Astrid slapped a hand over her mouth.

Tears formed in her eyes.

Urgently, Valka stepped forward and took Tuffnut by the shoulders with an intensity that actually made him serious. He glanced to the side and then back at her. "Was he hurt?" she demanded, her voice just barely not breaking.

"Uh, yeah, he didn't look so good."

"What about Toothless?"

"Toothless wasn't—ow!" Tuffnut pulled himself from Valka's grasp and massaged his arms. "He wasn't there!"

"What?!" Astrid exclaimed.

"He wasn't there, Astrid, Hiccup was riding on the White Fury."

Valka looked at Astrid, whose blood was suddenly quite colder than it usually felt.

"So we're gonna go bust 'em out, right?" Tuffnut asked eagerly. "Get the whole gang together, get over there and do a rescue mission, except this time we're saving Hiccup?"

"No, no," Astrid said, frowning and holding back tears. "Hold on. We can't… They know where we are. And they want our dragons, and they want us to help them take over the world, and now…and now—"

"Hiccup will be their bargaining chip, now," Valka finished for her.

—

Albino's chest heaved. She was surrounded by the scent of Night Furies and metal, perched on the top of the crown of rocks surrounding their graveyard. Her sight flicked from one corner to another, seeking movement. Toothless's scent had led her here.

There was nothing moving on this forsaken island, nothing green, nothing living. Still, she roared out. Maybe…?

Her pupils thinned to shreds and she lowered her head, gripped with fear, turning to fly back the way she'd come, but something caught her eye at the bottom. Toothless's saddle, and the prosthetic half of his tail, had both been removed and were lying on the ground without him. She leapt down, trying not to think, and flapped to lower herself to the ground just next to them as gently as possible.

They did not smell of death. Toothless's distinct cacophony of scents was as strong and as alive as ever.

Albino crouched and powered into the air again, coming up on the opposite side of the rocks and landing on the spiked ridge of the half-mountain. She still could not see him. But he was out there. She pushed off again, still following his scent, her wings pushing against the wind and stretched taut so that she could go to him as fast as possible.

—

The sea swayed the ship.

"Hiccup…" Ruffnut's fingers grasped the cage bars. Hiccup was lying flat on the doctor's table, too far away to reach to, strapped down by leather bands. They'd taken his armor, taking it to present to one of their Warlords, leaving just his bloodstained underclothes. They'd almost taken some of Ruffnut's, too, but once they realized it was all she was wearing they'd backed off.

He had just been lying there, staring at the ceiling, for a worrying amount of time. "Are you awake? Or, like…alive?"

"How could I have just let her take him?" Hiccup asked to himself. "I never should have trusted her to see him."

Having been filled in on the situation, Ruffnut said, "Maybe she just shouldn't have taken him."

"But I knew she was a Night Fury hunter," Hiccup kept staring at the planks of the deck above them. "She'd been trained that way, for years, of—of drugging and abuse and a few days isn't enough to reverse all that. Argh!" He picked up his head and slammed it back down on the table. "How could I have been wrong? I was so sure that Grimmel was wrong, that you can't keep a dragon's obedience forever with conditioning and drugging and whatever sick dependence they have to him. I had her trust, I tried to help her the way I would help any dragon, and the second she saw him, she still went back to Grimmel. I should have known."

"Well, that's one of those things you do," Ruffnut said, picking at her teeth. "Being unrealistically trusting is like your whole thing."

"Thank you for summing that up," Hiccup muttered.

Ruffnut paused.

"If it helps, I bet the Dead-grabber or whatever appreciated it. I mean, think about it. A whole lifetime with ugh, What's-his-name, Oh I'm Gonna Kill So Many Dragons Mc-Gristle over wherever in Odin's name he is. I mean that's like… That's gotta be the worst torture I could think of. She probably was so thankful to get a few days of peace. A little unearned trust does wonders for the soul."

"Yeah…" Well, now Hiccup was just thinking that if Toothless was still alive, like he hoped, he was living with Ugh What's His Name Oh I'm Gonna Kill So Many Dragons Mc-Gristle. And he probably hated it more than anything, he was probably so afraid and alone that it made Hiccup's heart hurt just thinking about it.

"Alright," said a gruff woman's voice, from the stairs up to the deck. "Let's have a look what they've done to ye."

A large-framed redhead woman stepped down into the room. Her hair was impeccably braided, with not a strand out of place, and her clothes and apron were similarly clean. She made her way to Hiccup's side and peeled back his shirt so that she could see the wound.

"You're Doc?" Ruffnut asked rudely.

"Aye," she said. "Got a problem with it, have ye?"

"You just look more like the lifting-ten-ton-barrels type."

"When you're the medic for a hoard of Warlords, ye might want some more flesh on yer bones," Doc said, leaning down to inspect closer. "Yer patients get uppity if ye can't hold 'em down. Did someone cauterize this'n?"

"I tried to," Hiccup said.

"How long ago?"

"About four days ago?"

"Four days! The gods must like you, boy. Chief." She didn't say 'Chief' like an insult the way everyone else had been; just corrected herself. "Do it to yourself, did ye?"

"Yeah."

Doc huffed. "And they said ye weren't as impressive as they thought ye'd be. What sorta pain tolerance do they train ye for on Berk?"

"Emotional," Hiccup and Ruffnut answered in unison, and Doc let out a hearty laugh.

"All right." She reached both hands into the pocket of her apron and brought out some jars. "Well, we'll stitch it up for ye and hope it's not been infected. Four days, too. My goodness. It'll leave a scar, that's for sure."

"You jealous, Ruff?" Hiccup grunted as she smeared some stinging paste over the wound.

"Ugh," Ruffnut replied. "Look at it, it's not even gonna be a cool scar."

"I still got one first."

"It's gonna be a dumb little baby scar and you know it, Hiccup."

"Is it even yer first scar?" Doc asked. "Looks like yer down a leg, too."

"That doesn't count," Ruffnut said. "I always wanted a shoulder or lower back scar, those are the coolest. Hiccup never wanted a scar. Too scared. You shoulda seen him when he was a kid. Talk about pain-avoidant. He didn't wanna do anything cool, he wasn't on firefighting duty, he didn't wanna go into dragon-fighting training, he just wanted to draw and screw up our defenses on raids. Pacifist. We were SHOCKED when he turned out to be a dragon whisperer, I mean NO one expected something cool from him."

"Oh, many thanks—"

The sarcasm was cut short as Hiccup inhaled sharply through his teeth and held his breath as Doc began sewing his wound up. Ruffnut clutched onto the bars of her cage again, seeing Hiccup in pain. Doc glanced up at her and chuckled. "Don't worry, Ruffie."

"Uh, that's not my name," she shot back.

"What should I call you then?"

Ruffnut puffed up her chest. "Ruffnut Thorston."

"Thorston, huh? Sounds familiar. Must've heard it from one of the Warlords."

"Yeah, probably, sure, because my mom was totally a big warmonger. Yeah, for sure, she was all up into the fighting, and the conquering, and the being a total—"

"Easy does it, easy does it. The Warlords knew people before they were warlords, you know. Well, Chaghatai Khan came from a family of conquerers, but Griselda the Grievous used to be a traveler with her family, and Ragnar the Rock used to be mere townsperson in the west. I couldn't tell ye their whole journeys, but that's how they started."

"What about—agh—what about Grimmel?"

"Grimmel, well, he's more of a mystery," Doc said. "Fearsome man. There's plenty of rumors where he came from. We know he used to be at home in his village, and they hailed him as a hero when he killed a Night Fury in its sleep. Though, that must have been thirty, forty years ago. And no one knows which village. And whether that village was his birth-place or not. One of the rumors says he's from Berk."

Hiccup suddenly remembered his first conversation with the man, back on Berk. "He said something like that," he murmured pensively.

"You've spoken to him?"

"Once, kind of," Hiccup said. "I thought he was lying the whole time, but…I guess…it's possible there was an element of truth to what he said."

"Oh, gross," Ruffnut scoffed, making a throw-up noise. "That means we might know someone who's related to him."

"Gods, what did he say?" Hiccup thumped his head on the table again, not very hard, trying to remember.

"Eh, I wouldn't put too much faith in anything Grimmel says, Chief," said Doc. "Not that it matters any, either. He is what he is now, and not trying to be any better.

"Hey, Doc, how does a woman like you get pulled into working for the Warlords?" Ruffnut bluntly asked, putting her arms through the cage and resting there. "You seem…I dunno, too nice to be working for dragon-trappers and murderers."

"What? Oh. Just because I have no love for Grimmel?" Doc asked.

"And no hatred for your enemies, either," Hiccup added, and she glanced at him.

"Berkians just aren't my enemy," she said. "And, if I'm being frank, neither are dragons; they always left us alone. I guess we were too inland for their taste, and no Nest near enough around to be worth coming to raid us much. No. My love and my boy both died to a land dispute between two nations five or so years ago. I didn't know enough back then to know what to do to save 'em."

"I'm sorry," Hiccup said, although wondering why this was reason to join the cause of Warlords.

"Yeah," Doc said, wiping her nose with a cloth. "So was I. Figured it was all I could do to prevent more from dying. Practiced medicine, until lo and behold Griselda the Grievous was on my doorstep needing medical attention the likes of which you've never seen. Starts talking about conquering the world, uniting everyone under the three of 'em. I thought to myself, it might not be so bad. Living under someone else's rule for a while, just to stop needless violence."

Hiccup was quiet. Doc was just finishing his stitches when Ruffnut decided not to follow his lead.

"That's a dumb reason," she said firmly. "I mean, think about it for like, a little longer. You don't like needless violence but you like Warlords? Lords of War? The only thing the Warlords are doing differently from the land dispute you mentioned is that they're committing needless violence on a HUGE scale. Like, titan-sized needless violence."

"You'd feel different if you'd lost someone like I had," Doc said, defensive but certain. She turned to a crate and fished out a fur vest for Hiccup, not that he could sit up and put it on.

"Loss?" Ruffnut scoffed. "You think Berkians haven't lost anything? For three hundred years we lost Viking after Viking to dragons. They stole our food, they took our lives, and the only way to stop it wasn't by waging war on dragon-kind, it was to not kill anymore."

"I lost my father," Hiccup confessed. Doc unstrapped his arms and chest from the table and helped him up. "A dragon. Oh, Ruff, do you remember the Bewilderbeast? While Toothless and I were gone, we found him again. We took the shackle off his tusk."

"Cool."

"Anyway." Hiccup turned his attention back to Doc as she placed him in his cage. "He was the dragon who killed my father." She paused before closing the cage, and Hiccup said, "I get that peace is worth fighting for. But the Warlords have taken an awful lot of lives for people fighting for peace."

"Well, then," Doc said, and closed the cage after him, locking it. "When you come face to face with them, I invite you to try and change their minds."