Chapter 11: Year Gone By

A year had gone before he thought to count it.

It had gone the way long stretches of times always seemed to, quietly, while he was looking the other way.

A year since he came up out of the tree.

Saying it made it real, and real made it heavy.

The cove had been about two moons further back than that, which he only worked out because he went looking for it. He had not counted the months from the cove. Not once, not all year.

Somewhere along the way he had quietly stopped measuring his life from the morning it ended and started measuring it from the morning this one began.

He did not feel much when he counted it.

A dull, far-off ache, the way an old scar aches before rain.

Still, it had not been a wasted year, and he made himself remember that. Not even close to wasted. He had built things in it, learned things, become things.

A great many things had changed.

They cut the morning without a sound, the Night Fury folded tight and fast and his rider laid low along his warm black neck, and from the ground there would have been nothing to see but a place where the cloud thinned for a heartbeat and closed again.

A year of practice had taught them to fly as one.

From up here, where it was easiest to look at it, Hiccup let the air pour over him and took the measure of all that had turned for the worse.

First, the fog that had once ringed the island was long gone, drawn back past the edge of sight, and the lost place had stopped being a secret the sea kept and started being somewhere the world could find.

The dragons had found it first.

For most of the winter the island had been a silent place. Its shores, its beaches, its mountainous regions, its vast stretches of long green hills under the worked plateau of ruins.

It was not truly silent, of course. There were still birds calling on the sea-cliffs, and seals barking in the coves, and deer and rabbits going about their small rustling business in the deeper woods.

But without dragons the place felt wrong, thin, the way a hearth feels wrong when the fire has gone out.

Despite himself, time had gotten him used to that silence. He had half come to think of it as his.

That was gone now.

The dragons had come the way water finds a low place, a few and then in numbers, until the cliffs and the abandoned avenues had voices in them again.

The rattle of Nadder spines on the heights. The dull boom of a Gronckle dropping onto warm stone to sleep.

The heads of a Zippleback bickering with each other somewhere in the wet woods, and Terrors squabbling over fish-heads in the rafters of houses that had stood empty for an age.

Some had nested too.

The ruined citadel had a pulse in it again, small and wild and growing, and on his better days he let himself be glad of it.

The dragons were not the only ones who had tried. That was the grimmer half of the story.

More than half a dozen ships had tried that year.

Some of them had been honest people.

Some fishing boats ventured too far and some lost merchants blown too far north he only frightened off, usually overflying them with Toothless while having him scream would be enough to have them veer off long before they came near enough to make out the island behind the murk.

He had no quarrel with anyone scraping a living off the cold sea, and a year had taught him to tell that kind from the other at a glance.

The other kind he knew by the sound, and by the smell of drink and filth that carried on the wind ahead of the hulls themselves.

The lean ships riding low with the particular hunger of men who take, burn, and destroy and never make, who had crept close enough to see ruins standing where only water should be, who steered on singing their songs of riches and raids and death.

None of them were afforded the mercy of reaching shore.

They came on with their eyes fixed so hard on the prize glittering at the horizon that not one of them ever saw the thing that fell on them out of a clear sky, and they went down into the northern waters with a final sizzle of burnt flesh.

No man who had ever laid eyes on the ruins had lived.

The ones who stayed on their ships met the same fiery fate. The ones who threw themselves clear of the fire he had to personally kill in the water. It didn't make a difference. It was work.

He did it the way someone would gut a fish, and felt about as much.

Sometimes there was a small part of him, somewhere far down, that was still screaming at the blood fresh on his hands. He had learned not to listen to it, and so he did not.

Beneath him Toothless rolled, lazy and showing off, so that Hiccup had to grab tight to keep his seat.

"Subtle," he chuckled, dry.

The dragon crooned, hugely pleased with himself, and levelled out.

Of course, the island was not the only thing that had changed. Hiccup had changed, too.

His hair had grown long, falling past his jaw now, black as ever and gone faintly curled at the ends. His face had hardened out of its boyhood. His frame had filled into a man's, a tall one.

He was heavier now. Denser. The lean whip of him had filled out into something with power behind every motion, the shoulders gone broad, every line of him hard. It was not the soft muscle a man carries, either.

It was different altogether, closer to the dense draconic cord that lay packed under Toothless's hide, tough as cold iron and quick as a sprung catapult, only laid now over a frame that had once been human.

He had come, over the year, to make a kind of peace with all of it.

With the reflection staring back in the still waters. With the long strange road ahead. And with learnt gratitude for each grey day he was gifted.

Their flight ended on the high cliffs above one of the island's settled nests, which was where it always ended. The routine gave way to the one stubborn experiment he had not yet let go of.

He came at the dragon slowly.

It was a Gronckle, a dumpy brown boulder of a thing, all jaw and stubby wings and debatable aerodynamic qualities. It flew like a thrown rock and lived mostly to eat stone and sleep in the sun. This one knew him.

He had done this to it a dozen times already.

So he put out his hand, palm open, eyes down, and waited, and after a moment the Gronckle leaned its blunt warm snout into his palm with a rumble that sounded like a millstone turning.

It was not the first time. That was the whole trouble.

He frowned without meaning to and the Gronckle felt the suddenness of the change in him and drew back, wary.

I am not upset at you. Sorry.

So he gentled it with a low sound and a scratch beneath the jaw until it settled.

However, his scowl was still there. He was angry at himself. At a full year of patience that had still not yielded results, nor any answer for what was being done to these dragons.

The numbers honestly shamed him.

The fog had finished drawing back about eight moons ago, and the first dragons had settled inside a moon of it. Eight moons, then. More than half a year.

So how could it be possible that even with his sharpened senses, Hiccup had yet to solve a thing happening in front of his face?

His taming had never held with them the way it held with Toothless.

With Toothless it had been a door that opened once and stayed open for good. However, with every dragon since, it had been a thing written in water. He would always earn one's trust over days, and he had already, many times, and then one morning they would simply be gone.

Not dead and not driven off either.

Just, gone.

The dragon would rise without warning and fly off in a dead straight line over the open sea toward nothing, and never come back.

He had watched it too many times to still call it chance. He had watched a Nadder build a nest over a fortnight, lay her eggs, sit them faithfully, and then one grey dawn stand up off them and fly south and leave them to go cold.

It was not one species either. Nadders, Gronckles, Nightmares, it took them all, sooner or later, the same blank straight flight into the south. It was not the place either. He had seen it happen on every island near enough to watch.

It was not a sickness of a kind, and it was not a curse belonging to any one stretch of land, because it could happen anywhere of the island and anywhere beyond it.

So it was something that reached across both?

He felt the urge to rip his perfect, silky, wavy hair out from sheer desperation. He had already checked everything a man could check.

Their feeding, in case the island's shores were growing something that turned them. Their eyes, their wings, their health, for rot or wound or fever. He had found nothing. Whatever took them left no mark his inhuman senses could catch.

It was the largest failure of his year.

A whole island filling his dragons in front of him, the murals' promise close enough to touch, and he could not keep a single one. He shook his head. Not a single one.

At that, Toothless lifted his head and gave him a flat, deeply offended look.

"A single other one," Hiccup amended. "Obviously."

The dragon settled, mollified.

Hiccup had come to suspect, more from resignation than any actual evidence, that it was not the dragons themselves failing him at all. He had spent the last year methodically crossing off every possible explanation. The impossible ones were all that remained:

Hiccup had the suspicion that something unseen was reaching into their minds, or their souls.

Some disease or voice or curse they had no choice but to obey and follow. It would explain the lack of any visible mark, and the unyielding grip of it, total and silent, on every kind alike.

And whatever it was, it could not reach Toothless.

He had his guesses.

Maybe it was the strange depth of the Night Fury, who had always shown to be more intelligent and cunning than other dragons. Maybe it was the bond itself, holding Toothless anchored where the rest drifted loose.

He did not know.

The grey weight of it pressed down on him, and there was nothing under it he could fight.

And so, because there was nothing else to do with his hands, he turned back to the warm blunt head still waiting under his palm and scratched the Gronckle's jaw a while longer, while he still could, and tried not to think of it as another goodbye.

Hiccup went down the long slope from the cliffs in great loping bounds, more leaping than running.

And Toothless flew loops around him the whole way, tongue lolling, drunk on his own freedom, swooping in close enough to ruffle his hair and peeling off again, just to be insufferable about it.

Hiccup laughed despite himself.

If failing to tame more dragons was the year's defeat, then the this had to be its triumph.

It had taken him most of the winter and a great deal of swearing. He had wanted it perfect, and past perfect, he had wanted it to last forever.

A tail fin that needed no rider and no pedal at all. One that read the dragon's own body and answered it, that felt the smallest lean and twist and flexed to match the way the lost fin once had, organic, alive, a part of him and not a thing strapped on.

It could not be done something inside him pointed: A metal thing cannot feel. It cannot want what the body wants a half-beat before the body moves.

He had thrown out fifty designs that would not work, and fifty more that worked but were too tangled and clever to actually trust, and found his answer, in the end, in simplicity.

It was a birthday present, of a sort, though he never said so out loud. Neither of them had any other kind. Hiccup did not know at what time of year Toothless was hatched and his birth date had become irrelevant a long time ago.

So the morning both of them had come up out of that white bark and survived, had quietly become the only date either of them kept.

That's why he had wanted the thing done and flying before the seasons came round again.

He had wanted his friend to fly free, truly free, for the first time since his own bola, the clever trick he had built to bring a Night Fury out of the sky, had taken the real one from him and sent them both down this strange fate.

As said, it should have been impossible to create something like this.

So the fin had to be strong enough to trust a life to, and that had cost him rare metals he could get no way but taking. You know how it goes. Some heist here, a sunk ship there, and through all that, a hundred failed iterations now scattered across the forge's floor.

And it finally worked.

Hiccup did not need a mystical bond to know Toothless had never once, in all his life, been happier.

There was the broad steady warmth it transmitted, the deep clean joy of realising that he just owned the sky again, and could fly when he pleased, how he pleased, where he pleased.

Then there was the other kind of warmth. Though that was less steady and more like a bright stupid spike, sudden and sharp, and Hiccup turned in time to watch Toothless fold and drop like a pebble onto an unsuspecting rabbit in the scrub.

He rolled his eyes.

"Really," he deadpanned, to no one.

The dragon came up chewing, immensely satisfied, and Hiccup did not bother to pretend he disapproved.

Let him have his fun... I guess. One of us ought to.

If Toothless had the sky, and, now and again, a poor rabbit for good measure, Hiccup had the books.

And the books had not gone so well.

The deepest things he wanted from them he never managed to reach.

Not the why of the kingdom's fall, and not the rest of the gods forsaken story, how it had risen, how the pale tree had come to be the heart of it, what the tree even was.

The answers, if they were anywhere, lay in the oldest books, on their last pages, and those were the very pages the centuries had crumbled past reading.

It was after weeks of getting nowhere that he had let that thread go slack and turned his hands to things he could actually finish.

The fin was the most important of them, and now that it was done, it left him with a head full of what came next.