Part Two
Dagur doesn't think that there's anything really all that great about Berk, except that he's not supposed to be here. If he didn't have to be here, really really have to – because honestly, did they expect him to turn around and run home instead of chasing after the most glorious creature he's ever seen? – he wouldn't be.
And there's the twitch in Astrid's eye with every step he takes across her precious little island. That's probably the best thing about it.
She's really mad, under all those nets holding her and her silly pet dragon tight; it's perfect. Serves her right for being so convinced that she's better than him, like she could make an army flinch in their stupid stinking boots just by laughing at them. Or at the sky. The sky was pretty funny that one time.
But the even greater thing about Berk, the absolutely best thing, just has to be the Night Fury somewhere on it, and the savage-eyed dragon rider who is clearly a man after Dagur's own heart at last. Someone who truly understands the ferocious nature of dragons and Berserkers alike, who not only understands it but embraces it.
They must be so bored, working for this milksop lot. Dagur can't wait to find that man and his beast and set them free to fight.
He's got some ideas.
All right, he's a tiny bit mad about the trick with the Skrill. How had the rider done it? The Skrill belongedto Dagur: that was obvious. It was his tribe's symbol, his dream! And yet somehow the Fury's rider had stolen its proud and vicious heart in no time at all and turned it on its rightful master.
Dagur still gets chills thinking about it, remembering the Night Fury prowling through the clutter of his useless Berserkers who still think they can call themselves warriors. Every step had been as precise and graceful as a perfect sword-blow, as tidy as the single moment between strike and screaming. He'd reached out for it, thinking only oh, mine, mine, I want that!
And then the flash of blade and fangs in seamless unison, the death-black dragon turning on him in glorious defiance and the man on the dragon's back who Dagur hadn't even noticed, who had stayed hidden and plotted it all, snarling at him as fierce as the Fury itself –
Chills.
And Dagur had stared, terror and wonder and rage and disbelief warring within him, in the moments before they had flown away.
He'd stomped frantically on the dazed, ringing feeling dancing through his skull like some of his warriors when they've broken into the spoils of a raiding party – an image Dagur has yet to unsee, try as he might. He'd been hit worse. All hells, he'd hit himself worse by accident. He's the best at everything, of course, but every so often he likes to visit everyone else's level and practice a bit, somewhere no one can see him, or against someone he can threaten into silence later.
He'd gone looking for the Skrill he'd coveted all his life – and found it, too! – and instead here at last was someone who really understood.
Someone who finally had something to teach him about being terrifying.
And maybe the Skrill had gotten away, and blasted his warriors right out of what few wits they'd had in the first place. And maybe the Night Fury had looked at him as if he was less important than the iceberg beneath its claws. And maybe its rider hadn't even given him a second glance, only clicked a wordless command to his dragon from beneath a glossy black helm of dragon-scales and ridden right past Dagur like the untouchable warlord the Berserker chieftain only dreams of being.
But all in all, a mostly good day.
Dagur needs to find that dragon rider and corner him and demand to know how he does that, and where he got the Night Fury, and if there happen to be more, and if not what he'll take in trade for his beast.
And then, once Dagur's weighed him down with enough gold to outshine the Fury's fire, Dagur is going to have a nice long talk with him about what happens to arrogant dragon trainers who get in his way and dare to draw steel against him and think they can look down on him like that. He might demand the Night Fury just as a well-deserved apology.
Once he gets that Night Fury – one way or another – Dagur will be the one with dragon fangs and a knife blade at the man's throat, and they'll have a very interesting chat about who's in charge around here. He'll see reason. Dagur's sure of it.
He'll see something, anyway. It'll work out.
And, well, he knows where to find dragon riders, doesn't he?
The whole way here Dagur had talked of nothing else, the Fury and the rider, the Fury and the rider, jumping from excitement to rage in frantic circles until his soldiers were flinching at every breath he drew in case this particular eruption ended with one of them flailing in the ocean rather than treated to another description of how fantastic the Night Fury had been.
Keeps them sharp.
He hadn't been quite sure how they were going to find the Night Fury and its ferocious master, how he could lure out Berk's secret spies who'd followed him to what he'd thought would be his greatest triumph – see! see! didn't he know they were being spied on? – but they did still have all that dragon-capturing equipment going unused…
Astrid thinks she's so clever, flitting around in the sky like she thinks she's a bird. But who walked right into his trap? Who's laughing now, Astrid?
Bafflingly, the answer is Astrid.
"What's so funny?" he demands, squinting at the little blond minx as she drops the handfuls of nets she'd been trying to strangle and reels back against her dopey Nadder, laughing fit to burst. "I beat you, can't you see? I won! You're my prisoners now, you and your pet dragon and those creepy twins, and you have to do what I say, and I say you have to bring me the Night Fury and its rider so I can tell them how awesome they are, or else!"
Astrid waves a hand at him through the nets as if that will chase him away, as if he's not even worth swatting. No one takes him seriously anymore, and he grits his teeth with frustration as she laughs. "You think –" she says, between giggles. "You think – I mean, if you can call that thinking – that –" And she's off again, howling.
Dagur can feel his Berserkers staring at him, and he glares back. "She's cracked!" he announces. "Lost her mind under the strain. Poor little girl."
"Dagur," Astrid wheezes, irritation fighting with amusement on her face, lips pulling back in a grimace, "drop dead."
"Not until you get me that dragon rider," he shoots back.
Her dragon fidgets nervously under the ropes, and pushes at her like a baby running after its mother, and she pets it. "Oh man," she chuckles. "Oh, man, that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard you say. Ever. I mean, that's up there with thinking you could fool me into jumping into Breakneck Bog by telling me that swamp muck would make my hair shiny and then someone might think that I was a halfway pretty girl rather than a miniature troll. But this? This beats everything. Now why don't you paddle back out to your ship and go home before I get to watch Stoick drop you in the well."
"Huh?" Dagur says intelligently.
"You'll see," she says, grinning. "I tell you what. Why don't you and your lackeys here surrender like good little boys. Rather than set you on fire again, we'll all go up to the village, and you can tell Stoick exactly what happened when you got on the bad side of that Night Fury. You, uh, can swim, can't you? People drink out of that well. Having you rotting in it isn't going to improve the taste any."
Dagur doesn't quite believe in that grin. There seem to be a lot of teeth in it. "Hah! As if! You go back to your stinking little village, and you find that dragon rider and tell him I'm here, and I'll stay here with your precious pet dragon just to be sure you do what you're told."
The grin turns a snarl. He saw that coming. "Not a chance." She folds her arms stubbornly and leans against the dragon, nets draping around her. "Or maybe I'll just stay right here. Anyone who gets anywhere near Stormfly is going to end up with a face full of spikes, and I bet you get bored before I do."
Actually, Dagur would quite like to leave her there, because he's pretty sure this whole area is going to be underwater when the tide comes in, or at least very damp. He seriously considers it, gnawing at one of his knuckles, and muttering, "Hmmm…"
Her glare could melt through ice, fixed on him and unmoving, not looking around.
It's a little unnerving. Dagur glances behind himself just to be sure that the Night Fury isn't sneaking up on him.
Which would be awesome. It's probably dead silent when it moves, like a ghost, appearing from shadows and vanishing into them like fog, ready to strike at its master's command.
Such a waste that they're working for Astrid.
"Hey, aren't there more of you?" Dagur realizes, scratching at his head. He'd gotten hauled off to Berk plenty of times as a kid. Stupid sappy Oswald was always running off to ask Stoick about one thing or another. He's long since taken stock of everyone who was worth noticing – not many – and a few people who just weren't.
Right up until one of his spies – look, he'd needed to know what sort of fight his Skrill was going to be facing – had reported that some of those useless wet kids were jaunting around on dragons just like Astrid. And then he'd started paying attention.
"That jabbering fat kid, and what's-his-name, Snotthing?" Dagur glares back at her. "You're stalling!"
Snapping his fingers at the nearest warrior, Dagur commands, "Pick up the net! Get them under cover with the Zippleback! Careful now! Don't let her go! Or that Nadder, either!" To the accompaniment of all these entirely necessary commands – everyone is just so damned stupid, Dagur has to do all the thinking around here – and with the help of a couple of spears, the Berserkers half-drag, half-prod their captives into the shelter of the rocks and the shade of the blind they'd built this morning while Dagur crouched in wait and occasionally giggled to himself, waiting for some dragon rider or another to fall into his trap.
He'd been hoping for the Night Fury, but Astrid is a much better catch, now that he thinks about it. She can go bring the Fury and its rider to him, all nice and mannerly, and he won't have to threaten them all that much.
Within the blind, two warriors hold swords to the necks of the trussed-up Zippleback, and its riders immediately start shrieking at the sight of him. Or they would, if Dagur hadn't ordered them tied up and gagged for entirely their own good.
The crazy twins give Dagur the creeps, just a bit. One of them is probably a girl, but Dagur has never been able to figure out which one is which. They make him feel like he's drunk: seeing double, and nothing at all makes sense. One of these days he's going to knock them both over the head and toss them to big sharks, just to shut them up.
He should have a pet shark. He'd keep it in the harbor. At least until he tracks down the Skrill again.
Something to think about.
"Not okay, Dagur," Astrid growls at him. "Not that I don't sympathize, but untie them right now, or I don't tell you anything."
"Oh really? So if I do untie them, you will start talking?"
She rolls her eyes. "Try it and see."
Dagur considers the possibilities and decides that he can always order the twins shut up again later. "No screaming, or my men start cutting off heads," he orders the interchangeable twins, who make terrible faces at him even as he gives the order to let them go.
"Finally!" one of them says the moment he or she is loose. "What's the joke, Astrid? I wanna know the joke!"
"Yeah!" the other one pitches in. "Tell it tell it tell it now pleeeeease!"
Dagur would quite like to know what the joke is, too. He hasn't said anything funny that he knows about. Astrid just started laughing out of nowhere like…well, him. But he can't say that, so instead he says, "Well?" and waves at her as if presenting her for a performance of an Interesting Dance Involving Being Covered in Nets, which is probably a thing and not something he just made up out of his own head right now.
She snorts, probably at the gesture. "This idiot," she says, jabbing a thumb at him dismissively, "ran into Hiccup and Toothless. And they set him on fire some. And now he thinks they're all going to be wonderful friends."
The twins look at him and blink. They look at Astrid and blink some more. They look at each other and blink again. They look back at him and will they just stop blinking already?
And then they dissolve into laughter too, which involves much flailing around on the ground and slapping each other and choking on the muddy sand this stirs up as they try to laugh and inhale sand at the same time.
Really, why is this so funny? Dagur wonders, and then says in a way that is absolutely not a scream of frustration.
"And they're not here anyway," Astrid says in tones of profound boredom. "I have no idea where they are, so I couldn't get them for you if I wanted to, which I don't. So go jump off a sea stack, Dagur."
Dagur doesn't believe that for a minute. Who would be stupid enough to let a Night Fury just go? And Astrid is annoying, but she's not stupid, and not that deep down she's mean, almost as mean as he is, and she's got to be lying to him.
"They've got names?" he says instead, cunningly, trying to trick her into talking and revealing where they really are. "Code names, right? So no one knows what they are!"
"That'd be cool," the twin on the right says. They might have switched places while they were rolling around on the ground, but since Dagur generally refers to the twins as "You" never mind which one he's aiming at, he doesn't really care. "We should have code names! And special helmets! I could be The -"
"No," Astrid says immediately.
"And they couldn't say them anyway, stupid," the twin on the left says, hitting its sibling over the head with a dull clonk. "Hiccup doesn't talk," Left Twin explains helpfully in Dagur's general direction.
"That's the rider?" Dagur asks just to keep Left Twin talking. It's got the be the rider, right? Dragons don't talk anyway. Unless he missed something.
Like the joke.
"Yeah," Left Twin confirms.
"Because Hiccup's a dragon," Right Twin immediately contradicts.
Dagur is entirely at sea. He must look it, because Left Twin picks up the nonsense with, "He is! It's so cool! He's got claws and he flies but he can't breathe fire even though Snotlout said he could."
"He lied," says Right Twin solemnly, and they both sigh.
"Snotlout's perfidy knows no ends," Right Twin goes on.
"But you're mean to dragons, so he's not going to like you at all," Left Twin complains to Dagur.
"Yeah! Your nasty people with swords who won't let me borrow one for just a second –"
"Maybe two," Left Twin contributes.
"Or five. One of those numberish sort of numbers anyway – keep poking Barf and Belch. You're gonna make them sneeze!" warns Right Twin.
The aforementioned Berserkers with swords look at Dagur nervously, and he glares at them to keep those swords right where they are.
"Did Toothless really set you on fire?" Left Twin giggles. "That sounds fun."
"Are those even words?" Dagur demands of them incredulously. "I don't think those are even words. Uh, what are they talking about?"
Astrid leans against her net-covered Nadder's flank and smirks at him. "Oh no. You got them started. You get to sort them out."
The fastest way to do that is probably shouting. Dagur forgets that they're hiding from the other dragon riders out there and shouts, "Shut up! Make sense!"
The twins look at Astrid like this is a new idea and they're waiting for her to explain it to them, probably in very small words and maybe with hand puppets. "Are they a secret?" Right Twin asks.
She rolls her eyes. "Well, not anymore."
"Okay. 'Cause we wouldn't want to tell any secrets." Right Twin appears to be serious. Dagur experiences the very understandable urge to beat someone's head in with an axe handle. He's not sure whose.
It only gets worse from there.
"You're making this up," Dagur decides somewhat later. He still thinks that Hiccup and Toothless have to be code names, because no one in their even slightly right mind would name a Night Fury Toothless. It nearly bit his hand off. And there is absolutely no way that dragons could have raised a stolen baby to grow up into one of them, because that would mean that the world was way too weird even for him.
Any dragon that stole a baby would have just eaten it, which sounds like a perfectly reasonable reaction. It's a miracle babies survive to learn to shut up at all. And dragons are vicious.
There's no way that the Night Fury's rider can talk to it in its own language, or understand it when it talks back. Why would dragons have a language? Dragons aren't clever like people – even very stupid people usually understand words, and dragons don't.
And even if – if – any of that was true, Dagur doesn't believe for an instant that the creature they're describing would be smart enough to sneak around and ruin a plan as clever as his.
"They made up the part about the glow-in-the-dark eyes," Astrid puts in idly from where she's been keeping score, thumbs up and thumbs down, throughout their rambling story. Most of the time her thumb has stayed up. She'd better not think that Dagur has been so distracted he hasn't noticed her trying to work her way free of the nets. "And about that Toothless eats people. At least, I'm pretty sure he doesn't. But they're right about one thing."
"Lots of things!" objects Right Twin, who has become Left Twin over the course of a weird shuffling reenactment of, apparently, Night Fury and wild rider fighting raiding dragons over Berk.
"Some things," Astrid concedes. "Most of all that Hiccup and Toothless are wild creatures, and they go where they want and they do things for their own reasons. Gods only know what, most of the time. And they don't like Vikings much. And you probably scare the life out of them. So go chase them across the ocean if you want to, Dagur. Have fun. But don't hold your breath. Actually, do hold your breath. Start now."
Dagur stares at her while he rearranges that in his head into something that isn't absolute nonsense. Secret secret spies, then. Someone who knows so much about dragons that he can live among them, that he can survive in their midst and make them do what he says!
So that's how the plodding dull Berkians are doing something as crazy as training dragons!
That's even more awesome. Who do Astrid and the twins think they're trying to fool?
Now he really must have them.
"You," he declares, glaring, "are lying to me. Do you really think that a story like that is going to make me let you go? None of you are going anywhere until you get me that Night Fury and its rider!"
Astrid glares back. "Idiot! Think beyond your own skull for once! If we were making up a story, don't you think we'd make up something –"
"Charge!" a voice from outside the blind yells, and all of a sudden the biggest Nightmare Dagur has ever seen quite this close is trying to claw its way in among the rocks and a Gronkle with a yelling man on its back is snapping up the debris that explodes away from the ravening flaming maw. Stones ping off helmets and thunk into leather armor as the buzzing dragon spits out melting pebbles like a hovering oversized slingshot.
Burning branches rain down all around them as Dagur snatches up his sword with an oath that by all rights should make the flames burn blue. It doesn't. There's no justice. "Attack!" he screams at his men, who are trying to scatter in the close quarters and not getting very far. "Dragons! Get them!"
"Move!" he hears Astrid shout, amid the chaos, and Dagur realizes that he'd forgotten to post sentries. He shouldn't have needed to! Can't his useless excuses for minions even build a decent hunting blind?
Dagur yells, "Don't let them get away!" and grabs one of the hooked chains they'd brought to capture the Skrill. His first cast misses the Gronkle, and nearly brains a running Berserker, assuming the man actually has brains, but that Nightmare is too big of a target to miss. He'd just die if he missed a target like that at this range.
Probably of a bad case of Monstrous Nightmare.
The hidden encampment explodes into chaos, loud and exciting and dangerous. Dagur's kind of world! Especially because the dragon riders are outnumbered, and trying to fight in an enclosed space, and Dagur really did insist on bringing all the dragon-capturing equipment his men could find, buy, borrow, or steal, and then drilling them on it all extensively, for his quest to find and bring home his Skrill.
Which he still wants. But he doesn't have any idea where to pick up its trail.
And Dagur is not going home empty-handed. Not after bragging for months to everyone in his tribe that he, at last, was going to outdo all their stories and harness the mythical Skrill.
See, what the Berserkers don't realize is that there are more of them then there are of him. As long as they're scared of him, he gets to stay in charge. But he dreads the day they figure out that they could get rid of him, if enough of them only dared.
Dagur can't let that happen. He can't. He can't. He's wanted to be the chief all his life, to be a conqueror, a hero, a slayer of monsters, the sort of warrior who has stories told about him. Everyone dies in the end, even gods die, but Dagur is going to be immortal, because they're never going to stop telling stories about him, even if those stories are whispers around campfires.
Unless, one day, he can't live up to all his tough talk and fast fists, and they turn on him.
He needs that Night Fury, and he needs to know the dark magic that commands it, that commands all dragons – he will have that rider, too, wild creature or warlord or sorcerer or whatever he is, in chains if that's what he's forced to do!
The twins had said that dragon and rider loved each other, as if beasts could understand love, as if love ever counted for anything.
Well, then let Dagur only put a knife to one of them, and surely the other one will come to heel, meek as milk – yes, and fierce as lightning, if he commands them to be!
He'll persuade the man, if man he be, by flattery or force, whichever works. And the beast will learn to obey.
Even men learn to obey, if they're shouted at enough, and Dagur shouts orders and insults and screams in excitement as one chain after another lashes around the Nightmare's horns and turns its jaws away, and he shouts a handful of men into jumping onto its shoulders and grabbing its rider, and he raps the hilt of his sword against one of the Zippleback's skulls so that it's turning in circles and blundering into Berkians and Berserkers alike as half of it reels.
When all the fires are finally put out – stupid branches, who put those up there? – and no one is running around very much anymore, their hiding place has been totally destroyed, and Dagur is up at least two nasty rope burns and a handful of crushed fingers. If he ever finds out who that oaf was, there will be screaming.
But he now has four mulish-looking dragons and five bickering dragon-riders.
"Nice one, guys," Astrid says in tones of deep disgust.
"Found you!" says Snotlout gleefully, waving a handful of flags despite the dragon-proof chain wrapped around his legs. "Haha! We win!" The twins immediately cry foul, and they all set to squabbling. It's as if there isn't a small army of thugs standing around on the newly cleared shore, looming over them and scowling over their own wounds from where dragon wings and Viking fists had struck before their escape somehow fell apart.
Astrid really can't work out whether she wants to laugh or sigh or scream in frustration. It's the teamwork that makes them worth anything, as a force to be reckoned with. Until they get the teamwork down, it's all luck, and things like this happen.
If Fishlegs and Snotlout's attempted rescue hadn't been such a disaster, it would almost have been a relief. Some things are as sure as the tide and the moon, like the silly argument that breaks out around her. At least it drowns out the memories of Dagur's covetous, stupidly cunning expression as the twins babbled all over the place about Hiccup and Toothless. She worries for her strange friends so, having seen that look on his face.
Dagur would have been absolutely the last person she would have told about the Night Fury and the feral, and all the while she'd rolled her eyes and played at calm, she'd seethed with worry for them. She knows they can look after themselves, but no one deservesto be subjected to Dagur and his crazy-weirdness – and his persistence.
He will hunt them. And there's no way that Hiccup will understand what Dagur wants of him; Astrid isn't even sure what Dagur wants of him! So when they frustrate him, and when Hiccup and Toothless defy him, Dagur will not be kind.
At least now she has an immediate problem to solve. She can work out how to get her people away from Dagur, rather than itching at the strangely exposed feeling of Ruffnut and Tuffnut talking so freely about the Wildfire and his Night Fury twin. She's in that story! That's her story to tell, and to choose who to tell it to, not theirs.
At least Ruffnut and Tuffnut don't seem to understand the heart of it – oddly enough, as the twins are the closest thing Berk has to what Night Fury and Wildfire seem to be. It's not that the dragon-pair are closer than brothers and the best of friends, Astrid knows, but that they need each other. She thinks of them as grown together like trees, twined and tangled, the galls of old wounds healed into each other, sharing sap and breath and sunlight.
Gods, she hopes to never again see anything as heart-wrenching as Hiccup trying to go on living without Toothless there beside him.
Cruel people would say – Astrid herself would have said, once – that he's a ruin of a person anyway, all the cleverness in him gone untaught. Left to rot and to spoil, like an untended garden.
But it's not at all true, as long as he and Toothless are together. As long as he's all there, something sly in her says, and for a moment she knows it to be as true as blood and bone, and then forgets. Hiccup is strong-willed and wary and alert, clever and a little bit funny when she understands his jokes, and he's her friend. And if that's the ruin, then by gods she wishes she'd met the man.
But alone… For the first time she'd really understood the waste of him.
It makes her almost ill, to have Dagur put his hands near something as close to her heart as that. As Dagur had stared at the storytelling twins with his mouth half-open and mockery just waiting to be spoken twisting his lips, Astrid had fought back a shudder like she'd caught him peeking at her while she was brushing her hair.
She'd considered making the twins shut up, but she's not sure they're capable. And anyway, that would have just made things worse. If Dagur thinks someone's keeping a secret from him, he'll go after it like Fearsome after fish.
Maybe she should have lied to him, she second-guesses herself. She could have told Dagur that they were dark gods conjured up from, oh, who knows, a haunted bottomless well or something. That the Night Fury and the Wildfire were ghosts that hunted Vikings on moonless nights. Or that Hiccup was a Lycanwing, and that he'd bite – that one step too close and snap, Dagur's life would be over, that he'd go madder than usual and jump off cliffs trying to fly.
But that's Dagur's kind of story. And Astrid won't insult her friends by bringing them down to his level.
…and the level of the rest of her friends, admittedly, who are now arguing about rules that they've just made up a minute ago. Ruffnut has pulled a carved wooden whistle from one of her pockets and is blowing it every time Tuffnut declares that Snotlout and Fishlegs have broken a rule. Did no one think to check her pockets? Or then again, maybe the Berserkers, who are looking more rattled with every whistle blast, can deal with dragons but just didn't dare face the horrors that are Ruffnut's pockets.
"Hey, what's he doing here?" Snotlout finally notices the increasingly red-faced Dagur. "We could use Berserkers as human shields? This is a way more interesting game!"
Ruffnut and Tuffnut go into an intense debate on the legality of human shields, and Snotlout seizes the opportunity to ask, "So do we get points if we set them on fire? Or if we shoot past them? Because Fearsome can do that. Either way," over their heads.
"No, you numbskull," Astrid says, making her voice as bored as possible in the hope that Dagur might actually explode with rage at being ignored. "There aren't any points. He thinks he's captured us."
Dagur finally manages to get a word in edgeways. Unfortunately, it's "Uh."
Peep! Ruffnut blows her whistle at him. He grabs for it and misses. She falls over. Astrid mentally awards them each a point.
Dagur's losing.
"I have captured you! You're all very captured! Ropes! On you! See them?" Dagur screams.
Fishlegs scowls. "Of course I see them. I'm watching you, mister." This last is not to Dagur but to the two men holding spears against his Gronkle. "It's okay, Minnow," he coos, gesturing despite the bonds. "These are stupid rude people. Look unamused at them."
Minnow does indeed look unamused, lowering her eyelids and glaring at the men like a yak that has just realized it's a lot bigger than its herdsman.
The Berserkers gulp visibly.
"Good Minnow!" Fishlegs praises her. "Oh, look, iron! Wait for the snack, girl!"
"Psst!" Tuffnut whispers audibly. "Points are for setting them on fire."
Ruffnut holds up a thumb and says "Yep!" cheerfully.
Snotlout scratches his head. "Oh. Why?" he asks Astrid. She doesn't miss his wink and thumbs-up back to Ruffnut.
That's not her problem, so Astrid just shrugs. "He's looking for Hiccup and Toothless, I think."
"Oh," Snotlout repeats. "And again, why?"
"I really don't know," Astrid says thoughtfully. Dagur looks furious at being talked around in front of all of his bully-boys, which serves him right. "He thinks they're mercenaries or something like that."
"Hello-o! I'm standing right here! With a sword! And all of you in snares!"
"What?" Fishlegs says, incredulous. "That's stupid. They're dragons. Wild dragons."
"I'm stupid?" Dagur is actually shaking with rage. The point of his sword wobbles back and forth as he tries to figure out who to point it at. "I'm stupid? You keep talking like this Hiccup actually is a dragon, and I've seen him! He's not! How stupid are you?"
Dagur settles for pointing the sword at Fishlegs, but their resident dragon scholar hasn't been the frightened fat kid Dagur used to throw scraps at in a while. He was part of that expedition that got chased off the unexplored island that turned out to be inhabited by angry Typhoomerangs. By all somewhat surprised accounts it was Fishlegs who kept things under control and kept the dragons distracted long enough for everyone to get away, scared, upset, and lightly scorched, but unhurt. He can get all seven of his Gronkles to walk at heel in a long and tidy line straight through the village like he's the head goose in the flock. Of all the dragons who live in the village, his sprawling and silly Gronkles are probably the best-behaved even though there's so many of them – except for Stormfly, of course, Astrid adds privately.
Fishlegs doesn't let people bully him anymore. He'd told Astrid once, in confidence, that if Hiccup could stare down the world and insist it treat him the way he wanted it to, then surely Fishlegs could stand up to Snotlout and his gang, right? And she'd told him to go for it.
Sword or not, Fishlegs' only reply is a prim, "Well, he is."
"And just why," Dagur snarls, "would you expect me to believe that?"
"Because he does," says Astrid. "Maybe more importantly, the dragons do."
"Oh, because he's so happy as one! And anyway, he's in the Book," says Fishlegs, who'd put him there.
"Are you kidding?" Ruffnut yells. She eyes Dagur closely. "He's not kidding," she reports mournfully, and blows her whistle again.
"Because," Tuffnut starts, and together the twins chorus, "That's so cool!"
Dagur turns to Snotlout, who rolls his eyes. "Because you can argue with him," Snotlout says laconically. "Or you can go along with the whole nonsense. Then you get to keep your face."
For a few heartbeats the only sound is Dagur breathing very hard and choking on it. From somewhere, Astrid hears a hastily muffled chuckle.
"Who said that!" Dagur erupts in rage, turning on his own men. "Who's laughing? You laugh when I say you can! No laughing! I want whoever thinks this is funny to step forward right now!"
Nobody steps forward, and Astrid is not at all surprised.
Dagur fumes for a few heartbeats more, maybe hoping that there'll be another laugh and he'll be able to figure out where it's coming from.
In the end, it comes from him. He looks around and clenches his fists and glares and visibly chews over everything he's just been told, and then he starts giggling.
"Actually," he shouts, "that really is funny! You really had me going there for a minute! But I know what you're doing…you're stalling again, Astrid! All of you are liars. Shut up. No more stupid stories."
Somehow managing not to hit himself with the sword, he tears at what's left of his hair and goes from rage to bewailing his sad, sad fate in the blink of an eye. "Why do people never just do what they're told?" he demands of the tied-up Barf and Belch. "I come here all nice and polite, and you guys –" He spins around and points at the dragon-riders overdramatically, like his audience of Berserkers will miss them if they're not clearly pointed out. "– are being totally not helpful. So," he declares, marching over to Astrid and waving the sword at her. Suddenly his hands are completely steady.
"I'm going to say this one more time, and then I start cutting bits off your dragons. Or maybe your friends. I haven't decided yet. Or you could go get me my Night Fury and that rider right now!"
It's all Astrid can do not to flinch as he screams in her face, and there's a madness in his eyes that makes her believe him at last. And it doesn't escape her notice that he's worked his way around to Toothless being his Night Fury now.
So much for Dagur being reasonable and listening to her for once in his life. She'd never really believed that was going to work anyway.
Time for a new plan.
"Okay," she says, and sees out of the corner of her eye four faces turn towards her in puzzlement. She ignores them and holds out her wrists, freed of the net still ensnaring Stormfly, but with new chains of her own. "So are you going to let me go, or do you expect me just to yell and hope they hear me calling?"
He actually says, "Hmph," which sounds ridiculous. "Fine," Dagur grumbles. He sheathes his sword and picks at the knot hastily tied in her chains. Eventually he manages it.
"Fine!" he says again. "Go back to your village, and go fetch your spy and bring him here! And don't forget the Night Fury. And then you can have your precious blue pet back. And maybe these others, unless whichever twin that is keeps blowing that damn whistle!"
Ruffnut puts the whistle in her mouth to hide it and tries to look innocent. Since this blows her cheeks out like a squirrel, and since Ruffnut couldn't see innocence with a spyglass, it doesn't quite work.
Dagur storms over to the Berserkers keeping Minnow pinned down and pushes them both aside. "Here! Take this one with you, because I'm so nice. Go, go, go! And come back quickly with your spies before I get bored."
"Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time." Astrid rolls her eyes and glances over at her crew. She's glad to see that they know something's up.
Stormfly whistles a protest at the sight of Astrid on the back of another dragon, and Astrid waves at her. "It's okay, girl," she calls out. "I'll be right back."
Damn right she will be, she thinks to herself as Minnow takes off reluctantly, unhappy at leaving Fishlegs behind. She really doesn't have Hiccup and Toothless to give him – as if she would anyway! – so it's not like she's going far.
Instead she makes a big fuss about flying Minnow off into the forest, across the still-wild heart of the island and back towards the village, at least until they're out of sight of Dagur and his thugs.
"Right," Astrid tells Minnow, who rocks from paw to paw in the underbrush and grumbles in a voice like grinding stone. "Quietly now."
Minnow is thick and heavy, but she has the same careful grace as many of the oversized Vikings Astrid has been living amongst all her life. They're giant oafs much of the time, but put them in a fight or a dance, or on the deck of a heaving ship, or leave children underfoot, and suddenly they don't put a step wrong. And Gronkles are stocky, with no long tail or broad wings to snarl themselves in the undergrowth and make it rustle. She follows Astrid cooperatively, hovering like a honeybee, as the Viking woman sneaks through the forest.
Astrid walks softly, mindful of her feet, putting her weight on her hands from time to time as she ducks under a low-hanging branch that would have whipped back on her if she'd tried to push it aside. She calms her breathing and listens to the sounds of the forest that any hunter knows. She watches the way the sunlight glancing through the tree cover flows over the terrain, and sticks to the faint traces of animal tracks, and in this way she returns to the shoreline unheard and unseen.
Of course, she could have walked tall and clapped her hands and announced herself with a drum to keep the beat at the oars, for all the difference it would have made, because there is simply no way to march four uncooperative Vikings and three reluctant dragons back to wherever Dagur has left his landing craft while his bigger ship plays decoy out on the horizon. Not quietly, or quickly. Not as rattled and overtired and stressed as the Berserkers clearly are. If the scorching on their armor and the broken calluses on their hands and the chips taken out of their blades are any sign, they've been in a fight or two and come off worse pretty recently.
And where does Dagur think he's taking them anyway?
From this distance it's a little harder to make out the details, but Astrid is pretty sure she can hear Ruffnut protesting the taking of her whistle.
"Remind me to take that off her myself, if she gets it back," she comments to Minnow, who whines. Only Astrid's hand on her harness holds her back from trying to get to Fishlegs, who stops short to lecture the soldiers surrounding him on something or other. When Astrid peeks out from the undergrowth, she sees him pointing to some detail of Stormfly, walking discontentedly beside him. Gronkles are unbelievably strong for their size, and even smaller-than-most Minnow could snap free of Astrid's touch in a moment, or drag her into the air or behind her across the ground helplessly, but she obeys.
She really is well-trained.
"And that is what Dagur doesn't understand," Astrid says to her. She's developed quite the habit of talking to dragons, for the surprise and joy of having them sometimes talk back now that she knows what to look and listen for. "That's what he hasn't seen – well, he has seen it, but he hasn't understood what he's seeing."
Astrid sets her free hand on her own hip, and glares. "It's not magic," she declares. "It's not. It's work."
Because dragons don't know how to live among humans. They have to be taught. They have to be taught things like it's not okay to bite, even when Vikings are being very annoying.
All their dragons have been trained to behave even in the face of loud and shouting people.
A single command from Astrid, and the dragons stop being quite so patient. Honestly, she's surprised Fearsome has stuck to his training this long.
When she looks out again, it turns out that the ever-contrary Nightmare has decided that this is an excellent time to take a nap, and is suddenly asleep on the gravel and the sand. From the sound of it, Snotlout is choosing not to be helpful, and no one else is in a tearing hurry to kick a Monstrous Nightmare quite that big.
Dagur is loudly and clearly unhappy. It's a wonder they can't hear him in the village.
"All right," Astrid mutters. "This has been real fun. Let's not do it again sometime. But I've had just about enough of you."
She pulls her own whistle from her pocket, and blows.
The sound of it – deeper and stronger than the little signal whistles the rest of her crew have; only Stoick has another whistle that sounds like this – rings out across the beach, and Stormfly's head comes up. Barf and Belch arch their necks back like angry snakes. Fearsome wakes up again in a big hurry. Beside her, Minnow growls a thunderous counterpoint to the signal.
It means fight back, and it wasn't much fun teaching them that, and Astrid didn't feel all that good about it.
But Astrid will not see them taken again by people who treat dragons like tools and think they can conquer the world, and if that means teaching them that there are exceptions to every rule, even this is home; play nice, then that's what she'll do.
Dragons are cleverer than Vikings ever gave them credit for. They'll figure it out.
And even as the sound of her whistle echoes back from the cliffs, the dragons that had submitted meekly enough to hurried snares and nets and loose chains start striking out, sending surprised Berserkers running. Dagur screams at them to hold their ground for once and at the dragons to stop that and at the sky for Astrid to show herself and apologize for not playing by his rules.
Minnow charges off to go rescue her Fishlegs, and Astrid follows along behind at a casual stroll.
All the fun is more or less over by the time she gets there, although Dagur leaves off chasing his soldiers and yelling – whether it's come back and fight or wait for me isn't quite clear – long enough to turn and shout, "Don't think you've won, Astrid! I'm gonna find them!"
His followers practically have to haul him away bodily, but soon enough a small flotilla of stealthy little rowboats puts out from a hidden cove and Dagur's stream of curses fades away beneath dragon roars.
Eventually, Astrid's crew gets their dragons calmed down again. The dragons are mostly just happy to be free of the various restraints hobbling their steps and fouling their wings, and can be tempted away from going after the ship on the horizon by being petted and fussed over and praised.
"You don't think he will, do you?" Fishlegs asks a little later, while Snotlout and the twins do a triumphant war dance to the accompaniment of Barf and Belch lurching from foot to foot, tongues panting and tails wagging. "Dagur, I mean – there's no way he can actually find Hiccup and Toothless, right?"
Stormfly is trying to knock her over, and Astrid side-steps another smothering pounce, lifting one hand to be nuzzled at instead. "He was still talking about them, huh?"
"Was he ever. Complete gibberish, but he sure wants to get his hands on them."
"Fastest way of losing your hands I've ever heard of," Astrid comments wryly. "He's not going to find them here, anyway. They're never here."
There must be something in her voice, because Fishlegs peers at her like he's worried about her. "You miss them," he says.
"What? No!"
Even as she speaks, Astrid reconsiders. She does, a little bit. She likes having them around even if they don't come any closer to the village than the cliffs. She likes watching Hiccup just exist, for the wonder of what he is, and seeing Toothless look at the world with intelligence in his eyes. "They'll come back when they're ready to be around humans again."
"And I guess they know to avoid Dagur now, if they already met him once," Fishlegs says, but he doesn't sound convinced.
"Sure," Astrid tries to reassure him. "They're clever. More than I can say for Dagur, right?"
Turning away to pet Stormfly until both of them calm down again, Astrid mutters, "Idiot. Stay off my island."
Back on his ship and just over the horizon, Dagur rests his chin in his hands and grins, leaning over the edge and chuckling to himself. He's scaring the crew, and entirely happy about that.
He'd wanted them to break and run at the first opportunity, but they didn't have to look quite so enthusiastic about it. He'll consider not screaming at them if they act like proper warriors when his plan starts being for real.
Astrid probably thinks she's beaten him – even in his own head, he doesn't think again. How adorable. He let her go. She'll take his message back whether she knows it or not, and then he and the Fury's rider – he and Hiccup – can have a nice talk without the riffraff of Berk cluttering things up.
It's a Night Fury, after all.
He doesn't expect it to come out during the day, not unless it's on a mission.
"Okay!" he says, snapping his fingers at the man pulling on one of the sail lines. "That's given them the scent of the bait. Let's get out of here!"
His warriors run to obey, and Dagur grins even wider.
"See you tonight, my friend," he says cheerfully. "Bring your pet."
To be continued.