as he tested exactly how pliable they were, slowly bending them over the edge of the bench.

It had been weeks since he worked at his forge at home. Since he'd seen Toothless, or Cloey or Shadow or his younger siblings, or Heather…

He put the rods back on the fire, their glow fading to a duller orange that would render all his work moot if he persisted.

With all that was going on, he'd not had much time to dwell on home. On what would be going on there, with him and his siblings – and Ruffnut and Einn, for good measure – disappearing in a storm. Making sure he could bring everyone back took precedence, and his sleepless nights were spent worrying about that, not about what might be happening in their absence.

But at times like this, when he was already doing absolutely everything he could think of to ensure the apparent tragedy of their disappearance didn't turn into a real tragedy, he found his thoughts turning to them. To the ones left behind.

His parents would be beside themselves with worry, but they'd be stuck at home, watching the little ones. With him, Von, and Toothless gone, they would be struggling to manage at all, with no time left to go out looking. The other families were probably searching in their stead. Heather would be out looking, for sure…

He felt bad about all of the worry their absence was undoubtedly causing, a gnawing guilt in his gut ameliorated by the knowledge that he couldn't have prevented it without something worse happening instead. But for Heather, the gnawing was a full-on ache in his chest. One he tried his best to put aside whenever he needed to think, to work on saving Toothless, but right now he could do both.

The rods were white-hot again, so he removed them from the fire once more and finalized the palm-length right angle he had hammered into them both. Then they went into the quenching barrel, the salt water this time for a harder quench. The two largest controlling rods needed to be stiff; it was safer if they broke than if they bent. If one of the two broke, the tail would be stuck in whatever position it was in at the time. If one bent, the tail would likely be pulled closed, dropping Toothless into an unrecoverable free-fall. Broken was at least potentially recoverable. He remembered explaining as much to Heather when they were working on the automatic tailfin.

Heather had taken to hanging around when he was working in the forge. And Toothless would either be there or would be commenting in his head… Von didn't do that. Von was busy flying in circles above a ship for some reason, not offering experienced advice on the tailfin replacement he was forging.

He missed them both.

Toothless would be saved. He and Toothless would return to the Isle of Night, and everything would go back to the way it had been before Skrill yanked them away from their lives. Maour would settle for nothing less.

He used the tongs to pull the rods out of the quenching barrel and dropped them on another bench, one with an assortment of other parts. It was a good thing Von had shed and kept a total of five scales since their unexpected journey began; if it weren't for her, he would have had to find some other way to pay for the raw materials needed. That would have taken time, time he might not have.

"We're coming for you," he muttered to himself, reaching forward to begin assembling the old-fashioned tailfin arrangement he knew by heart. He didn't have the plans for the automatic tailfin with him, and he was taking no chances with that. Especially not when Toothless was likely to need every bit of their experience flying together. Maour doubted they'd be getting him to safety without a fight.

O-O-O

The key to cheating without getting caught was to do it in a way that nobody would expect. Ruffnut usually had the upper hand with this sort of thing; by being loud and obnoxious most of the time, those who knew her would be blindsided by subtle tricks.

The bald man sitting across from her, huddled in a large coat, took much the same approach. He was grandiose and friendly and open, making one think that if he had the upper hand he couldn't possibly keep it to himself. In a game where bragging did not change the outcome, he would happily tell everyone exactly how well he thought he was doing.

"My luck is underwater, it's so low," Eret lamented as he passed his turn yet again. The bald man casually placed his third to last tile down with no comment.

His silence made him seem uncertain of his prospects. Like he thought he might not win.

'He has the symbols to match off of his own tile,' Von reported from afar. 'He does not have any that look like pawprints.'

He was almost certain to win if the game played out as it should. He knew it. But he wasn't showing it, so when he did win he could play it up and act as if it was pure luck. Not the skill he had kept back and hidden from them in their previous practice game.

"Why did we have to play this outside?" the woman with braided hair muttered, placing a tile of her own to match off one Ruffnut had put down several turns ago.

"A fat Gronckle was asleep in our usual spot and Drago's favored here suggested the deck," Eret said tiredly. "You were there."

"Every time snow gets in my eyes I feel I need to be reminded," the woman retorted. "We could have used the Gronckle as our table, it wouldn't have woken up."

"The chill is bracing," Ruffnut objected. She eyed the tiles in her hand – all four of them – and selected one that would match to the bald man's last tile but present a symbol he didn't have, effectively countering him by what would seem to be pure chance. He had been sandbagging last game, but she was cheating this game.

They were playing at a table set on the deck of the visitor ship – getting to watch Eret strain to move the thing out of the hold was a side benefit. Von was flying low in the air above the ship, seemingly idling her time away while Maour was off doing whatever it was he had found to do. She was close enough to see the tiles if she squinted whenever she passed by, and Ruffnut was the only one who could hear her relaying her findings.

All as planned. Ruffnut was glad Von was able to convince a Gronckle to take up their usual spot, but she could have worked that out some other way. Now they were out in the open, playing in the drifting snow and flickering torchlight, and the bald man was repressing a dismayed scowl.

"Finally," Eret said loudly, slapping one of his six tiles down to match to Ruffnut's latest addition. Luckily for her, his tile didn't give the bald man an opening, and he passed with a subdued wave of his hand. The woman passed as well, leaving Ruffnut free to be rid of another tile.

Eret played another, clearly happy with his changing fortune, and the bald man was forced to pass again. His uneasy scowl was more genuine now; this one round wouldn't decide their game, far from it, but he probably thought his luck was taking a turn for the worse.

When it was Ruffnut's turn she put down her penultimate tile and smiled disarmingly at the bald man. "You were right, we are getting better!" That dragon-doping alcohol was going to be hers! This had to be more interesting than whatever Maour was doing right now. She hadn't listened when he said he'd be busy tonight.

O-O-O

The summons had come on a folded note slipped under the door to their shared cabin. Maour found it after a full afternoon of tweaking Toothless' replacement tailfin in the forges and later on the deck when he was kicked out by a swarm of blacksmiths. Whatever they'd been tasked with doing, it was on a scale that did not allow for a single workstation to be lent out. The formerly empty forges were practically vibrating with noise.

The note itself was a simple thing, a scrawled line on parchment. Drago intended to meet with him, and only him, tonight. A complex signature sprawled out beneath the demand.

Maour wasn't an idiot; the first thing he did after receiving the note was ask around to make sure this was something Drago normally did, and to check that the signature was legitimate. According to the guards he'd asked, it wasn't common but it did happen. A merchant staying on the visitor ship showed him an old parchment with a very similar demand on it, from when he had first arrived.

His worries mostly assuaged, Maour hadn't minded Von volunteering to stick around above-deck while he met with Drago. Ruffnut had dragged her into something or other, he hadn't asked. So long as she was available if he ended up needing a quick extraction.

He made his way to the remarkably small and unassuming cabin Drago had specified just as the sky was darkening from a cloudy afternoon grey to a much darker, night grey. The green lanterns cast eerie shadows everywhere, contrasting more as the ambient light faded. The cabin door was guarded by three men with crossbows and short swords, but they all stood aside when he approached.

If this was an ambush, it was one plotted by Drago himself, which was unlikely. So far as Maour knew, Drago was entirely happy with his cooperation and maybe even a bit fearful of setting Von off. So he pushed the door open with no small amount of confidence, wondering what Drago wanted with him.

What he saw was not at all what he had expected. Drago sat in a simple chair at a rough table of dark wood, poking at a whole roast chicken with one hand. His polearm was off to the side, within easy reach but not immediately available.

"Sit," Drago said absently, tearing a drumstick off the chicken and leaning back. "I wish to speak with you."

"Sure, that's what I'm here for," he replied. The chair on the other side of the table was uncomfortably hard, and whoever had made it had failed to make the legs level so he had to lean forward to stop every little movement from rocking it back and forth. "Anything specific you wanted to speak of, or…"

"You are not what I expected," Drago said simply.

"Too little muscle, or too politely optimistic?" Maour asked.

"Too easily destroyed," Drago replied. He still held the chicken wing in his hand, though he'd not made any move to actually bite into it. His grey gaze bored into Maour with an unnerving intensity. "Too little effort. You have bound a monster to your will, but none who see you in action can understand how you did it."

"I'd say much the same of your armored dragons," Maour said casually. "That armor could be thrown off, most of them aren't tied down anywhere…" To someone without his insider knowledge, Drago's dragons looked just as 'inexplicably tame' as Von did. Even with his inside knowledge he didn't understand how Drago had ended up with the current situation. One did not come to an accord with a King by accident, and then there was the language barrier that went at least one way, possibly both.

He wanted to ask, but with the way Drago was looking at him, he suspected he'd need to answer the question posed to himself first. That unamused stare was not the stare of somebody willing to change the subject.

"What I did was not… difficult," he said slowly. It would be easiest if he didn't have to lie. The truth was one story he already knew, far simpler to remember than any falsehood he might come up with. He just had to word it right. "It was dangerous and unexpected, but once done it was not something that I could ever undo by accident." The love of his family was not something easily stripped away, and that was what it would take to turn Von against him. Some sort of horrible treachery.

"Too easy," Drago repeated. He put the chicken wing down, leaving it on the table next to the cooling carcass, and learned forward. "How long has it held?"

"Long enough," Maour said vaguely. "Years. It is not some fragile leash, not something that could be broken in a moment."

"I thought the same once," Drago said brusquely. "But Night Furies cannot be tamed. They cannot be broken, no matter how well you might think you have done it."

"Then it's a good thing I didn't try to do either," Maour shot back, doing his best to hide how much he disliked the way that had been said. Drago spoke of a 'tame' Night Fury as if it was some desirable thing, but all he could think of was Togi, his intricately scarred underbelly. "Don't try. You do nothing but build the tools of your own destruction and any who might come after you."

"That is exactly what I did," Drago said quietly, his voice a heavy rasp. "Trusting the instrument of my destruction..."

A heavy, brooding silence came between them. One with a putrid undertone of unpleasant realizations, at least on Maour's part.

He hadn't connected them. Togi's tale, his past, was a distant story of terror and horrible humans who should all be dead by now, decades later. Drago's work here was practical, surprisingly progressive compared to the average Viking, and genuinely impressive for all that it was obviously imperfect. That the two could both be the same story, the same history of the same man…

"It is a folly, to use them for anything, to believe they will stay cowed," Drago said darkly. "I learned. You ought to learn from me."

"I heard a story, once," Maour replied, his voice surprisingly firm for all that he was half sure he was sitting across from a torturer who had done terrible things to his friend and might very well be willing to do them again to his sister if the opportunity arose. "Of a man who took a Night Fury and broke her, using her as a weapon. Who took more, tried to break another, to breed an army…"

Drago's stony visage didn't change in the slightest. The flickering torchlight reflected in his eyes was the only movement.

"I heard the Night Furies razed his island to the ground, and that the one he had thought broken died trying to kill him," Maour concluded. "I trust my source, but I had assumed all involved dead by now." Save for the Night Furies, of course… But if Drago was the one, then Maour was going to do his best to ensure Drago had no reason to suspect Togi or the other still lived.

"Not quite," Drago said roughly. "Not yet."

"So I see." He wondered whether he could get away with attacking Drago here. He wondered whether he was willing to attack Drago.

"I learned a harsh lesson that day," Drago all but growled at him. "They cannot be used. Not forever."

"Is that all you learned?" he asked carefully. Not that torturing and trying to break a person was wrong, not that it was immoral… Just that it didn't work. That it couldn't work, if Drago's vehemence on the subject was any indication of what he really thought.

"I am not the child I once was," Drago replied after a moment's thought. If he sensed that he was on thin ice with Maour at the moment, he either didn't care or didn't think Maour could possibly be dangerous to him. "Rebuilding… It took time, and when the next chance to bring dragons to my cause came about, I approached it… differently."

"How?" Maour asked tersely.

"Understand what they want, and make yourself the way they get it," Drago explained, leaning back in his chair. He never broke eye contact. "They are brutal, violent creatures… But so are we, in our own ways. Give them a reason to follow for a time, and plan for when they will no longer follow, just like you would men. Knowing when they will abandon you and accepting it means you will not keep them overlong and force them to turn on you."

"Then what do these dragons here want, that you can give?" Maour pressed. That was certainly… a way of looking at things. Not necessarily a good one, but not all that bad either. Not in comparison to 'kill or enslave them all', which was apparently where Drago had come from.

"To fight others of their kind," Drago said bluntly. "They want to live and eat and fight amongst themselves, not to fight our kind. Their leaders want to destroy each other and be served. There is a leader out there, in the ice field. Those here wish to see that leader dead. I wish to see that leader dead. Our interests align until that has happened, and when it does I will let them leave."

"What if they go back to doing exactly what the ones at the ice nest are already doing?" Maour asked, picking at Drago's reasoning. It sounded nice and simple, but he didn't believe that was as far as Drago had thought about it. There were enough glaring holes to sail a ship through. "What do you gain if you are replacing one mindless tyrant and his horde with another?"

"This one will respect us," Drago insisted. "We will have fought beside them, killed their dragon enemies for them, made their peace possible. They will not strike at humans, for fear of others doing what they are doing now. They understand the workings of power, there would be no leader dragons if they did not. They will not even attack defenseless villages…"

"Because they know that people like you sail around avenging those villages, or at least they believe as much." Maour shrugged his shoulders uncomfortably. "Well, you've certainly got ambitions…" Ambitions he wasn't sure were possible to fully achieve. Dragons were smarter than that, not so simplistic. Even if they were that simple to manipulate, they would grow old and die and be replaced by those who hadn't experienced the same things. That was life.

But even if Drago's plan was intrinsically flawed, it was still good. In the short term, if nothing else. The current King of the ice nest was razing islands and spreading his influence. The current opposition alpha was fighting back. Said alpha might very well think as Drago expected, and would probably live for a long, long time. A change in regime would be good for the region, good for the dragons and the humans. Not to mention good for Night Furies in particular, as there was no obvious hatred of them to be found in the alpha working with Drago.

Drago was working on thoroughly flawed assumptions and a very simplistic understanding… but his actions weren't bad, even if his hopes for what they would lead to were ridiculously overblown. The man might be amoral, but his incorrect beliefs were guiding him in ways that kept him on a fairly good path forward. He believed dragons could not be dominated, not that they should not be dominated.

Maybe that was better. Few men tried to do the impossible. Far more found their morals slipping somewhere along the way and turned to things they once considered wrong. If Drago believed it was impossible to do horrible things, then who was Maour to correct him?

Maour shifted uneasily in his chair, breaking eye contact with Drago to look down at the table for a moment. For Togi's sake he wanted Drago to suffer, to at least understand that he was wrong, that what he had done was terrible. Assuming Togi would even want him to do such a thing, and in the process to risk changing the person Drago had become. A surprisingly moral person by merit of believing things he had no way of knowing were false.

Dragons were people. People could be broken. It was not some law of nature that Drago was doomed to fail, he had failed as much through chance and his own mistakes as anything.

What kind of person would Drago become, if he knew all of that for fact? If he was given reason to question what he currently believed? Told that he could have succeeded all of those years ago, had he just avoided a few simple mistakes?

"I think I understand," Maour said quietly. He understood what he needed to do. "That is… not unlike what I have done." He wasn't going to risk all of this, all that Drago was and had built, being turned to less moral ends.

"Then you have learned at a far younger age than I," Drago said approvingly. "And without the same sacrifices."

He had learned. He had learned far more than Drago ever would. What Drago did with flawed assumptions and incomplete knowledge he did with true understanding, or at least something much closer. But if he said so, if he tried to explain, it might very well turn Drago against him.

"I would see your Night Fury," Drago said abruptly, standing from his chair with a flourish of his cloak. "I thought you were following the same foolish path I once did. Now that I know you are not… I want to see it."

"She is with me because our interests align," Maour warned, doing his best to hold to the principles Drago espoused. "Don't give her reason to dislike you." Von hadn't been listening in to this conversation, so she didn't yet know who Drago was, or what he had done. Maour had no intention of telling her until they no longer needed Drago's help with anything. He would rather not have known himself. It was easier to trust Drago when he was an unexpected, unknown individual who seemed to have good intentions at heart. Now he knew that Drago was a product of chance and self-interest, all built upon an unstable base. Still good, but only by circumstance.

"I am not that foolish," Drago said gruffly. He pulled the door to the small cabin open, said something Maour couldn't make out to his guards, and left. Maour followed him across the ships, to the visitor ship and the odd scene playing out on its deck.

Night had fallen. The snow was picking up, gusts and flurries whipping across the deck and collecting in every available crevice. It was cold and dark out.

But there were four people braving the cold, sitting around a table set right in the center of the deck, huddled over a collection of wooden tiles and bantering like they were unaware of the weather.

'He has three with the fang symbol,' Von called out from above, swooping down close to the deck for a moment before flying back up. None but Maour even saw her.

Maour didn't know what he was walking into, but he took it in stride, mostly by ignoring the four tile-placing madmen and madwomen – it wasn't even a surprise that Ruffnut was among them – and waving his hand in the air. "Von, come here!" he yelled authoritatively. Drago had boarded the visitor ship and was looking to the sky.

'What am I flying into?' Von asked warily as she swooped low once again, making a pass but not yet committing to a landing.

Maour couldn't answer her, not with Drago right in front of him, but he beckoned casually. Von knew he wouldn't be leading her into an ambush, not without any warning.

A dark Night Fury speckled with accumulated rime descended from the sky directly in front of Drago. Three of the four players at the table nearby jerked away from her abrupt landing, their chairs scraping on the deck. Ruffnut just laughed and put a tile down.

Their reactions weren't important. Drago, on the other hand…

He was staring, his cold, grey eyes focused squarely on Von's head. He turned to the side, his shrouded arm facing her, and lifted his polearm just high enough that the bottom was no longer touching the deck. Held as a weapon, not a walking aid.

Von tossed her head and eyed him warily. 'If he points that stick at me, he's going to lose it.'

"Put the weapon down, she can tell you're ready to use it," Maour said to Drago. He quickly crossed the short gangplank to the visitor ship and walked around Drago, not so subtly getting between him and Von. "You wanted to see her, so…"

"I did," Drago agreed with a short rasp. He was tense; Maour would have assumed he was deathly afraid and struggling to hide it if he was… anyone else, really. Maybe he was afraid, his past deeds aside. He was definitely wary.

A short shout resounded from the gaming table off to the side. A bald man in an oversized coat scraped a bunch of wooden tiles toward himself. Neither Von nor Drago so much as looked away from their staring contest.

"I see no difference," Drago said slowly. "None at all."

"You wouldn't see it," Maour told him. He didn't know what Drago expected; he had been told that Von was with Maour because their interests aligned, nothing more. It wasn't as if she would be chained or beaten or broken. She didn't wear armor like the other dragons Drago had under his sway, but she had a saddle… A nice saddle, he had spared no effort in making it, but still a saddle. But Drago seemed to be expecting more.

It wasn't easy, keeping to the decision he had made back in Drago's cabin. If the world was fair and just, Drago wouldn't be here at all. Someone else who actually knew what they were doing would be, while Drago would be dead decades back. Maour wouldn't need to keep him blindly following the right path.

Von chuffed in annoyance and looked away first. 'My nostrils are frozen from the inside out,' she complained to Maour. 'That prize Ruffnut keeps refusing to tell me about had better be good.'

"You should go inside," Maour told her. "Warm up. Whatever you were doing up there in the cold can't have been that important."

'It was not,' Von agreed. 'Ruffnut, you're on your own!' she called out, before carefully backing away from Drago. She wasn't staring directly at him anymore, but Maour was sure that if he so much as twitched she would know it. She didn't know who he was, not like Maour now did, but she was still wary. Wary enough that he didn't think telling her would accomplish anything positive.

Drago watched as Von quickly made for the nearest hatch leading into the depths of the ship, deftly pulled it open with one paw, and disappeared below. A conversation started at the strange table off to the side, replacing what would have been an ominous silence with a low chatter.

"You are nothing like what I was," Drago said after a few long moments of staring at nothing. His flinty, unreadable stare transferred to Maour. "The time comes."

"For what?" he asked.

"You are my answer to the dragon rider," Drago said bluntly. "You proved your worth. My forces grow, but my ability to effectively maneuver them has peaked. The weather will only grow worse."

"So the attack has to happen soon," Maour concluded.

"Now," Drago corrected with a low growl. His dreadlocks swayed in the wind, snow catching in the rough ties. He turned away from Maour, looking out over the fleet. "We leave in the morning for the ice fields. Be ready for a fight. Whatever comes, you are tasked with downing the dragon rider."

O-O-O

The wind was cold, but the mood was hot with tension and some good old-fashioned stubbornness of the hole-digging variety. Inwardly, Ruffnut was sorely wishing she had a thicker tunic. Outwardly, she was smiling confidently as she waited for what was likely to be the final hand of the game.

The bald man had played well, as well as could be expected of someone with such inexplicably bad luck. Ruffnut was only one of three opponents, and the other two often unwittingly blunted her most effective plays against him, but having even one player supernaturally predicting and blocking his best placements was wearing on him. Nobody had gone out yet, but he was close, and Eret and the woman whose name Ruffnut could never remember were down to their last false coins.

They were also, judging by the quick, thoughtless moves they made, down to their last remnants of patience for the game and the weather. Eret, hunk of muscle that he was, suffered in stoick silence, but the woman more than made up for it.

"You Northerners must have skin like wool and brains like pebbles, to play in this," the woman asserted as she tossed her last false coin into the pile in preparation for the next round. Ruffnut put in one of her many, many coins, and watched as Eret threw in his last as well.

"Don't call me a Northerner," the bald man growled irritably. His cheerful demeanor had acquired more holes than a bucket after somebody trapped a Terrible Terror under it. The smoldering wreckage barely clung on, especially now. The game was all but won in her favor, unless he convinced her to do something incredibly stupid–

"Let us end this," he grunted, shoving all of his currency into the pile. "All in. Winner takes all. One last round."

"Oh, sure, because that's so fair," Ruffnut complained. She had just lost Von – Maour had brought her down to show to some big guy with a walking stick, and apparently that was enough of an excuse for Von to chicken out – and she doubted her ability to match the bald man in skill alone. "I've got so much more than you… At least put some conditions on your win, or something."

"Like?" Eret asked. "Anything to end this game quickly."

"I win if I'm down to two or fewer tiles when somebody else goes out," Ruffnut proposed. "Either beat me by a lot or I win." It was more than fair; she had the vast majority of the coins, and in any normal game her victory was a foregone conclusion, a matter of time instead of skill. The weather was working against her now, forcing her to risk her cleverly cheated advantage for a much less solid head start.

"Deal," the bald man agreed, quickly sorting out the tiles one last time. "This is for everything. I must win before you are rid of your third to last tile. A fitting challenge." He made no mention of the other two players who were theoretically still in the game, and neither of them objected. Everybody knew that this was between him and Ruffnut; they were just there to take up space and put their tiles down to be played off of.

The tiles were dealt out, and Ruffnut didn't like her hand. The best hands were the ones where she could, with a bit of luck, play off of her own previous moves and empty her hand without needing anyone else's tiles. This one, though… Not even close. And Von had chosen now to leave her hanging! Maour and the big brooding guy were still talking, but Von had gone inside, so Ruffnut couldn't even subtly try and call her back without it being incredibly suspicious. The bald guy was already giving her the stink eye whenever she won a round, he had to suspect she was cheating.

Maybe it was for the best that she couldn't cheat now. There would be absolutely no evidence for him to find if he outright accused her of it once she won. If she won.

Eret slapped down a tile to start them off, and the game began. The wind swirled snowflakes and sea mist in their faces, and Maour's mental voice was annoyingly clear where nobody else's words were. He was saying something about an attack, but she couldn't care less.

She dropped her hand to five tiles in the first few turns, but the bald man, no longer plagued by Von relaying information, played off every single tile she placed, keeping up with her with no difficulty. Ruffnut dropped a tile with a dragon's fang on the open side, and he placed one to match it. She tried to get rid of one with a bundle of wheat, Eret played off of it, and the bald man played off of that without even hesitating. They were neck and neck, and maybe it was the stakes or the terrible weather, but it felt like everybody was rushing to the conclusion.

Then her fortunes took a turn for the worse. She had to skip a turn. Then another. The bald man gleefully took advantage of both chances and took a two-tile lead. She got rid of her fourth, but he immediately discarded his second tile, leaving only one in his hand.

"Here we go," he said seriously. "You have four, I have one. If you cannot play and I can, I win. If you can play and I cannot, then play again, you win. Either way, we all get to get out of this horrid weather."

Over the bald man's shoulder, Maour and the big guy parted ways. Maour headed below deck, while the big guy stayed. He had nice dreadlocks; if he weren't so old Ruffnut would be all over that, to learn some new hairstyle techniques to use on Tuffnut the next time she caught him unaware, if nothing else.

The woman put down a tile; it offered a match with any sword-symbol tiles. The only other open tile involved yet another wheat symbol, and she already knew she didn't have any of those.

She looked at her hand. Three of her four tiles had a sword on them. If Von were around, she'd stall until she got a report of what the bald man held, then play something that didn't match him. But Von was gone, and the big guy looking over at them wasn't likely to help her out.

It was all up to luck. She put one of the three out without even looking. Whatever happened, happened. She could always try and nick the alcohol later.

Eret passed. The bald man… He waved his hand with a heartfelt grimace. "My luck has been missing as of late," he conceded. "Perhaps Drago employs you for yours. You were not so good last time we played."

"I'm not one of his most trusted subordinates for my luck," Ruffnut said loudly. Her turn came around, and she triumphantly slammed another of her tiles down. "Two in the hand. By our agreement, I win!"

"You win a case of frostbite," the woman announced, shoving herself, chair and all, away from the table with a scowl.

"And that jeweled crossbow of yours," Ruffnut reminded her. It was under the table, right next to a couple of Von's scales, Eret's silver dagger – not as good as his shirt, but she'd take what she could get – and the round cask of alcohol the bald guy had entirely refused to open up until now.

She reached beneath the table and pulled the cask toward herself. "Let's just check," she murmured, leaning over to pop the lid off.

There was a smell, unidentifiable but potent. Her vision wavered, and she slammed the lid back on with every neglected shred of self-preservation she still possessed after a lifetime of living with Tuffnut. "Wow, that's a thing," she said woozily. "I thought it only worked on dragons?"

"Perhaps if you are unused to alcohol of any kind, it would affect you too," the bald man said sourly. "Congratulations."

"Well, I earned it," Ruffnut told him. The others were all getting up, but she was content to sit there and bask in the glory of victory against a superior foe. Sure, she had cheated, but he had undersold his skill from the start. She counted this as a legitimate win, all things considered.

The big guy was still watching her. She felt like she should know him… But there were so many bulky, brooding soldiers in the fleet. This one stood out, but not enough for her to remember him if she had ever run into him before.

"Drago's trusted subordinate," he announced. For some reason, Eret flinched and the bald man spun around so quickly he almost tripped over his own chair. Sure, the guy had a creepily raspy voice, but not enough to get that sort of reaction!

"Yeah, what of it?" she demanded.

"I don't remember you," he said dangerously.

"I'm only memorable when I want to be," she shot back. "I do good work." She'd ask Maour who this guy was later; for now she needed to defend her story.

Her three companions were slowly backing away from the table. She expected more from Eret, at least.

"When were you brought on?" he asked.

"About the same time as the Night Fury," she said vaguely. "To keep an eye on the new Trapper crew, you know the drill." She pointed at Eret. Eret nodded silently.

"Has she been… helpful?" the big, nosy guy demanded of Eret.

"Very," Eret quickly assured him. "She taught my men how to use the net launchers you outfitted us with, and that was just the first night. She has been a great help."

"Is that so..." The nosy guy stared at her. She stared right back until a snowflake got her right in the eye, then blinked rapidly at him until it was gone.

Then he shrugged his shrouded shoulder and thumped his staff on the deck. "Be ready. The final assault begins tomorrow." He turned and stomped his way off the ship, his masterfully tangled net of hair swaying against the back of his neck.

"So…" Ruffnut said once he had left. "Why are you all so terrified of that guy?" She certainly wasn't scared of him. Nosy old guys were annoying, at best.

"Only you," Eret said with a shuddering laugh. "Now I get why you're so trusted… Not many people can mouth off to Drago Bludvist and get away with their lives."

The bald man and the woman both nodded in agreement.

"Oh," Ruffnut said eloquently. That had been… lucky.