Chapter Text
The dragonet was inconsolable, and Hawthorne didn’t know how to help.
He didn’t usually have any difficulty making friends with other children. Even as a baby, before he could walk, when his pram was placed alongside another baby he had had no difficulty in chatting in baby-talk with other babies. (In fact, it had been another baby, whose name he didn’t even know, who had taught him to say the word “dragon” comprehensibly enough that his parents knew what he meant.) As soon as he had been able to walk, he had happily been able to run into the park near his home and play with other toddlers or even older children.
Before long, he’d been able to get his parents to understand that he didn’t just enjoy playing at being a dragon, or playing that Mum and Dad or Homer were dragons when they gave him rides on their shoulders, but that he actually wanted to learn to ride real dragons. When he started his lessons at the dragon stables when he was three, he had been able to get the dragons he rode on to understand him.
But this was different. This wasn’t a well-trained adult miniature dragon whom he could ride, as if she were an unnimal. This was a dragon child, and she was unhappy, and he didn’t know what to do.
‘You’d best keep away from that one,’ said his teacher, Cecily, a catwun-minor with a furry face and body, clawed hands, who walked upright like a human and didn’t have a tail, but refused to wear clothes unless it was really cold. ‘That’s Flaps Like a Crow In the Evening Storm. She’s a bit – odd.’
Hawthorne looked at the little black dragon. Her wings were feathery, like a bird or an angel, instead of the stretched membrane of all the other dragons he knew.
‘How old is she?’ he asked.
‘Five, like you. She was hatched at Eventide, five years ago.’ (Hawthorne wondered why he had never seen her before, if she’d been here for the past two years, at the dragon stables he visited every week.) ‘Her mum was Dances Like a Candle Flame, one of our silver dragons, but she got out one night and was gone a long time – we think she might even have mated with one of the wild dragons in the Wintersea Republic. She’s lucky she survived – they hunt dragons there, as if they were unnimals. They’d probably think I was an unnimal, too – either stuff me, or cut my tongue out, put a collar round my neck and set me to pull a carriage, the way they do to Magnificats.’ Cecily’s fur bristled with horror and indignation, and she quickly ran her tongue over her shoulder-fur to calm herself. ‘So, anyway, Dances had the sense to come home eventually, laid an egg just after she got back to her stable, but she was so exhausted from the journey that she died immediately afterwards. We tried getting Dances’ mum, Rises Like Dawn Mist, to incubate the egg – none of Rises’ other children was ready to start nesting yet – but she wouldn’t even look at the egg – behaved as if it didn’t exist. So we had to incubate it artificially until it hatched, and rear little Flaps by paw.’
‘Doesn’t she have any friends?’ Hawthorne had seen the other dragonets playing together, including silver dragonets who he supposed must be Flaps’ cousins.
‘No, she makes the other dragons nervous. We have to keep her on her own.’
Hawthorne leaned over to the enclosure. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Want to be friends?’
‘Maybe you should try talking to her in her own language,’ Cecily suggested.
‘Okay. How do you say, “Will you be my friend?” in dragon language?’
‘“H’chath shka-lev,”’ Cecily told him. ‘It means, “Long may you burn.” If she wants to be your friend, she’ll say, “Machar l’ok dachva-lev,” which means “I burn brighter knowing you.”’
Hawthorne repeated ‘“H’chath shka-lev.”’ The dragonet’s wings and head drooped, and she responded with something that included the word lev.
Cecily talked to her soothingly in Dragontongue, and eventually the dragonet lifted her head and replied.
‘What did she say?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘She said, “I can’t breathe fire at all,”’ said Cecily. ‘So I was just explaining that it’s not a problem, and plenty of dragons don’t breathe fire until they’re six or seven, and that you didn’t mean it literally and it’s all right to say, “Machar l’ok dachva-lev,” if she wants to accept you as a friend. She says she won’t say that, because it’s a lie, but that she’d like it if you could come in and play with her, and she promises not to hurt you.’
‘How do I say, “My name’s Hawthorne”?’
‘I’m a bit busy now,’ said Cecily. ‘Dragons to groom, you know how it is. Hiccup? Can you give this kid a tutorial?’
A boy with wild untidy ginger hair, a few years older than Hawthorne, came over to join them. He had a tiny green dragonet, no bigger than a Sangese lap-dog, riding on his shoulder.
‘Hiccup?’ said Cecily again. ‘Hawthorne here wants to learn Dragontongue. Can you and Nips With Tiny Toothless Gums teach him?’
The little green dragonet said something Hawthorne couldn’t understand, which made Flaps’ tail twitch in what looked like amusement for the first time.
‘He says dragons are never helpful,’ explained Hiccup. ‘Which isn’t true. Nips is really brave and loyal, he’s saved my life nearly as many times as he’s got me into trouble.’
Nips made another comment.
‘He says that’s only because I tickle his tummy and tell him jokes and fetch him snacks.’
‘You can tell jokes in Dragontongue?’ said Hawthorne. He had barely known that dragons had a language, let alone one that was complicated enough for jokes.
‘Some. They’re not always that good, but they work if Nips hasn’t heard them before.’
‘Do all dragonriders learn Dragontongue?’ Hawthorne hadn’t encountered it in his lessons so far.
‘Most of them don’t bother learning more than greetings,’ Hiccup admitted. ‘My dad doesn’t like me talking to Nips With Tiny Toothless Gums in Dragontongue. He says the right way to train a dragon is to yell at it until it gets the idea. But then, he didn’t hear his dragons threatening to eat Nips when I first brought him home.’
‘You have dragons at home?’ Hawthorne knew that he could only dream of having a dragon of his very own, at least until he was practically grown-up, maybe ten years or so away.
‘A few. We’ve got my dad’s hunting dragons, Rends With Fangs Barbed Like Fishhooks and Stifles With Breath Like Pondweed, and when my mum’s home, her riding dragon, Shimmers Like a Phantom, lives with us too.’
‘Where’s your mum usually?’
‘Off on quests. She’s in the League of Explorers. She was home for a bit last year, when I first caught Nips and started trying to train him, but she’s never been around much, even when I was your age. My granddad – mum’s dad – was the one who mainly brought me up, and he’s the only person who thought speaking Dragontongue was a good way to bond with Nips. Now, what do you want to say?’
‘How do I say my name: Hawthorne Swift?’
Hiccup gave him a long Dragontongue phrase. ‘That’s the Dragontongue version. Literally, it means Radiates Hope As the Blossoming Trees and Migratory Birds Bring Promise of Summer, so it works quite well in Dragontongue. Ben over there – Hiccup gestured to a boy with raven-black hair and pale skin who was rubbing the scales of a magnificent silver dragon – is Brings Joy Like a Son of the Open Meadow.’
‘What about you?’
Hiccup sighed. ‘Fills With Alarm and Dismay As When a Fish-and-Chip Dinner Turns Out to Be a Nightmarish Monster.’
‘Really? Cool!’
‘It’s not cool,’ said Hiccup dejectedly. ‘It means I’m a disappointment.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Because of everything. Because I’m a nerd and a scrawny little wimp who’s scared of nearly everything and gets seasick, and I’m left-handed, and I speak Dragontongue and I prefer reading to playing rugby, and I own the tiniest dragon ever, and – just everything. Except being ginger. That’s maybe the only thing my parents like about me.’
‘Yeah, but – you’re a surprise. Like Flaps. Surprise is the start of an adventure. That’s better than just being the child your parents expected to have, isn’t it?’
Hiccup brightened. ‘Maybe it is. Nips isn’t at all the sort of dragon I’d have meant to choose, when I went to catch a dragon to train, but I could sense him, even in the darkness of the cave, and I just felt that we were meant to be together.’
Hawthorne wondered whether he could sense that about Flaps Like a Crow. He liked her, but was that the same thing?