When Harry woke, he found that someone (presumably Dinky or another house-elf) had left a piece of parchment with his school timetable on his bedside table. Professor McGonagall had said that children were grouped by house for their classes, but what she hadn't said was that they usually doubled up with one of the other houses. Slytherins were mostly with Gryffindors, which was strange if they were supposed to be traditional enemies, but at least it meant he would have plenty of time with Ben. On the other hand, it also meant they would have to hear a lot of Ron Weasley and Draco Malfoy bickering.
Presumably that meant that Ravenclaws were mostly with Hufflepuffs. It was just as well that Fishlegs and Hiccup would mostly be together, as they were so close that they were more like siblings than Ben and Guinevere were – but on the other hand, it also meant that Twigleg wouldn't have much time with Ben.
Oh well, they had been told to spend their free time in their house common rooms, but nobody had said there was actually a rule that everyone had to sit with members of their own house to eat, had they? Harry put on his hat and robe (which he noticed were now trimmed with Slytherin green and silver, again presumably by the house-elves), hurried to the Great Hall, and headed for the Ravenclaw table, where dishes of breakfast were already appearing. There were only enough plates, cutlery and chairs set out for the number of Ravenclaws present, so Harry fetched his from the Slytherin table. Fishlegs, presumably catching sight of this (though he had such a bad squint that it was hard to tell), fetched his own supplies from the Hufflepuff table. Ben got up to sit next to his sister (and Twigleg, who was sitting on the table nibbling the edge of a cornflake), swapping places with Padma Patil who wanted to sit with her own sister at the Gryffindor table.
'Are you sure this is allowed?' asked Hermione Granger, yawning. She looked as if she hadn't gone back to sleep after the midnight trip to the kitchens. Toothless was curled up asleep on Hiccup's lap, not even bothering to scrounge or steal kedgeree, which tasted even more delicious than it had smelled the night before.
'Nobody said we can't eat together,' said Harry.
'Nobody said we can't be together outside, either,' said Hiccup. 'I need to take Toothless out at least twice a day anyway.'
'And they can't object to the rest of us going out with you to get some fresh air,' said Harry. 'At my old school, they always made us go out at playtime unless it was pouring.' Dudley, whose brain never engaged for any other purpose, had been an expert on finding opportunities to beat him up in the playground without attracting the dinner ladies' attention.
'At our old school, nearly all our lessons were outdoors anyway, even in a blizzard,' said Fishlegs. 'It always brought on my bronchitis. But the teacher was usually still in shorts and bare feet, even in the snow.'
'I've seen him wearing a coat, in that really bad winter a few years back,' Hiccup reminded him. 'It made him look like a bear, remember?'
'And we can study together in the library,' added Hermione, cheering up. 'I've been a member of the public library back home ever since I was a baby – my parents used to take me there every week to choose picture-books – but I've never been in a magical library before. I read a story once about a magical university where the head librarian had been Transfigured into an orang-utan by accident and refused to let anyone turn him back, because he liked the way people were terrified enough of him to bring their books back on time.'
'My parents used to tell me stories about a girl from a magical family who lived in a castle with a library of magical singing books,' said Guinevere. 'But their books were much friendlier.'
'The nearest librarian in our area might as well be an orang-utan,' said Hiccup. 'I've never been into his library, though. It's called the Public Library, but it's in a heavily guarded castle and no-one is allowed in. The only reason we had a book on our island was that my teacher broke in once and stole it. And it was a really disappointing book, too,' he added disgustedly. 'It's supposed to be about dragon-training, but none of it worked on Toothless. I'm going to write my own version, when I grow up.'
'Maybe that library is full of dangerous magical books, and it's guarded to protect people from them,' suggested Hermione. 'In the story I was reading, some of the magical books ate people who tried to read them. The hero was a wizard who only knew one spell, because he'd once read a book with a spell so powerful and dangerous that it took up all the space in his head and wouldn't let him learn any other spells.'
'No, where we come from, they just think reading or learning anything is dangerous,' sighed Hiccup.
'My aunt and uncle are a bit like that,' said Harry. 'Our teachers used to take our class to the library in the High Street to borrow books, but my aunt wrote a note to the school saying the teacher wasn't allowed to let me borrow fantasy stories in case they gave me unrealistic ideas. My cousin isn't into reading – he just likes computer games and television – so my uncle said I was a nerd if I ever read a book. But somehow, it was okay for Dudley to watch cartoons about heroes with superpowers, or a young Ewok training to be a shaman, but if I liked them, my aunt and uncle just complained about how ridiculous they were.'
'I think books are only dangerous if you're Twigleg's size and you're trying to climb down from a shelf carrying a book bigger than yourself,' said Ben. 'You are allowed to ask people for help, you know,' he added directly to Twigleg, ruffling the homunculus's spiky red hair.
'I've been handling books in an alchemist's library for more than four hundred years,' Twigleg reminded him. 'Most of those were much bigger than modern books.'
'I know. You're strong for your size, and you're good at being independent. It's just – you're my friend and I don't want you to get hurt.'
'Yes,' said Twigleg, rubbing his head more closely against Ben's hand, like a cat. 'Friends. Until I found you – after my brothers were eaten – I didn't have any friends. Except books.'
'I didn't have any friends at my old school, either,' said Hermione. 'Except books.'
'I didn't have any friends, until yesterday,' said Harry. 'And now you're apparently not supposed to be friends with me – especially Ben – because Gryffindors and Slytherins have to be enemies. Did your head of house give you that talk last night, as well?' he asked Ben. 'About how the other houses are your enemies, so Gryffindors have to stick together to defend each other?'
'No, Professor McGonagall didn't come in to talk to us at all,' said Ben. 'I think she had a meeting with Professor Dumbledore. But the prefects and the head of the Quidditch team told us that Slytherin had been winning the House Cup and the Quidditch championships for years and it was time we won them back.'
'Professor Flitwick told us that as the house of the brightest students, we had no excuse for not getting better marks than the other houses in every test,' said Hiccup. 'It's good having a teacher who actually wants us to read – quite a change from Gobber the Belch, isn't he?' he added to Fishlegs.
'So's Professor Sprout,' said Fishlegs. 'She doesn't yell at us "SHUDDUP AND GET INTO LINE YOU MISERABLE TADPOLES!", for one thing.'
'But why do they want the different houses to be enemies?' Harry asked. He could feel the eyes of his fellow Slytherins glaring at him for betraying them by sitting at the Ravenclaw table. 'It's bad enough living with Muggles who hate magic, without coming to school and finding out that wizards are supposed to hate each other as well.'
'It's tribalism,' said Hiccup. 'It's like – well, Fishlegs and me, we're from the Outer Hebrides, and on a good day we're about a thousand years behind the times. On a bad day, it's more like two thousand. So, we're still under the feudal system – as in, we all feud against each other, all the time. Basically, every island is a separate tribe, with names like the Hairy Hooligans – that's our tribe – and the Meatheads and the Bog-Burglars, and most of them hate each other. Last year, some terrorists kidnapped Fishlegs and me and the daughter of the leader of the Bog-Burglars, to try and trick the Hooligans and the Bog-Burglars into blaming each other for stealing each other's children, so that they'd fight. So we were imprisoned together, and the girl wouldn't stop shouting that the only good Hooligan is a dead Hooligan.'
'She's completely mental,' said Fishlegs.
'Yeah, but she is brave, isn't she?' Hiccup added. 'She punched out a guard and disguised herself in his clothes to try to escape – and it might have fooled anyone who didn't notice that she was an eight-year-old girl and only four feet tall.'
'I suppose it's like football teams,' said Harry. 'There's no point being an Arsenal fan unless you hate Spurs.'
'It's bad enough that different species hate each other,' said Ben. 'Kobolds despise dwarves for being greedy for treasure, dwarves despise kobolds for being greedy for mushrooms, Asian kobolds quarrel with European kobolds and Asian dwarves quarrel with European dwarves, fjord trolls despise mountain trolls for being stupid, mountain trolls hate dwarves for hacking into them with pickaxes, dwarves hate mountain trolls for stamping on them, griffins are the enemies of dragons…'
'Selkies and mermaids are rivals over who rules the oceans,' added Guinevere.
'And people kidnap young dragons and keep them as pets like dogs, and wizards expect house-elves to work for no pay and won't let house-elves or goblins or centaurs own magic wands because they're afraid of letting them get too powerful,' added Hermione. 'I still can't understand why the house-elves here seem to like humans. Do other fantastic beings?'
'No, most of them are afraid of humans,' said Ben. 'When Firedrake and Sorrel met me, Firedrake was willing to give me a chance even though I was a human, but Sorrel didn't trust me as far as she could spit.'
'They hadn't met a good human, before,' said Twigleg. 'I hadn't, either. Until I met you, and Professor Greenbloom, the only human I had ever known was the alchemist who made Nettlebrand and me, and he was even worse than Nettlebrand. And by the time I realised I liked you and didn't want you to die, I was already helping Nettlebrand to hunt you down – and I had already led him to Professor Greenbloom…' he broke off, dissolving into tears.
'Yes, but it worked out all right,' said Ben, cupping his hand affectionately around his friend. 'My father's used to dealing with much worse monsters than Nettlebrand. And you helped us defeat Nettlebrand, didn't you? Because you could convince him that you were still on his side and just pretending to have gone over to our side. You're a hero.'
'A Slytherin hero,' suggested Twigleg, half-comforted.
'Probably. And if you had been sorted into Slytherin, it still wouldn't stop us being friends.'
'You'd probably be way better at being a Slytherin than I am,' said Harry. 'I'm not really cunning enough to qualify. But the hat said I had to be there, because I can talk to snakes, and now everyone thinks that means I'm not supposed to be friends with the rest of you.'
'Maybe it's just random, who's a friend and who's an enemy,' said Hiccup. 'I mean, Toothless here is the best friend that any dragon could be – any dragon who isn't a Silver Moondance, anyway. But if Hagrid's right – and I think he is – then Toothless is the same species as the three dragons who came to attack our village last year. The first one was big enough to swallow a ship whole, but he got eaten by another, bigger Giant Seadragon, who got eaten by another who was even bigger. The third one swallowed me for pudding, but Toothless helped me escape. That's how he got the scar on his chest, fighting that massive dragon – he nearly died, risking his life to protect me. But – suppose, instead of meeting Toothless when he was a cute baby dragon, I'd met him when he was a bit older – big enough that I could ride on him instead of the other way round – and he was attacking our village? Probably we'd have fought, and maybe I'd have injured him so that he couldn't fly, in which case he'd have a grudge against me, like Alvin. I don't know if we could have become friends, if we'd got off to a bad start like that.'
Author's note: since Cressida Cowell is deliberately inconsistent about when How to Train Your Dragon is set (the dates in the library book in the first novel imply that we're in at least the 9th century, yet the Roman Empire is still active – and besides, the Vikings aren't Christians, so their 9th century might well not be the 9th century since Jesus's birth; also, potatoes are an exotic and supposedly mythical vegetable from a supposedly mythical land, yet we see Gobber the Belch eating a tomato sandwich without anyone thinking this is odd, and nobody asks whether what Old Wrinkly smokes is tobacco from the Land That Does Not Exist, cannabis from India, or some local herb that grows on the Isle of Berk), I have decided that there's no reason they shouldn't be still living in the Dark Ages when the rest of Britain is in the 1990s. It's convenient that, as Harry's year are children born in the year 1979/1980, Hiccup can still keep his canonical birthday of February 29th – though I don't know whether, in this story, he will spend February 29th 1992 stealing a book from the Restricted section of the Hogwarts library.
