How to Train Your Dragon: How to Fight a Dragon's Fury Read online

  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