She carefully pulled down
the hood of her bearsuit
and whispered confidingly,
‘Sometimes I even scare myself…’
‘I bet you do,’ said Hiccup admiringly. ‘You
didn’t, by any chance, have a very scary grandmother,
did you?’
‘All Wanderer grandmothers are scary,’ replied
Eggingarde.
The witch leapt on to the Top Table, and when
she straightened and opened her mouth to speak, it
was as surprising as if a dog had suddenly got on its
hind-quarters, and spoken like a human being.
‘FOOLS!’ screeched the witch.
‘IGNORAMUSES! COWARDS! LAZYBONES!
WHERE IS MY JEWEL, YOU NUMBSKULLS?’
‘As you can see,’ purred Alvin, polishing his
hook, ‘my mother is a little annoyed.’
‘Slaves of the Amber Slavelands,’ said the witch,
calming down with bewildering swiftness, to the
relief of her electrified audience.
Now she put on her sweetest, most reasonable
voice. ‘I have brought you Grimbeard’s map.’ She
pointed at the map, which Hiccup could now see
had been hung very carefully in the centre of the
courtyard. ‘See how clearly it is marked, how the
Dragon Jewel is hidden somewhere in between
the Maze of Mirrors, and the prison of Darkheart?
All I ask, and it is for the good of the Wilderwest,
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is for you to find me the Jewel.
‘But I see you may need a little more motivation.
Listen up slaves!’ yelled the witch. ‘Anybody who finds
me the Dragon Jewel, or indeed that little Outcast…’
Hiccup gave a guilty jump in his seat to hear himself
personally mentioned, but luckily everyone was
concentrating so firmly on the witch that they did not
notice. ‘Whoever is the Jewel-finder gets the most
precious prize of all…
‘The prize,’ crooned the witch, ‘is FREEDOM.’
The crowds leaned forward eagerly, as if her words
were water and they could drink them in. ‘Freedom…’
they crooned after her longingly. ‘Freedom…’
‘Just close your eyes,’ smiled that infernal witch,
‘and imagine what freedom means to you…’
Close your eyes and imagine what freedom means
to you.
Such simple words.
The tattered scarecrow slaves closed their eyes
and to each one it meant something different, but
somehow the same. A clear blue sky. Flying on the
back of a dragon. Out in a ship on the restless wave.
A small house in a quiet village on a small island, with
the smoke rising lazily from the chimney. Home.
Somewhere far away from these chains, these
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desperate sands, these dark prison walls.
‘What about the Slavemark?’ cried out a slave,
forgetting his place.
‘It can be burnt off,’ said the witch craftily. ‘It’s
a slightly painful operation, but a small price to pay for
FREEDOM.’
‘You’re lying aren’t you, Mother?’ whispered
Alvin the Treacherous.
‘Of course I’m lying,’ the witch whispered back
sweetly. ‘The Slavemark can never be removed. Once
a slave, always a slave.’
She turned back to the crowds of slaves.
‘At the Seeking tomorrow, you shall bring me the
Jewel, I know you shall!’
And she bounded off the table and out of the
room.
Oh, that witch.
She and her son were not nice people.
Not nice people at all.
7. A TRULY SCARY BEDTIME
STORY – DO NOT READ THIS
IF YOU ARE ABOUT TO GO
TO BED
The little dark-haired girl called Eggingarde showed
Hiccup where to sleep, in a corner of one of the
dungeons of Prison Darkheart, which served as the
slaves’ dormitory.
‘It looks like someone’s already sleeping
there,’ said Hiccup doubtfully.
‘No,’ the little girl shook her
head firmly and mournfully. ‘It
used to be Loserkid’s bed. But he
doesn’t sleep there any more.’
Hiccup settled the
Wodensfang and Toothless in
the bed underneath a tattered
blanket he had brought with him
in his rucksack. He then had a whispered argument
with Toothless under the blanket. ‘What have I said,
Toothless, about not eating inedible objects? Look,
you’ve eaten a large hole out of my shirt…’
Toothless widened his greengage eyes, and
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innocently batted those preposterously long eyelashes.
‘Wasn’t T-t-toothless…’ he mumbled in
between a large mouthful of shirt, and he pointed a
hopeful wing at the Wodensfang. ‘Must have been the
W-w-wodensfang…’
‘I can see you’re eating it right now!’ whispered
Hiccup in exasperation. ‘You might as
well own up!’
Toothless protested.
‘No,
n-n-no, no...’
But as he
did so…
… he accidentally spat out one of the buttons.
Both Hiccup and Toothless looked at the button.
Even Toothless had the grace to look
slightly guilty.
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‘S-s-sorry, shirt,’ said
Toothless. ‘Look, T-t-toothless
owned up!’
Toothless swallowed the remains
of the mouthful of shirt. ‘Sorry, b-b-
belt. Sorry, top-of-trousers. Sorry, w-w-
waistcoat pocket… Ooh, Toothless is g-g-
good at this owning-up business…’
Hiccup sighed.
At this rate he was going to have nothing left that
didn’t have bite marks in it.
Hiccup popped up from underneath the blanket
to ask Eggingarde a question.
‘Where does Loserkid sleep now then?’ asked
Hiccup.
Eggingarde frowned.
She didn’t answer the question, she just counted
on her fingers the previous occupants of the bed
Hiccup was about to sleep in.
‘And before Loserkid, it was Goggle-eyed
Gertie’s, and before that it was the funny looking kid
with the big ears, and then there was Bobblehands –
that’s his candle you’re holding on to there.’
Hiccup took his hands off the candle as if it
was poisoned.
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‘And Littlearms the Brave and—’
‘What happened to all these people?’ asked
Hiccup in horror.
Eggingarde did not answer.
‘Are you quite sure that there was never a boy
called Fishlegs sleeping in this bed?’ asked Hiccup.
Eggingarde looked startled.
‘Was Fishlegs a tall skinny boy with curly hair,
smashed glasses and a face like a haddock who wanted
to be a bard, just like me?’
‘Yes,’ said Hiccup eagerly. ‘That’s Fishlegs!’
‘No,’ said Eggingarde. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever
seen anybody like that around here. But if I had,’ she
a
dded wistfully, ‘I think I would have liked him.’
‘Eggingarde, you just described him!’ said Hiccup
in exasperation. ‘You must have met him! Please,
you have to tell me. He’s my very great friend – what
happened to him, where is he?’
Anxiously, Eggingarde shook her head. ‘Sshh,
I can’t tell you. I’m not allowed to tell you about the
Lost, it’s bad for morale.’
She looked over her shoulder at the dungeon
filled with whispering that was dying away as people
settled down for the night.
Eggingarde put up the hood of her bearsuit, and
119
peered out from underneath.
‘But I can tell you a story,’ said Eggingarde
determinedly, drawing down her thick dark eyebrows
into a straight line and sucking in the air through the
gap in her teeth. ‘A very scary story.
‘This story isn’t about your friend Fishlegs.’
Eggingarde shook her head violently. ‘No, no, no, no,
no. It’s about… somebody else. The story is called:
The Slave-Boy, the Slave-Girl and the Monster of the
Amber Slavelands.’
POUF! Someone blew out the last candle in
the dungeon, and in a doomy alarmed and alarming
whisper, the little girl insisted on telling the story.
You have to imagine this story being told in the
huge, echoing dungeon with the whispering voices in it
sounding like spirits of the dead. You have to imagine
Eggingarde, lying back in her bearsuit, conjuring
up the story with wild wavings of her arms, and the
moonlight making shadows of those arms on the
dungeon walls.
‘Once upon a time, a poor slave-boy and a slave-girl
were paddling their sand-yachts in the most Evil of
the Evil Reaches, deep in the heart of the Amber
Slavelands,’ began Eggingarde.
‘Oh d-d-on’t let her tell this story…’ moaned
Toothless from under the bedclothes. ‘Toothless is
worried that this might be a scary story and this is
really quite a scary dungeon already…’
But Eggingarde was not to be stopped. She told
the story as if she could not help herself from telling
it, as if it was something that she could not keep to
herself.
And Hiccup wanted to hear it, because he was
worried that Eggingarde might be lying, and that this
was a story about Fishlegs after all.
For someone so little, Eggingarde told an
excellent story, as if she were a grown-up. Maybe it was
the amount of time she spent with adults, or maybe it
was just that Wanderers are wonderful storytellers.
‘So low was the tide,’ whispered Eggingarde,
‘that the dreaded red sands stretched as far as the
eye could see to the north, west, south and east –
nothing but sand.
‘Sand everywhere.
‘Sand and a sinister silence.
‘No birds called over those
dreadful red sands. No seagulls screeched.
For something terrible lurked beneath,
something truly awful, and the birds knew to
stay away.
‘The slave-boy and the slave-girl paddled
their sand-yachts out on the Eastern Sands, looking
around with wild eyes, paddling as if witches were
after them, though not a human soul could be seen
in any direction. They kept looking left and right,
and every now and then they stopped, reached down
with their curious long nets, and bent to pick up a
piece of amber lying on the beach.
‘These pieces of
amber, revealed by the low
tide, were amber jewels
of astonishing richness
and variety, some the
colour of honey and the
lightness of air,
others milky drops of
yellow-green, others red
as coral, warm to the
touch and flecked with
insects’ wings.
‘The Amber Slavelands are the best amber
hunting-grounds in the whole of the Viking world,
and many a slave has died there in the Quest to find
the amber Jewel that would be fit for a warrior Viking
princess, or the sword-hilt of a king. Low tide was best
for finding amber, and lowest tide the best of all… But
it was also the most dangerous.
‘On, on, they paddled wildly. On and on and
further out – the willow baskets on their backs
nearly full now. The red sand made a sludgy
swishing sound as the rims of the yachts
splashed
through
it, on, on,
on, for
there was no
turning back –
and suddenly they
stopped, both at
exactly the same time,
as sharply as if they
had been hit
by arrows.
‘In front of them in the soft, wet, red sands
were deep scarlet indentations appearing out
of nowhere, and stretching out for miles, the sea
puddling in the imprints, shining in the early evening
sunset as if it were blood.
‘The footprints were so large that the slave-
girl’s yacht came to a dull squelching stop right in the
middle of one, and it was as large as the
yacht itself.
‘They were the footsteps…
‘… of a GIGANTIC…
‘… dragon.’
Toothless let out an unhappy whine.
‘The slave-boy and the slave-girl felt their
hearts almost die within them.
‘Oh their luck had really vanished now.
‘They knew that they were doomed.
‘They looked at each other, and then
they both hid their heads in their hands,
curled up in the yachts, and the slave-boy
pretended he was back home, in his
village, and the slave-girl would have
pretended she was back home if she
had known where “home” was.
‘But then the slave-boy remembered that he had
been a Viking-in-Training, once upon a time, before he
had been a slave. And the slave-girl remembered she
was actually extremely brave.
‘And the slave-girl and the slave-boy made fists
out of their hands and shook them at the footprints to
show defiance.’
Eggingarde made a fist out of her own hand, and
shook it furiously in the air, and her shadow-fist shook,
larger still, on the dungeon wall.
‘Toothless not liking this story,’ whispered
Toothless.
‘Yes, I don’t think I like this story, either,’ said
Hiccup out loud, forgetting that Toothless wasn’t
supposed to be there.
‘I don’t have to tell you the end of the story if
you don’t want me to,’ said Eggingarde, dropping her
arms.
Oh dear, Hiccup had to hear the end of the story
now, although he did not really want to hear it. ‘No,
carry on,’ said Hiccup.
‘The slave-girl and the slave-boy knelt to
examine the footprint,’ said Eggingarde. ‘And
very, very quietly, as they knelt, somet
hing
moved in the sand behind them.
‘It made no sound,
just a little light spurt of sand, like
a tiny, bubbling upwards waterfall. Up it rose
a little more. What was it? Something very curious…
‘It was an eye, lying on the sand, blinking there
quietly for a moment, like it had been discarded by a
giant. Slowly, up it rose, and there were four more eyes
burrowing out of the sand like periscopes, curiously
attached to the end of long dragon fingers. And the five
together made a gigantic dragon claw.
‘The claw held still. The eyes, horrifyingly
attached to the fingers, focused in on the boy without
blinking.
‘And
kneeling in the
sand, they sensed a
presence
behind them,
the hairs on
the back of
their necks tingled
and prickled with
alarm, slowly they
peered behind
them—’
‘You’re freaking me out, Eggingarde,’
said Hiccup.
‘She’s freaking me out too,’ said the
Wodensfang, peering out from under the covers.
‘And T-t-toothless,’ said Toothless, whose wings
were over his ears. ‘Can’t you make her stop? B-b-
bite her or something?’
‘Manners,’ said the Wodensfang.
‘Just a l-l-little bite?’ pleaded Toothless.
‘A sweet one? To make her stop!’
But nothing was going to make Eggingarde
stop now.
‘“Aaaaargghhhhhhhhh!”
they screamed,’ said
Eggingarde, and she sat up
and screamed ‘Aarraghhhh!’
herself so loud, that Hiccup was
astonished that none of the other
slaves woke up, but they had
obviously had a hard day out on the
sands, for they snored on.
‘And the slave-girl and the
slave-boy got on their yachts,
and propelled them
forward with the
oars as fast as they could.
‘Wildly they oared the careering
yachts, crying and splashing across the
scarlet sand. They could not stop to blow their
whistles, they could not stop for the dragon was
How to Train Your Dragon: How to Seize a Dragon's Jewel Page 6
