You don’t HAVE to read the Hiccup books in order.
But if you want to, this is the right order:
ABOUT HICCUP
Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third was
an awesome sword fighter, a dragon-whisperer,
and the greatest Viking Hero that ever lived.
But Hiccup’s memoirs look back to when
he was a very ordinary boy, and finding
it hard to be a Hero.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Text and illustrations copyright © 2015 by Cressida Cowell
Cover art © 2015 by Red Hansen
Cover design by Nicole Brown
Cover © 2015 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning,
uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission
of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.
If you would like to use materials from the book (other than for review purposes),
prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at
[email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
lb-kids.com
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned
by the publisher.
First U.S. ebook edition: November 2015
Originally published in Great Britain in 2015 by Hodder Children’s Books
ISBN 978-0-316-29919-0
E3
~ CONTENTS ~
The Story So Far....................................................................................17
1. However Bad Things Seem to Be, They Can Always Get Worse..........30
2. You See, it Just Got Worse Again Less
Than Five Minutes into the Story.......................................................43
3. The Minor Problem.............................................................................61
4. The Larger Problem...........................................................................88
5. Getting to Tomorrow..........................................................................110
6. It’s Difficult to Rescue Somebody Who Doesn’t Want
to Be Rescued....................................................................................123
7. Only the One with the King’s Lost Things Can Land on Tomorrow
and Live.............................................................................................144
8. I Bet You Thought That This Was Never Going to Happen..................160
9. The Prophecy of Grimbeard the Ghastly.............................................177
10. Who is the King?..............................................................................192
11. Grimbeard’s Letter...........................................................................212
12. The Crowning of the King of the Wilderwest.....................................234
13. A Very Short Chapter That Begins Well and Ends Badly...................255
14. That Grimbeard the Ghastly Really Was a Very
Tricky Man.......................................................................................263
15. Preparing for the Funeral – Sorry, Single Combat............................272
16. Single Combat ................................................................................285
17. Sometimes What You Are Looking For is Right Here at Home.........313
18. The Past Never Leaves Us..............................................................321
19. And it Haunts the Present in More Ways Than We Think..................330
20. It Certainly Scares the Living Daylights Out of Me..........................344
21. The Witch Intervenes with Fate.......................................................350
22. That’s Why They Call Him Alvin the Treacherous
(the Clue is in the Name Really).......................................................356
23. Total War.........................................................................................364
24. Did I Mention That the Past Has a Way of Catching
Up With Us Eventually.....................................................................378
25. How Can I Trust You?.......................................................................396
26. The Pledge......................................................................................412
27. The Ghosts Have Been Set Free.......................................................440
Epilogue By Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third................................481
THE STORY SO FAR
‘There were dragons when I was a boy.’
Those were the first words of the beginning of
this story.
Once there was a boy named Hiccup Horrendous
Haddock the Third, who lived on the little isle of
Berk with a hunting-dragon called Toothless, and a
riding-dragon called the Windwalker, wild and happy,
in a world full of dragons.
Hiccup was the son of Chief Stoick the Vast,
and the most unlikely Viking Hero you could
possibly imagine. A skinny runner bean of a boy, who
was nonetheless an awesome sword-fighter, and a
Dragonwhisperer, one of the few people who have
been able to speak Dragonese, the language dragons
speak to one another.
One dreadful day, Hiccup accidentally released
a great Seadragon called the Dragon Furious, who had
been chained in the terrible forest prison of Berserk
for over a hundred years. The Dragon Furious began
a Dragon Rebellion that aims to kill the entire human
race, and the humans and the dragons are now fighting
each other to extinction.
The dragons have set fire to the little Hooligan
17
village where Hiccup grew up, and the humans have
been driven out of their houses and are now gathered
on the island of Tomorrow, waiting for the Final Battle.
There is only one thing that can save the humans
now. A new King of the Wilderwest must be crowned
on the island of Tomorrow. Once the King is crowned,
he will be told the secret of the Dragon Jewel, and this
secret has the power to destroy all dragons forever. But
a King can only be crowned if he has gathered together
the King’s Lost Things, ten objects that have been
scattered across the Archipelago and lost for a century.
Over the course of eleven exciting and long
adventures, slowly and painfully, Hiccup Horrendous
Haddock the Third has gather
ed the ten Lost Things
together, with the help of his best friends Fishlegs
and Camicazi, an ancient old Seadragon called the
Wodensfang, and a beautiful three-headed riding
dragon called the Deadly Shadow, that can camouflage
itself so effectively you think it is invisible.
But the wicked Alvin the Treacherous (the clue
is in the name, really) has stolen all of the Lost Things
from Hiccup. Alvin is on the island of Tomorrow right
now, and he is about to be crowned King. If Alvin is
made King, he will use the power of the Dragon Jewel
to make dragons extinct forever.
18
Everybody believes that Hiccup is dead, shot
through the heart by Alvin the Treacherous’s Warriors,
but in fact Hiccup survived, and is lying unconscious
on the little beach of Hero’s End, an island a little way
from Tomorrow.
But Hiccup has no riding-dragon, no boat and
no Lost Things. And only the one with the King’s Lost
Things can land on Tomorrow and live. If Hiccup
sets one foot on the beach, the Dragon Guardians of
Tomorrow will rise from beneath the sand and carry
Hiccup up into airy oblivion…
This is a dreadful predicament indeed.
Today is the Doomsday of Yule, the day of the
Final Battle between dragons and humans.
There is only one day left now, for Hiccup to
become the King of the Wilderwest, and to save the
dragons.
One day more…
CAN HICCUP SAVE THE DRAGONS?
19
THE WORLD NEEDS A HERO
It was the darkest hour that humanity had ever faced,
and a terrible doom had come upon the Archipelago.
Once, not so very long ago, these little green
islands had been bustling and full of life, with a cosy
little village nestled on every hilltop. Now, those same
villages were blasted all to smithereens, and even the
scorched hills themselves had great bites torn out of
them, mountainsides up-ended, rivers re-routed, trees
turned upside-down with the sap weeping out of them,
and great gouges in the face of the earth caused by the
raking of angry dragons.
The smoke of the burning villages and the
flaming of the forests had combined with the early
morning mist to create an eerie fog, out of which
the Dragon Furious and the numberless forces of
his dragon army gathered in Wrecker’s Bay loomed
spookily like ghosts. The majority were still sleeping,
waiting with half-closed eyes and hungry talons for the
Final Battle between the dragons and the humans.
It was Doomsday, and the world needed a Hero.
Not just any Hero, but a
Hero who could change the
course of history.
And there were those
abroad, even now, very
now, in the palest hours
of earliest morning on the
Doomsday of Yule, who
were out there looking for
one.
Two young Viking
warriors, a boy and a girl, were
sitting on the back of a beautiful
three-headed Deadly Shadow dragon. Both
had ruins and rags for clothes. They were far, far from
home, these young Warriors, for the tornado howl of
the dragons’ war had flamed their sweet safe homes
into ash, and tossed them in the air, and blown them all
away to be scattered to the four corners of the earth by
the wild winds of the Archipelago.
Only a Hero could save them now, and they were
both afraid – very, very afraid – although the girl was
pretending not to be.
The girl, a ferocious little Bog-Burglar with hair
so tangled it was as if it had been whipped up by a
whirlwind, leaned over the side of the Deadly Shadow
dragon, crying with fierce
desperation into the dense and shifting
fog:
‘Hiccup? Hiccup? Where are you, Hiccup?
Hiccup, where are you???’
The boy who sat beside her was called Fishlegs.
He was a raggedy spider of a boy, with burnt curly
hair, and smashed glasses perched lopsidedly on his
nose. ‘Hiccup is dead, Camicazi,’ he said quietly, with
a weary resignation. ‘Everyone knows he is dead. They
even saw it happen…’
‘He is not dead!’ replied the little girl, angry
because she was frightened. ‘I refuse to believe he is
dead! I know he is alive! I know it in my heart…’
‘Hiccup? Where are you, Hiccup? Hiccup, where
a-a-a-are you???’
There were others abroad, out hunting for a Hero.
Far away in the fog, the Witch’s Vampire
Spydragon had escaped from drowning, and spread
his cruel bat wings, red eyes gleaming, monkey face
snuffling, hunting, hunting for a Hero. But the
Spydragon was not hunting blindly in that
misty darkness; he was hunting with
exactitude, and surety, and precision.
Two days earlier, he had bitten the
Hero Hiccup with his very own
jaws and
left two of his favourite
teeth in the Hero’s arm, and he
could hear those teeth calling to him,
somewhere down there in the foggy seas.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, sang the teeth of the
Vampire Spydragon, tick-tock tick-tock, as they lay
there ticking in the Hero’s arm, down there in the
darkness.
And up in the misty skies above, the Spydragon’s
bat-like ears swivelled to the sound: tick-tock, tick-tock.
No, no, thought the Spydragon to himself. The
Hero is only terribly wounded, he is not dead… But he is
GOING to be dead, oh yes he is, I will make sure of that …
The Dragon Furious also knew that the Hero was
not yet dead.
And all through that fog, throughout the entire
Archipelago, the Dragon Furious had sent out search
parties, hunting, hunting the Hero in the desolation of
fog and sea-wilderness.
Across the Sullen Seas they had flown all the night,
with dripping fangs and bright cats’ eyes, north to
the Frozen Isle of Nowhere, east to the Bay of the
Broken Heart, south to the Flaming Forest, west to the
Mystery and the Waterlands, flying like vengeful ghosts
and spirits of the past, all of them crying in a bitter
relentless chant:
Hunt the human…Hunt the human…Hunt the
human…
And…
‘Hiccup? Where are you, Hiccup? Hiccup,
where a-a-a-re you???’
One of those search parties was a little band of
Sand-Sharks. They had spotted the Spydragon tracking
someone with his teeth, and they knew who that
someone was, so they followed the Spydragon
through the fog…
‘Hiccup? Where are you, Hiccup? Hiccup,
where a-a-a-are you?’
Oh, the world needs a Hero all right. For in a few
small hours, the rest of that sleeping dragon army
would awake, and then the inferno would begin.
But who would
; get to Hiccup first on the last
day of Doomsday?
Would it be the friends with their
helpful hands and loving hearts, or would it be
the enemies with their fangs and fire?
Follow me, reader, if you dare. Take my hand, for
we can fly swifter than Vampire Spydragons, and more
invisible than the Deadly Shadow; we can follow the
sound of ticking teeth faster than they can, and trace
the Hero back to where he lies, on the little isle of
Hero’s End.
The little isle of Hero’s End, where things end
and things begin…
Let me begin at the beginning, even though this
is the ending.
1. HOWEVER BAD THINGS
SEEM TO BE, THEY CAN
ALWAYS GET WORSE
On the last Day of Doomsday, known as the Doomsday
of Yule, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third lay
unconscious on a beach on the little isle of Hero’s End.
It was a dreadful day indeed, bitterly cold, with
the sun struggling to come up over the frozen horizon,
and the Winter Wind howling like a hundred banshees,
and the early-morning fog so dense and thick with the
acrid smoke of War and burning forest that you could
barely see your hand out in front of you.
The fog was a blessing, though, for it hid the
blackened devastation all around. It hid the many
dragons that had been out all night, hunting for our
Hero. It hid the Dragon Furious’s mighty army that
was just beginning to wake up and move about in the
nearby desolation of Wrecker’s Bay.
And it hid the Hero himself.
Hiccup had always been an unremarkable-looking
boy for a Viking Hero, with one of those ordinary faces
that was difficult to remember. But now he was a truly
pitiable sight, like a broken scarecrow that someone
30
31
has accidentally trodden on. Half in and half out of
the water, strewn with seaweed, his clothes ragged
and in ribbons about him, two black eyes, face clawed
How to Train Your Dragon: How to Fight a Dragon's Fury Page 1
