ON WITH THE SHOW!

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Nightfall, Part Eighteen

For as long as anyone can remember, the Vikings of Berk have been capturing dragons to lock up and then set loose on armed children so those children can learn to survive against the day when it's their turn to fight for real. It's easier and safer for the trainees but, Astrid is beginning to realize, rough on the dragons.

Astrid is not particularly optimistic that she can get any of the ones they currently have to go from fighting humans to defending them.

Why would they? If anything, these dragons have even more reason to hate them than the wild ones do.

But Astrid can't let go of the idea. If she can take something away from her failure with Hiccup, it won't have been a complete failure after all and she won't have to feel quite so ashamed.

She's been at it for over a week now, mostly on her own because Fishlegs is more interested in observing dragons than working with them. He'll watch from the edge of the ring or outside the chain netting over the pit and take notes, but he's more reluctant to come down or jump in and risk his own life the way she's doing.

Astrid has spent the time dodging fire and fangs and being roared and jumped at, and she can't help but feel that she's running out of time. The raids are coming faster and lasting longer, so she probably has only another week, if that, before there are hungry dragons in the sky again. This has to work.

So far, it's not doing so.

Today, blue dragon and Viking woman glare at each other with equal distrust and skepticism. The latter doubts that she's getting anywhere with this, and gods only know what the dragon thinks of it all.

True, Astrid has managed to get to a point where she's sort of all right with having the Nadder in the pit with her without keeping it – her – on a chain, partly because when the dragon isn't on a chain she's hiding as far away from Astrid as possible. It's the same one that had been in the ring during Astrid's training, and she is mildly impressed that it has survived this long, one of the reasons she has continued to work with the Nadder despite the fact that every attempt seems like a new way to fail.

Astrid had spent most of an afternoon one day walking in circles around the edge of the pit with the Nadder shuffling away from her and bristling but not attacking, around and around endlessly until she wasn't sure who was chasing who.

When she had started to think that all she'd achieved was to reenact the last three hundred years in one afternoon with only two players, she had given up for that day and gone to bed, wondering if she'd wake up a little less crazy and decide that this whole thing is the joke that the rest of the village seems to think it is.

"Because they do," Astrid complains to the Nadder, because she has no one else to talk to.

The blue dragon ruffles her wings, making herself look bigger defensively.

"My people think I'm crazy for trying this. We've always managed just by knowing that dragons are the enemy, that you're a monster."

The Nadder is easy to talk to because she's so obviously not listening. It's exactly like talking at Hiccup when he was ignoring her – not running away from her, just not caring that she was there and making noises.

"But damn you, how am I supposed to ignore something like Toothless? He must have learned to get along with – oh, who am I kidding?" she demands, not expecting a response. "– to love a human. Even one that thinks he's a dragon. So it can be done."

Astrid has refused to name the Nadder anything more specific than "You", because she wants to train it and the others for war. When she succeeds in training them, and she will no matter what it takes, if she's going to send them up into battle against the attacking dragons then some of them are going to get killed in the fight. If there's one thing Astrid knows more than anything, it's that every battle has a cost and any fight could be your last, and she goes into every single one accepting that possibility but resolved that this fight will not be the one that kills her.

She goes into battle to reclaim her life, not lose it. Heroic sacrifices make good stories, but it is always a better day for the enemy to die.

Still, she's reluctant to get attached to this creature. The Viking woman guards her heart jealously and if she fears any pain at all it's that one she fears most. It's easier that way. The chief is no longer as angry as he was when he had been resolved to bring the wild boy back to Berk and humanity by the scruff of his neck through as much dragon blood as necessary, but he is still not the exuberant chieftain that he was before Toothless had been shot down and the Night Fury and Hiccup had come crashing, however reluctantly, into their lives. So surely she'll be a better leader if she never lets anyone into her heart to hurt her the way that the loss of his wife…and his son…has hurt Stoick.

Right?

"Try telling that to Vikings, though," Astrid mutters, setting her back against the wall of the pit and folding her arms across her knees, raised defensively before her. "It's not hard. You're here anyway; we'd be stupid not to use you."

She has to consider this statement for a few minutes – Vikings are tough but she has to admit to herself that they can be very stupid quite often.

"I can't believe I didn't think of it before. I can't believe no one else has thought of it before. Or maybe someone did and they got killed horribly and that's why we've never tried it again."

This, she must admit, is a possibility. Everyone knows dragons can't be trained. Except her. She doesn't think it's ever been tried here, but maybe Stoick has heard stories from the other, smaller tribes in the Archipelago. But she can't ask him…he doesn't want to know anything about what she's doing here.

"I'm not crazy…even though I'm talking to a dragon…damn it!" she cries, wishing she had something to throw. Her waving hand finds her braid and she pulls on it in anger and frustration until she realizes she's doing it and stops.

Across the ring, the Nadder whistles and cringes, tipping her head back and forth to eye up Astrid. She sounds worried.

Astrid waves a hand. "I'm not mad at you," she tells her. "Not much, anyway. I'm mad that I was stupid enough to chase away someone who knows what he's doing. I'm mad at the people in town who laugh and tell jokes about what happens to people who try to tame dragons. Did I tell you about the idiots in the Great Hall last night? I actually had to punch one of them."

If she did, the Nadder is not telling.

For a while, there's silence in the ring as Astrid thinks about things she will never say out loud, even to a dragon that doesn't understand her and can't repeat it back to anyone.

She's beginning to doubt herself and this project. It's more than the fact that all she's managed to do so far is let a dragon off a chain and sit in a mostly-enclosed space that it's scared of with it.

It's the way her people look at her incredulously and wonder what's gone wrong with her – the way they doubt her as they've never done before.

It's that both of Berk's leaders are acting strangely, although Stoick is acting more rationally and is slightly more approachable now that he isn't trying to snatch at an impossible hope and burning up inside with hatred at the same time, and they can't afford that sort of insecurity. Uncertainty means death up here in the north; you have no room to make mistakes in, so you do what you've always done because experiments get you killed the first time you get something wrong.

It's that Astrid hates to fail, and this feels like a failure, and she cannot afford to fail – not for her people, and not for her own peace of mind. She is good at what she does, and the things she does have visible and immediate consequences. She swings an axe and a dragon dies or flees. She hauls a line and a sail unfurls. She breaks up a fight or resolves a quarrel and the village is at peace for a little while longer. She gets up early in the mornings to run and the next time she needs to be somewhere quickly she outpaces the larger, heavier Vikings and is first to the scene. She tracks her prey through the forest, and she brings home food for her people. She gets results, and when she doesn't get the results she wants she works harder. But now she barely knows what she's doing and she doesn't know how to do it any better, because dragons are not boats – they have whims of their own she can't control.

It's that Stoick clearly hates this project and she doesn't like being at odds with her mentor on something so fundamental. They've always argued quite often – he respects her as his heir because she will stand up to him and not agree with him just because he's in charge and twice her size – but that's different. This is the chief objecting entirely to something she believes she is doing for the good of the village, if not outright forbidding her to do it. He won't go anywhere near the ring these days, and whenever he sees her on her way up here or when she's obviously returning from another useless session he avoids her too. His disapproval and hatred – not of her but of dragons as tamable creatures, because if it works all that will do is remind him that even hereditary enemies can be brought under control but his own son is lost to him forever – is like a fog over her head. They talk about what's going on in the village, what they need to do to protect their people, but never about dragons, and never about the inspiration for Astrid's attempt to train dragons to protect the village rather than attack it.

It's that, much to her disgust, she suspects part of her actually misses Hiccup.

Quite against her will, she'd sort of gotten fond of him whenever they weren't fighting. She'd hated not really being able to talk to him, hated that he was so very much a dragon when he shouldn't have been, hated that he wouldn't listen and didn't care about the trouble her people are in, but the time she'd spent on that shoreline had been an entirely new experience with an entirely different kind of…yes, a person.

Astrid is driven, competitive, a perfectionist, a woman of honor harder on herself than anyone else would ever be on her. She has standards and sets expectations of herself and then pushes herself to meet them no matter how high she sets them. While she loves being the chief's heir and the leader-in-training, and never wants to be anything else, her people are constantly demanding things of her.

Resolve this. Solve that.

Protect us, from dragons and the weather and other Vikings and ourselves.

Lead us. Answer all the questions, even the silly ones that we should know the answers to already or be able to figure out by ourselves if it wasn't easier just to ask someone in charge. Take responsibility.

Think ahead. Remember what we've done in the past.

Lead.

But Hiccup hadn't expected anything of her – if she had decided not to feed him that day, he wouldn't have cared or blamed her, he would have gone back to eating whatever he could find and survive on; if she had stayed away entirely he wouldn't have demanded to know where she'd been. He had mostly accepted her presence until she had hurt or threatened him, and once she had backed off again then the fight had been over.

Despite the fear she'd felt of Toothless, the dizzying wrongness of looking at a human figure who acted and spoke like a dragon but then drew and maybe even sort of thought like a very clever human, and the pressure she'd been under to communicate with him so she could ask for help, she'd almost learned to relax in his company from time to time.

She didn't have to be a leader around him. She could just be Astrid, and that is puzzling her now, because Astrid's concept of herself has been inextricably linked for a very long time to the idea of being a leader; she doesn't remember who she is outside of that role, because that is what she has become.

But now part of Astrid wants to go back and sit on the beach and draw in the sand and watch the waves some more.

At the time it had only been another source of frustration, because she has thought most about the times when things were happening, or failing to happen even though she was trying to make them happen.

But for the first time in her memory, Astrid had been given a chance to spend hours doing nothing at all.

If he was still here, she thinks she'd probably be talking at him instead of the Nadder – they have the same sort of ability to listen without really understanding or caring. It's like talking to the wall: pointless, but somewhat helpful just because she can listen to herself talk things through.

Maybe her people have a point – what in the name of all the gods is wrong with her?

She doesn't look up from her intense concentration on the ground before her until that ground darkens slightly as a shadow falls over her.

Moving as little as possible, Astrid lifts her eyes but not her head to see the Nadder standing over her, sniffing at her.

All her instincts yell at her to jump away, to duck into the blue dragon's blind spot and stay there until she can grab a weapon or spot a weakness in its scales that she might be able to hit with her fists or feet, or to expect to die.

She doesn't do any of that. She doesn't have a weapon and her audience of gawkers has gotten bored after the first few days of nothing happening and no interesting carnage, so there is no one to help her if she screams. She'd gotten bored in her own right with Fishlegs talking constantly. She suspects that his endless wellspring of information about dragons, most of which she is beginning to think is wrong in some way, is scaring the dragons they are working with as much as their presence, especially as for much of the time Fishlegs has been shouting at her from the ringside. So today Astrid is alone.

Astrid stares at the blue dragon, which has her head on one side to watch the Viking woman on the ground.

"Hello," she says. It's a stupid thing to say but it's better than screaming.

A yellow eye blinks at her, and nostrils flare. The dragon smells of fish and reptile and the dank stone of the caves ringing the pit. Astrid wonders what the dragon thinks she smells like. Metal, probably, like the axe she remembers using on this dragon a number of times before. The ocean, hopefully. Fear, hopefully not.

After a very long moment the Nadder huffs and retreats a few steps, crouching down like a nesting bird and staring at her from a safer distance.

"Okay…" Astrid says eventually. "My turn?"

She gets up from the ground and walks very slowly towards the Nadder, keeping her hands visible so the dragon can see she's not holding a weapon.

Step…step…step…but she must have crossed some invisible line because the dragon leaps to her feet and screeches, jumping at Astrid on the attack.

Her instincts take over and Astrid drops and rolls backwards, evading those long claws and tumbling across the ring on purpose. She comes out of the somersault on her feet and blesses all that practice in training and in battle, getting her hands on a javelin hanging from the rack on the wall and whipping it around to throw almost as soon as the Nadder realizes she has missed her strike.

But she doesn't want to kill the blue dragon – she'd have to start all over and she does not have the time or the patience, not with a war on and getting worse and worse every time her enemies come back – so Astrid throws it past her. The dragon's head snaps around to follow the spear's flight as it ricochets off the pit wall, then leaps after it.

Much to Astrid's surprise, the Nadder pounces on the fallen spear and carries it back to the center of the ring again, then drops it.

…and nudges it with her nose so that it rattles across the ground towards the Viking woman.

"Gods of fire and thunder," says Astrid, low and impressed and incredulous, completely taken aback. She will never understand dragons, ever. She kneels and stretches out to get a finger on the spear and pull it towards her, rising to throw it again in a different direction.

The Nadder thunders off after it, catching it in midair this time and bringing it back, dropping it on the ground in a different place and ignoring Astrid until she goes and gets it herself.

Dragons play fetch? Astrid can work with that.

Flinging the spear away for a third time for the blue dragon to retrieve, Astrid runs for a fresh sealed barrel of fish and opens it while the Nadder is distracted. This time, once the spear has been successfully caught, Astrid waves the fish to catch the dragon's eye.

"Fish!" she calls. "Come on! Fish!"

The dragon drops the spear and heads for the fish.

"No!" Astrid commands, using the palm-out signal that the dragon has already learned to recognize, pointing to the fallen spear, and beckoning.

Hiccup had understood things better if she used signs than when she'd used words… She's still not sure how much of what she'd seen had been corrupted human behavior and how much was genuine dragon, but that's all she's got to work with.

After a few false starts, her fellow fetch-player figures out spear, fish; no spear, no fish and picks up the spear again and brings it to Astrid in her jaws.

Astrid trades fish for javelin despite all those teeth right there and, as the Nadder eats the reward, dares to reach out to touch blue scales, keeping the spear carefully point-down and away from the dragon, saying "Good girl," in a low and unthreatening voice.

Dragons are definitely warm, and their scales are softer than she had expected, even when her unarmed hand encounters an old scar. Astrid thinks she might have been the one who put it there, and feels unexpectedly guilty.

The blue-dappled dragon growls at that, but is placated by another fish.

"…Gods damn it," Astrid says without any particular venom. "You are definitely going to need a name."

Two mornings later, she steps out of her house into chaos.

She is busy thinking about what she is going to call the Nadder and what she might try next and if other dragons can be taught to fetch or if that was unique to…she still hasn't chosen a name…and how that can be used to teach them to defend Berk rather than attack it, so she doesn't even notice the shouting until she is right in the middle of it.

Quite literally – it seems to be centered right here.

Astrid ducks as something flies over her head, and decides to stay down as something else flies after it – she thinks the second one might have been a weapon of some kind. There's shouting all around her of things like, "Little monsters! Get 'em!" and "Pests!" and "I've got one cornered! …never mind! Fast little –"

She misses the ending of that under a dragon screech and is probably glad of it.

Interspersed with yelling humans, there's the extra racket of a whole mob of shrieking little dragons, which are buzzing everywhere and landing on things and speeding away into the air only to return to dive onto Vikings – Terrors are small but they're stubborn. And if the bellowing of the man currently running in circles waving his arms is any indication, they also bite ears quite hard.

"What the –" Astrid doesn't get to finish her sentence, which is probably a good thing because she doesn't even know what the rest of the sentence would have been, before she's swarmed by Terrible Terrors, which all stop in midair at the sight of her as she stands back up and then dive at her in a shrieking cloud.

Small claws catch in her ruff and her hair and her tunic, snag on her belt and her leather skirt, cling to her leggings and hide behind her boots. Her arms come up involuntarily to block them but somehow the movement turns into trying to hold three Terrors at once against her body as they hide from the Vikings who are chasing them.

They all peep and whine and cry at her at once and in nothing remotely resembling unison, scolding and complaining and acting truly pitiful as they protest their treatment by humans.

Big eyes in oversized heads look at her appealingly and the Terrors talk and babble incomprehensibly, frightened chattering turning into happier sounds as the flock clings to her or hides behind her.

"Um," says Astrid, for lack of a better observation, and then notices anew that the crowd outside her house is trying to figure out what to do next. They can't attack the little dragons that have so unusually invaded their village. Terrors usually only venture into town to steal the occasional chicken or shiny toy, but they mob and attack Vikings who have gone into the forest and into their territory, especially after dark, which is probably how they'd earned their name. But now they're all over Astrid and Viking axes aren't much use with her so close. And if that woman swings that mace in any direction but dropping it Astrid is going to be upset – it's a menace.

She wants one.

"It's all right!" she says as a precaution. "They're not trying to hurt me…what are you lot doing here?" This last is to the Terrors, some of which she thinks she recognizes by their markings as part of the flock that liked to play with Hiccup and Toothless on the beach.

Excited dragons shriek and wave their wings and make what she now recognizes as dragon-grins at her, crawling all over her like she's a tree. They keep huge careful eyes on the gaping Vikings but they also start making happier noises, thrumming and chirping. She realizes they're talking to her.

Maybe this is what a beehive feels like. Astrid is somewhere between horrified and hysterically amused.

"Did you come looking for me?" she asks them, knowing she's not going to get an answer. "All the way into the village? Really? Don't you have anyone else to play with?"

The Terrors know she's talking to them and that she's not really mad even if they don't understand her words. They yelp joyously at the attention and the one perched on her head leans over to lick as much of her face as it can reach.

"Augh!" Astrid protests. "Don't do that! Get off!"

It was bad enough being climbed on by Terrors on the beach with no one to see her, but with what feels like half the village watching –! Astrid can feel herself blushing with embarrassment and blushes at that.

"Are you all right?" the woman with the mace asks her. "Hold still! We'll rescue you!"

She doesn't need rescuing. She needs…Astrid doesn't know what she does need, but she knows she doesn't need an audience. Unfortunately, she seems to have one.

She also has a decision to make.

Silly little dragons purr and stare at her and hang from her clothes and her hair trustingly.

Vikings stare and prepare to attack on her word.

Damn it all.

"Leave them alone."

"Really?" just about everyone asks all at once.

"It's all right," Astrid admits, chagrined and resigned to the fact that everyone has now seen her covered in dragons and she will now be officially crazy in the eyes of the village once this story gets around as it inevitably will. So the only thing to do is embrace it and stride through. "They're not hurting me. They're just looking for someone to play with and silly enough to come into the village after me. I bet they were swarming around my house when you spotted them, weren't they?"

Vikings nod.

"You followed my scent, didn't you?" Astrid asks the Terrors, who chirr at her cheerfully. She adds to her would-be rescuers, "I'll send them away."

"You can do that?" a younger man asks.

"Maybe not," she has to say – the last thing she needs is to fail at that in front of everyone. Well, the last thing that could probably happen right now…she can think of a lot of other things that she doesn't need. A freak snowstorm – around here, it could happen. A giant sea monster – one that eats boats. An attack of Flightmares – lots of them this time. An ambush by Berserkers, unless they've all charged off cliffs at some point – also possible around here. A sudden plague of twins.

That line of thinking is getting her nowhere, and she still has Terrible Terrors climbing on her in public.

"But…oh, I know! They came here looking for me, so they'll follow me. Watch this!"

It's unexpected free entertainment – she couldn't stop them from watching if she had a big hammer and all day to put it to wholehearted use.

This had better work.

"Come on, you little monsters," Astrid says. To her surprise, she can hear affection creeping into her voice – they're pretty harmless despite the little scratches she has accumulated from their claws as they scramble over her. And they're kind of cute in a really awkward way. "We're going to the dragon pit and I'm going to introduce you to another dragon that I want to like me. Seems like you do already, so maybe you can give her some hints. But you're going to have to let me move."

Astrid walks through the village with her head high, everyone watching her and talking to each other about her, and an entire flock of little Terrors following her quite happily. And she keeps her dignity every step of the way.

If she's crazy, at least she's impressively crazy. They'll thank her when she comes up with a whole new way to protect them from dragon raids and the humans get one step closer to winning this war for good.

"I want one," she hears a child's voice say in her wake.

As she might have guessed, by the time she's played a few more rounds of fetch with the Nadder she's decided to call Stormfly, they've attracted a brand-new kind of audience, this one mostly consisting of children who want to come down and play with the Terrors, who are holding races around the edges of the pit for no good reason whatsoever.

Far from recommending her to Stormfly in any conventional way, the Terrors have done so by annoying the Nadder so much that Astrid's newfound power to tell them to go and play somewhere else – they never go far, but they do go – has endeared the Viking woman to the dragon somewhat.

It's something Astrid noticed earlier today that gives her an idea.

"All right," she calls up to the watchers at the top of the ring and over to the ones pressed against the portcullis, "but I need you to run an errand for me first."

Hands go up and she instantly has a dozen volunteers.

"Run back down to the village and tell Gobber that I want to put chain nets over the doors to the dragon pens. I need the nets and people to install them. Oh, and more fish – even little fish. Especially little fish. Got that?"

"And then we can play with the nice little dragons?" a red-haired girl demands.

They can when Astrid finds any – right now what she's got is overactive Terrible Terrors.

"Yes," she agrees anyway. "But only once the nets are set up."

Kids scramble and she and Stormfly and the Terrors play fetch some more. The Terrors had gotten the hang of the game just by watching, and of course they had wanted to play too, although at first she'd thought they'd gotten bored and left. After they'd swarmed back in and she'd been showered with twigs that were the right size for Terrors to fetch, she'd learned differently.

Throwing little sticks for little dragons had turned out to be kind of fun. If the little ones insist on playing with the Terrors, she's going to delegate that game to them. Maybe no one will end up too scratched by the end of it.

Not that she will admit this to the people who respond to her summons with stone-working tools and chain nets. Astrid bribes Stormfly back into her pen with another fish and distracts the Terrors by dumping the pail of bait fish in an out-of-the-way area where they won't get stepped on by her workers and leaving the flock to fight over it. That will keep them busy for a while.

"I'll show you," she says every time someone asks why they are hanging chain netting very securely in front of each cage. "I don't have time to teach all of these dragons to work for me instead of fighting me. So I'm just going to teach one – and let the rest watch."

If the Terrors, who are not very bright, can learn by watching, then surely the bigger dragons can do the same. And that's how Gobber has taught trainee fighters for ages now – he's always got to make an example of someone, and everyone else learns from that poor idiot's mistakes in a big hurry so Gobber doesn't have a chance to mock them too. At least, that's Astrid's theory.

This sounds like the promise of a spectacle, so she has acquired what feels like most of the people in the village by the end of the afternoon. A number of them are grumbling that they were raised to fight dragons, not play with them.

"Yes," Astrid says for what feels like the hundredth time, "but wouldn't it be something to have dragons fighting for you instead?"

"Dragons hate humans," she's told over and over again.

"Not always," she retorts. "I'll show you. If I can get a dragon to play with me, I can get a dragon to fight for me. And if I can get one to fight for me, I can get others to do the same. What better way to fight dragons than with dragons?"

She does not like having her instructions questioned, but she knows she's seen things they haven't. She's seen a human boy ride on the back of a dragon, the two like a single creature; she's seen them play together in the sand like children; she's seen them curl up together and comfort each other; she's seen something more than a monster in a dragon's eyes and she's seen a dragon's heart – which does exist despite everything she's been taught – in almost-human eyes.

They doubt her. All right. She'll convince them.

Her people will have to trust her until she can prove herself, and she knows that the only proof some of these people will accept is every dragon dead except the ones she manages to train to fight for them, and even then they'll probably want those killed as well.

She will deal with that after they win.

"I hope ye ken wha' ye're doin', lassie," says Gobber, who has come up to the fighting pit to oversee the work – and watch the show.

"I do," Astrid says, but she thinks it might have come out as "Me too."

Finally the work is done and the bolts are tested and it is time for Astrid to try out her idea – in front of what feels like everyone on Berk. She clears everyone out of the ring, including herself, and double-checks just to be sure. As she'd half-expected, two of the children have slipped back in to play with the Terrors. Their parents corral them and the Terrors fly up to hover around Astrid anyway.

"All right," she commands. "Open the pens."

Vikings hurl themselves against levers and pulleys, competing with each other to be the ones who get their pen open the fastest, and all the gates creak open at once.

All the construction noise has probably annoyed the imprisoned dragons quite badly, because a blast of multicolored fire erupts from every doorway before they're even fully open, but the chain nets, just like the ones over the top of the pit, keep the dragons inside, and eventually they run out of fire. A high wind disperses any unexploded Zippleback gas and the arena clears.

Astrid enters the ring frightened but refusing to show it – not of the dragon eyes fixed on her from all directions and the snarls and the chances that one or more of them has kept back one last blast; and not of the audience of people who are all going to lose all respect for her if this doesn't go the way she thinks it will, the way she's planned that it will; but of the enormous red-bearded man who she has just now spotted watching her with cold eyes from his chief's chair.

After all these days of avoiding her project entirely, Stoick has come to watch her. She suspects he has come to watch her fail – he wants nothing to do with dragons ever again, except at the business end of a weapon.

"Stormfly!" she calls.

The only pen they haven't spread chain nets across is Stormfly's, and the Nadder is learning her new name. She responds to Astrid's beckoning hand and stalks towards her.

Halfway there, Astrid reaches out a hand and says "No!"

To her relief, the blue dragon stops. She holds her there for a few more seconds to show that it's not a coincidence, and then uses the same come here gesture she'd learned from Hiccup to bring the Nadder closer.

"Good girl," Astrid says, petting Stormfly's nose. "Good girl."

From above she can hear mutters of doubt and amazement.

"It's all right," she reassures the blue dragon; Stormfly is starting to look up at the crowd nervously. But almost as importantly, the dragons in the pens are watching through the chains as dragon and Viking interact without trying to kill each other. For now.

"Fish!" Astrid rewards her with one from a basket protected by a shield she'd set there on purpose earlier. "Good girl. Play fetch?"

Stormfly knows that word, and she bounds off to find the javelin she likes best.

But once again, the Terrible Terrors find a new thing to interrupt. From one of the pens, two small dragons squeeze themselves through the chain links and leap upward to the circling flock, shrieking joyously.

And for a few minutes all is chaos as the Terrible Terrors celebrate the return of two of their own. They're loud and silly and ridiculous and so very happy that even from the ground of the pit Astrid can see some smiles.

When the Terrors have exhausted themselves and are draped over the chain netting over the top of the pit, the eyes of the surrounding people turn back to the ring, where Astrid and Stormfly are calmly playing a perfectly friendly game.

Finally, after she starts to hear applause for particularly good catches on the dragon's part, Astrid takes the much-chewed spear back from Stormfly, pats the dragon's nose, sets the butt of the javelin down by her foot, and challenges the crowd, "Dragons we can teach to fight off dragons. …Anyone else want to play?"

Stoick is not among the volunteers – he is nowhere to be seen and she has no idea when he left, he can move very quietly for such a big man – but she sees some people who look like they're genuinely thinking about it.

For the next hour or so Astrid takes names and talks with her volunteers about battle strategies and goals and ideas and, yes, supervises a grand game of fetch between the children of the tribe and the Terrible Terrors until it gets too dark to play. She thinks she might have a chance to make this work.

If the gods will just give her a chance, they might be able to win the war this way, or at least do some real damage to their enemies this time.

Except early the next morning a full-scale dragon raid sweeps in.

The next morning everything changes.

To be continued.