How to Train Your Dragon: How to Seize a Dragon's Jewel
Cressida Cowell
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 swordfighter, 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 © 2012 by Cressida Cowell
Cover art © 2013 by Red Hansen
Cover design by Kristina Iulo
Cover © 2013 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 material 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.
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Hachette Book Group
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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 ebook edition: September 2014
ISBN 978-0-316-29952-7
E3
~ CONTENTS ~
1. The Warrior...........................................................................19
2. A Few Little Communication Problems...............................46
3. Hiccup Must Die....................................................................66
4. One of Hiccup’s Less Brilliant Plans....................................72
5. The Wrong Side of the Door................................................85
6. The Witch Excellinor is a Little Annoyed............................106
7. A Truly Scary Bedtime Story..............................................116
8. Hunting for the Amber in the Amber Slavelands..............138
9. The Evil Reaches...................................................................154
10. The Deadly Shadow............................................................172
11. A Genuine Surprise.............................................................175
12. Bear-Mama..........................................................................191
13. The Past has a Way of Catching Up with You..................197
14. The Luck Turns Alvin’s Way..............................................200
15. Hiccup Sets Off to Find the Jewel.....................................217
16. The Triple-Header Deadly Shadow...................................227
17. Did I Already Mention that the Past Has a Way
of Catching Up with the Present?......................................238
18. Searching for Fishlegs........................................................246
19. The Monster and the Slave-Boy.........................................249
20. Oh Dear................................................................................256
21. A Story from the Past........................................................259
22. What Happened Next.........................................................275
23. Some Dragons Really Are Monsters.................................280
24. The Wink of a Red Herring................................................296
25. I Don’t Think I’m Dead.........................................................304
26. A Ghost from the Past........................................................312
27. The Story Ends as It Began...............................................324
28. Facing the Music… and Alvin and the Witch....................328
29. An Unexpected Development............................................354
30. The Battle of Prison Darkheart.........................................366
31. The Secret Hideout............................................................392
PROLOGUE BY HICCUP
HORRENDOUS HADDOCK III
Courage.
You, dear reader, will need courage to read on.
This is NOT the last of my memoirs. But the
story has become darker now, so dark that I need all
my courage just to write it.
I am looking back to that time when I was
fourteen years old and an Outcast.
The Red-Rage had taken over all the dragons in
the land and the Dragon Rebellion had begun. The
Great War between humans and dragons had started.
The Vikings were being led by that dreadful
villain, Alvin the Treacherous, guided by his even-
more-dreadful mother, the Witch Excellinor.
The Dragon Furious was in charge of the
dragon forces, and his aim was nothing less than the
extinction of the entire Viking race.
And the Dragon Furious was winning.
The Vikings’ only hope was for a new King to
be crowned King of the Wilderwest. A King who,
according to ancient prophecy, would have all ten of
the King’s Lost Things.
13
Nine of the
Lost Things had been found. Only the Dragon
Jewel, the most important, remained Lost.
The Dragon Jewel had the power to destroy
dragons for ever… it was the only thing the Dragon
Furious was afraid of.
Alvin the Treacherous had eight of the Lost
Things.
I, Hiccup the Outcast, had only one: my little
hunting-dragon called Toothless. But I also had
Grimbeard the Ghastly’s map that showed the way to
where the Jewel was hidden.
And so I, ‘Enemy Traitor Number One’, was
being hunted through the Archipelago, by both
humans and dragons alike. A proclamation calling for
my death hung on hundreds of burnt-out tree trunks.
My fourteen-year-old self was all alone apart
from three dragon companions.
My Tribe had been driven out of their home on
Berk by the Dragon Rebellion.
My father Stoick and my friend Fishlegs had
been turned into slaves and sent to the Amber
Slavelands. (Originally, they were in the Uglithing
Slavelands, but when the witch figured out where
14
the Jewel was, she moved
everyone.)
You see why I call these
my darkest times?
I had to have hope
that things would turn out
well in the end, that
the s
mallthings and the
happiness of peacetime would return.
I had to remember this through the teeth and fire
and talons.
I had to have Courage.
15
THE PROPHECY OF
THE KING’S LOST THINGS
The Dragontime is coming
And only a King can save you now.
The King shall be the
Champion of Champions.
You shall know the King
By the King’s Lost Things.
A fang-free dragon, my second-best sword,
My Roman shield,
An arrow-from-the-land-that-does-not-exist,
The heart’s stone, the key-that-opens-all-locks,
The ticking-thing, the Throne, the Crown.
And last and best of all the ten,
The Dragon Jewel shall save all men.
1. THE WARRIOR
One cold moonlit winter night in the Forgotten Forest,
a gigantic Warrior sat high and still in a treetop, like an
Angel of Death.
The Warrior was out hunting. It had been on the
trail of the Outcast for many days. It was intending to
kill this Outcast, this enemy of the Wilderwest.
Its metal visor was down. Its sword was ready in
its hand, looking for the kill. It was still as a statue, only
its bright blue eyes looking down on the path winding
through the woods far below it.
In those times, the humans and the dragons were
at war, so it was strictly forbidden for humans to ride
dragons any more.
But surprisingly, this Warrior was seated on the
back of a dragon, lying lazy but alert along the length of
the tree branch. The dragon was an Air Dragon of the
purest silver; very, very rare and very, very dangerous.
It too looked down at the snowy path below, only
its pointed tail moving, slowly and rhythmically, like the
tail of a cat.
All was quiet. After a little time, a noise was
heard. The Warrior had closed its eyes, but now, buried
in the black visor, they snapped open.
19
Way in the distance, a human was
moving along the path through the woods.
The human was ‘The Outcast’, the Enemy,
exactly the person that the Warrior was waiting
to kill.
20
The Warrior gave a grunt of satisfaction, and sat
up a little straighter.
When you looked at this Outcast close-up (which
the Warrior couldn’t, not from that distance) he was
not at all what you might imagine an Outcast to be.
He was very different from the clever confident figure
he cut when he was releasing dragons from right under
the Visithugs’ noses two hours ago.
He was a young boy called Hiccup Horrendous
Haddock the Third, about fourteen years old, very
skinny and ordinary-looking, with the dark purple
mark that the humans called the ‘Slavemark’ – a
tattoo in the shape of a dragon –
burning blue-black on one
side of his forehead.
Hiccup had been
sleeping rough for
six months now, in
treetops, or in caves,
and all he’d had to eat
in that time was berries
and nuts and food stolen
fearfully from sleeping
Viking villages.
Risking his life day after day undoing the dragon-
traps the Vikings had been setting for the dragons,
and constantly running away from the humans and the
terrifying hunting-dragons of the Dragon Rebellion had
really taken it out of him.
So there in the moonlight, Hiccup looked like
what he was.
Afraid, alone.
He was dressed from head to toe in a
dragonskin fire-suit, ripped and tattered by brambles
and branches. He was muddy and dirty, the strain
and fear of being hunted showing in the stiffness of
his body, and the anxious tic in his eyes.
He had a black eye, and he was limping, as was
the riding-dragon trotting along beside him. The
Windwalker was exhausted, which was why Hiccup
wasn’t riding him, and puffing out great wafts of tired
steam.
Around Hiccup’s head fluttered two tiny
hunting-dragons. One very old one, the Wodensfang,
with wings all tattered and torn. One very young
one, Toothless, a bright grass-green – the naughtiest,
most fidgety dragon in the whole of the Archipelago.
They were talking together in soft whispers
in Dragonese.
24
‘I’m telling you, Hiccup,’ the
Wodensfang was saying in a light
quavery voice, ‘your Quest is very simple.
‘You have to find the Dragon Jewel, go
to Tomorrow, get yourself crowned King of the
Wilderwest, and then the Tomorrow Men will tell
you the secret of the Dragon Jewel and you can stop
this stupid war, and save the dragons and the
humans from extinction.’
‘Did you s-s-see me?’ squeaked Toothless. ‘Did
you see me dive-bombing that Visithug? Wasn’t I
clever? Wasn’t I brilliant? Wasn’t I m-marvellous?’
25
‘Yes, you were marvellous,
Toothless,’ replied Hiccup, ‘but
can you keep it down a bit. The
forest dragons are hibernating at the
moment, and we don’t want to wake
them up.’
He rubbed the back of his neck, and
sighed, because he was missing everybody so much.
Being an Outcast was very, very lonely.
‘The thing is, Wodensfang, nothing is ever that
simple. People actually have to want me, a slave, an
Outcast, to be King. You have to have actual human
followers, not just you three. And I have to have
all of the Lost Things, and Alvin the Treacherous
already has eight of them.’
‘You’ve got m-m-me!’ squeaked Toothless,
landing on Hiccup’s arm. ‘I’m one of the Lost Things,
and I’m the best one!’
‘Manners,’ reminded the Windwalker gently.
‘Don’t forget, Toothless, no boasting…’
‘OK,’ said Toothless, his brow furrowing.
‘Toothless is the best one… p-p-please?’
‘The map says that the Jewel is in the Amber
Slavelands,’ said the Wodensfang. ‘Why aren’t
we there?’
26
‘Because instinctively I don’t think the
Jewel is there,’ replied Hiccup.
‘That is because your heart is not yet in
your Quest,’ replied the Wodensfang, solemnly.
‘At the moment, you are on a different Quest,
the Quest to find your friend Fishlegs and your
father. Admit it, that’s why we’re here.’
It was why they were there. The Hooligans were
supposed to have hidden out in this country after
Berk was burnt out by the Dragon Furious.
‘OK,’ admitted Hiccup. ‘I am worried about
Fishlegs, he’s always sort of relied on me.’
Fishlegs was a ‘runt’ who had been washed up
on the beaches of Berk fourteen years ago. He had no
parents, so i
t was Hiccup who looked after him and
stopped the other Hooligans from bullying him.
‘And this is getting in the way of your true
Quest,’ interrupted the Wodensfang, ‘which is to
find the Dragon Jewel.’
‘Not entirely,’ said Hiccup, ‘because I still
don’t think the Jewel is in the Amber Slavelands,
whatever the map says.’
They had walked such a long way now, that they
stopped right underneath the tree the Warrior was
sitting in. Hiccup got out the map.
27
The map was quite complicated. It showed a nice
distinct picture of the Amber Slavelands, and there was
a maze of mirrors and Prison Darkheart, and there, in
the heart of it, was the Dragon Jewel, helpfully pointed
out with a large arrow and capital letters.
The three dragons peered at it over Hiccup’s
shoulder. So too did the Warrior and the dragon
perched high, invisible and menacing in the treetops
above Hiccup.
‘Look,’ said Hiccup, pointing to a large fish at
the top of the map – a fish so long that it took up the
entire space from left to
right. ‘What is that?’
Trust sea-faring
creatures like dragons and
Vikings to know their fish
species.
‘It’s a member of
the herring family,’
said the Wodensfang.
‘And what colour is it?’
‘R-r-red!’ said Toothless
proudly. ‘Ask me another one! I
know all the colours,’ he confided
confidentially to the Windwalker.
30
‘You see,’ said Hiccup, ‘in the human world a
“red herring” is another way of saying a false start,
or a wrong direction. My knowledge of Grimbeard
the Ghastly is that he was a tricky man, and this
is his way of saying that the Jewel isn’t in the
Slavelands at all. What do you think, Wodensfang?’
The Wodensfang was the only one of the four
of them old enough to have actually met Grimbeard
