Chapter 2

ASTRID

Astrid resumed her escape attempts on the second day in the cabin. Every time, she aimed for deafening failure.

On her first attempt, she tried to slide her wrists out of the cuffs, yelping with every clumsy yank and newly blooming bruise. By the end of it, Astrid and her mother had locked into a screaming match that left both with sagging shoulders and strained voices.

Her second attempt involved yelling while yanking at the beam around which her chains were wrapped. The beam didn't break, but its creaking - and the small groans from the walls - shot her mother's eyes wide open.

In the third attempt, Astrid slammed her body against the walls until even the briefest movement sent sore shocks across her back and ribs. Again, she made as much noise as possible.

Of course, Astrid scheduled those and all other escape attempts at night. She added in impromptu repeats of attempts when her mother tried to nap during the day time. The goal was to push her mother into the same exhaustion that weighed Astrid down. The nightmares during travel robbed her of sleep, and the cabin only had one bed, which her mother alone occupied. As punishment, Astrid made as much noise as possible when her mother flopped onto the blankets and closed her eyes. Even when, by day three of cabin living, Astrid could barely move from weariness and soreness, she continued to scream and howl long after her own voice abandoned her.

Her mother couldn't injure her. She'd come at Astrid with the dagger, after the fifth attempt, but Astrid flipped her locks over her face and hid behind her hair. Her mother, as expected, jumped back, gasping at the thought of accidentally hurting a single thread.

Three days after moving into the cabin, her mother disappeared. Astrid slumped into her corner again and strained for sleep in those eternal hours. Finally, the woman struggled down the path, and Astrid watched from the brief sliver of window access she was afforded as her mother dragged a sack of dried grass through the dirt. She dropped it off just past the front door and disappeared again, coming back at least an hour later with some brownish-grey blankets and a large linen bag. Astrid watched, silent, as the woman packed the grass into the bag, tossed the blankets on top, and shoved the arguably new mattress into the corner.

"Now..." her mother wheezed, collapsing onto the bed. "Shut up and sleep."

Astrid obliged with neither a word nor any expression of gratitude.

She scrubbed at the gritty remains of tears pasted across her face and picked at the dirt beneath her fingernails.

A hunger strike for two days rewarded Astrid with a bucket of cold water, a bar of soap, and a threadbare washcloth. A second hunger strike convinced her mother to unlock one hand. Even then, only after twenty minutes of puzzling did Astrid succeed in peeling her dress off her body and stringing it up the chain. With her back straight and hands folded, her mother sat and watched as Astrid hooked an ankle around a chair, jumped onto the chair, and hung her dress on the rafters.

"How are you going to get the dress back on?" were her mother's only words, sniffed disdainfully.

Astrid had jumped back onto the ground and attacked the washcloth. "I'll solve that when I get there," she grunted.

Now, turning her determination onto her arms, Astrid watched with a grim satisfaction as red flushed on her skin. Even the gentlest air would sting, but at least the brown streaks of dirt were finally vanquished. She worked her way down her torso, occasionally pausing her efforts on her skin to shove her sopping-wet hair out of the way, and she worried her lip between her teeth when her washcloth reached her toes. She rubbed the cloth at the caked dirt and bits of grass coating her soles.

Her back ached from bending over, and, after a final scrutiny of every inch she could see, Astrid pitched backward onto her mattress, sighing at the release of tension. She was in only her underclothes, but fatigue weighed her down and made the prospect of detangling her dress from the chain utterly unappealing. Back in the days before Hi-

Back when she was younger, she had attempted days of complete inactivity a few times, which always left her more tired than a busy day ever did. Now, these days of chained lethargy, coupled with the nightmare's repeated attacks, had dragged sluggishness across her mind and limbs.

To prolong wakefulness, she focused on the heavy coldness of her hair and the sting of her clean skin. Her mother had left the cabin halfway through Astrid's bathing, and straining her ears told her that the woman had left on some mystery errand rather than just scrabbling about the garden.

Astrid stared up at her dress hung above her. Its tattered sleeves and mud-coated hems fluttered in the weak breeze pushing through the faded yellow curtains adorning the windows. At least, with the manner in which it was twisted around, the bloodstains were largely hidden. She groaned. The cloth was more rags than dress, but it was all she had - and Mother did not harbor enough warm and fuzzy feelings about Astrid to obtain replacement clothes for her.

The drowsiness that always came with damp hair took a moment to lift, and Astrid blinked away the hazy eyesight and thoughts slowly before comprehending that something had broken the stillness around her.

Whispering.

She shot up on her mattress, her ears straining. There was more than one whisperer. Rather, an entire group of people's hushed voices spoke in unintelligible mumbling and hissing. A shudder scampered down Astrid's spine.

"Hello?" Astrid said. She saw nothing in the windows but thick gray clouds and tree branches fluttering in steadily strengthening gales. "Is someone there?"

She could hear distant rumbling now too, and the whispers ebbed and flowed in volume though not in clarity - she still couldn't pick a single word out of the hisses. Astrid grabbed at her dress, forgoing any caution for the sake of preserving the dress. There wasn't much worth preserving, she reasoned as she wrestled with the tangled, stiff fabric. At least she could be somewhat more clothed if the whisperers decided to approach the cabin. The only result was a loud ripping noise as her tugging shredded her dress in two. She grimaced.

It took a moment to realize that her heart was slamming in her chest and that her hands were cool and clammy. Another moment flowed and ebbed before she heard her own shaky breaths flutter above the whispers. Those were eerie whispers, strange things, still without words, oscillating in volume at random intervals, and intermixed with a crackling sort of rumbling.

They weren't human whispers.

Stay still. Listen. Barely honed battle instincts had her straining against her logic and her chains to reach the frying pan on the floor against the opposite wall. No matter how hard she yanked, the chains refused to budge, and her only quasi-weapon remained totally out of reach. Even with the clatter of chains filling the cabin, Astrid could still hear the whispering and rumbling. Where were they coming from?

Her ankles nearly buckled as the ground rumbled beneath her. She launched her body against the wall for bearings as the floorboards trembled. "What on earth..." she said, splaying her fingers and leaning on her bent arm. The hissing intensified. Astrid shuddered. It seemed like a whole tribe of creatures was pressing their faces to the wooden boards, whispering their formless curses through the cracks in the floor.

Whatever was happening couldn't be solved with a frying pan, but now she was newly motivated to untangle her chains. This would be the first genuine attempt. Astrid chose quickly between the sustained heavy pressure of hanging her entire body weight on the chains or yanking repeatedly in short but powerful bursts with her entire frame. Selecting the latter option, she took quick stock of the exact curves of the chains, grabbed a tight hold on the chains with both hands, and jumped up to push off the wall with her bare feet. She swung from right to left, from the wall toward the doorway, letting her full body weight hang briefly before dropping back to the ground. The chains rustled, harder to hear now over the intensified whispering and the rattling of the entire cabin. Again her feet slapped against the wall, and she pushed into a short swing. Landing was more difficult the second time, with the rippling floor providing no steady foundation.

The door flew open, and the motion and the loud bang of the door slamming against the wall drew Astrid's eyes to her wide-eyed mother standing in the doorway.

"A little help here," Astrid grunted, jerking her head at the matted chain that still refused to budge from the cabin rafters.

The woman took only a step before the floor collapsed beneath them. A scream bolted out of Astrid. Her grip on the chains had instinctively tightened when the floorboards buckled and collapsed into the dark, gaping pit. It quickly ate up the furniture, and Astrid felt a jolt of adrenaline as she watched the edges of the walls begin to crumble. They must be build on stronger ground, or at least less-affected ground, because the roof and beams above trembled but remained largely unmoved. Astrid calculated that she had maybe a minute before the rest of the cabin succumbed.

Thanking her younger self profusely for insisting on climbing and balancing practice in her tower-dwelling years, Astrid clambered up the chains and onto the beams. Loosening the chains proved much easier from up top, especially when the ground shook violently and sent the nearest crossbeam and part of the roof falling. Astrid didn't bother shaking the dirt off her head as she slid the chains off the end of the beam now left open after the neighboring boards had tumbled into earthy oblivion.

Her mother still stood frozen in the doorway, looking between Astrid and the hole below. Astrid could see the woman's chest rising and falling in hyperventilation, only quickening as the whispering grew louder.

Astrid's mind finally connected that word "whispering" to a conversation in a royal library, where her shoulder pressed against the frame of a skinny hero who she couldn't think about now as he told her about a dragon that whispered.

Astrid dragged up a curse word she'd learned in her escapades and whispered it under her breath. A Whispering Death. She'd seen the illustration in the dragon manual. She would not be needing to get an up-close look at the actual creature to confirm its identity.

A jagged crossbar poking at the hole in the roof claimed her attention. It appeared just long enough and just sturdy enough to assist in her escape. Astrid took a second to reposition her feet on the beam before leaning back. Her upper torso then shot forward as she tossed the chains toward the crossbar.

It missed.

"Come on," she hissed. Gathering as much strength as she could, she tried again. The effort had the wood beneath her complaining, and again she missed.

With a yell, her final attempt yielded success. Astrid wasted no time for even the briefest celebration. She jumped and swung toward her mother. As she flew through the air, a rumble from below sent the cabin into its final throes of death. Astrid plummeted into her mother, and the two women sprawled backwards into the grass. Astrid landed face-down, and the dirt crumbled on her tongue before she pressed her hands into the ground and pushed herself up. Pivoting, she watched the cabin crumble down into the hole.

A crackling roar echoed from the pit and through the woods. Astrid sprung to her feet and started running. She felt a brief tug, but she didn't stop her gait. To her side, her mother appeared, matching her speed and cradling Astrid's chains in her arms. Astrid decided she could be angry at a wasted opportunity for escape later. Now, as the ground rumbled and cracked behind them, she and her mother ran for their lives.

HICCUP

Hiccup tried his best to face his demons.

He got as far as the front door before deciding to not do that, not yet, and he took a sharp left turn to hide in the shadows of the longhouse, where he watched a group of warriors swarm Cor and Stoick. Hiccup grated the toe of his cane into the floor and strained his ears to listen to the conversations. In all the chaos around the jarls' planning table, neither Stoick nor Cor had noticed Hiccup yet - and he'd prefer it to stay that way.

But the hiding and listening just twisted his stomach tighter and tighter as he realized he couldn't decipher a word. Battle strategies, caravans of munitions, fortifications, or spy-work - the jarls might as well be speaking a different language. Hiccup kept hoping someone would mention a weapon. He'd been apprenticed to Berk's best blacksmith for eight years, so he knew what weapons were and what they looked like. Yet if armaments did appear in the discussions, they quickly bowed out after only the briefest acknowledgment. Blood gradually squeezed out of Hiccup's knuckles as he listened. War, apparently, had very little to do with weapons.

Listening was useless. Tired of Cor and Stoick yelling over each other about battle strategies he didn't understand, he looked over his shoulder at Cass, still standing at the longhouse doors. In the presence of royalty, she abandoned the slouch and crossed arms for a stiff-backed alert position, but Hiccup saw the narrowed eyes and thin lips. She was still brooding.

He couldn't hear the clicks of his cane over the shouting as he edged his slow, clumsy way over to Cass. She stood beneath a lantern, but he clung to the shadows, trying to preserve the pseudo-anonymity that would no doubt be soon ripped away from him. Cass spared him only a glance. When the lights of lanterns ebbed away from her face, her eyes seemed even darker than they already were, but Hiccup stared into them anyway and threw out the few bits of military jargon he absorbed over the years. "Brief me. What do you know about the assassination attempts?"

Cass's eyes became slits, but the doors swung open, and her father strode through them. Vernus and Cass were different enough that they both honed and perfected their own distinct glares, and they shot both at Hiccup. He sighed, nodded at Vernus's bow, and watched the captain of the guard pass and bow again to the jarls.

His eyes hadn't returned to Cass before she started talking. "Amateurish."

"Huh?"

"The fact that the assassins got as far as they did has less to do with their skill levels and more to do with how weak and unprepared our guardsmen were that night." A shudder rumbled through her, and her lips curled to bare her teeth. Hiccup had heard Vernus howling like a summer storm when he felt his guards' spines were just one degree off straight. He had no trouble imagining Cass's own snarling shrieks entwining with her father's roars when a threat actually surfaced and overwhelmed their forces.

He shook his head, trying to rearrange the information into some pattern that would clear everything up. Instead, the world swayed before him, and he stumbled beneath the weight of trying to decode a war less than an hour after waking up. His cane clacked as he stabbed out to steady himself.

The thought of a prosthesis quickened his pulse. Gobber would probably insist he try out a multitude of prototypes. The blacksmith himself had never shied away from improving his own prostheses and testing them in Hiccup's presence. The bald, heavyset man growled, winced, hissed, yelped, and cursed as he fiddled with cups, leathers, and metal bars of varying shapes and thicknesses.

Was he really distracting himself from an oncoming war by thinking about his newly amputated leg? Was trying to focus on the war a distraction from Toothless and Astrid both captured? Was everything really this bleak?

Hiccup's breath caught in his throat as he swayed nervously back and forth. He was the third most powerful person in the country - a fact that by itself he'd been desperately trying to ignore for most of his life - and still helplessness was gripping his torso, demanding that he decide what to do while reminding him that there didn't seem to be anything to do.

A huff of a sigh hissed through Cass's nose, and Hiccup pulled his absent stare down from the rafters back to her tight grimace. "So we only survived because whoever it was who sent assassins didn't bother sending good ones?"

Cass's bangs trembled as she shook her head in a quick jerk of movement. "My father thinks there's a possibility they were independent attacks, planned by the traitors themselves rather than any leader or faction."

As his eyebrows knit together, Hiccup leaned back and frowned deeper. "But still motivated by someone, right? They can't have come out of nowhere," he mused.

"Your dad thinks so."

Hiccup rolled his eyes. "But..."

Cass put words to their shared thought. "Cor disagrees, yes." She grunted, then muttered, "He thinks we're bound to get attacked any day now."

"Yeah, but by who?" Hiccup's body swung around to fall into habitual pacing. Hiccup's legs- leg - reminded him immediately that this habit would have to be shelved, at least for now. He lifted his chin up, some futile attempt at keeping at bay the mystery emotion that kept trying to crawl up his throat..

He felt questions tugging at him as they demanded to be asked but refused to reveal themselves. Hiccup's tongue wavered in his mouth, hovering around syllables that wouldn't form. How was he supposed to start? How was he supposed to help?

What little coordination he had - already in short supply even before his dragon took his leg - had him bouncing on his toes. He cleared his throat. The only words his lips could form cut at him on their way out. "I should have been here," Hiccup said. Neither of them could look at each other. "I don't know anything about this," he admitted. "And I know you're mad at me. I get that. But... you have to explain it to me. Explain all of this-" and his right hand released its death-grip on the cane to swing out over the chilled tenseness of the reality they refused to interact with yet "-because I can't put it off any longer."

The conflict inside felt like two gargantuan hands pushing down hard on his shoulders. It was the weight of knowing that what he had been doing all these years - exploring the world, saving dragons, antagonizing trappers - had been right, it had been good. But Hiccup saw his father standing on the southern side of the table and Cor on the northern side, and that empty eastern side should have been his place a long time ago too.

There was no one right place to be, it seemed. Hiccup rubbed at his face with his right palm.

Cass pulled back into the shadows with him, and he watched her arms cross again as she crumbled back into some version of herself he'd yet to see until this moment in the darkness that was only sporadically interrupted by the flicker of candlelight.

"There's not enough time to teach you everything you've missed." Her gaze remained locked on the jarls, but her lips still twitched into a deeper scowl when he winced. "I'll fill in what I can, but-" She wasn't glaring when she finally looked at him. "You need to get in there."

The last vestiges of familiar cowardice seemed to flow out as his Adam's apple bobbed. "Okay. Alright."

That first click of the cane reverberated so loudly that he couldn't freeze or turn back, not even when the jarls' eyes found him, not even when the warriors and guardsmen followed the gazes of their leaders. Hiccup hopped and clicked forward, through the gap in the crowd that formed before him like it never had before, to that empty eastern expanse of time-worn wood at the edge of the table. Hiccup splayed his hand on the map of Berk. His fingers plucked at one of the pins sunk into the parchment and mahogany.

Hiccup didn't say anything. He only listened to the clearing of throats and rustling of armor before Cor finally rumbled, "Look who decided to join us."

Hiccup kept his head low as he surveyed the other pins launched into the map, so he couldn't determine whether Stoick's growl was aimed at him or at Cor.

"Just-" Another sigh, and he marveled that there was any air left in his lungs "-tell me what's going on, and what I have to do."

The rumbling of warriors faded into distant clinks of servants bustling with dishes. Hiccup pulled his head up to face a cohort of staring warriors. Stoick's head tilted at he frowned at his son. "What you have to do?" he repeated, slowly.

His hands flailed until he tucked them across his chest. "What-what do you want me to say?!" he sputtered. "Sorry?!"

Cor growled.

"Fine!" Hiccup tossed his hands up and took a step back. "I'm sorry for all my mistakes, indignities, long-grown wounds of intemperance, whatever-"

"This is serious, son!" Stoick hissed.

Hiccup held his palms open to the ceiling. "I am being serious!" he said, straight-faced despite the crooked words. "I'll fight the war, I'll be the son you always wanted, I'll do all the killing you want! You want me to chop a guy's head off? Done! You want me to make a garment out of his blood? I'll make a whole outfit!"

Something silvery-cold in his chest reached up and grabbed a tight, suffocating hold on the anger burning like a coal above his heart. He wished he could choke on his own tongue, to at least give himself time to hear what he'd just promised. Hiccup's hands slid up his face to rest on his forehead. "I'm sorry," he repeated, quieter. "Please just tell me what's going on, so I can help."

He could hear only the rustle of weapons and armor and the servants in the background biting off their conversations so that the jarls' silence could fill the room. Meanwhile, it took a few tenuous seconds for Hiccup to meet his father's furrowed gaze.

Finally, Stoick leaned back over the map. Hiccup followed his father's thick pointer finger to the tiny peninsula that poked out from the southeastern corner of Berk. A tiny town was sketched there, only a few miniscule squares marking the place named, in rough, slanted handwriting, "LAGHNE".

Hiccup took a guess. "One of the towns we haven't heard from?"

A warrior with long, thin dark braids spilling across her shoulders and skin the color of skotspine trees grunted. Hiccup wracked his brain for the woman's name as she shoved a short ginger warrior out of her way to get to the table. Her voice rasped low as she said, "We normally don't get much communication from Laghne - usually about once in a moon's cycle. With Laghne, though, we haven't heard from them in two."

Hiccup leaned back as his eyebrows knit together. "Nobody checked on them?"

Snorts and eye-rolls aplenty told him that was a stupid question, and his arms crossed back over his chest. The ginger warrior, a plentifully-bearded man just over half Hiccup's height, grunted. "Aye, we sent a squadron to check on them. But tributes arrive late all the time, lad." Hiccup didn't have to look at Cass to know she was bristling at the informal address, but he said nothing as the man explained. "Emrin and his boys had a few stops on their route. Laghne is at least a ten-day ride from here, longer if you have other places to go, a big crew, or foul weather on the mountains."

The others hummed and muttered in agreement. The braided woman pulled a dagger from her belt and began twirling it between her fingers. The candlelight flickering on its blade drew Hiccup's eyes even as her words drew his ears. "And Emrin, Geirs, Alheilde, Mindren, Bol - they never came back."

Hiccup swallowed, watching shoulders drop all around him. "When..." he had to shove volume into his softened voice in order to be heard. "When were they expected back?"

"Week before your accident, lad," the short warrior replied, his milky face flushing red. His eyes squinted tight, but Hiccup still caught the glimmer of tears.

"A whole moon's cycle," Hiccup breathed.

The braided woman - Hrevneir, that was it - Hrevneir flickered the dagger between her fingers even more quickly. "They would have sent a messenger by now if they were held up."

An entire team of warriors, gone. Swallowing took painful effort. Hiccup dragged his eyes back down to the map. "You said more than one town went silent?" he asked Corran.

The man's grey-streaked dark beard bristled as he nodded curtly at the same southeast corner of the map. "Aye. Kalda and Arnlaugs as well. Not as long ago as Laghne. They sent their tributes last moon cycle, but merchants' messengers have reported attacks by mercenaries trying to keep people out of that region."

Hiccup slid his fingers to prod at the pins tabbed into Kalda and Arnlaugs. While both towns weren't more than two days away from Laghne, all solidly on the southern coast, Kalda and Arnlaugs weren't peninsula towns. "All concentrated in one area, but spreading out," he murmured, ignoring his brief triumph of at least understanding one detail.

The lettering blurred beneath his eyes. Hiccup swung forward and planted his palms on the table. An ache began to tighten in the back of his head, and shaking himself only strengthened it. Exacerbating the pain was a nagging - a rumor of a ghost of a memory. Hiccup blinked the fog from his eyes and affixed his gaze on the mountain range stretching into the peninsula where Laghne lay shrouded from them all. A memory of treetops and drizzling rain was his only confirmation that he and Toothless had flown through the fog shrouding Laghne at some point in the past few moon cycles. Though his skin recalled cool taps of rain, the purpose of the visit eluded him.

Hiccup's hands twitched for the small notebook usually strapped to the arm of his flight suit. Yet the gray tunic someone must have slid onto him in the past three weeks had no such attachment. He ignored how the dull ache was spreading from the back of his head, and he mentally retraced his steps, which stumbled briefly over a memory of Astrid twirling in the town square to admire her braid-

Come on, focus, you have to save her.

It began with the crown, not with any kind of exploration or leisure flights. Hiccup had slid out of the fortress into Mulchbucket's with the plan of escaping the rising tensions between the jarls, only to have his evening interrupted by Snotlout sliding onto the bar-stool next to him and brandishing that crown before his eyes.

A sigh of relief rolled from him. Unless the chest at the foot of his bed had been disturbed over the past few weeks in a major deviation from reality, the chest would still house his flight suit and, subsequently, the notebook.

"I may have some information we can use," he said, and the hastily stifled guffaws from the warriors didn't escape his ears. Raising his head, Hiccup watched as only the jarls, Hrevneir, and the short fellow Froki kept straight and serious faces.

"What kind of information?"

Hiccup seized the opportunity. "The kind you can only get by riding on the back of a dragon."

The crowd, as expected, erupted. Hiccup locked eyes with his father and raised his voice. "I've scouted the entire country with Toothless, Dad."

"Toothle- that dragon?"

"Fantastic, just what we need, the heir gone mad!"

"He's betrayed us."

But Hiccup could picture Toothless crouched in a dark cell, pressed against the wall and hissing at the slightest sound. He could see his dragon's ears flat against his head, eyes flickering around frantically, toes curled. A shudder overtook Hiccup. He didn't break eye contact with his father, instead shouting over the din until it sputtered into silence.

"You want to know where I've been instead of here? Fine! I've been flying over this entire archipelago, discovering new species of dragons, fighting dragon trappers, updating our maps, and protecting our entire island."

His mind pulled him toward habitual pacing, but the click of the cane against the table kept him still.

"Protecting?" A high-pitched warrior's voice snarled.

Hiccup's laugh was bitter. "How many dragon raids did you have in a moon cycle four years ago?"

The answer that Hiccup knew and the warriors muttered amongst themselves was "plenty". Although the dragons usually steered clear of the fortress, they wreaked destruction of numerous types across the city. In the life before Toothless, a younger and infinitely more foolish Hiccup weaved through the fire-laced streets with doomed plans to prove his worth. When one doomed plan proved not-so-doomed, and he ended up with a personal moral revolution and a dragon best friend, the pair skirted the night skies and tried to mitigate both sides' damage. Catapults were destroyed, more rambunctious dragons were warned off, and Hiccup finished the nights with singed hair and sometimes an arrow in his arm. In the next day's ruckus of rebuilding a quarter of the city, he hid his injuries and planned his next escapades.

Hiccup raised his eyebrows at Stoick and Cor. "And how many raids do you have now, in your estimation?"

He knew the answer, and he spoke it over the hesitant grumbling of the crowd: "One."

Last Gói, dragon trappers lurking in the southern islands of the archipelago had made themselves such a nuisance that an entire migration of Moldruffles rerouted across Berk's city. They'd been largely intent on moving to their nesting grounds, but a few of the more hot-headed dragons in the crowd had obviously taken offense at the Berkian cannon fodder launched their way. By that point, at least, Hiccup and Toothless could pinpoint plasma blasts to strategically decommission machinery while avoiding human or dragon casualties.

"Do you think the drop in the number of raids was some random accident?" Maybe in a different reality - where Toothless roamed free, Astrid was safe, and he'd never felt useless - he'd tighten his grip on his anger and control it the way he'd learned to do over the past few years. Now, he stood in the middle of warriors with double his years and weight, yelling. Was this loss of control the thing making him dizzy or was it the leg more noticeable in its sudden absence?

"What are you saying?" Stoick rumbled. His face was pinched, but his jaw was slackened - the only sign that he was confused rather than irate.

Hiccup swept his hand across the maps. "I've spent the past few years rerouting and dispersing dragon raids onto uninhabited islands, rotating locations so these dragons don't decimate the local wildlife populations because they were so desperate to feed their queen." He stabbed a finger at the Red Death's old nest, vacant now for over a year. "And that's why they took all those animals, by the way. A Stoker-class dragon, a Red Death with a wingspan as wide as the city, eating the dragons themselves if they didn't bring her offerings."

Murmurs abounded as fists tightened around the hilts of sheathed weapons. Froki growled. "A Red Death?" Berkians were far from experts in dragon classification the way Fishlegs professed to be, but anybody who'd lived through a raid had learned the names and characteristics of the most common or, in this case, most deadly dragons. "We have a Red Death to blame?"

Her scream of death echoed in Hiccup's ears. He winced and scowled at the way it pierced through his memories, through every wispy scent of methane that dragged him right back into that terrible moment, through every insomniac night of convincing himself he did the right thing. He shook off the ache, and his voice crackled as he said, "I took care of her. She's not forcing them into any more raids."

Cor grabbed Hiccup's forearm. "You're certain?"

Her body burned before him, destroyed by her own fire. Safely on Toothless's back, Hiccup and the Red Death found each other's gazes.

Hiccup swallowed and nodded. "Yes."

A dagger slammed down into the middle of the map. Even the other warriors, well-accustomed by now to the jarls' tempers, started at the sudden motion and sound. Hiccup jumped as he followed the thick fingers wrapped around the hilt, up the freckled arms to Stoick's reddened face. "Absolutely not!"

"Dad-"

"You think I'm going to condone this?!" In the echo of Stoick's bellowing Hiccup could hear that the hall had lapsed into true silence as it cowered under the might of a jarl's fury. "This- this riding on dragons? You betray everything we stand for, and you come to me thinking those bloodthirsty monsters will be welcomed? That I'll just forget everything that's happened? You're out of your mind!"

Hiccup's throat seized from panic, but he managed to cry out, "Toothless and I have saved lives!"

"You expect me to believe that!"

"Yes! Because it's true!"

"Listen to yourself! You don't know what you're saying!"

His hands shook. "I do," he croaked. "I know it sounds crazy, Dad, but they're not monsters-"

Stoick thundered, "They've killed hundreds of us!"

Hiccup screamed back, "And we've killed thousands of them!"

Stoick's eyes widened and then narrowed. He started forward, taking a deep breath, but an arm slapped across his chest. Cor held Stoick back with his grip and his ice-cold eyes, warning Stoick to hold on his tongue whatever he'd been about to say.

His swollen chest finally falling, Stoick took a minuscule step back. He said nothing else. Instead, Cor swung his gaze of winter storms to Hiccup. "Leave," he rumbled.

For only the second time in Hiccup's life, the warriors parted in front of him, and the still-soundless hall reverberated only with the thumps and clicks of Hiccup making his slow way out.

Cass held one of the massive doors open for him as he struggled out into the courtyard, into the bitterly chilling rain. Her boots sent water puddles into chaos as she followed behind him. Hiccup didn't look back and kept moving toward the rest of the old stone fortress. There was no point in hurrying. The downpour had already soaked him thoroughly. He felt the rain slowly seep into the bandages around his chest, but somehow that penetrating cold didn't send him into uncontrollable shudders like he absently thought it ought to.

Still following, Cass said nothing.

Hiccup stopped and listened to the clatter of rain dragged down by greedy gravity. Unmoving, he stood there, letting droplets tremble on his bangs and eyelashes.

He peered at Cass even as water flicked into his eyes and made him squint. "You're still mad at me," he said, raising his voice only to be barely heard over the rain. It wasn't an accusation or a question, and Cass responded accordingly by saying nothing. Her face was a mask of controlled blankness.

Hiccup's hands trembled in their grip on the cane. He hoped it was only from the chill.

"That doesn't matter," he continued. "You can be mad all you want. I know what I need to do." And he did. It would probably end with his father disowning him and casting him onto the streets, but all this time Hiccup had been trying to do what was right. He had nothing else left but to continue.

Hiccup scanned the skies for wings he knew he wouldn't see. Then he looked back at Cass. "Go to Mulchbucket's. I need you to find Snotlout, Ruffnut, and Tuffnut, and bring them to me. You know where I'll be."

The rain hushed the world around him. Even the pattering on Cass's helmet and shoulders seemed muted. Eventually, Cass nodded.

Author's Notes:

As you may or may not have noticed, my updating schedule won't be nearly as frequent this time around. There's just more to do, and more to write. In addition, I don't want to publish anything until I really like every part of it. More work but more satisfaction for me, and more waiting but hopefully more fun for you?

Footnotes:
1. I would be dead in the water if not for my youngest brother. He's an art student and a Dungeons & Dragons DM. When I got stuck writing this chapter, I called him, and he proceeded to solve my plot problem in about 15 seconds. There's no way he's reading this, but he deserves some credit.

2. My best friend and beta is also to thank here, because I was about to unknowingly name this fic something with rather risque connotations. She caught it and begged me to change the name. Thanks, Liv!

To see the rest of the footnotes (with links to very useful maps, calendars, and even trees), just go to bannisterroadkill dot tumblr dot com, click "Writing" at the top, click on "The Raveling", and scroll down to look at the footnotes for each chapter.

Oh, and before I go: has anyone recognized the Shakespeare play I've been blending into Hiccup's storyline?