ON WITH THE SHOW!
Nightfall, Part Nine
For Valka, it begins in terror.
She's no sooner gotten her arms around the baby than enormous claws wrap around her body in the exact same way and she feels her feet leave the ground.
Of course she screams, panicking and afraid. She had only wanted to get to the baby, she thought the dragon had understood, that when she had signaled to Stoick that he didn't have to attack she had been saving all their lives, but instead she has killed herself and the precarious, precious little life she's doomed with her.
Terror is her husband's roar of rage and loss from far below, the howl of the hungry fire, the screams of dragons, the crying of the baby.
Three of those sounds recede into the distance as the enormous dragon clutching her flies upwards into the cold darkness, carrying her away.
And then the baby stops crying.
Valka forgets her fear for her own life instantly. It's too dark to see and Hiccup's sudden silence brings back too many memories of nights when she'd sit up until daylight, because she thought if she took her eyes off the tiny, fragile baby he'd stop breathing when she wasn't looking.
But when she presses her face to his she feels delicate eyelashes blink against her skin and a noise that sounds like a wondering sigh.
They are in the air for what must be hours, because eventually the sky begins to lighten all around them. Hiccup does not so much as sob the entire time and Valka holds the last part of her life she has left to hold onto and prays.
As the sun comes up, the enormous dragon sets down on an island – barely even that, hardly more than one of the sea stacks that make sailing in the north in a storm such an adventure. It releases her as gently as possible considering how stiff her entire body is, and she stumbles away from the dragon's claws, uncurling her limbs for the first time in hours. In her arms, Hiccup wakes up and yawns. She envies him his acceptance of the impossible way his world has just changed, but she supposes everything is impossible to a baby and wonderful as long as it is not actively painful.
Puzzled, she stares at the peculiar dragon, who stares back at her. Again, she finds herself caught by its eyes. Most dragons she's encountered look through her or look at her as a threat. This one is looking at her.
"Hello," she says tentatively.
It – he? – thrums deep in his chest.
Well, he hasn't eaten her, or the now-squirming baby, so Valka takes her chances. "I'm going to look after the little one now, all right?"
The dragon looks away from her, which she decides to take as permission to do whatever she wants short of hurting him.
It's only sometime later, when she lies down and puts her back to the dragon, baby Hiccup protected from sun and dragon alike by her body, that her abductor looms over her again.
He rears up, spreading his wings indicatively and for balance as he stretches out a back paw, claws splayed out.
"Oh no," Valka tries not to complain. "More flying?"
She doesn't have very much choice, so she steps into his grip and they take off again.
The next time they come down they do so in a terrifying dive through the most peculiarly shaped glacier she's ever seen. It looks like an explosion made of ice wrapped around an island, which, she discovers as she pries her eyes open and loosens her crushing grip ever so slightly on the baby – who is laughing – is essentially the case.
And they are surrounded by dragons, hundreds of them, ones she's never seen before and can't even begin to put names to.
They are very far from home.
Valka decides to give up being terrified. She is not yet dead, and 'her' dragon has had plenty of opportunity to kill her. The baby is apparently perfectly happy, undisturbed by dragon-sounds from all around and a constant unfamiliar but not unpleasant background smell of what she decides must be a dragon nest as much as their sudden plunge or prolonged flight. Little Hiccup is doing better than she is, she notes ironically to herself.
'Her' dragon releases her to walk on her own two feet, but almost instantly drops his nose to her back to nudge her in front of him.
"Go that way?" she asks, wondering if she's just making noises at him.
He pushes her again, so she goes before he pushes her over on her trembling and stiff legs. In this way they travel through a handful of darkened tunnels, dragon pushing her one way or another in the half-dark. There is just enough light from somewhere up ahead for her to see by.
When she emerges into the light she does so with awe.
There's life in this impossible island, green plants and all sorts of colors decorating them, and even more and stranger dragons overhead and scattered around on the ground. They stare at her curiously even as she stares back.
Stumbling forward on reflex now, she sees for the first time the king of them all.
Whether she drops to her knees that first time from exhaustion or wonder she will never quite be sure. Had she thought that 'her' dragon was enormous? This is the biggest creature she has ever seen, and it looks at her with what she suddenly realizes is intelligence.
It sees her. He sees all of her.
He sees the woman who believes there are other and better options than killing, the woman who wants to know things, the woman who wants to change the world because it could be other and better than the way it is if people would try.
Before this great king of dragons she is the woman who can stand in front of an enraged warrior and say "No," and hold her ground, the woman who had taken on the burden of a leader and the love of one at the same time despite all the things she didn't like about the people who would look to her, the woman who loves a man who argues with her and dances with her and who could hold his son in the palm of his hand when he was born but who loved him anyway and insisted that he would survive despite what anyone else said, the woman who would run unarmed under the nose of a dragon to save a child.
The king of dragons sees Valka, in all her fear and confusion and courage and love, and she knows he sees her: she holds her baby and weeps under the eyes of the king.
A few days later, after she has slept and washed and eaten and drunk and begun to be less overawed by this incredible refuge of dragons that has survived untouched by humans under the rule of the great king, it occurs to her to wonder what Hiccup had felt under the gaze of the king of dragons, and what the king had seen in a baby who reached out to dragons and laughed when he flew.
The dragons are curious about her to the point of intrusiveness. When she laughs with the baby, they imitate her, going hough hough hough at each other and her. They have been bringing her things – sometimes animals and plants, sometimes metal, sometimes more delicate things clearly stolen from humans, like fabric – to see what she'll eat, what she'll reject, and what she'll do with what she can use, with an interesting range of results.
Valka is infinitely grateful to the one that found her a beehive full of honey – even if he hadn't quite managed to get all the bees out. She'd only been stung twice, though, and the nearby dragons, staring at her antics with interest, had worked out that she did like the beehive but didn't like the bees, and taken over swatting or flaming them down, after a few minutes. Bees, apparently, do not bother dragons. Too many scales, she guesses. (She'd had to snatch up Hiccup and hide behind a protective and solicitous Cloudjumper, who is not so much 'her' dragon as she is 'his' human, while they did that, and the abandoned hive had barely escaped being stepped on.)
But the honey was a gift from the gods. She's been using it up at a fair-winds rate soothing a mildly colicky baby, and has found that the easiest way to do so is simply to smear Hiccup's little hands in honey and let him lick it off, or, as he tends to do, try to cram his entire hand into his mouth to get it off. He's utterly unfazed by being surrounded by dragons many times his size, babbling quietly and unintelligibly to himself, her, or them through a sticky fist. They sniff and stare at him with as much interest as they do her, but never so much as scratch him.
When a little black hatchling of a species she doesn't recognize on sight – not that that's anything unusual; this place is a menagerie – and that seems to be all head, eyes, wings, and tail crawls over to investigate the baby, she doesn't think anything of it. Dragons, it turns out, are better babysitters than most Vikings on their best day. Who would have thought it? And, having learned that and more, how could she ever go back to a world where they're killed on sight? How could she take her son back to that world?
She turns her back for only a moment, one ear alert for the sounds her baby makes but the rest of her attention on the dead rabbit a 'helpful' Nightmare has just brought her. Its fur is only marginally burnt, which is an improvement. There's enough unburnt skin and hair to make a pair of small shoes for the baby.
When she turns back to said baby, she drops the rabbit in horror, crying out. The baby's hand has vanished into the little black hatchling's mouth.
She's running over to them before the rest of her brain registers that Hiccup is still making happy little noises, but her approach makes the little dragon drop the hand – slobbery and honey-free but still very much attached and unmarked – and back away, cowering and whistling.
It's only then that the baby bursts into tears. She picks him up and rocks him, petting and soothing, until he calms down to only an occasional sob, by which time the black hatchling has worked up its courage to approach them again, sidling towards mother and baby as if it expects to be yelled at again, but is determined to get there despite that.
"It's okay," Valka tells it, freeing up one hand to beckon invitingly. "Come here, little one."
It eyes her mistrustfully.
"I'm not mad," she says, keeping her tone level and light. "Come on."
Gradually, it edges closer, huge green eyes more on the baby than on her. When she sits down on the floor, its approach speeds up, clearly drawn to the baby, who stops crying immediately at the sight of it and returns to making happy burbling noises, reaching out the same dragon-slobbered hand.
She watches, amazed and amused with the rush of relief, as dragonet nose nuzzles infant hand, and licks at it gently. Hiccup laughs outright, a baby giggle, and waves the hand back and forth, only contacting the dragon by accident but clearly enjoying it when he does. When his hand swings back into reach, the hatchling's tongue snakes out and snares it, clearly intending to pull it into its mouth again.
"No," Valka tells it, pulling her baby away.
She's instantly outvoted as dragonet and baby wail in unhappy harmony. But as the dragon cries, she notices that its open mouth is all gums. Luring it back to her with the promise of the baby in her lap – they pet each other and make baby noises together as she examines the hatchling – she finds that the little dragon has no teeth, just soft little buds.
"I've never seen a toothless dragon before," she tells it – it rolls an eye in her direction but is still fascinated by the baby.
Resigned, she puts Hiccup down and lets them play with each other. The little toothless dragon is incredibly patient with him even when he gets hold of an ear-flap and pulls, getting it all the way to his own mouth and sucking on it. In turn, the hatchling persists in mouthing at any hands in reach and licking at the baby, possibly because he tastes of honey. Valka is fine with that, as long as it isn't the taste of baby that the hatchling is drawn to.
She supervises for a while, but eventually decides that little Toothless is not going to hurt the baby, and returns to working on the rabbit skin while keeping an eye on them. They fall asleep in a pile of black scales and baby freckles long before she's done.
(A year later, the name becomes completely misleading when Toothless sprouts a mouthful of little fangs that retract and spring out whenever he wants them to, at almost the same time as Hiccup's baby teeth are coming in most rapidly. But by then every third word out of Hiccup's mouth is "Too-ess!" and he's toddling around the caves hanging on to the rapidly growing little dragon for support and talking to him incessantly.)
This is an ordinary morning for Valka and her son.
Every time she wakes up, she vows to herself that this is the day she's going to cut her hair. She no longer has to spend most of the morning combing pine needles and bits of bracken out of it, not since she convinced Cloudjumper that she would like some sheep with skins not eaten and not burnt and not torn but dead was all right, and he convinced the rest of the flock to bring her enough to construct two good piles of sheepskin as beds for herself and Hiccup. But the long fall of hair still gets tangled as she sleeps.
She only feels slightly guilty about sending dragons out on the same sort of raids that, back on Berk, her own people would try to kill them for. When it comes to looking after her son, she will bear the guilt any day.
Every day she combs her fingers through her hair, cursing, and puts it up in a loose braid instead.
Before anything else, she needs to know where her son is. She has a fairly good idea of where he'll be, but it never hurts to check, not with how daring and fearless and creative Hiccup is growing up to be. Generally, though, no matter where she puts him to bed, he always ends up in the same nest as Toothless, now that he seems to have outgrown crawling in with her. She has given up separating them – it's not doing any harm, the black dragonet is always actually very careful with him even when they play rough, and it's good that he has a friend.
It's a cold, cold world out there in more ways than one, and Toothless seems perfectly happy to keep the little boy warm.
Sure enough, she finds her son and Toothless piled all over each other in a tangle of limbs and scales and grubby tunic. One of them is snoring, but she's not quite sure which. It might be both of them, in unison.
While he sleeps he's slightly less likely to get into trouble, so she lets boy and dragon be for now.
Later in the morning, she goes to wake him up. She suspects that he was running around very late last night, probably long after she thought she'd put him to bed, and reminds herself to keep a closer eye on him. Dragons wake and sleep when they will, but she is trying to keep her son on at least a somewhat human schedule. Some days it works better than others.
"Hiccup," she calls, putting a hand on his hair, "time to wake up."
The little boy opens one eye and blinks at her.
"Good morning, baby."
He whistle-chirps a dragon-like noise at her that she recognizes from the real dragons as something close to "good morning".
"Hiccup, words," she reminds him for the thousandth time. He can talk; he just prefers to sound like a dragon whenever she will let him get away with it. She can't stop him from talking directly to the flock they have been adopted into in such a way, and is in fact slightly jealous that he has picked up so quickly and naturally a language of sorts that she is still figuring out on a moment-by-moment basis, but she expects him to use Norse to her.
He wrinkles his nose and growls.
"Hiccup…"
The little boy sighs, which turns into a yawn halfway through and ends up as a squeak. "Mornin', mama," he says clearly.
The activity has woken Toothless, who has not bothered to move except as far as necessary to bring her into his field of vision. The black dragonet whistle-chirps the same 'good morning' sound at her in exactly the same way. Dragons grow faster than humans do, and a hatchling the size of a small six-month-old has grown in the last three years to easily match up to a decent-sized pony. Valka pets him, and he purrs.
"Good morning to you too, Toothless."
She should have known she wasn't going to get away with that: Hiccup spots the hypocrisy immediately and scolds, "Tooth'ess, words!"
Valka is very grateful that she doesn't have to point out the mistake in there – Toothless takes care of that himself, giving Hiccup a deadpan look that dares him to try to enforce that order.
After feeding him and letting the little boy play on his own time for a while, Valka ropes him into a new game which is actually teaching him to do useful things, like fixing an enormous tear in one of his battered pairs of trousers that she suspects was from a wrestling match with Toothless. He's got clever and delicate fingers and an incredible ability to focus, and he's picking up the basics of how to sew quite quickly, if roughly. Hiccup has learned already that needles are sharp – "like claws, baby, be careful" – and that they should poke the fabric, not fingers.
She manages to keep him at it for what feels like almost half an hour before she looks up to realize that the project has been abandoned and the little boy has wandered away. For a moment she almost assumes that he will be fine – every dragon in the flock adores him and looks out for him just like one of their own incredibly playful and very silly hatchlings – but reconsiders immediately. No dragon is capable of getting into as much unexpected trouble as an active three-and-a-half-year-old.
When she finds him she's simultaneously struck flat with horror and glad she went looking, making a diving leap for the boy and snatching him away from the edge of the sea cliff and clutching him in her arms. He had been all ready to jump off the big, big cliff into the rough ocean below.
Hiccup wails into her ear unhappily, briefly deafening her.
"Hiccup, no!" she orders, bringing him back inside despite his struggles.
He protests, still trying to get free and back out onto the edge. "Wanna fly! Hiccup flying!"
Valka is never letting him out of her sight ever again. She briefly wonders if he would have been this much trouble if they were still back on Berk. As she sets him down back in the cave that has become their sleeping area, which has the advantage of a comparatively small entrance that she can block any last-ditch escape attempts at by small boys, somehow…she thinks so.
"No, baby, no…you don't have any wings!"
His eyes go very big, and he turns in place, pirouetting as he awkwardly tries to see down his own back. "No wings?" Hiccup says disbelievingly, as if he'd never noticed their absence and was expecting wings to appear magically any second now.
"No, you don't," Valka assures him.
It doesn't stop him for very long. "Wanna have wings an' fly!" Hiccup announces argumentatively.
In some ways, although vanishingly few of them, Hiccup is absolutely a Viking – arguing with him is often not worth it because he'll go right for it with the stubbornness of a child who wants something, and not quit, ever. Valka thinks he's inherited that from his father, dismissing the many full-out (and quite enjoyable by both sides) screaming arguments she had had with Stoick over the years. She decides not to try arguing with their son, at least not until he's old enough to either really actively reason with or fight with interestingly. "Well, until you do have wings –" she temporizes, because that was never going to happen, right? "–no jumping off cliffs."
He pouts. He probably doesn't know how adorable it is.
Valka rolls her eyes and sweeps him up again, bringing him back out into a larger area of the cave that is occupied by several dragons, including, she is pleased to see, Cloudjumper, and where Hiccup is used to playing inside. She sets the little boy on top of a medium-sized rock. "Here," she offers, "jump off this smaller rock instead inside where I can watch you."
Hiccup is sufficiently distracted, and does so, leaping down to the ground and climbing back up almost instantly.
Cloudjumper, watching, makes a noise that she is absolutely certain is a laugh. Valka beams up at him. "I know. He's only little."
Her friend rolls his eyes. She thinks he recognizes most of the words she uses – the dragons have been learning her language even as she and Hiccup learn theirs.
"Yes, well. Cloudjumper? Babysitting? No one is to let the baby jump off cliffs! Everyone needs to watch him, all right?"
Cloudjumper looks over her head at the little boy, pointedly. Hiccup is still jumping off the rock repeatedly and with great enthusiasm, yelling "flying!" in little-kid joy.
"That's okay. Just not off sea cliffs!"
Somewhat inevitably, given the near-constant traffic of dragons in and out and through this section of the caves and that he and Hiccup are practically inseparable, Toothless flutters in to see what his friend is doing, hovering around the peak of the rock and whistling curiously.
"Tooth'ess, flying!" Hiccup whoops with joy, and leaps straight at the black dragonet. Toothless is not yet quite big enough to catch him and keep them both in the air, although if he keeps growing at this rate he soon will be. For now, though, the midair collision knocks them both out of the air and to the ground in a squawking pile.
The little boy chatters at the dragon incomprehensibly, laughing and purring and nuzzling against him like a cat even as Toothless bats at him with remonstrative but gentle paws, and then bounces to his feet and scampers back up his flying-off rock.
Toothless stays where he is, eyeballing Valka. He doesn't have to do anything more to convey the message. This, his expression says, is your fault.
"Sorry, Toothless," Valka tells him. The little dragon huffs, climbing to a sitting position and turning his back on her. She almost believes it until she catches him sneaking glances over his shoulder to see if she notices how much he's ignoring her.
Hiccup jumps off the rock again, but this time Cloudjumper pounces right over Valka and catches him in midair by the back of his vest. Grumbling, her dragon friend stalks off with him through the caves out to the protected meadow that she thinks of as the king's open-air Great Hall, the little boy hanging from his jaws yelling with absolute joy.
"Eek! Flying, Hiccup flying!"
Toothless immediately drops his pretense of shunning them all, bounding off after Cloudjumper and buzzing around them trying to get his friend back.
Valka laughs quite hard, shaking her head. She wonders aloud to Hiccup, who is now too far away to hear her and very busy screaming with dragonish amusement in the open air: "I can't imagine what your father would have made of you."
Last winter Hiccup had climbed into her lap after talking to a scarred newcomer to their island sanctuary, which had been scared of Valka but tolerant of the almost-five-year-old, perhaps because he was so much smaller and sounded like a dragon much of the time anyway, and announced to her solemnly: "It biting."
A rather roundabout session of translation, using Hiccup as the go-between, later, Valka had managed to figure out that the scars on the dragon's leg and wing were from a trap and that she had torn herself loose to escape.
What she could see of the scars had been truly grotesque, and Valka had gotten deeply and passionately angry. She had managed to obtain from her little dragon translator that there were many more traps like it, and many more dragons being trapped.
When the flock figured out what she was asking about, a number of dragons found her to show her similar scars.
Looking at the injuries to beings – to people – that had cared for her son and looked after her and had altogether not been at all the monsters she'd been taught all her life that dragons were, Valka had been furious. She has resolved for some time now to journey back to Berk someday when Hiccup is older and she feels better about taking him into a war zone. Between the two of them, the chief's wife and the chief's son – the latter of which is the perfect go-between, one who can talk to dragons in their own language and humans in theirs – surely they will be able to put a stop to their war for good. She has dreams of using all they've learned and discovered here to make a difference for people she'd taken a responsibility for when she'd married Stoick.
But just then, she'd muttered to herself angrily about the cruelty of Viking trappers, overlooking the attentive boy still sitting in her lap.
Bowing before the great king of dragons, she had told him what she wanted to do and begged his permission to carry out her plan and the help of his flock.
Since then, Valka has become somewhat of an expert on dragon traps, and she has taught her son to sabotage and open them as well. His clever fingers and ability to tell frightened and angry dragons that they are trying to let them out, not hurt them further, are incredible assets to her that more than equal her greater strength and reach when it comes to physically breaking open stubborn catches or sawing through ropes. The little boy is fascinated by the machinery of the traps, turning the disassembled pieces of a lock or trigger over and over in his small hands with interest.
And the dragons – our flock! Valka had thought unexpectedly, and smiled, understanding the joy in Hiccup's voice when he talked to them like a dragon himself – had been very helpful once they'd understood what she was doing, bringing back reports of traps set and trappers in the area the same way they reported good fishing areas and animal migrations with the passage of ships and the presence of strange dragons in their skies.
Now they have brought her news of a fresh range of traps set to the south, and Valka tracks down her active son, finding him curled up in a dragon's nest otherwise full of eggs and mother dragon, purring to her and examining the eggs with the utmost gentleness, delicate child's fingers brushing across one shell and ear pressed to another one.
"Time to break some more traps, Hiccup," she calls to him, and his head comes up over the edge of the nest curiously. "Say goodbye for now."
He whistles to the nesting dragon, and then, to her surprise, puts his cheek against the closest egg and hums a goodbye to it too.
"Can the eggs hear you?" she asks him as she carries him to where Cloudjumper is waiting to carry them away from the sanctuary.
"Uh huh," he asserts, although whether or not this is true or the product of a child's creative mind she doesn't know.
The two of them, mother and child, had spent quite some time designing a harness for a child who fundamentally cannot sit still even while on a dragon's back impossible distances up in the air above a fatal fall. The result is improvised but much safer than letting him run loose, or having Valka try to hold onto him and keep her own balance at the same time, and Cloudjumper is surprisingly good about wearing the leather straps that attach child to dragon.
Hiccup doesn't particularly like it – he's entirely unafraid of falling, and Valka had practically chewed the horns off a pair of dragons she'd caught flying him up into the sky and then dropping and catching him, as a game he was enthusiastically participating in – but she gets him into it eventually over his protests. When she puts him down to retrieve her bundle of trap-breaking supplies that she has assembled over the past few months, all wrapped around a solid staff of driftwood that she had rescued from being chewed on by dragons after it had resisted said treatment, Hiccup's break for freedom is foiled when Cloudjumper sets a claw down on the trailing edge of the harness, pulling him up short and bumping him down abruptly.
The little boy collapses backwards and glares at the large red-gold dragon from there, croaking with playful irritation. Cloudjumper rumbles back at him and they argue until they are interrupted by Toothless, who has found Hiccup possibly going somewhere without him and has turned up at top speed to object to this very strongly.
The growing black dragon manages only a few seconds of wailing – Valka privately suspects this means something along the lines of me too, me too, me too, me too! – before she raises a hand and says, "All right, Toothless, you can come with us if Cloudjumper doesn't mind."
Honestly, she feels like she has two sons, one who happens to be a dragon and one who seems to think he is, despite her insistence that he speak in Norse as long as he's talking to her and that he learn to use his hands in ways that only humans can, to sew and draw – which he took to like a shot – and use and understand tools like the riding harness and the triggers of traps.
Cloudjumper rolls his eyes but makes no objection to Toothless accompanying them.
Hiccup screams with joy and forgets about the harness and the claws keeping him in place, wrapping his arms around as much of Toothless' head as he can manage and purring. This conversation, whatever it's about, keeps him quite happy until Valka is ready to go.
They, and a cloud of flock-mates escorting them, go far enough that she expects the little black dragon to have to set down and take a break on Cloudjumper's back at some point, but Toothless keeps pace with the older dragons without any trouble. Valka is impressed. She wonders where he comes from, and if his mother had brought or left him here and then flown away on her own journey. If an adult of his kind has even more stamina or love of flight than the little one does, then she could have flown over the edge of the world and back again by now. She wonders where Toothless would have ended up, what distances he would have reached, if he were not so permanently attached to Hiccup's side.
Hiccup is usually perfectly happy as long as he is in the air, but today he is restless – well, more restless than usual. "Fly with Toothless!" he insists.
"One day," Valka promises him. "When he's bigger. And you are."
This does not fully satisfy him, but he settles down somewhat, which puts Valka's mind a bit more at rest. They have come a long way from that first terrified flight in Cloudjumper's claws, and if – gods forbid – the boy did happen to fall one of the dragons flocking all around them would catch him before anything actually happened to him, but her instincts are to protect him and even if he doesn't worry she does. She's his mother, that's her job.
The scouts lead them to a large island that extends into the distance even from this height. As they descend, Valka scans the treetops for any indication of human interference, and directs the flock to a mountainside that seems clear.
Sliding from Cloudjumper's back and settling Hiccup on her shoulders so she can have her hands mostly free, she signals to the dragons that have accompanied them.
"Traps here," she says. "Careful. Stay down, stay still. Wait for me to call."
Cloudjumper scans the assembled dragons and growls reinforcement to her orders. They settle down and wait, watching her and sunning themselves.
"Back soon," she tells them, and sets off into the woods, looking for trappers' signs. She has begun to recognize the indicators and warnings that a particular group that has been working this area uses, and she is quite pleased to be able to use their markings to her advantage.
She's only been out of sight of the flock for a minute or so before she hears a rustling from above.
Hiccup looks up and croons happily. Valka sighs.
"Toothless, is that you?"
It's barely even a question – of course it is. Toothless is growing apparently endlessly and he is slightly too big to hide in the tree branches he's landed in, and has not yet learned to compensate for his increased size. It means he's mostly hidden, but not completely.
He realizes this after a moment, pokes his head out of the tree cover, and whines. Clearly he's not going to let them – or more probably, Hiccup – go anywhere without him.
Valka sighs. "Come on, then."
Toothless follows obediently in her footsteps as they travel. After a while, that becomes less helpful than ever as Hiccup continually twists around on her shoulders to chirp and croak back at the little black dragon.
Finally, she stops, takes her son off her shoulders, and puts him on Toothless' back instead.
That works out better for everyone, and they proceed with Hiccup on dragonback, still talking constantly to Toothless, but much more quietly, since Toothless' ear-flaps are right there in front of him. As they walk, Valka can also hear Toothless talking right back to him.
For most of the afternoon the odd little procession follows trail sign and looks for the telltale indications of set traps, of which there are many. She is very glad that she had instructed the expedition to stay where they had set down, because whoever is setting this trap line is clearly unable to take a hint or understand the concept of 'too many'. Vikings, Valka thinks to herself, shaking her head. Whatever else you say about them, people who live in this cold and harsh northern ocean do not quit, ever.
Toothless digs up tripwires and Valka cuts them with a freshly sharpened knife. Hiccup pulls springs loose from triggers and pockets them to play with later, humming with interest at a mechanism that is meant to grab a dragon's ankle and hold it but could easily take off his fingers. Valka snatches him away from it and hands him to Toothless to look after.
The traps are recent and the forest has not yet returned to its undisturbed state – it still betrays the trappers' presence. Valka is proud of her scouts. They are getting better and faster and she is pleased that no sooner have these traps gone down than her family is going to take them up again.
Whatever do they want to trap dragons for, anyway? she wonders, noticing how many of them are live traps rather than killers. She's glad of this – it's much easier to successfully rescue dragons when the trap is meant to keep them alive anyway – but the pattern puzzles her. She is uncomfortably reminded of the dragon-fighting training pit on Berk, and the captured dragons kept there for children to practice on until the dragons are worn out and killed.
She had no choice but to tolerate that on Berk, but if her scouts find a dragon-fighting pit here, she is going to take her jail-breaking efforts to a new level and they will have to burn something down.
Valka is somewhat aware that if she did this, she and hers would be raiders no different from the dragons that attacked Berk all the time. It's not a very comfortable feeling.
She will have such a lot of explaining to do when she gets home.
She is spared from further considering how she is going to explain their very un-Viking-like son to Stoick by a fluttering whining sound coming from off in the trees. Beckoning for Toothless and the boy on his back to stay close, she treads carefully, watching for hidden dangers.
But the trap has already been triggered, capturing a smallish Nadder in its jaws. The blue-dappled dragon is caught by its tail and a wingtip: the loss of either would seriously hinder its ability to fly.
It screams when it sees her, cowering away as far as it can.
"It's okay," Valka says soothingly, stretching out a hand. "I'm not going to hurt you. Hiccup? Tell our friend here we're not dangerous and we're going to help, all right?"
The little boy sits up on the black dragon's back and croons liquidly, interspersing and intertwining the sound with a chittering popping noise Valka knows her throat can't even begin to make. Whatever he's saying, it works fairly well, and the Nadder stares at him as if uncertain whether to believe its ears – which are telling it that these newcomers are not a threat – or its eyes – which are showing it humans.
When she gets a good look at the trap, she scowls. It's familiar but old and rusted and will take her time to get open. She relays this to her little translator, who passes it on. The Nadder sags as if giving up regardless of whether they represent a threat or not.
Valka grits her teeth at the touch of rust on her bare skin and gets to work. After a few minutes, she sees Toothless and Hiccup wandering off into the woods.
"Don't go far," she tells her son. "Stay where we've already been."
Either Hiccup or Toothless – she genuinely cannot tell their voices apart sometimes – whistles at her. But then the sound cuts off in mid-trill and says, "Yes, mama," so it must have been Hiccup.
Several minutes later, she is still at work on the trap and the Nadder is getting ever more agitated, making a proper racket and waving its free wing.
"It's all right," she tells the frantic creature. "I'm going to get you out of here, and I'm working as fast as I can." But although it seems to have gotten the message from Hiccup and Toothless, it continues to babble frantically in her ear as she works. Not that she doesn't make plenty of noise herself, swearing freely now that Hiccup cannot hear her – the boy mimics everything! – and wrenching at the stuck clasp with her hands and then trying to lever it open with her driftwood staff.
Finally it pops open, utterly destroying the hinge in the process, and the Nadder tears itself free and hurtles into the air, squawking. Maybe Cloudjumper and their expedition will intercept it and bring it back to the king's island, maybe they won't. In any case, it's out of the now nicely broken trap.
It is only when the dragon's shrieks stop ringing in her ears that she hears an entirely different distant scream.
She honestly cannot tell whether it is Hiccup or Toothless screaming; she can when Hiccup is happy, because he can use words that dragons cannot to talk to her, but when he's scared he panics and sounds exactly like a frightened dragon.
Valka takes off running towards the sound.
Just before she gets there, she pauses, realizing that the dragonish cries are angry rather than hurt and that charging in without knowing what she's getting into might not be a good idea. It takes all her effort of will to think this far through the sound of one – probably both – of her sons in distress, but she grips her driftwood staff in preparation and glances around the tangle of trees between her and her children.
Also between her and them are a handful of armed men, arrayed in a semicircle and trapping Hiccup and Toothless against a rocky bluff. Hiccup is standing protectively in front of the black dragon, little arms stretched out to hide Toothless as much as possible even though he's so much smaller, snarling furiously.
"It's okay, little guy," the man crouched on his heels in front of her son, one hand outstretched, says, "I've got a little boy too, and he'd love to play with your pet there. Why don't we all go together?" But the tone in his voice is avid, covetous and cruel, and Hiccup may not have much experience with humans rather than her, but his instincts are good and he bares his teeth and growls wordlessly at the trapper.
"Get away from my sons!" Valka roars, coming out swinging. She takes down the nearest trapper at the ankles and hears bone break. Well, this staff had survived being chewed on by dragons and used to break iron – the man's ankles hadn't stood a chance. The same swing drives the butt of the stick into someone else's guts and he goes down retching.
She gets in a good few more blows before her charge puts her on a collision course with the man trying to steal her little boys. He's faster than his cronies, though, and rolls out of the way before she can break his neck like she'd been trying to do.
Now it is Valka holding her ground between the trappers and the dragon. Hiccup says "Mama!" with absolute joy and relief.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," the trappers' leader says defensively, climbing to his feet and waving his hands at his men, who back off – although they have all drawn weapons since her first attack, and she doesn't feel that much safer. "Where did you come from?"
"Doesn't matter," Valka retorts. "You leave them alone."
"Oh, he's yours, is he? Spunky little kid. Bites, too." He holds up a bare hand on which the marks of little-boy teeth are imprinted.
Valka is so proud of her son.
"Did you try to touch him?"
"Hey, lady, he came at me."
"Then I wish he'd gone for your throat."
The trapper laughs. "He was damn well trying. Hey, wait a minute. I know who you must be." His eyes drop to her hands. She knows better than to take her eyes off the men who are threatening her little family, but she knows suddenly what he must be able to see – the smears of rust from that ancient trap.
"You're the one who's been messing up our trap line!"
"Oh good," Valka glares at him. "I've been wanting to meet you." She shifts her hands on her staff and her feet on the ground to more stable positions to reinforce that she has not been looking for him to cook him a hearty meal.
He grins in a way he must think looks charming. "Hey, I'll tell you what. I'll call it even – if you give me that little Night Fury instead."
Night F—Toothless? The nightmare of Vikings, lightning and death's child, the little dragon who adores her son and can't bear to be separated from him? Valka has never been able to put a name to Toothless' breed, but then no one knows anything about Night Furies, except that they are incredibly rare.
"I told you," Valka says, letting none of this show in her voice, "leave them alone."
"Lady," the trapper says – he is done being charming – "that little beast is worth more than I'd earn in a lifetime of trapping, and my son's lifetime too. You give him to us, or we will take him."
Valka drops her shoulders and lowers her head, letting the staff sag towards the ground. She looks down at Hiccup, who stares up at her with terrified green eyes, and Toothless, who watches her in the exact same way. She does not know what these men would do to Toothless if they got their hands on him; she knows that the loss would break Hiccup's heart; she knows that she will not let any of it happen as long as she can stand and fight and protect her family.
"Babies," she says quietly, "run."
She lunges for a man on the edge of the semicircle, knocking him back and opening up a gap for the black dragon to streak through with her son on his back.
"Cloudjumper!" Valka yells as loud as she can. "Cloudjumper!"
She keeps shouting for her dragon-companion as chaos breaks out and she tries to stop anyone from going after Hiccup and Toothless, keeping the humans' attention on her. It doesn't work, and she finds herself tearing through the forest after them with a pack of dragon trappers in close pursuit.
Cloudjumper won't be able to find her in these woods – they're too dense. She finds a clearing where she can swing her quarterstaff and that is open to the sky, and a moment later her sons emerge from the woods and try to head towards her.
They duck back into the undergrowth immediately when the leaders of the pursuit break out and attack her. There are too many of them and she holds them off, knowing she has only to hold her ground until Cloudjumper gets here. If he can hear her. If she has not gone too far and he can hear her cries. But dragons have good hearing and he knows her voice…
If Valka had seen it coming, if she had known what was happening, she would have blocked it, but everything goes wrong at once and something heavy hits her back and shoves through just as a familiar shadow falls over her.
And as darkness falls around her she truly can't tell which of her sons is screaming…
To be continued.