The dungeon is a dank, smelly pit carved out of the foundation of Alvin's compound. Individual cells are simply hollowed out husks within the stone. The walls are slimy with moisture, iron bars block the doorways, and a few half-hearted torches burn along the aisle between cells.
I'm dragged past five cells before the guards reach the one set aside for me. Two of the cells are empty. One holds a gaunt man in filthy clothing huddled on a thin straw pallet. One holds a younger man shackled to the back wall. The cell across from mine holds a young pregnant woman wrapped in a coarse brown blanket. She doesn't look at me.
I wonder which one of them is the spy planted here to gain my trust.
After pulling me into my cell, the guards fasten heavy iron cuffs around my wrists, and take my bow, the sheath of arrows, the dagger in my left boot, and my knife. While one guard pats me down, looking for additional blades, the other yanks on the heavy rusted chains attached to the cuffs at my wrists, testing them for weakness.
The chains loop through iron circles welded into the back wall of the cell and restrict my ability to go more than halfway toward the doorway. I ignore them in favor of scanning the ceiling for any small holes that I could carve through. I can't find any, but decide the smartest act is to act like I'm being watched at all times.
If I'm going to escape, I can't afford a single misstep.
Satisfied I'm weaponless, the guards take my cloak and toss it just out of reach, leaving me to the mercy of the dungeon's chill. They laugh as they slam my cage door shut and leave.
A few strong pulls assure me my chains aren't coming out of the wall without help. Which means I can't reach my cloak. Which limits my options. Fear for my father and the others is a constant hum in the background of my thoughts, but I can't give into it. The only way I can be useful to them now is to keep a clear head and apply logic to my current circumstances.
I have my boots. My belt buckle. My empty knife sheath. Not enough to stage an escape plan. I need my cloak, but I refuse to reach for it. I refuse to even glance at it. If I'm being watched, the fastest way to ensure I never see m cloak again is to look like I want it.
My cell has a thin, water-stained pallet lying on the stone floor, and a half-rotted wooden bucket shoved into the center closest to me. Neither seems particularly useful for an escape effort, but you never know what might come in handy.
The shackles bite into my wrists as I stand and slowly pace the back wall, counting the measurements and feeling for drafts so I can calculate how close I am to the outside wall of the dungeon.
Heavy footsteps sound at the main entrance, and I look up to see two guards, blazing torches in hand, precede Alvin into the miserable space. I move closer to the bucket, putting enough space between me and the door of my cell that he'll have to come all the way inside if he wants to hurt me.
He doesn't come into my cell, though. He stops in front of the cell containing the pregnant woman huddled in a blanket.
"Warm enough, Rachel?" he asks without a hint of concern in his voice.
She doesn't respond.
I keep my expression neutral as a tight band wraps around my chest. If Alvin's cold enough to keep a helpless, innocent woman prisoner, then he's the man that he says he is and more. One thought lingering in my head is more like a question. If he's keeping her here, she must have some form of value. I shudder at the thought of Alvin using her as a blackmail or bribe.
I refuse to consider the alternative.
She doesn't look up at Alvin as she pulls her thin blanket closer to her body, but it doesn't matter. He never expected a response. This show was for me alone. His laugh is an ugly thing filling up the space between us as he crosses the aisle and gestures for the guards to open the door to my cell.
I back up until I have several lengths of loose chain at my disposal.
Alvin steps into my cell. The flickering torchlight illuminates his face, throwing the rest of his body into the shadows.
"You thought you could outsmart me, didn't you?" He flexes his right hand into a fist. The light slides along the ecru curve of his horned shoulder plate and highlighting the metal of his horned helmet. I brace myself and gather up a length of chain as quietly as I can, ignoring how bruised and battered I feel from the sword-fight on the gallows stage.
"You were always sure of yourself. So convinced no one could outwit the great Hiccup." His lip curls as he spits my name at me.
Maybe I shouldn't engage him. Maybe I should keep my silence and let him talk, hoping to pick up nuggets of information along the way. Or maybe pushing him to his limits is the best way to peel back the mask and see what I'm truly dealing with.
"How do you know?" I ask. "You've never bothered to have a proper conversation with me."
His fist plows into my gut, slamming be back against the wall. I double over and take the opportunity to gather more lengths of chain while catching my breath.
"I don't have proper conversations with the son of those who defy me." He kicks my feet out from under me. I hit the floor hard, and nearly lose my grip on the chain I'm holding like a rope.
Pushing myself back to my feet, I say, "My father had the right to defy you."
His fist slams into my shoulder, spinning me to the side. I narrowly keep from hitting the wall with my face.
"I wasn't speaking of your father." His breath is a harsh pant against my ear.
I take a deliberate step away from him. He's playing games with me. He knows I have no idea who my mother was, and he's using it against me. Still, part of me wants to ask, just to finally have that gap in my past fully filled in.
The conversation with my father when I was in bed, her cookbook of special recopies sprawled across my legs, wasn't enough.
I don't usually miss my mother. How can I? She died when I was very young. And whatever memories I do have with her, now that I'm older, they're nothing more than faded memories. And no matter how much I long to remember them, make them solid in my mind, I can't.
And at some moments in the village, like when I see a child running, pulling at their mother's wrist to see the dragons, I miss what we might have had together. I imagine our hair would've been the same shade of brown. Our eyes the same shade of green.
Maybe we would've both loved lemon cake and hated spinach. Or maybe we would've both thought the only truly useful item in any room is something sharp. Pointy things make excellent weapons.
I'll never know, and thinking about it won't help me escape.
"You knew my mother."
He laughs. "You're just like her. Two beings cut from the same cloth."
"And what cloth would that be?"
Alvin's face, bathed in shadow and firelight, is lit with malice. "Unworthy. Disloyal. Without honor."
I straighten and brace my feet. "You wouldn't understand honor if it was branded into your skin."
He lunges for me, but I duck back. Swinging the chains up, I wrap them around his arm. One swift jerk and I fling him onto the filthy floor of the cell. He lands hard, and I drive my knee into his back, but the guards outside the cell are already on me.
They pull me from him, toss me to the ground, and attack. I swing the chains, brutally slashing one guard's face and knocking out another's tooth. One draws his sword, but I duck out of the way. Looping the chains around the sword's hilt as I go, I yank back hard. The sword goes skidding across the cell.
Two more guards arrive, and I'm fighting for my life. Dodging blades, absorbing blows, and doing as much lethal damage as I can with the lengths of the chains in my hands. It's four on one, and I know I can't keep it up much longer. I'm hoping I won't have to.
Alvin rises from the floor and screams at the guards to stop. They back away, bleeding and cursing. I'm bleeding and cursing too, but I hold my head high as he approaches me. I have to make his next actions seem like his idea.
"Go ahead and kill me, if you can." I say, rattling the chains in my hands as if I'm ready to go another round with the guards. "You've given me all the weapon I need."
He spews venom at me. "The second I no longer need you, you're dead." He closes the distance between us, stopping just out of range of the chains. "You may die thinking you've saved everyone, but you, you get to live long enough to know you haven't saved anyone."
Ignoring my anger at the thought of Skullette and my dad attacking the Outcast Island when I specifically told them to flee if I was caught, I focus on getting the second thing I need. I rattle the chains as if I still have the energy to use them.
Alvin gestures to the closest guard. "Get those things off him and remove them from his cell."
I put up a fight, make it look like I mean it, and it takes three of them to get the shackles off me. The instant I'm free, I back into a corner like I know I've been beaten at my own game.
Alvin laughs and waves at his least-injured guards. "Teach him a lesson. Just make sure you leave him alive."
Two guards advance, fists raised. I parry the first punch and absorb the second as it plows into my shoulder, but see stars as one guard's booted foot slams into my rib cage and sends me sprawling. Pain flares to life within me, and it's all I can do to curl up in a ball and endure as the guards use me as their punching bag.
I've lost track of time when Alvin calls them off. I'm bleeding from my nose and mouth, my body feels like I've been run over by a wagon, and a rib on my right side feels like someone is skewering me with a lit torch every time I breathe.
Alvin strides over to me, grabs a handful of my hair, and wrenches my face around to his. "You've lost your little game. And everyone you love will die because of it." He gestures to a guard, and I hear something sizzle and spit in the flames of the nearest torch.
I know that sound. It's the sound I know better than anything. Being surrounded by weapons, an anvil, fire that breathes to life every time I pump the bellow, nothing sounds more familiar. I begin to panic, and Alvin can feel it. I can't crane my head to look because Alvin holds my hair with a vicious grip.
A guard steps closer, a long thin pole in his hands. At the end of the pole, the metal insignia of the Outcasts, glows red hot. I twist away from Alvin, but he settles his knee on my side, turning my aching rib into a breath-stealing howl of agony, and holds my face steady with both his hands.
"I beat you," Alvin says, "and every time I look at you, I'll know it."
The guard presses the blazing-hot metal into the side of my neck, and I scream. When he said "brand me as an Outcast", I didn't know he meant literally.
The smell of scorched skin fills the air, and I retch as brilliant spots dance in front of my eyes. I drag in a deep breath and try to ride out the worst of the agony, but it refuses to abate. Letting go of me, Alvin rises and says to the dungeon guard, "Water only. Don't bother offering this one any food. We won't need to keep him alive long enough to warrant it."
Leaving me huddled on the floor, burned and bleeding, Alvin and his guards leave, slamming the cell bars closed in their wake. I wait until I hear their footsteps fade. Until the door at the entrance closes. Until I've silently recounted everything I know about every dragon in the book. The Scauldron having venom in its front buck teeth. The Whispering Death's rotating teeth can burrow through anything.
When I'm certain I've spent enough time looking defeated and broken that anyone watching me wouldn't question my need for warmth, do I slowly crawl across the floor. Every inch is torture. I clench my teeth and tell myself pain is just a state of mind. I can rise above it. My body doesn't agree with my theory, so I force myself to recite the entire book of dragons - cover to cover – to give myself something productive to focus on.
I'm shaking by the time I reach my destination, but furious triumph warms me from the inside as I lay hands on the one thing I wanted all along.
My cloak.
I claw through the fabric with desperate fingers as I try to locate my prize of enduring the pain. I finally manage to find the pocket I've been searching for, near the small button that connects my hood to my cape. I dig through it hoping, praying I don't find it gone. When my fingers close around the Oleander berry, I breathe a sigh of relief.
I had quickly switched one berry from my pocket on my suit to my cloak. Just in case the guards somehow saw the pocket and needed to check. I assume the other one in the pocket of my Dragon Conqueror suit is squished from the beating.
I clutch it in my right hand, just enough so that I can feel the skin of the berry touch my skin, but not enough to squish it, and wind my left hand protectively around my right, and scoot back into the far corner of the cell. Not even caring about the pain from my rib.
I can't afford to lose this. Not now. I'll treat it like its porcelain.
With shaking hands, I open my fingers slowly and stare at the berry in the torchlight.
Do it. Do it. Do it! I scream to myself.
One gulp, and this whole thing will be over. No more war. No more pain. No more Alvin. And yet I can't bring myself to tip the heel of my hand to my lips and just let the berry slide onto my tongue. Killing me the minute I swallow.
My heart pounds in my sore joints and slams my head from the inside. My hands get worse and nearly drop the berry, but I catch it and clutch it tight to my chest. Suddenly, I begin to cry.
Not from the pain. I know it's not that.
Am I crying because I'm too weak to do it, or because I'm strong enough not to?
Maybe I just don't want to say goodbye. Not like this.
Maybe it's because it don't want to look defeated. If I'm going to do this, it'll be after I kill Alvin. Then I'll swallow the berry before the Outcasts can tackle and kill me.
I pull my cloak over my shivering, bloody body, and pull the hood over my head - opening first - so it blocks out everything I see. The cloak naturally drapes around my body, doing its best to shade me from the cold.
Wrapped in darkness, I remember that feeling of protection I feel from Toothless whenever his wings wrap around us both. Securing us. Protecting us. I nestle down deeper, uncomfortable and cold. Even in the darkness of the hood covering the front of my face, I can still see the outline of the berry in my hands.
I'm breathing heavily from my inner conflict on whether or not to swallow. Tears scald my cheeks with warmth. I don't know what to do.
I want to die, but I want to say goodbye.
I want to kill Alvin, but suicide is so much easier.
And faster.
And possible.
Images of everyone walking away from me as the Outcast roped me and pulled me away, flash through my mind, along with the gory images of Hunter dying in my arms. Mulch, icy cold with blood adorning his lips.
I cry some more.
Skullette, weeping in the Dragon Academy with Toothless and Astrid, and everyone else.
I cry some more.
Dad sitting in my room, holding my mother's cookbook along with my green tunic.
Today he might lose his son too.
Gobber, slamming his hammer down on the anvil as he tries to deal with his virtual loss.
I cry some more.
My fingers open once again to reveal the berry, still perfectly preserved. Sobs choke and claw at my throat. Finally, I clutch it tight in my fingers.
Then I drop it to the moisten floor of my cell, and slam the heel of my boot on it, hearing the fruit break under my foot with a distinguishing squish.
And I cry some more.