Chapter 02: One Last Look

For that terrible second, the cove listened.

Hiccup felt it land.

He saw the doubt move across a dozen faces like wind across water, he saw the axes dip an inch, he saw his father's hand come up again, open (hold, wait, hold), and the wild, drowning, clueless part of his heart leapt up and saw hope.

They see it, after everything they finally see it, it's going to be all right...

Spitelout Jorgenson had never in his life been a patient man.

The kid was a danger.

He had gone too far, he had crossed the line, he had made friends with the devil.

His axe left his hand from the middle of the press, turning over and over and whipping the air, in a perfect trajectory to the bulk of the dragon's skull.

No!

No, no, no!

Hiccup turned into it with everything he had left and got his left arm up, and there was nothing on that arm to stop an axe with but his own leather and his own bone.

Flesh tearing, Chwak!

It bit deep past the leather and into the meat of his left shoulder, and he felt the bone crack and split beneath it.

The pain arrived a half-second after the sound.

There were no words to describe it. He heard himself scream and felt his left arm go loose and useless and hot, and then the blood came, more of it than he had ever seen leave a person, sheeting down his side in a wash he could feel cooling against his skin even as it poured.

After that he stopped counting.

There were too many of them and far too little of him.

But nobody wanted to be the next one.

That was the thing he did not understand until much later. The blood going into the grass was the chief's son's blood, and every man in that cove could see whose it was, and after Spitelout's axe not one edge in a hundred came at him again. They came around him.

Hafts and shield rims and shoulders and open hands, boots and elbows and fists in his collar, a whole village trying to haul a fifteen-year-old out of the way of the work and none of them willing to be the second man who had cut him.

So they beat him aside instead. And the axes went over him and past him and around him, at the dragon.

And they were coming at them like a tide. Toothless roared and could do nothing about any of it, because he was holding a closing half-circle off with his body, and every time he turned his head to reach for the boy the ring came into the gap he left.

He got his jaws on him once. Closed them on the back of Hiccup's tunic and pulled, and Hiccup set his heels and would not come, and the dragon found out in that half second what it would actually take to move a braced boy who did not want to be moved.

It was more than the boy would survive.

So he let go, with a strip of the tunic still in his teeth, and Hiccup stayed exactly where he was, for all his useless stubbornness.

The Vikings descended, and a spear-haft cracked across his numb arm and put him on one knee, and he barely felt it land over the sheer agony of the first wound.

He barely hauled himself up by a fistful of the dragon's scales.

Then something hard hit him above the eye, and the cove tilted, and his own blood ran into his sight and turned the whole of his vision red.

Some of the worst blows landed on the dragon, regardless of his attempts to stop them. Most of what reached Toothless was haft and edge turning off scale at bad angles, because he never once stood still and because there was a boy in the way of the rest.

One of them went through the membrane of his left wing and did not turn off anything at all.

He stayed up. He could not have said how.

Each blow that landed on him was a blow that did not land on the dragon shrieking and snapping at his back, and that was the only thought he had room for now, me, not him; me, not him; me, not him.

The cove had filled with the iron stink of his own opened body, and the injuries accumulating all over Toothless, and the howling of people he had known since before he could walk.

All of them trying with everything they had to kill the only living thing that had ever loved him back.

He was drowning standing up.

With every beat of his heart a little more of him left through the gaping wound on his shoulder, and the edges of the world began to soften and grey.

His legs had started to feel very far away, as if they belonged to someone else who was also dying, somewhere nearby.

In that greying clarity his eyes found his father's.

Stoick was not swinging.

The chief of Berk stood stock-still in the middle of the endless tide of heads with his great axe hanging from a slack hand, his mouth open, and he was saying something, son, perhaps, or stop, or nothing at all, his lips just moving around a shape they couldn't fill.

And on his weathered face was the expression of a man feeling the solid ground disappear beneath his own boots.

He had buried a wife to dragons. He had given the whole iron length of his life to this war, to keeping this island alive one winter at a time.

And he stood ten feet from his only living child and watched the boy be beaten down and get up and be beaten down again, bleeding out of the ruin of one shoulder, to shield a beast with his body, and he did not understand it.

That was what cut sharper and deeper than any axe ever reached. Not the pain. The blankness.

His own father, watching him die for love, with no more comprehension in his eyes than a dog has for the moon.

And Hiccup, swaying now, red to both elbows, his ruined arm hanging, the world narrowing to a wet grey tunnel, looked across the cove at all of them, at Stoick and Astrid and the whole confused, terrified, righteous crowd of them.

And he felt the love he had carried for these people every single day of his life curdle, all at once, into something black and cold and almost dull.

Something hammered flat by the pain and the blood and the neglect, and by the roars of desperation as Toothless did his best to drag his body away from them.

He hated them.

It was the clearest thing he had ever felt.

There was no grief in it, no rage left, nothing childish or jagged at all, because he had been drained of any of it.

It was just a vast, quiet, final certainty settling over him, like a bucket of cold northern water on a grey morning.

Not for the axes.

He could have forgiven the axes, and the blood, and the pain.

He hated them for the confusion.

For the fact that he could stand here pouring his life out into the grass, showing them with his own breaking body that the dragon would not raise a claw.

And still, still, they only frowned, and tightened their grips, and waited for his body to fall so they could get on with the real work.

They would never understand.

How had he been so blind?

Not in ten years, not in a hundred. Understanding had been bred clean out of them, generation by generation, as surely as flight had been bred into the creature at his back.

He had been trying his whole life to teach the deaf to sing and he was done.

He would waste no more of himself on it. Not one drop more than they had already taken out of him.

"Toothless," he said. Quietly. Almost gently. Around the blood pooling warm behind his teeth. "Fly."

And the boy stopped fighting him at last, and the dragon did the two things he had been trying to do for a minute and a half.

The first was the shot. It went into the rock face behind the crowd rather than into the crowd, which was a choice, and which nobody standing there was in any condition to appreciate.

The whole front rank went over backward in the blast of it and the ring came apart, and for four seconds there was open ground in a cove where there had been none.

The second was the boy. Toothless got his head under Hiccup's chest and put him into the saddle the way a man throws a sack onto a cart, and that was the whole of it.

He never afterward remembered the climb into the saddle.

There had not been one, and the wounds had taken even that from him, along with so much else.

Somebody in the crowd was bellowing at them to bring it down. Nobody moved. There was exactly one voice in that cove that a hundred people would have followed into the air itself, and its owner stood ten feet away with his axe hanging out of a slack hand and did not use it.

Hiccup never knew that. He was busy with his foot.

He got it onto the pedal and could not hold it, because the leg had stopped belonging to him somewhere around the second time he went down.

So he did the last useful thing he would do for a great many hours: he drove the pedal to the middle notch, the neutral one, and jammed his heel in hard behind the stirrup strap to hold it there.

Straight and level. Nothing else. No turns worth the name, no landing worth the name.

It would have to be enough.

He remembered the tail rig snapping open in answer, and the great black wings hammering down once, twice, thrice, like a door slammed against the whole of the world, and then the cove dropped away beneath him, and the screaming dropped away.

And the axes and the faces and the blood-wet grass all fell into the grey, and there was nothing left but the cold rushing air and his own heartbeat, very loud and very slow and beginning, he noticed distantly, to skip.

He looked back exactly once, in his last moment of clarity.

Berk was already small, a knot of dark figures gathered at the bottom of the world, every face turned up to watch him go.

Astrid stood at the front of the younger ones with one hand half-raised, toward him, he realised, or after him, or only to shield her eyes; he would never learn which.

He did not want to know either.

Stoick had run three heavy steps to the very lip of the cove and stopped there, because there was nowhere left to give chase, nothing left to do but stand at the edge of the world and watch him disappear off the end of it.

And ringed behind them all, Fishlegs, Snotlout, the twins scattered and staring, and even now, even at this height, even with his sight greying at the edges, Hiccup still found nothing but blankness on every upturned face.

What is he? What is wrong with him? What did the beast do to him? Was he possessed? Had the dragon cast a spell?

As if the dragon were the thing that had changed him.

As if it had not been them, all of them, all along.

He did not wave. He did not weep. He turned his back on Berk, and on his father, and on the girl, and on every single year he had ever lived, and he faced the open and vast sea.

That was the last look he ever gave the people that had tried to murder his heart.

Then the cold came for him in earnest, and the edges of everything went soft, and the grey began at last to close.

He never knew how long they flew.

He knew it was north, because the wind turned to knives and the grey sky bled down to black.

The stars came out hard and strange overhead. His sight was blurry, but at moments clear enough to notice a few constellations no chart of Berk had troubled to name.

Or perhaps it was his delirious mind.

He feared the absolute darkness of the night.

He feared they were crossing water no Viking longship had ever ventured. The unmarked waters.

The blank places at the edges of the maps where old stubborn men simply wrote 'here ends the known world'.

Yet there was no way back.

He knew his blood was still leaving him, because he could feel himself leaving with it, draining out of the hole in his shoulder drop by patient drop into the dark.

Beneath him Toothless flew, and flew, and flew, with a desperation Hiccup could feel transmitted straight through the saddle into his own failing body.

His sight went, and came, and went again.

His mind flickered in and out of existence.

His heel stayed where he had put it. It was the only part of him still doing its job, and it did it all night, jammed behind a strap on a leg he could no longer feel, holding one fin open at one angle for a dragon who could therefore go north and could not do anything else.

He saw his mother once, which frightened the last clear part of him badly, because he had no memory of his mother at all, nothing but a name and a shape in a song.

He heard Gobber laughing somewhere off to the left and turned his head and there was nothing there but black water and black sky.

He saw the cove again and his father's open, uncomprehending mouth, and he flinched, and the flinch nearly took him off the dragon's back.

He slumped forward instead and pressed his cheek flat to the warm black scales of Toothless's neck, and after a while he could no longer tell where the dragon's heat ended and his own draining blood began.

It was all warm. It was all going cold.

Stay, something said.

Stay.

Toothless?

His eyelids hardly answered him anymore.

No, it's not Toothless.

Toothless had no words.

Toothless had never needed them.

The faint voice came from somewhere else, from below, from the black water, from the curve of the dark horizon itself: old, and patient, and vast. Or perhaps it was all the delirium of his mind. Pulling him the way the tide pulls at a swimmer's legs.

Stay. You are almost here.

You are nearly home.

Stay with me a little longer, my son.

His mind was playing tricks again.

He wanted to laugh, but all that came down his throat was a wet cough.

He didn't understand the words.

Stay. Stay what-?

But he held to them anyway, because they were warm, and because the only other thing left to hold was death.

A wall of impenetrable fog rose up out of the horizon to meet them like a held breath, and they vanished altogether.

The island was massive.

It came out of the mist all at once and entire: black cliffs sheer out of the black water, a ring of pale fog standing perfectly still around its shores.

High on the heights, breaking the line of the cliffs, stood the broken teeth of buildings: towers, walls, and something else that was all blurred.

It was all difficult to make out.

Toothless dropped toward it the way water finds the lowest ground, without hesitation, without searching, as if some part of the dragon had always known the way here.

Toothless came down hard on a beach in the full dark, because with one fin locked at the neutral notch there was no other way down that he had.

Hiccup came off the saddle, and did not so much dismount as fall, and the world was a long slow tilt of grey and black and the cold shock of wet stones against his cheek.

He could not feel his left side at all.

At some point the pain had stopped screaming at him and it had all gone numb.

And Toothless, keening low and broken in the back of his throat, got his great head beneath the boy's chest and dragged him, gently, so terribly gently, up out of the reach of the hissing surf and into the black mouth of a cave.

Hiccup lay where the dragon left him.

He had lost consciousness at some point. He could feel the lengths between each time grow longer, more difficult to wake from.

Something told him the next time would be his last.

On the cold floor of that cave, he looked up at the dripping unseen ceiling, and understood, with the strange flat calm that comes only at the very bottom of fear, where there is no further down to fall, that he was going to die here.

He was so weak.

He was so cold.

The boundaries of himself pulsing thin and translucent.

Fifteen years old, said a flickering voice somewhere far back in his skull, almost wondering.

Fifteen, all of it ending in some cave at the edge of the world.

He had always imagined he would die of old age.

Surrounded by family. A wife. Some kids.

Hiccup Haddock indulged his imagination for the last time, and he saw their faces.

Their faces.

Why was he seeing Astrid?

After everything she did.

The confusion turned to rage, and the rage took a second to build itself up, and when it did, the image of what could have been burned to ashes.

He was back on the floor of the cave, and his heart was hammering in his chest, and he was gritting his teeth hard enough that some of them cracked.

He was dying.

Fifteen.

Hiccup did not care about his life. For all it mattered he was already dead.

No.

The only thing sharp enough to put a childish sob into his bloodless throat was Toothless.

Because he knew.

He had lived enough and loved him enough, to know what his friend would do if he died then and there.

That stubborn, stupid dragon would not leave.

Toothless would stay there, in this cold cave at the edge of nothing, curled around his cooling body, and keen, and return the loyalty he had shown by never letting go, and starve, and eventually succumb to his own wounds and follow him down.

And the image of that, his best and only friend grieving himself to death over his corpse, was the single grief left in the world large enough to reach him, where his own death no longer could.

He sobbed dry tears.

"I'm sorry," he breathed. He didn't have the air for more than a few words. "Bud. I'm so sorry. You should've... you should've left me back in the... you should've just hidden..."

His voice had grown distant, foreign, and rough.

There was no answer.

Hiccup struggled and barely turned his neck to find the dragon, and the cave was empty, and cold, and silent but for the slow drip of water somewhere.

And there was a light.

Faint. White.

The pale of moonlight shining somewhere down the wrong end of the cave, from deeper inside the mountain, from a passage in the rock that Hiccup was certain had not been there a moment before.

With the light came the voice again, and it pulled him the way the tide pulls.

Come down, it whispered.

Come down. Come down out of the cold and rest.

He should not have been able to move.

He had nothing left to move with.

But his resourcefulness had not died yet.

He turned over onto his ruined side and he crawled, dragging the dead weight of his left arm, leaving a long dark smear shining wet across the stone behind him.

Down, and down, into the throat of the depths, following the white light around bends in the rock that seemed to open before him and close behind.

Until the passage at last gave out into open space, and what he saw there took from him the breath he had so little left to give.

A cavern.

Vast and hollow as the sky itself, its far walls and ceiling lost entirely in the dark.

And rooted alone in the centre of all that emptiness, throwing the only light, stood a tree.

Ancient beyond any sense the word had ever held for him. Older than Berk, older than the wars, older than the oldest song the oldest man on the island had ever half-remembered.

How he knew, he was not aware.

Its bark was white, the drowned-moon white of the light it cast, and its bare branches spread wide and high, every limb of it seeming to turn, very slightly, toward the broken body dragging itself out of the dark.

And there, curled sleeping among the great pale cradle of its roots, at peace, fully and deeply at peace for the first time since the morning and the cove, lay Toothless.

Hiccup did not question it.

He was far past questioning.

There was no questioning left in him, only the pull, and the white light, and the dragon, and the last few feet of floor.

He crawled them on his elbows because his hands had grown numb, and left the last of himself shining wet across the cold stone, and when he reached the roots he climbed up into them beside his dragon.

And he laid his head down against the warm scales that rose and fell so slowly, and he let his eyes fall closed at last.

The bark moved with a gentle cracking.

It came up around them the way sleep comes, somewhere between dream and reality.

Pale living fingers of wood unfurled from the roots and rose, and wound up his ruined arm and his shattered shoulder and his cold and bloodless legs, drawing him gently down, and in, and through, and it did not hurt.

After all the axes and all the blood, it did not hurt at all.

It felt, instead, like being held.

It felt like the thing he had been reaching for with both empty hands his whole short, furious, lonely life.

The pale tree closed over the boy and his dragon like a deep wound drawn shut clean, and the fog drew close again around the seas, having let one thing through and meaning to let nothing follow, and the unmarked waters kept their secrets.

And for a long, long time, nothing at the edge of the world stirred at all.

Far to the south, in a cove gone suddenly and terribly quiet, Stoick the Vast stood with his axe loose in his hand and stared at the empty grey square of sky where his son had been.

The blood was still bright in the grass at his feet.

Too much of it.

Far too much of it for a boy that size to lose and still fly.

The warriors around him had gone silent, one by one, the war-fury draining out of them as they began, slowly, to understand what they had just done, and what they did not, any of them, understand at all.

Astrid Hofferson stood a little apart from the rest, at the very edge of the cove.

Her hand still half-lifted toward the empty north where the black shape had gone small and then vanished.

She was not crying. She did not cry.

But there was a question opening in her chest like a crack running through ice, and she had a cold and certain feeling that it was going to go on widening for the rest of her life.

He looked at me, she thought.

At the end. He looked right at me.

She had spent her life learning to read a man's eyes.

Yet she could not, for anything, make sense of what she had seen in his.

It had not been fear. It had not even been hate, though there had been hate in it too, black and bottomless, more hate than she had known the gentle, useless, infuriating runt could hold.

Underneath the hate there had been something worse.

Something that looked, impossibly, like grief: the grief of a man at a graveside, looking down at people he had already finished mourning.

Astrid lowered her hand.

Out over the black water, the last of the night swallowed the last of the dragon, and the horns fell silent, and the cold came down over the cove.

And not one soul standing in it understood a single thing that had happened, which was, though none of them would know for years yet, the truest and most terrible thing about them all.