XLI.

At the edge of the Wanderers' cluster of fires stood an old stringy woman who looked more like a parched, withered beanstalk vine than a human being, although the resilience in her fiery black eyes could not have been considered "withered" at all. Her hunched back arched like an angry cat's, and the white fur on her thick hood very well could have been bristling. Even her tiny little jaw, which might have been dainty on any other human being, clenched with a mighty, resolute force that would have ground granite slabs into sand particles. Long before Eggingarde led Hiccup right up to this snarling woman for introductions, the young Berkian could easily determine this dramatic, ancient presence must be the Northern Wanderer Tribe's Elder. None but leaders could emanate such demanding presence. Her stooped posture alone carried enough pride to remind Hiccup of Stoick.

He quickly smothered the pang of grief that punched his heart and stepped up to meet the Elder.

"Grandma," Eggingarde hailed from beside Hiccup. "Do you –"

The young woman's voice was cut off by a horrible creak. It took Hiccup a moment to realize that that forbidding noise was in fact the ancient woman's voice. "Who is this?" the Elder squawked in much the same manner a hoarse bird might speak.

For that matter, her stare was rather hawk-like, too

And Hiccup had thought Eggingarde's gaze was perturbing.

"I'm Hiccup, from the Hairy Hooligan Tribe," he introduced himself succinctly. He intentionally omitted his full name and title. I'm not even sure what my title is now, anyway. I suppose I would be chief, but I've been gone along enough someone might have filled in for my absence. None of those options were enjoyable thoughts. Hurriedly, Hiccup continued, "I'm here because Eggingarde and…" he paused to recall the other woman's name, and thankfully successfully recalled the name, "…Dagmar rescued me from the snowstorm. I would, ah, be very thankful if I could stay with you until the snow passes over?"

The old woman's eyes narrowed as though she detected the hidden information behind his name, or elsewise knew something about him of which even he was not aware. "Eggingarde," she barked – at least as much as she could with that gravelly old voice – "leave us."

"Yes, Grandma," Eggingarde acquiesced, and withdrew. "I should probably see what Bearcub is up to anyway. That stupid kid has probably gone off and…" her mutters faded into the background until Hiccup no more could hear her. The Elder of the Wanderer Tribe stalled even after Eggingarde's voice had long disappeared; but then again, if her ears were anything as sharp as her hard, drilling eyes, she very well might have boasted more astute hearing than Hiccup, despite her age.

She drummed a desaturated, wrinkled hand against her thigh. "So you're a Viking," she remarked at last. "A little far from your home, aren't you?" Hiccup opened his mouth to explicate, yet she continued speaking past her question, observing, "And you're not just any Viking, either. You wouldn't happen to be named Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, would you?"

Hiccup started.

With an ominous sideways squint, she intoned, "Yes, I thought so. Viking royalty. How… interesting."

"How do you –"

"How do I know who you are?" She wheezed out a mirthless laugh. It bent her already-bent back into a grotesque, spine-contorted position, and the rasps in her lungs sounded almost as though she were about to die from choking. "Berk might not be the most heavily populated chunk of rock, but we tribe leaders in the Barbaric Archipelago all tend to know each other. At the very least, we know a bit about each other. Our Northern tribes may be forgotten by most peoples, but we don't forget you, so I know the name of the Viking chiefs just as well as you do. Mogadon the Meathead. Ug the Uglithug. Norbert the Hysteric. Oswald the Agreeable, Chief of the Berserkers."

"Actually, Oswald has –"

"Bertha, Chief of the Bog-Burglar Tribe. And –" she halted her list for just an instant "– Stoick the Vast, Chief of the Hairy Hooligans. Your father?"

"Yes," said Hiccup uncomfortably. Well, more uncomfortably than any of his prior contributions to this conversation had been; his entire meeting with this astute Wanderer Elder had been more than incredibly disturbing, after all. The mention of his late parent simply augmented the atmosphere.

"So how does the chief's son make his way so far north that he runs into us?"

"I was taken against my will by the dragon rider to her mountain. I escaped, grabbed one of her dragons –" he gestured back with both hands toward where the Sabre Tooth Driver Dragon now napped "– and have been trying to travel back to Berk as quickly as possible before the dragon rider might harm my village."

"Interesting," the Elder remarked again. She rather appeared to enjoy using that word. She stared at Hiccup closely, weighing his sentences and measuring their veracity. "So you say the dragon rider is your enemy, too?"

Hiccup hardly desired to answer that question. To label his mother an enemy… so easily, so very easily, situations might have turned differently. To have avoided the Bewilderbeast storming upon the Berk fleet, prevent Toothless from opening his jaws for a killing plasma blast, to never have experienced the death of his father. But that last event guaranteed that Hiccup and his mother, however he wished it, could never be allies. Blood splattered on an icy blue surface. "She's a threat, to say the least," he responded to the Elder while awkwardly scratching his hair behind his ear. Then he considered the last sentence the Northern Wanderer had spoken. "Wait… are you implying she's an enemy of yours?"

The Elder gestured to the walls of the cave and panned her hand from campfire to campfire, gesture extending over every bear-hooded head and upright-propped skis. "These are my people. We are small and few. We are even smaller and fewer since that foul rider took occupation of the Bewilderbeast's mountain. Her dragons have killed many of us; it is a hazard to step out into the snow even when the sky is clear. We may hunt the bears of this land, but the dragon rider hunts us. There is no peace, no peace at all, so long as that Viking looms over us from the mountain.

"And yet…" the Elder's crackling voice trailed off. "I can't say I've ever seen another Viking ride a dragon apart from that rider up north," she remarked suspiciously. "And you are a bit off-course if you want to be headed straight for Berk. How do we know you're not in league with her?"

I believe I already told you, Hiccup thought irritably, though bit back his tongue before he could snap out such an irreverent comment aloud. Instead, he turned straight to explicative narrating. "The dragon rider attacked a fleet of ships from Berk. She wants to kill anyone who's a threat to her dragons."

"A threat to dragons? That doesn't seem to include you," the Elder pointed out, peering behind Hiccup toward where the Saber Tooth Driver Dragon lay. It appeared to be just another ice mound from here, but apparently she had detected its presence nevertheless. Of course. Hiccup had mentioned the white dragon in a previous comment of his, and Eggingarde besides had remarked the Elder someone gleaned information about anything occurring around her.

"It does include me," Hiccup insisted. It'd be nice if I actually met someone once who was friendly and trusting. This is exactly like the argument I just had with Eggingarde and Dagmar. "She believes only she understands them and that she must fight for dragons so they can fly free. She doesn't consider our dragons free, so…"

Derisively, the Elder stated, "You are a Viking. I think you are saying this so that we will let you go on your little journey, and you will fly back to freedom on your island and forget about us and the dangers the dragon rider presents to other tribes. Or you might even betray us." She shook her head. "No. One thing I have learned about Vikings is that they should never be trusted."

Gesturing aggravatedly, Hiccup responded, "She's killing my people! If there is any reason to trust me, it would be for a reason like that!"

This is getting to be incredibly unreasonable.

Unyielding response. Cold voice scratching against his ears. "Your people have killed my people for as long as my people can remember. They have robbed us, and lied to us, and cheated us, and sold us into slavery." Her gnarly, knobby hands reached up to pull off her hood. Slowly the white bear hairs parted and uncovered her forehead, where there at the edge of her hair line, on the upper right side of her temple, was a bluish-blackish tattoo. The design consisted of a narrow-eyed dragon shaped in an "S", hissing and puffing out a small stream of fire. The mark of a slave. "All of history is against you, Viking."

"I am very sorry," Hiccup said, much in part because he did not know what else to tell her.

"So how can I trust you when hundreds of years tell me not to? I cannot trust a Viking. I especially cannot trust a Viking who comes here with a dragon as a companion. I am trying to protect my people, and if there is any chance of a threat –" her eyes darkened "– then I will make sure that the threat is… eradicated."

A chill swept over Hiccup despite his proximity to the fire.

"If you stay in these caves, one man and one dragon, you are not much of a threat to us. We can handle you. But what happens when the storm blows over and you leave? Where will you go? What will you do then? What allies will you speak to and turn against us? It might be best if I don't let you leave these caves."

And why did Eggingarde tell me I had to speak to the Elder? Hiccup fretted, wishing he had never stepped toward this strong-willed wrinkly woman. I came here to stay the night, not live here my entire life!

"You can trust me because we have a common enemy," Hiccup claimed, and before he could conceive the thoughts on his tongue, spoke out, "She killed my father."

Flashback image, blood on gritty blue ice.

The Elder expressed no remorse. Nor did any sense of sympathy touch her eyes. Rather, a rather hungry glint suddenly lit her squinty eyes, converting her from human to predatory raptor. "So you're the chief, then?"

"That is, well, that is me." Hiccup guessed.

Calculatingly, the Elder rasped, "Suppose I believe your good intentions. What then? If I believe you and let you return to your warm island, what will that do? Even if you somehow manage to chase the dragon rider away from your people, she will return to her mountain and continue to plague us."

"If you let me go," Hiccup stated, realizing more and more there were a question of that happening, "then I will find a way to stop the dragon rider. Completely. Not just drive her away from Berk, but prevent her from harming anyone."

"How can you do that? Even if you are a chief, you are just one man."

"I will find a way," and suddenly he recognized he absolutely meant that. "I'm pretty sure I will, anyway. I've done this sort of thing before." His memories returned to the battle with the Red Death five years before in which he had downed an enormous dragon which should have destroyed an entire armada of Vikings, not been destroyed by one boy and a crippled young Night Fury. As hopeless as the current situation might have appeared to his mind's eye now, Hiccup very well could possess the means to halt Valka and the Bewilderbeast, too. "I give you my promise," he declared.

And yet the Elder returned, "A Viking's promise is worth nothing."

"What would you have me do to guarantee my word? I need to leave here as soon as the storm blows over! I need to stop the dragon rider!"

The wizened old woman pursed her wormy lips and stared deep into the nearest fire, contemplatively grinding her teeth together with such a horrid scraping noise it made her scratchy-throated rasp sound musical in comparison. Her hands fidgeted by the fire. At one point she stooped her already-stooped body to pull out something much akin to a branding iron, and stared at its end for a long while before replacing it back beside the flames. Hiccup shifted, feeling increasingly nervous, and though he had nearly frozen to death two hours back, now his body crept with sweat.

"Very well, then," she decided. "Viking chief, we have a deal."

Relief.

"But it will come at a price." She pulled up the branding iron again, and at this point, Hiccup could see smudges of blue outlining the pattern of an "S". "In return I will give you the Slavemark. The ink comes from a dragon's venom. When used in conjunction with heat, it makes a permanent mark against the skin. The Slavemark is easy to give, but impossible to remove."

Relief exploded into shock. You have to be kidding me!

"You will not be able to forget us then. Swear by this Mark that you will help us escape the dragon rider's grasp, or I will not let you go."

Hiccup's first instinct would have been to shriek an outright "No!" and lash out a subsequent biting comment against her, yet his mind drifted back to Berk's predicament. Hiccup absolutely did need to return to Berk instantly, and it would be unlikely for him to escape from the Wanderers on his own. My father would have stopped at nothing to defend Berk. So I can't stop either. Eyebrows furrowed over determined irises. If this is the only way to return home, and if this is the way to gain allies… Fists clenched to sides.

I'm going back.

He steeled himself for the branding iron on his forehead and opened his mouth to respond.

I'm going back to Berk.