18 Searching for Fishlegs

18. SEARCHING FOR FISHLEGS At that moment, Hiccup didn't know why, but Eggingarde's story came into his head. 'Fly east,' Hiccup said, 'to the Evil Reaches… We are looking for a rock shaped like a witch's finger.' The Deadly Shadow flew east. Hiccup did not want to find the rock shaped like a witch's finger, but he had to look. One of those treacherous sea mists was

blowing in from the east, so the dragon had to swoop low over the red sands. For a long time he flew. Surely it was too long for anyone to yacht that far? Looking down over the Deadly Shadow's shining shoulder, Hiccup saw what he dreaded to see. A crooked jagged rock shaped like a witch's finger, pointing upwards to the sky… and a little way away was the speck of a yacht on the sand.

'Down, Shadow! Down!' cried Hiccup in terror. Down they flew, and as they grew closer, Hiccup could see, with a plummeting of his stomach, that the yacht was not upright. It was turned over, on its side. Desperately, he looked to the horizon to the left, to the right, his eyes already blinking with tears. No sign of an untidy daddy-long-legs Fishlegs-figure anywhere. Of course there could not be. Because suddenly the truth broke upon Hiccup, the truth that maybe he had known somewhere, all along. The story that Eggingarde had told him, two nights before. That story about the Monster and the slave-boy? That story was not a story. It was true. And the reason that Eggingarde would have known it to be true, was that she was there… She was there. She was with Fishlegs when the Monster struck, and when that dreadful creature pulled Fishlegs beneath the sand. It explained why she was so fearful, so scared of the Monster but not of anything else. Why she had told him the story as if she had to tell it, to get it off her chest. It explained everything.