WARNING: This is a sequel to my previous work, The Tangling. If you don't read that one first, this one isn't going to make much sense.

ASTRID

Astrid lay on her back, cuffed hands secured above her head, and stared up at pale light slowly trickling through the overhanging blanket of clouds. Her blindfold slipped down in her sleep, as usual, but exhaustion weighed her down too much to take full tactical advantage of the view. A few feet away, her mother groaned, gradually waking from her slumber on a thick blanket stolen from the clothesline of an isolated farm. Her arms stretched above her head as she yawned with an exaggerated slowness, and the poise and control in her motions, coupled with her refusal to look at Astrid, successfully fired up the fury that had been burning in Astrid's bones for days.

"Well, that was uncomfortable."

Astrid sucked in her cheeks and spit at her mother. The mass of saliva hit the ground a solid foot from her mother's waist.

Eyes still closed, the woman said, "Your aim is slowly improving."

"Rot in Hel."

"Charming." Still in the throes of a performance, her mother rose to sit back on one hand, while the other wrist slid gracefully across her forehead. Her fingers lowered to obscure a delicate yawn before sliding onto the coil of golden hair piled at her side. Her voice, lowered by the morning, began to croon out the familiar healing song. Every morning and night, in the secluded places her mother chose for rest, they continued the same ritual that had marked nearly every day of Astrid's childhood.

A frown flickered across her mother's face when she finally glanced at Astrid. The healing glow of her hair flowed onto them both. Sniffing, her mother curled her lip. Astrid stiffened in the warmth of healing, She couldn't enjoy the normally soothing glow that nonetheless still made her cuts and soreness fade away. Her mother shook the disdain off her face and finished the song.

"Well!" Sighing, her mother eased herself to her feet and began rolling up the woolly maroon blanket. "Shall we continue?"

Astrid's mind had supplied a new resistance tactic when she lay awake hours earlier, gazing up at the sky with eyes that felt like balls of granite. Another night of graphic nightmares had thrashed Astrid around on the forest floor and shot her into wakefulness multiple times. Tonight, there was only one nightmare, repeated over and over through every bout of restless sleep. It was the one where she blew out seven candles on her birthday cake and then gasped with delight when her mother pulled a young potted plant out of her bag. In the true memory, newly seven-year-old Astrid sat staring at the plant, nestled in the corner of a windowsill, for hours, swearing she could hear it grow. In the nightmare, when her tiny, skinny fingers wrapped around the pot, blood began dripping off the leaves, and her mother's voice echoed, "Now look what you've done, Astrid" Her vision filled with deep forest green before being flooded coppery red. She had awoken with gasping whimpers and the crushing weight of reality.

Now, with light creeping across the tiny clearing, and with her mother voicing her demand to keep moving in the form of a question, Astrid flopped back onto the ground, tensed her jaw, and said, "No."

Her mother huffed with frustration. "Astrid, please-"

"No."

"Why not-"

Astrid hissed out, "Because you-" She fought the lump in her throat back down. She'd cried enough the first week after H-

She'd cried enough the first week after everything. Her voice rasped out, "You killed him." Trying to say his name would summon that painful lump again and hold her breath hostage.

Though her gaze - forcefully pinned to the sky - beheld only the dusky gray of newly lit clouds, she could imagine the irritated eye-roll her mother was likely directing at her. "You're still whining about that?"

When Astrid lifted her hands to rub her palms into her eyes, one blink revealed blood dripping on her palms. Another blink cleansed her vision but not the memories. Her hands were plastered with dirt, but her mother had dragged her to a puddle last week and scrubbed the blood from Astrid's palms. Fighting her own trembling lip, she crushed her hair in her fingers and ground her teeth until the pain struck away the tears she felt coming again.

The first week after Hic-

The first week after it happened, Astrid became painfully well-acquainted with the side-effects of crying.

Her throat burned constantly, energy drained from her body and made walking an ordeal of balance, wind cracked the tear-raw skin around her eyes, and she drowned in the lethargy that naturally came after sobbing everything out of her body. Even fighting, her instinct, seemed like the pursuit of some other Astrid in some other world.

Of course, the fighting spirit came back in the second week, because he was dead.

And her mother killed him.

So Astrid would kill her mother.

If there was a rock on the ground near Astrid's feet, she kicked it at her mother's head, gradually improving her aim over the first two days of attempting active vengeance. If her mother even barely slackened the chains still binding Astrid's wrists behind her back, Astrid leaped and swung her arms under her feet, whipped her wrists up, and attempted to strangle her mother with the iron links. If her mother stood too close, Astrid slammed her body into the woman and her forearm into the woman's throat.

Her mother learned quickly. After a few hours of Astrid's first attempts, the woman blindfolded her daughter, wrapped Astrid's own hair around her chained wrists and arms, and tied Astrid's skirts tight around her knees. Trying to ram her mother to the ground minutes later, Astrid ended up flat on the forest floor, unable to push herself to her feet. The most Astrid could do was feel for rocks with her toes and spit in her mother's general direction. Now, on the cusp of the third week, exhaustion had reared its ugly head, keeping her on the forest floor despite her mother's protests.

Trees rustled above her head, and she tensed. The wind in the branches, the animals scurrying overhead, and the gradual shifts of nature's courses had not yet fully made her acquaintance, despite the two weeks in their midst.

Cracking through the clearing was her mother's voice, cold. "Come now, don't be ridiculous."

Astrid would run out of fingers if she counted the scars on her lips. A hundred wars were marked there, where she waged against her own tears. But now, here, she didn't add to those ragged tallies. Instead, tears burned the raw edges of her eyes, and she stared up at the sky and refused to blink.

"Why?"

"'Why' what? At least be specific-"

"Tell me why you killed him, and I won't fight you for one day." As limited as her navigational awareness was, Astrid could still feel how her protests and obstinance slowed their pace across the two weeks. Even blindfolded and exhausted, she fought against every step. "Tell me why."

Astrid's raw voice matched her skin. Her body weighed a thousand pounds. Her eyes, with the trees and sky above blurred into pastel swaths of greens and grays, felt immovably weighted. She listened to a bird trilling and the flutter of wings.

Swallowing, she pushed the boulder that was her head to the side to see her mother: arms crossed, brow darkened, chin lifted. "I would have gone with you," Astrid rasped. "We had a deal."

A groan bled through her mother's words. "I never should have let you near him. He never would have left us alone."

"You don't know th-"

"Oh, please, Astrid, do you think I'm an idiot?" Her mother scoffed. "He gave up the crown for you. He came back to the tower for you. For whatever reason I can't fathom, you had him absolutely bewitched."

Astrid dug her fingernails into her palms. "He's-" she choked back a sob and forced words out instead. "He was a good person. He was kind."

The woman actually snorted. Then she tossed her head back and laughed. The street performers Astrid saw beneath the lanterns had trilled their lines with the same insincerity. "Please, dear," her mother said, wiping away an invisible tear that left her fingers bone-dry, "you would describe the way he kissed you as kind?"

Astrid hadn't tasted anything when she kissed him. Some part of her had expected a taste, but it was the touch and the smell that had dizzied her. His fingers - she'd felt them once, when they'd fled the inn all those days or centuries ago, when he'd reached out of the darkness and grabbed her hand to pull her toward safety - were unexpectedly rough in some places and painfully soft in others, and he'd traced invisible pathways on her face like he wanted to map out every one. Astrid remembered how he smelled, too: like the logs tossed onto the fireplace sporadically throughout her childhood. When she was little, Astrid always drew near to relish the sparking, smoky smell that clouded her face and hair.

But then there was that copper smell, ruining everything, polluting her memories with its wet, scarlet horror-

Astrid rolled to her side and propped herself onto one elbow, and the horror surged up in her until it roared up her throat and make her heave last night's foraged excuse for a meal.

She could hear her mother's groan of disgust somewhere beyond the cacophony of the vomiting.

Astrid heaved again, and again, and again. When her gasping echoed in her empty stomach, she collapsed backwards onto the matted grass beneath her. Air sweetened her lungs, and her loud, gulping breaths filled the void between her and her mother.

"Oh, good, you're done with that." Her mother inspected the flawlessly maintained beds of her nails. A different kind of sickness swarmed over Astrid. All those masks of kindness, care, and compassion her mother wore throughout the years had been left behind in the tower to rot.

Don't think about the tower.

Astrid pushed one more shuddering breath into her lungs. I can't cry any more, she told herself. Her fingernails dug down past the grass into the dirt and clawed at whatever tendrils of calm or composure it might provide. "Where are we going, Mother?" She felt the fight rising in her - and she relinquished her hold on it. Just for today. One of them had to hold to their deals.

Sniffing, her mother shoved the last of the supplies into their sack. "Showing actual concern for where we're going? Or are you just planning another escape?"

Astrid's voice struck a single tone, dulled by exhaustion. "You don't have a plan, do you?"

"Typical. You never trusted me to take care of you, so why start now?"

As she closed her eyes, Astrid heaved another labored sigh. "I did, Mother. But you betrayed me-"

"You betrayed yourself, Astrid! And you betrayed me!" Grabbing at the chain, her mother growled as she pulled Astrid's hands beneath her bent legs and behind her back. A few more grunting yanks pulled Astrid to her feet. She didn't fight against the woman but instead remained limp and dull-eyed as her mother spewed more vitriol. "What happened to that sweet little girl who loved her mother?"

Anger takes energy. Pain takes energy. Save it. Conserve it. Wait. Astrid stood, shoulders loose. "I don't know," she murmured. "What happened to her?"

Her mother wrapped her in chains and her own hair, as she did every morning, and Astrid plucked at a loose strand of hair that had caught on her fingernails. "Honestly, Astrid, you really need to communicate better with me! We could have avoided all-" her mother scanned Astrid and huffed a dark curl out of her eyes "- this... if you had just communicated with me from the beginning!"

Had her conversations with her mother always spun in infinite loops like this? Astrid hadn't bothered to count her mother's calls for communication over the past few days, but she tracked the rises and falls of her mother's voice with a dutiful expectation of the patterns. Yes, these circles of blame had always lived with them in the tower - and the codification of her mother's rants was an old habit she never acknowledged before now.

Astrid interrupted the newest heaping of blame and deflection. "Where are we going?" A small bird, a streak of blue, shot across the patch of sky peeking through the trees. "I told you I wouldn't fight you today. So just tell me."

The chains jangled as her mother adjusted her grip to swing the sack of supplies over her shoulder. "I do, in fact, have a plan and a destination, Astrid," the woman huffed. "And as it just so happens, we're almost there."

Before her mother had grabbed the blue scarf to use as a blindfold last week, Astrid could see the forests sprawling around them. When her eyes were obstructed by that dark cerulean - a color that now made her teeth grit and shoulders stiffen - the rustle of trees and chatter of squirrels still flowed around her, and soft grass or thin twigs still prickled at her feet. Thus, from what little Astrid could comprehend of this vast world - and occasional slips of the scar onto her nose - they still walked through forests. Today, for whatever reason, her mother didn't bother with the blindfold. Astrid's arms and legs were too well-secured for her to attempt anything anyway.

The blindfold offered only one respite that she was loathe to admit. When it bound her eyes, she didn't have to force her face upward. She didn't have to shepherd her gaze away from the brown stain stretching from her collar to her hem.

His blood.

Astrid's stomach seized again, but there was nothing left to expel. She used the last dredges of energy to put one foot in front of the other and keep her eyes pinned to the horizon.

The sun was slowly making its procession toward the peak of the sky, and the mountains crept closer and closer until their tips soared above the cloaks of the trees an hour ago. She only knew those jagged monoliths stretching across the horizon were mountains because Hi-

She only knew they were mountains because of the description offered to her, weeks ago. When he'd first struggled to explain - and now Astrid pushed at the memories of arms waving around as they gestured, tracing invisible mountain peaks in the air - then Astrid had let the visions of mountains trickle across her mind, and she'd pictured herself grinning and sprinting toward the first mountain she would ever see, someday. Now, in the someday that had crept into today, Astrid could only stumble toward those distant peaks and swallow the bile that memories elicited.

Astrid, trance-like in exhaustion for most of the morning, heard some thoughts echoing in the back of her mind with questions of how her mother intended on confronting the mountains. But when the two women curved around a thicket of brambles that prodded at Astrid's bare feet, her mother's triumphant hums signaled that the cabin before them was their destination.

Blinking away the merciful fog in her mind, Astrid peered closer at the cabin. An overgrown path trailed to a mottled door framed with vines. Tall weeds skirted the foundations but found themselves cut short beneath the windows. Peeking around a corner was a pile of logs, freshly cut and neatly stacked no higher than Astrid's knees.

"Here we are!" her mother crowed, striding forward, the volume of her voice unburdened by secrecy in this secluded clearing backed by mountains. She tugged at Astrid's chains - not violent but still insistent - and Astrid stumbled after her mother. She walked down the path, where dirt dusted her ankles; through the doorway, where a tiny spiderweb glimmered with dew; and into the dark room. Her mother slid the curtains back to let gray light stream in, but not before Astrid nearly tripped on the frayed edges of a yellow rug.

Astrid watched her mother scan the room, tapping her fingers together in thought. "Now... where shall you go?" she murmured. "Ah, there! Perfect." After dropping their sack of provisions at the foot of a little round table, the woman strided to the far left corner, unreached by sunlight and bare of furniture. She swung the chain up and over the rafters and yanked Astrid farther and farther into darkness. Her mother set to work, wrapping the chain repeatedly, sliding it this way and that on the rafters, clicking her tongue as she loosened or tugged at the iron links to set the length just as she liked it. Finally, she shoved Astrid to the floor. When Astrid tried to sit comfortably, her arms remained suspended above her head. The woman pulled Astrid back to her feet, and Astrid ambled along with dead-weight steps as her mother checked how far Astrid could walk one way or the other.

"Perfect," she repeated, with a wide smile that hid the gleam of her teeth. "I'll fashion you a bed later." With a wave of her hand, her mother stretched, glided across the floor, and sank into the cot on the other side of the room. Astrid heard a chuckle lace her mother's words as she added, "Or perhaps not."

Sluggish, Astrid returned to her seat, this time curling up deep into the corner. Her arms still hung in the air, the chains refusing to budge, but Astrid's anger and tears had robbed her of any energy to care. Her head lolled onto her shoulder, her vision faded, and she grasped, starving, for a few tendrils of elusive sleep.

HICCUP

Consciousness proved to be sporadic. When it did grip Hiccup, dragging him from the strange gray fog of nothingness, consciousness also proved to be painful.

This time, darkness flickered back and forth across his vision, and at some point his mind grasped that the undulating blackness was nothing more than his own eyelids grudgingly allowing him back into reality. While he grasped at vision, at fully seeing the high wooden beams below him illuminated by some warm golden light beyond his peripherals, memories of consciousness paraded across his mind - just as elusive as steady vision.

Flashes of light and noise came first. He must have awoken several times before any feeling set into his skin and bones, but these moments must have passed quickly.

The later memories were more painful. Something drowned him, shoving him into seas of ice and squeezing his lungs beyond function. Then darkness, and nothing. Then something ripped a match across his chest, setting him aflame - and his skin crackled and burned like parchment. Then darkness and blissful nothingness followed again. Then something shoved him to the ground, screaming at him, but words were unfamiliar objects his mouth had never tasted, and darkness followed soon after. But in every instance, rough blankets scratched at his fingertips, and the familiar creaks of his old bed crooned at the edge of his consciousness.

Now - and Hiccup could think again, think well enough to remember that he did know what words were after all, and to finally snatch those wispy memories fluttering through his fingers - this time was different. A low groan eased out between his gritted teeth, and his toes curled into the blankets. His joints felt like the rusted pulleys he'd tinkered with as a younger teenager, and he halfway expected to hear them creak when he pulled his hands to his face.

When his palms ground into his eyes to give him that blissful pressure, one more memory that had felt more like a dream crept to the surface. It clung to the shadows, only forced into the open slowly at his prodding curiosity.

Sitting up straight in bed.

Gobber, offering some joke through a grimace.

Yanking the blankets off his bed with arms that felt more like some poorly-formed puppet's than his own.

Seeing-

Hiccup jerked up to a sitting position. Immediately, the memories swirled his head and pummeled his stomach. He hissed and winced, but his stiff fingers were jerkily crushing the blankets, and his already-aching arms were swinging backwards to see-

A stale breath he had been holding for who knows how long escaped his lungs, and his body crumbled into his seat. He stared down at a stump where a pale, freckled leg should have extended into big, bony toes.

"Oh." The word came of its own volition.

He remained alone in his room for only one more foreboding second before his bedroom door swung open, and Cassandra peered around the door-frame at him. His alive-and-whole curiosity jumped past the obvious, that of course Cass would be on guard, and tapped instead at the full set of armor hanging on her torso. When was the last time Hiccup had seen Cass on guard duty in full armor? Sure, she took her position seriously, but not usually to the point of wearing the entirety of her speed-reducing and clunky panoply.

"Hi" proved much harder to say than "Oh", rasping across the desert that lay in his throat.

He could have said other things now, like the usual "What's the damage?" after Cass dragged him home after a late night. He could thank her for keeping the lanterns dim so that light wouldn't sear his vision when his eyes opened. A tangle of questions, all of them pulsing with urgency but still obscured by the fog of sleep, nested in his brain, and grogginess made the prospect of detangling them seem exhausting.

So instead, they stared at each other. Hiccup saw the dark hollows under Cass's eyes and the way she gripped the sword at her hip with ice-pale knuckles, and his own fingers instinctively squeezed the folds of his blankets.

When she did speak, her eyes didn't leave Hiccup's, but she aimed her words to the side. "Alert their majesties. His highness is awake." He felt like a new recruit to the guard under Cass's narrowing eyes. She added, "And it looks like he's staying that way."

Listening to the clank of armor revealing that another guard had been positioned on the other side of the door until Cass sent him or her on their way, Hiccup pushed away the tendrils of sleep still trying to pull him back into darkness. Instead, that clank of armor faded as the guard left, and Hiccup's ears adjusted to the startling absence of silence. He could hear shrill voices shivering in the hallways, interspersed with the clanks of pots and pans, hurried but careful footsteps, palpitating laughter, and hissed whispers.

His brow furrowed and his lips twisted into a frown, but still Cass said nothing. She only looked at him. Hiccup squirmed, bending his knees to sit more comfortably - and then bending only one knee, remembering that sudden lacking that stilled him temporarily before spurring his squirming once again.

"Hi," he tried again.

Nothing.

The rumbles began in some distant hallway, and Hiccup sighed. He allowed himself the tiny respite of closing his eyes and relaxing his frame back to rest on his elbows as he listen to faint gasps and offerings of "Your Majesty!" as the rumblings grew in volume and urgency. He imagined, if a mountain could move, it would sound like his father striding down a stone corridor.

Anyone with even reasonably good attention to detail who lived in the stone fortress and spent sufficient time in the longhouse learned to distinguish the mountain from the thunder. King Alick, or Stoick to his friends: the mountain. Unyielding, massive, towering. King Corran, or Cor to a select few: the thunder. Sudden, overwhelming, foreboding.

Hiccup picked up the footsteps of the thunder too, from a different corner but moving steadily closer. He tilted his head back and hissed at the stiffness in his neck. He had just woken up, but somehow he was already in trouble. Excellent.

He brushed the dust off long-unused words and brought them out into the room. "How long have I been out?" His voice creaked from the strain of usage.

As she turned back to stand at attention, Cass released a small breath. Her armor clicked. "Three-and-a-half weeks," she said, just loud enough for him to hear.

Hiccup blinked slow as his mind unpacked and reassembled each word. "Three and..." he murmured. His hand nudged his tunic out of the way so he could finger the bandages wrapped neatly around his chest. Thumbing at the edge of the wrappings, he crafted in his mind what shapes a stab wound might form.

"Astrid," he whispered, because that was who mattered now. He was alive and whole-

Mostly whole.

Well, he was alive, at least, and except for the scolding he was likely to endure in a moment, he was safe. But the woman claiming to be Astrid's mother had dragged her away from him, and unless by some miracle Astrid had managed to escape, she'd been chained to her mother's selfish devices for nearly a full moon's cycle.

He detangled one question from the mess in his brain, about Cass possibly hearing of a fugitive blond girl with a frying pan, and he was dragging the query across his tongue when the thunder and mountain reached roaring crescendos.

"Hiccup!" His father rushed to his side, and the question fell away.

His father's eyebrows were knit together over wide eyes and a heavily breathing mouth. He wasn't angry. Stoick was afraid.

But on top of that - his father never called him Hiccup.

It had been his mother who bestowed that nickname.

Hiccup struggled with the sudden overwhelming situation. Everything demanded to be processed right now, but everything was too massive to fully grasp in his head.

"Hi... Dad." Whatever floundered on Hiccup's face was a poor excuse for a smile, but it spurred his father to dive down for a hug. Hiccup jerked in expectation of his father's normally bone-crushing embrace, but breath stayed in his lungs as his father positioned his arms loosely around Hiccup's torso, and only for a brief moment that trembled with how much his father clearly wanted to hold much tighter. "Uh," said Hiccup, flicking his eyes between his father's red mane and Corran's tight grimace from his position in the doorway.

His father pulled himself back up to tower over the bed as he released a hundred tightly-held breaths. "I'm so glad you're alright, son," he said, and Hiccup only realized what his own wobbly, unsure smile must look like when he saw something nearly identical peeking out from his father's robust ginger mustache.

"Yeah," Hiccup said, nodding just to do something with the sudden pent-up energy twitching within. "Same here."

Corran slid to the door and ordered the guard, "Please alert my wife that Prince Henry has awoken." The clatter of armor quickly faded as the guard moved. Corran and Cass turned to each other and exchanged tight and quick nods. Corran stepped back into the room. Cass closed the door behind him, though only Hiccup seemed to spot the sliver of light peeking through the nearly-closed door.

Cor clasped his hands in front of him. His shoulders drooped, and the unfamiliar shadows under his own eyes deepened. "We need to talk," he rumbled. Hiccup winced and wished he could close his ears somehow.

Stoick nodded at him, and the cheer melted off his face. Only when the lantern flickered more brightly did the light illuminate his bloodshot eyes. Hiccup inched back, looking between the two jarls.

"Hal, what happened?"

Grimacing, Hiccup did his best to answer, but his breath dragged across sandpaper in his throat. Stoick grabbed a mug of water but slid it gently into Hiccup's hands, and Hiccup tipped it back to drink greedily. The cool liquid washed away the desert, and Hiccup tried again. "I got stabbed." He paused, realized that part would be obvious, and continued. "Some woman... I was trying to save Astrid- save her daughter, and she- the woman, not Astrid- she stabbed me."

The men exchanged glances before Stoick surveyed him and asked, "And the Night Fury?"

Hiccup froze. "What-"

"A Night Fury plummeted to the front gate of the castle," Cor interceded, stiffening at the offense of a dragon existing in the same world as himself. "Carrying you in its mouth."

Yanking himself up to a sitting position, Hiccup yelped, "What?"

"We fought back the beast-"

"You fought him?"

"-clearly exhausted, so we managed to capture-"

"You captured him?

"-that library boy convinced us to let him study it instead of just killing it-"

"You were going to kill him?" Hiccup screamed, and both men stopped. Their tightening fists stilled, and their darkening brows lifted. They stared at him.

"Him?" Stoick asked, barely restraining some kind of emotion.

"My dragon! Toothless! Who you just said saved my life! You were going to kill him!" Hiccup had never raised his voice at his father before, but he couldn't reign in that terror pushing his voice up to the rafters.

Corran's brow furrowed. "Your dragon?" he murmured.

"It didn't save your life," Stoick roared, his face bright red. "It nearly killed you!"

"He took me to you so you could save me! He saved my life," Hiccup yelled as he leaned forward.

"It bit off your leg," Corran retorted, his voice low but still simmering.

Hiccup threw up his arms. "I was falling from the top of a tower! He had to catch me somehow!" Even as he defended Toothless - as he should, he knew it - his mind wrapped itself around the new absence. His eyes flickered to the bandages encasing his leg, but the glance was too brief to catch any glimpse of possible scars branching out from beneath the wrappings.

"You were falling from the top of a tower?" Cor repeated, questioning.

"Yes! Weren't either of you listening? Astrid's mother- or whoever that woman is- was going to chain her up and take her away, so I went to try to get her and save her- Astrid, not the woman. But that harlot stabbed me!"

"In a tower?" repeated Cor.

"Yes! And then she left me alone to bleed out, I guess, so I had to throw myself out the window-"

"You did what?" Stoick roared.

"-so I guess the only way Toothless could catch me was by grabbing my leg-"

Stoick howled, "You named it?" as Corran snarled, "You gave it a name?" Hiccup shrunk back as they jerked forward.

"I did," he said softly. Because he's my best friend. But those words, so long kept a secret, stayed habitually hidden behind his tongue. Swallowing a lump in his throat, Hiccup gazed up at his father, and he couldn't help the whine tinging his words as he begged, "Please, Dad. Please don't kill Toothless. Don't hurt him."

Stoick's fists shook. "You befriended it. You befriended that monster." His voice was a low rumble, like a cave shuddering in the wake of an earthquake. Hiccup shrunk under Stoick's glare as the man hissed, "You've gone mad."

"No..." The rest of the protest died on his lips as he watched Stoick pivot and stomped toward the door.

Cor held out an arm to bar Stoick's way. "Not yet," he growled, though the twitch of his eyes revealed the anger was reserved fully for Hiccup.

"You heard him!" Stoick hissed.

Nodding, Cor said, "I did. But that's not the only reason we're here." If he hadn't seen it with his own eyes, Hiccup would never have believed either man could shiver like that - barely perceptible, but so unbelievable that it couldn't be missed.

Stoick's shoulders fell, and he sighed while Cor rubbed at his brow. "Right," Stoick whispered.

His mind whirling, Hiccup's voice cracked as he interrupted the jarls' silent exchange. "Not right! It's not alright!" Only when his hands dropped onto his legs did he feel how his arms were shaking. "You can't kill my dragon, please-"

"Your dra-" Stoick snarled, and Hiccup missed those brief moments where his father was hugging him and looking at him like a long-lost gemstone. But his father squeezed his fists tight, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes for a few seconds. "We'll discuss that... devil... later. We have more importa-"

Hiccup's voice was so loud it shocked even his own still-sleepy, still-sensitive ears. "No! We need to talk about Toothless-"

Corran slammed a fist against the wall, glaring at Hiccup. "The beast is fine! We won't kill him for the moment!"

"Or hurt him?" Hiccup questioned, and he could hear his heart galloping in his chest in the resulting silence.

As Corran slid a hand down his face, he replied. "Aye. We have bigger problems even than your treachery now."

Hiccup's laugh was high-pitched and stuttering. He was powerless. All he could do was trust Corran's word. A few feet from the foot of his bed, the door completely closed, but again only Hiccup seemed to notice. Whatever was coming next, Cass didn't want to hear it, or she'd already heard it.

Cor rubbed at his eyes and forehead while Stoick squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth. Watching, Hiccup felt his stomach clench.

When Cor finally spoke, the words crept just above a whisper. "Four assassination attempts."

Hiccup's jaw dropped before he whispered, "What?"

Stoick clenched and unclenched his fists, his fury cast aside. "Two on Cor, one on me, and... one on you."

Someone shoved him to the ground, screaming at him. What he'd dismissed as another hallucinated side effect of a fever now established itself as reality. Stretching that half-memory out, he picked at every detail he could remember. That screaming voice. Low, barely tinged with femininity, rasping in its urgency-

"Cass," Hiccup murmured, and his father nodded as every giant bone in his body sagged.

"She saved your life," Stoick supplied.

Hiccup tried to meet his father's downcast eyes. "Why? Why did- who wants us dead?"

Cor grimaced and glared at Stoick. "If you remember, Hal, we mentioned reports of unrest throughout Berk. But your father, here-"

"Let it go, Corran," Stoick groaned.

"If you hadn't dismissed-" Pressing his fingers to his eyes, Corran tilted his head back. "Fine."

Hiccup fiddled with the frayed corner of an old woven gray blanket. "Unrest?" he prompted.

Folding his hands behind his back, Stoick explained, "We think those attempts were connected. At least two villages have fallen silent - no communication, no tributes or taxes paid, and plenty of rumors that traveling merchants can't get anywhere near the towns without being attacked by mercenaries."

"Mercenaries who seem to be hired to discreetly keep people away from those towns," Corran said. "And on top of that, a large number of runaways from neighboring towns. Not kidnapped. Just men and women who are packing for no reason one day, gone the next."

Hiccup shook his head, trying to process everything and clear the fog from his brain. "What does that mean?"

"It means..." Corran hesitated. "We think it means civil war."

Hiccup was no stranger to Berk's conflicts.

Dad once accidentally insulted Bertha of the Bog-Burglars. Sixteen-year-old Hiccup had hidden away on Toothless's back or at Mulchbucket's for those three irritating moon cycles. His strange new drinking buddy, a short, fiery girl with blond dreadlocks, had turned out to be Camicazi, the daughter of Bertha, who was just as annoyed by the petty disagreement as Hiccup was.

Alvin the Treacherous - named by himself, in no small show of humility - had been ravaging the southwest shore for a few moon cycles, though his secrecy meant he was hard to trace and nearly impossible to identify.

A rebel group from central Berk, where the ancient kingdom of Saporia once lay long before Berk's predecessors conquered the lands, tried to overthrow the kingdom a few times, but their best attempt had been sending a spy to romance Cassandra. Watching Cass mentally and physically destroy the guy was the highlight of Hiccup's fourteenth year.

Various island nations made their best attempts at attacking the capital city well before Hiccup and Toothless soared above their own beaches and forests. The conflicts ended occasionally with peace but more often with Stoick and Cor putting aside their differences for the sake of the country. They were united only in war and, apparently, in being disappointed with Hiccup.

Hiccup's memories of warriors leaping onto longboats, Gobber thrusting dull axes into Hiccup's arms with only an "About time you showed up!" as a greeting, and uproarious feasts to celebrate victories stretched back to the beginning of his childhood. He could more easily recollect drunken warriors' voices wildly exaggerating stories of battle triumph better than he could remember his mother's voice.

Now, flat on his bed, wanting to move but relenting to his stiff joints, Hiccup stared up at the ceiling and thought about Stoick's and Cor's slumped shoulders and overly-busied hands as they'd left his room minutes ago. He had no memories of their nerves before other conflicts. What he saw today beat rapid rhythms on his heart.

"Cass?" he asked the ceiling.

After a few seconds of distant clangs and bustling, the door swung back open. Cass peered around the door-frame, glanced back across the halls, and slid into the room. She pushed the door shut, still slow and careful. She needn't have worried. He would be a fool of an escape artist if he didn't regularly oil the hinges on his own bedroom doors.

Hiccup pushed himself up again and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He still expected to feel the thump of two feet hitting the floor. The reality of the single thump had him pushing out a nervous breath of air. Cass, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, watched him like a hawk.

"Hi," he said.

"Falling out of a tower on purpose, huh?" Usually she joined her questions with condescending smirks, but today she was tight-lipped and closed-off.

"Yeah," Hiccup replied. He tried to conjure an extension to the conversation, so that he could more successfully refuse to acknowledge the cane propped up in the corner. Instead, he swallowed and said nothing.

"They told you the plan." She threw the question between them, disguising it as a statement.

Hiccup push his hand through his hair. "Pretend everything is fine, pretend we don't know there's a rebel force so that we can utilize surprise, and Alyse pretends to have nightmares for some reason?"

Rolling her eyes, Cass said, "So that Corran can justify spending time and resources on improving our fortifications, recruiting more guards, and adding to the weaponry. Just a good husband pacifying his wife's fancies." The twist of her lips into a scowl revealed her opinion on the strategy. "No other reason."

"Right. Element of surprise." He let the silence in the room extend out as the muscles in his legs twitched, begging him to attempt the sudden skill of walking. That silence grew on him, broken only by the flickering of the lantern, before it suffocated, and Hiccup groaned. "But you're telling me there have been four assassination attempts, and nobody outside this castle knows?"

She huffed. "Apparently not."

"Because everyone would understand if we were tightening security because someone, you know, has been trying to kill us-"

Cass's fingers were gloved, but he could still see her fists tightening. "Assassination attempts don't justify fortification of the entire kingdom."

The implication was clear: Hiccup obviously would understand such tactics if he'd bothered to be in more leadership meetings. Blinking wearily, he attacked the metaphorical Gronkle in the room they'd been ignoring. "You're mad at me, aren't you?"

"No."

"Cut the dragon dung, Cass. Yeah, you are angry at me."

She jerked her chin up to glare pointedly into a dark corner of the rafters, but Hiccup had seen how her eye twitched when he said the word "dragon".

Drumming his fingers on the bed-frame beneath his knees, Hiccup said, "Fine. Get me my cane, then?"

Cass was always glaring at him and scolding him, but the venom behind the eyes and words never lasted as long as she seemed to think it did. Hiccup watched her stride to the corner, grab the cane, pace to him, and shove it into his outstretched hand. "Thanks," he said. She only grunted before retreating back to her brooding lean against the wall.

He gripped the handle and stabbed the tip into the ground between his fee- his knees. Stand up, he told himself. You can't sit down now. Astrid's missing. Toothless is captured. Stand up.

Hiccup did not stand up.

Cass didn't move. He didn't bother thanking her. The only reason Cass was still here was the royal emblem splashed across the shoulder pads of her uniform. Grunting, she muttered, "Gobber's working on prostheses in the forge. Perfectionist."

When it came to prosthetics, Gobber became annoyingly meticulous - between dragon raids, Hiccup had spent most of his apprenticeship in the forge watching Gobber tinker with his own metal appendages and argue with them like he could convince them to twist into supposedly better shapes. Hiccup tried to picture what Gobber might come up with, and then he imagined himself grimacing at the prototypes and making his own tweaks.

Just view it like any other project. You draw up designs, Gobber tells you what he doesn't like about them, you argue, you make it your way, it sucks, you remake it again. It's just another project.

Not a replacement leg.

Hiccup forcefully resurfaced a memory of Toothless rolling around in a field of tall grass, and he used the throat-choking surge of emotions to push himself off the bed. Of course, his body tried to balance on his two feet, and Hiccup nearly pitched into the small table next to his bed. He shot the cane out to steady himself at the last minute, even as the handle dug into his stomach and pushed all the air out of his lungs into a loud wheeze.

The rustling armor betrayed that Cass had twitched instinctively to jump forward and help him, but Cass was stubborn in every way. She stiffened back into his position, no doubt wishing he hadn't noticed she'd moved but also likely knowing he'd definitely noticed.

Hiccup did still owe her some gratitude. "Uh, thanks for saving my life."

Her only response was a grunt, and she remained still as he re-positioned the cane onto his right side and bent his right elbow slightly as he leaned onto it. All those supposedly useless lectures from Gobber about "How to use a cane if you use a leg, because you probably will, Hiccup, you're as coordinated as a baby sheep on a frozen lake" actually managed to come in handy. He'd never tell Gobber that, of course. Hiccup pushed the tip of his cane forward and anchored it into a groove in the rug, and then he took a tentative hop forward with his right leg. He wobbled on his landing, swinging his left arm around for balance. Hiccup kept practicing, making his unsteady way around the room in a jagged circle. After a few minutes, he already felt waves of exhaustion hitting him.

Instead of resting, as Cass would probably suggest if she weren't still glaring at him, he tapped and hopped to the door, swung it open with his free hand - thank all that was good and holy that he could keep his dominant left hand free - and swayed into the hallway. Cass's hand shot out to prop the door open, and as he set a course for the longhouse, she followed behind him like a petulant shadow.

Hiccup had avoided the jarls' strategy meetings at all costs for the past six years. But if he ever wanted to see Toothless or Astrid again, he'd have to begin facing his demons, starting today.

Author's Notes

HEY GUYS! :D

In my defense, I never clarified how long a few weeks would be. Oops! I have been working hard, though. Crazy how long this is so far - and how long it's going to be!

I'd love to chat, but we've got to jump right into the good stuff: from now on, I've got some extensive footnotes. The Tangling was a lot of fun, but it didn't involve much research (other than that bit about dustpans). This one definitely does. Partially because I'm now writing a disabled character, partially because I do want some historical accuracy (more on that in later chapters), and partially because the world building is about to get way more intense.

Footnotes:
1. I posted a link to a map of Berk (or at least the version I created) on my blog. You'll need it later, trust me.
2. I learned a lot about canes for this chapter from Dr. Jo's YouTube video about how to walk with a cane and the UC San Diego Health website. Did you know Hollywood doesn't usually portray walking with a cane correctly? Well, now you do!
3. Funnily enough, I learned a bit about prosthetics and amputation from my coworker, because her father recently had to have his leg amputated. Hearing her talk about his healing process during the lunch break has been weirdly informative.

For important links and full footnotes, you'll have to head to my tumblr blog: bannisterroadkill. You don't need to follow it or anything; just go to the "Writing" link near the top of the page to see my stories and the important links for each one. I tried to embed the links here with no luck.

Anyways, say hi! I missed y'all!