第一章：战士(8)

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.
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.