13 The Great Potato Burglary

13. THE GREAT POTATO BURGLARY 'AAAARGH!' raged Hiccup, shaking the bars of his cage. 'Typical! Five minutes ago I was just locked in a cage in a room full of Hysteric Warriors. NOW you've swallowed the key and set fire to the room! Flap up and wake up Camicazi and then PUT OUT THAT FIRE!' 'S-s-say pretty please…' choked Toothless defiantly. 'PRETTY PLEASE!' howled Hiccup in the loudest whisper he could whisper. Toothless flew unsteadily up to the beam where Camicazi was sleeping, and woke her up by shrieking softly, 'No key! No key!' in her ear, before flying back to deal with the fire. Camicazi took charge of the situation from the moment she opened her eyes. She got up, calmly balancing on the beam, for all the world as if she was safely down on the ground rather than almost twenty metres up in the air. She unwound another rope from around her waist, and threw the metal end of it so that it wrapped

around the beam from which Hiccup's cage was suspended. She pulled to check it was secure, and then swung out, clinging to the rope, and landed on the top of Hiccup's cage. Camicazi wriggled down the outside of the cage, and looked hard at the lock on the door. She felt in her pocket and brought out a long pin-like instrument, and stuck it in the lock, wiggling it expertly from side to side. 'That was so brave of you!' she whispered. 'For a boy of course… Leaping down into the soup like that! We'd NEVER have found out where they kept the potato if you hadn't done that…' Hiccup considered telling her it had all been a total accident, and then thought better of it. 'Oh, you know…' he whispered modestly back. 'It was nothing. I do that kind of… leaping all the time. What are you doing?' 'Picking the lock,' replied Camicazi airily. 'Locks are nothing to us Bog-Burglars… no prisons can hold us. We're as wriggly as eels. We're as jumpy as crickets.' The lock suddenly clicked loudly, and the door of Hiccup's cage swung open. 'Your exit, my lord,' grinned Camicazi. Hiccup scrambled out of the cage, and dropped down on to the banqueting table below, unable to believe his luck.

'And now,' frowned Camicazi, 'for the Vegetable- that-No-one-Dares-Name. We haven't got a lot of time.' Indeed they hadn't. Toothless had tried to snuff out the fire on the polar bear rug by smothering it with his wings, and when that didn't work, he threw Home-made Nettle Champagne on it. The flames sprang up a metre high and the fire spread to a nearby chair. 'Oh d-d-dear!' wailed Toothless. 'Toothless m-mmessed up… all Toothless's fault… ohdearohdear…' 'Toothless,' Hiccup ordered, 'stop making that fire WORSE and come over here. We're going to need YOUR help to steal the potato.' Toothless flapped over, his guilt making him unexpectedly obedient. 'I want you to melt the ice in the casket,' said Hiccup. 'B-b-but the Squealers?' whimpered Toothless. Hiccup wound his scarf around the little dragon's ears, to act as earplugs. 'Wait until Toothless has finished melting the ice, just in case you DO set off the Squealers,' he explained to Camicazi. 'The sound could STUN a dragon as titchy as Toothless if he's too close.'

'T-t-titchy?' huffed Toothless. 'Toothless not like the word TITCHY.' 'You're looking at the burglary EXPERT,' said Camicazi. 'There's no way I'm going to set off those Squealers.' By some miracle, all the Hysterics were so dead to the world that not even all this noise and commotion, and a large fire blazing in the middle of their Great Hall, had woken them up. They snored on, oblivious. Trembling with terror (and flying rather erratically because he was weighed down by his fur coat, his large meal, and the scarf around his head that was slipping

over his eyes) Toothless flew over the waving nails of the Squealers. This was very brave of him, for if he looked down he could see their horrible black bobby bodies with the piranha teeth, and to a dragon as small as Toothless, it was like wandering casually in front of a pack of lions with open jaws. Hovering above the casket, he was so scared that for a moment his fireholes seized up, and he couldn't breathe out a single flame, only clouds and clouds of bluey-grey smoke. 'Relax…' whispered Hiccup from the table. 'Breathe deeply… no pressure… you've all the time in the world…' Hiccup was trying to sound as calm as he could even though half the room was on fire. 'All the time in the world…' sang Hiccup nervously. 'Just relax… go to your happy place…' The nails of the Squealers began to twitch as they sensed the smoke. 'HA!' puffed Toothless furiously, practically disappearing he was making so much steam. 'Toothless's h-h-happy place! Happy place N-N- NOT here!' and to Hiccup's intense relief, Toothless's final indignant snort ended in a big breath of fire that engulfed the entire casket. 'Don't set fire to the potato!' Hiccup

reminded him. 'S-s-set fire to this! DON'T set fire to that!' complained Toothless. 'Mister Hiccup just stop being such a B-BOSSY-BOOTS and give a dragon a chance!' But he made his flame smaller, and directed it steadily at the ice around the potato, and slowly, surely, the ice began to melt. Meanwhile, Camicazi climbed back up to the ceiling again, and wriggled along the beams until she was directly above Norbert's Papa. She let herself down on another rope, so that she was hanging, like a little spider, about a metre above the casket, and then she wound the rope around her ankle and flipped upside down. She waited until Toothless had finished melting the ice, and had flapped off back to the safe distance of Hiccup's shoulder. Right in front of Norbert's Papa's frozen staring eyes, Camicazi reached into the casket and carefully, delicately, removed the potato with the arrow stuck in it from the bed of ice. Hiccup held his breath. If the casket was booby- trapped, this would be the moment that something might happen…