Cressida Cowell - How to Train Your Dragon 04 - How to Cheat a Dragons Curse

How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse (The Heroic Misadventures of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III #4)

Cressida Cowell

CONTENTS

1. The Hunting-with-Bows-and-Arrows-on-Skis

Expedition....................................................................1

2. Saber-Toothed Driver Dragons...............................16

3. The Hunters Become the Hunted............................36

4. Is There Something Wrong with Fishlegs?.............55

5. Smashsticks-on-Ice..................................................68

6. What Old Wrinkly Said...........................................80

7. The Quest for the Frozen Potato..............................93

8. The Wrath of Thor...........,......................................104.

9. Back on Berk...........................................................114

10. Freya'sday Eve on Hysteria..................................116

11. In the Soup............................................................127

12. Will Toothless Save the Day?................................149

13. The Great Potato Burglary.....................................157

14. The Potato-Burglars' Run.......................................177

15. They Might Just Make It, Now..............................181

16. The Doomfang........................................................188

17. The Quest Is Over...................................................200

18. Fishlegs...................................................................212

19. The final Chapter................................................... 220

Epilogue........................................................................237

[Image: Toothless Hiccup's pet dragon.]

[Image: Hiccup the Hero of this stony.]

[Image: One Eye (a Saber-Toothed Dragon Driver).]

[Image: Snotlout.]

[Image: Norbert's axe.]

[Image: Amicazi *glar and ward fighter.]

[Image: Stoick the Vast.]

[Image: Clueless.]

[Image: Fishlegs.]

[Image: Norbert the Nutjob (completely crazy * chief).]

I am the Venomous Vorpent And my sting is as deadly as a Black Widow Spider.

Even before this story begins I have already stung one of the Characters (I hope he is not your favorite.) And although he does not know it yet

THE CURSE IS COME UPON HIM!

My poison is creeping through his body.

My strong venom is killing his heart.

And at ten o'clock on Friday morning He shall DIE as sure as fish eggs are fish eggs.

Because NOBODY can CHEAT THE CURSE OF THE VENOMOUS VORPENT.

1. THE HUNTING-WITH-BOWS- AND-ARROWIS-ON-SKIS EXPEDITION

Winters were always cold in the Viking Lands.

But this winter was the coldest in a hundred years. It was so cold that the Sullen Sea had frozen over, and all the islands in the Inner Isles were now joined together by a great flat desert of solid ice, two meters thick in places.

[Image: One eye.]

On this particularly cold morning several hours before breakfast, it was as if the whole world was holding

its breath, frozen in time. The air was as sharp as broken glass; no sound disturbed the pure snowy silence.

No sound, that is, apart from an appalling, mad screaming coming from somewhere out in the middle of the ice.

For a small party of young boys and their teacher from the Hooligan Tribe had set out from the little Isle of Berk where they lived to the Island of Villainy to the south.

[Image: Hiccup.]

Not in a boat, of course, for you cannot sail across a frozen sea.

They were speeding far too fast across the ice in an enormous wooden Viking SLEIGH, pulled by six pure white Saber-Toothed Driver Dragons larger than lions and faster than cheetahs.

The dreadful mad yelling was coming from the man driving the sleigh, Gobber the Belch. Gobber was the teacher in charge of the Pirate Training Program on Berk, and he was an enormous monster of a man wrapped up in furs who could easily have been mistaken for a grizzly bear with a dirty red beard and an attitude problem.

"GEDDONWITHIT, YOU MISERABLE WHITE WORMS!" roared Gobber at the Saber-Toothed Dragons, cracking his whip above their heads.

"I'VE HAD SNAILS THAT HAVE MOVED QUICKER THAN YOU LOT! MY GRANNY COULD SKIP FASTER THAN THIS AND SHE'S A HUNDRED AND FOUR! YEEEEEEHAAH!!"

One gigantic furry arm lashed out with a whip that curled through the air like a great black serpent, the other shook the reins in a lunatic frenzy that sent

the Driver Dragons bounding forward in terrible uncontrolled leaps.

Behind Gobber on the sleigh sat twelve of his pupils.

Ten of these boys were ugly young thugs yelling as loudly in crazy excitement as their teacher.

"YEEEEEEEHAAAAH!" they whooped, as the sleigh hit a snow bank and sailed ten meters through the air and then slammed back down on the ice with stomach-churning violence.

"YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAAAAAAH!!

The last two boys were smaller than the rest and a lot less excited.

"I'm glad," gasped Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third as the sleigh tipped over wildly on one runner with an awful screech and spray of ice. "I'm glad I didn't have breakfast because I think it would have come up again ..."

Hiccup is, in fact, the Hero of this story, although you would never have guessed it to look at him. He was small, and red-haired, and very, very ordinary.

Hiccup's best friend Fishlegs, a skinny runner-bean of a boy with asthma and a squint, wasn't really

listening. He was praying to Thor with his eyes squeezed tightly shut.

"Please, Thor," begged Fishlegs, "please make it stop ...

Fishlegs's prayer was about to be answered.

The sleigh was approaching the great black cliffs of the Visithugs Territories far too impossibly fast for it to stop in time ...

"Don't open your eyes, Fishlegs," advised Hiccup.

Gobber the Belch reared up and with a mighty roar of "WOOOOOOAH!!!" leaned back so far pulling on the reins that he was nearly horizontal. The Saber-Tooths came to a plunging halt so sharply that the sleigh wheeled around in a mad arc.... They were going to slam into that cliff at such a speed they would all be smashed to splinters ...

"AAAAARGH!" yelled Hiccup, shutting his eyes too.

The sleigh screeched to a quivering halt. Hiccup opened his eyes again. Astonishingly, they were still alive. But the smooth black wall of the cliff was only centimeters away from Hiccup's cheek. Hiccup held on to the rock for a second to help himself stop shaking.

"RIGHT!" bellowed Gobber, clambering out of the sleigh entirely unconcerned. "WHAT ARE YOU

ALL DOING SKULKING IN THERE? GET OUT AND STAND TO ATTENTION, YOU PATHETIC DRIBBLES OF EARWIG DROPPINGS!"

Yawning and chattering, all twelve boys unpacked skis from the back of the sleigh and attached them to the bottom of their furry boots.

For six months of the year the Vikings lived

under SNOW ... so a Viking Warrior had to be just as good at SKIING as he was at SAILING.

This was a Hunting-with-Bows-and-Arrows-on-Skis Expedition. The boys had to ski down Mount Villainy, the largest mountain in the Inner Isles, shooting with their arrows as many Semi-Spotted Snow peckers as they could.

"I'm going to get at least FIFTY," boasted Snotface Snotlout, a tall thug of a boy with huge nostrils and a moustache like a little furry caterpillar squirming on his upper lip.

"SILENCE!" screamed Gobber, cracking his whip.

There was absolute silence immediately. It's a curious fact, but a heavily armed, mad, six-and-a-half-foot teacher holding a whip tends to get his class's attention.

"I will be staying here to guard the sleigh," yelled Gobber. "Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third will be in charge of the Hunting Party when you get to the mountain."