Unchained 13 (Patreon)

There had been something with him in the dark.

He could not have said what. Arya's spell had put him down below dreaming, down where there was no hall and no fire and no body to hurt, and he had not been alone there. Something had sat with him. Vast, and cold, and patient. It had asked nothing, it had said nothing. Once, near the end, it had turned and regarded him, and he had felt himself read like tracks in snow.

Then it was gone, and he woke reaching for her.

He could not lift his hands from the wool blanket, but his mind was already stretching out along the bond, and it found her at once…close, and warm, and awake.

She gave him no word.

But she gave him everything else. It came up the bond slow and cold, and it carried all of it. The stone under her belly. The foreleg that would not take her weight now. A flank that pulled and wept when she breathed—and on her left side an ache that began at the shoulder and ran out…and out…and out, the whole long length of a wing, down every finger of it to the tip.

He followed the ache to its end, and there was nothing there.

Eragon opened his eyes.

A low ceiling of dressed stone, one of the dwarves' flameless lanterns, turned down to a red coal. And beside the cot, on a stool too small for her, sat Angela, knitting something shapeless out of grey wool with a werecat asleep across her feet.

"Three days," she said, without looking up. "Before you ask. You bled like a pig at slaughter-time, and then you slept like a in a com—don't sit up!"

Eragon ignored her advice like he had ignored every sane one until now.

The world went white at the edges and stayed there a while—and when it came back he was bent double with his forehead on his knees, and the taste of burnt copper in his mouth—and fire burnt his side in a line from his armpit to hip.

"I did say." The needles clicked, and Angela sighed, "Go on, then. Look at it. You will anyway."

He looked. Someone had cut his mail and tunic off him. Under the bandages they had left, the wound was closed…cleanly. No stitches, no weeping, the work of someone who knew how to sing flesh shut. But where every other cut he had taken in that hall had gone to smooth new skin, this one had not. It stood up from his ribs in a ridge as thick as his finger, pale and shining.

"The elf did that one herself, twice over," Angela said. "And I had a go, when she was done glaring at it. It won't smooth. That sword was forged by an elf who knew her business, and it does what it was named for." She bit off a thread. "Misery. Your family does have a gift for subtlety."

Your family.

He had seen a scar like it once. By moonlight, at the edge of a lake, on Murtagh’s back.

Brothers.

Something stirred under his breastbone at the memory, pleased and angry at the same time, and Eragon shoved it underneath the worry that rose like a wave in his mind, his eyes turning towards Angela.

"Where is she?"

"Where she fell. Nobody in this mountain is fool enough to try and move a dragon who doesn't care to be moved, and I include myself, which ought to tell you something." Angela looked at him as if he were mad, before her eyes softened. For once there was no laughter in the look, no mockery—only grief. "She woke the first night, and she has not eaten since. She has neither let the elf near her since, nor me, nor that dwarf Orik who has been guarding her for the past three nights."

He put his feet on the stone, and nearly fell to the ground as his whole body screamed in protest. Besides him, Angela sighed long and slow, and he heard her stand.

"You'll tear it." she pointed one needle at his wound, and Eragon looked at her, feeling heat rise within his veins.

"Then I'll tear it."

"It is two hundred paces,” she pointed at the exit next, and rolled her eyes, “and you have the legs of a new foal."

"Then it will take a while." he mumbled, finding the wall with one hand and pulling himself upright—the scar burning with every breath. A shirt hung on a peg, a dwarf's shirt, too short in the sleeves and wide enough for two of him. Beneath the peg leaned the purple sword in its sheath, cleaned and oiled by somebody's careful hands. And beside the sword…

His breath stopped.

The saddlebag. The plain, scuffed leather one, buckled shut, with a weight in the bottom that he would have known in the dark.

"The elf," Angela said again, and went back to her knitting, as if the saddlebag was full of oats instead of…them. Unperturbed by the alarm on his face, the witch continued as if discussing weather,  "She climbed up to your eyrie for it the first morning, with half the stairs down. Wouldn't let a dwarf lay a finger on it, and wouldn't tell me what was in it—which I thought was rude." Angela paused, and then met his eyes, the same knowing glance she had given him when discussing his fate, and she tilted her head towards the bag. "They have been very quiet in there. I don't think they like what they are listening to any better than you do."

'Shur'tugal,' Obara said, and it was a mark of how shocked he was that Eragon didn’t even hear the dragon for a few moments, too busy staring at Angela, who went back to knitting.

Silently buckling his sword, he slung the bag over his good shoulder and nearly went down under it, cursing himself for his frailty even as he felt Obara feed a trickle of energy to his tired body.

'She has not slept,' said a voice in his head, Jormun’s words dry and unhurried. 'She has been counting your breaths through the wall. All of them. I would not keep her at it much longer child.'

“Neither would I.”

The hall had been cleared of its dead.

Three days, and the dwarves had carried out every body—theirs, the Varden's and the Urgals' alike—and sluiced the marble until the water ran clear, and still the smell lingered. Old blood, burnt hair, and under it the sweet char of scales that Eragon knew he would remember for the rest of his life.

The floor was the second thing he noticed. They had swept it from wall to wall, and the remains of the Star Rose lay heaped along the foot of the pillars in long drifts that caught the lantern-light and threw it back in rose and crimson. Dwarves knelt in those drifts with trays and tweezers and squares of white cloth, sorting the shards one by one, and none of them spoke or looked up as he passed.

And then he saw her.

Saphira lay in the middle of it all, in the one stretch of floor nobody had dared to sweep, inside a ring of grounded shields. Somebody had dragged an ox within reach of her jaws, flayed and whole, but the blood on it had long gone black. High above her, the roof of the chamber was simply gone, and down through the place where the Star Rose had hung fell one long shaft of grey daylight from the mouth of the mountain, miles above—and in that light, Eragon could see everything.

Orik saw him first. The dwarf looked as if he had not sat down once since the battle, his beard matted and his eyes red-rimmed, and he opened his mouth to say something before he caught sight of Eragon's face and shut it again. Wordlessly, he stepped aside, and the shield beside him swung back to let the Rider through.

‘Saphira…’

Her eye rolled toward him, the great blue lid coming down and rising again…and that was all. Then her head slid across the grit until her snout rested against his shins, and the breath went out of her, long and hot, and Eragon felt it through the borrowed shirt and all the way to the bone.

He put both hands on her, and for a long time did nothing else.

Then he walked the length of her and made himself look.

The foreleg first. 

Thorn had crushed it against the wall when he rolled on her, and no one had been let near it since—so it had begun to knit as it lay, crooked, the paw turned inwards, the long bones lapped past each other under the scales like badly stacked firewood. The flank was next. Arya had closed the worst of it on the first night, while Saphira lay too deep to refuse her, and it had held—but it was a field-dressing at best, three furrows as long as he was tall sealed over with skin thin as a blister, bulging and shining every time she breathed.

And then the wing.

He had pulled Garrow out from under the black timbers of his own house, and he had thought, kneeling in that ash, that he knew what fire and burns did to a thing. 

He had been wrong.

Where the wing had been, there was a spar. One length of bone, the upper arm of it, as long as his body and no thicker than his thigh, burnt down to something that looked like the handle of a pot left too long in the coals, the skin over it cracked and curled. Past the end of it, where the elbow should have opened into the long fingers and a membrane wide enough to roof a barn, there was only the hall, and the lantern-light, and a dwarf on his knees sorting splinters into a tray.

Bile rose in his throat, and Eragon swallowed it down.

'Shur'tugal.' It was Jormun, and for once the old fighter's voice had no growl in it. 'The leg and the flank. Those we can give you. Do those.'

‘And the wing?’

'Do those, child.'

He knelt at the leg and set his palms on the scales either side of the break, and he felt her brace—felt it in his own arm, the long muscles drawing tight—before she pushed a single thought at him across the bond, wordless and flat. Do it quickly.

"Waíse heill."

The Eldunari's strength poured into him, and Eragon gritted his teeth as he took hold of it.

Mending Arya at the oasis had been child's play next to this. The bones had to come apart before they could come true, and they came apart with a wet, grinding crack that rang off the pillars and made every dwarf in the ring flinch—and her scream went through him without ever touching the air, her claws tearing four trenches into the marble as Saphira clenched her mouth shut, a terrible, sharp vibration running through the floor as she swallowed her roar. Eragon held the shape of the leg in his mind, whole and straight and strong, the same leg that had pinned him by a creek outside Gil'ead and batted him across a clearing in play, and he poured the borrowed strength into that shape.

The Eldunari and Saphira assisted him, guiding his thoughts as they created the image of the leg in his thoughts, until the bones righted, the flesh grew, and the paw turned out and flexed, each talon in turn.

Within seconds, he was on his hands and knees, stumbling back and panting. Saphira nudged him, but he raised a hand towards her, their communication silent yet no less clear to each other.

He crawled forwards after a moment, and rested his hands against her side again. The flank was easier, or perhaps he was simply too numb to tell. The raw skin thickened under his palms, the furrows drawing shut from their ends, and scales followed, small and soft as a hatchling's, a paler blue than the rest of her. They would darken, he told himself, even as his hand spasmed for a moment, and Eragon forced the image of her pristine scales through his magi–

'Enough,' Obara said.

Ignoring the old dragon, Eragon continued, reaching for the last dregs of his power.

'Shur'tugal…'

"Waíse heill!"

The magic went out of him gladly, and that was the cruelest part of it. It went out strong and willing and whole, down into the burnt bone, and it did exactly what it was asked. The char split and fell away in plates, the bone beneath grey, then white, then slick with new flesh—hide crept down over it from the shoulder, and scales after the hide, bright and new, until it reached the end of the spar and closed over it, smooth and round as a knuckle.

And then it stopped…

He pushed harder. He had the strength of a Shade, and he put every ounce of it behind the word—and it was like shouting down a well. The magic knew how to mend, and it went looking for what was broken…only to find a limb that ended, healed and sound, exactly where it ended. 

There was simply nothing past it to call back—no torn edge, no pattern, only air.

And yet, he pushed. He pushed, for Eragon knew not a world where his Saphira would remain hurt. Would not fly again, would not swerve through the skies like the Queen she was. He felt it catch, the same pull he had felt in the armory at Gil'ead with the ceiling coming down, somewhere deep behind his heart. Warmth ran over his lip and into his mouth, and the lantern-light went violet at its edges…

And then it was gone. All of it. The four great presences shut off between one breath and the next, and his own magic slammed back into him so hard that he sat down in the crimson dust with his ears ringing.

'You will not,' Jormun said, very quietly, 'spend your life on a thing that cannot be bought. I have outlived one Rider already. I will not outlive a second for the sake of his stubbornness.'

"You have the strength!" Eragon's voice cracked, anger and despair warring in it in equal measure. "All of you, centuries of it! You threw half a forest for me in the Beors!"

'We did, and yet, had not fought a battle then, against a Forsworn or a Shade. And youngling…what a dragon's fire has taken, only a dragon's magic gives back,' Obara said, his voice heavy and final. 'That magic is no one's to call. It was not hers to call for Brom, nor for you in that cellar. It came, and it may come again…or it may not. There is no word for it in any tongue you will ever learn, and you will not find it by bleeding onto the floor.'

He wiped his mouth, and his hand came away red to the wrist.

Beside him, Saphira moved.

She got her forelegs under her, the mended one shaking but holding, and her hindquarters gathered as she heaved—the whole long weight of her coming up off the floor for the first time in three days, sapphire grit pouring from her belly with a hiss. And then she did what she had done every time she had ever risen in her life, since she had crawled out of her egg in his bedroom.

She opened her wings to find her balance.

The right one cracked wide, forty feet of blue, sending a gust of wind to the side, and every dwarf scattered as blue light danced amongst the crimson glitters.

The left shoulder rolled, the stump lifted, reached…and found no air.

She went over sideways, all of her, onto the side that had nothing left to catch her. The floor jumped under him, and the drifts along the pillars slid and chimed, and one of the dwarves in the ring made a small, choked sound before Orik barked something short and savage in his own tongue. Every one of them turned his face outward and kept it there.

Eragon was up before he knew it, hands out—

Her lip peeled back from teeth as long as his forearm, and a growl came up through the floor.

He froze.

She had never once bared her teeth at him. But the bond lay as wide open as it had ever been, and there was no anger in it for him at all. Only shame, and a single, fierce demand.

‘I will do it. Do not help. Do not watch me be helped, Eragon.’

So Eragon stood there with his arms at his sides, fists clenched so tight his nails bit into his palms, and it was the hardest thing he had done in that hall.

The second time, she kept the wing shut. She clamped it against her ribs till the bones stood out, thrust her tail out stiff behind her, and came up slow…listing, her head carried low and to the right, the round blue knuckle at her left shoulder twitching and twitching, hunting for a wind that was never coming. One step. She overcorrected and caught herself, and then took another.

She stood.

'Leave us a while, Shur'tugal.' It was Istalri, her voice soft, and there was no asking in it. 'There are things one of us must say to her that are not for a Rider's ears. Not even hers.'

He felt it happen. Somewhere in the great, bright country of her mind, which had been his to walk since the day she cracked her shell, a door swung gently shut. No bar dropped, no wall went up—it was only closed, and Eragon found himself remembering the night and day he had sat outside Garrow's door after Marian died.

He sat down on a fallen block of marble with the bag between his feet, and after a time, he asked them.

‘What was it?’

No one answered, and Eragon sighed.

‘It came out of the north and it broke Thorn's mind. You knew it—I felt you know it.’ He looked down at his bloody hand, frustration rising in his chest. ‘It was with me while I slept, for three days, and it never said a word.’

The silence went on so long that he thought they meant to wait him out. Even Jormun, who always had an opinion on the hang of his elbow and the state of his boots, offered nothing.

'It is not ours to tell,' Obara said at last.

Something cold turned over under Eragon's ribs—the Shade, pleased and cruel—and it smiled.

‘Brom kept things from me too. For my own good.’ His hand tightened on the bag’s strap. ‘He died with them.’ 

'Yes,' the old dragon said, and did not flinch from it. 'And you may hate us if it eases you. We will bear that. We will still not tell you.'

Arya had not slept in three days, and she had not missed it much.

There had been too much to carry. A leader to wash and wrap for the pyre. A message to send north, which had taken a night to word and most of her strength to cast. A bag of living hearts to carry down a broken stair in her own two arms, because there was no one else under this mountain she trusted to know what they were and keep silent about it.

And a dragon to watch over from outside a ring of shields—a dragon who would not even look at her.

Now that dragon was on her feet.

Arya stood at the edge of the ring with a bowl of broth going cold in her hands, and let herself look for the space of three breaths. Saphira stood canted to one side, and where the burnt spar had been there was a clean blue stub that ended in nothing—but she stood. The flank was whole, and the foreleg bore her weight.

Something that had been clenched tight in Arya's chest since the night of the battle loosened by a finger's width, and she did not let it reach her face.

The Rider sat on a block of fallen marble with dried blood down his chin and down the front of a dwarf's shirt, staring at his hands. He looked up when her shadow touched him, his purple eyes sunk deep, the crimson in his hair dull with sweat and grime. Sixteen, she thought, as she had thought more than once in three days, and each time it sat worse with her.

"You healed her." she said, offering the bowl, and her eyes turned towards the great dragoness again, who was looking down at her newly healed paw.

"I healed what there was." Eragon took the bowl because she put it into his hands, but he did not drink. "Thank you. For the bag."

"We will come to the bag." She did not sit, and Arya crossed her arms as she met his purple eyes, "There are things you must hear first, and you will hear them from me, plainly, before Hrothgar's court tells them to you crooked." She took a breath, and shook her head. "Ajihad is dead."

The bowl stopped halfway to his mouth.

"He fell on the line, near the end of the battle—and not to the Urgals." She had turned over many ways to say it in the past three days, and had found none of them kinder than the truth. "Murtagh was taken with a fit in the thick of the fighting. Blood welled from his eyes and ears, and the men around him thought a sorcerer had struck him down. Ajihad made a wall of his own guards around him and knelt in the mud to lift him up." She watched his face carefully, and for a moment, she thought the purple of his eyes had darkened, but Arya continued. "Murtagh got to his feet, and he thanked him, suddenly hale…and the men say they felt something around them. Then in one eyeblink and the next, he put his sword through Ajihad’s lung, and walked away toward Tronjheim while the Urgals parted to let him through."

The Rider said nothing.

He set the bowl down on the block beside him, very carefully…and Arya felt the air change.

She had been waiting for it, and she knew the signs by now. The lantern nearest them guttered and leaned, and the fine red dust at his feet stirred without any winds. Behind him, across the floor, Bjartskular’s head came round—and in the hollows of his face, the purple of his eyes began, slowly, to glow.

Her hand was on her sword before he could even blink.

The last time, she had drawn. In his chamber, with this same dragon at her back, she had put the point of her blade over his heart and meant it. Now she stood with her palm on the pommel, and the blade still in its sheath, and Arya thought none of that. 

Instead…she was hearing a sound through a cell door in Gil'ead.

"Do you know," she said quietly, feeling the tension in her arm as she let go of the hilt, Eragon’s eyes tracking each finger as it left the sword, "what you did, when the wing burned?"

The light in his eyes held, as he met her gaze again. "I cut Thorn's leg to the bone."

"Before that." she pressed, and she saw his eyes narrow, and a long moment passed. 

"I don't….I was beneath Saphira, and then I ran to hi–what are you trying to ask Arya?"

"You have forgotten, Eragon." Arya kept her voice level, even as her fingers itched to return to the sword, as she remembered that moment. "I was coming down the stairs, and I saw it from above. You went across that floor on all fours for the first ten paces, Eragon. You went through a Kull's corpse rather than around it…and you were laughing."

He flinched—and it was the first time she had ever seen him do it.

"I know that laugh. I heard it every day for months, through that door of oak, while he heated his irons." She did not soften it. He had not asked her to, and she would have thought less of him if he had. "It did not stop when you reached the dragon. It stopped when Zar'roc went into you. Murtagh did not have to be quick or clever—he walked up behind a thing that had forgotten it had a back, and he opened it. That is how near it came. Thorn's fire did not nearly kill you, Eragon, but your own did…you were entirely gone behind the Shade, and were it not for the…unexpected assistance we recieved, Murtagh and Thorn would have succeeded in capturing you and burning the Varden down."

Arya did not how he would take her words. Humans were short-sighted at the age Eragon was traversing, to say nothing of what his mental state must be right now. She had spoken the truth, though, and she was prepared for the defensive anger that would be coming any moment now.

“Saphira burnt the spirits out of me, in Gil’ead,” he said instead, as the glow behind his eyes dimmed until they were his mutated purple, and the barely there power in the air receded back into him.

“I know, Eragon,” she frowned, “Durza had twenty-one spirits to blame…you have none…and that makes your lapse all the more troubling. You cannot leave yourself open to Thorn or Murtagh—or anyone—like that again.”

His jaw tightened at the names, and Eragon’s eyes turned towards the broken pieces of the Star Rose, as his fists clenched.

"I'll kill him," Eragon said…and the flatness of it surprised Arya. She had not expected Eragon to make peace with killing his brother so soon…and she was loath to doubt and think them empty words. But still, she tilted her head towards the center of the Hall, where the floor still bore the marks of being burnt by Thorn’s fire, "Perhaps. But not like that."

"No." He picked the bowl back up, and this time he drank all of it without tasting it, wiping his mouth with his wrist after. "Not like that. Tell me the rest."

So she told him. The Twins were gone, their rooms stripped bare, two guards dead at a postern on the mountain's western face. Du Vrangr Gata had no one left to lead it, and was already quarrelling over who should. The Varden had counted a little under half their strength onto the pyres. And Ajihad's daughter, who was younger than the Rider looked, had closed her father's eyes with her own hand and then gone straight out to walk the lines of the wounded until dawn, so that every man there would see her do it.

"The Council of Elders think they have a girl they can lead by the nose," Arya said, a hint of grim amusement in her voice. "They will learn. She will want to see you, and so will they, separately, and for worse reasons. Swear to none of them—neither Nasuada nor the Elders. You are a Dragon Rider, not beholden to anyone save the Order itself."

"No allegiance, no bonds of service," he nodded, before sighing, “Brom told that to me, when we were walking towards Teirm.”

"Yes, he would know better than most." She nodded…and her eyes went, at last, to the scuffed leather bag between his feet. "Now…that."

He did not pretend not to understand her, and she gave him that much as she created a ward around them with a muttered phrase, ensuring no one could hear a word they said, either physically or magically.

"I felt them behind you when you spoke into my mind beneath the floor. Old minds, and many, and none of them yours—dragon minds, Eragon. And there are no dragons." She looked at the bag. "I carried that down from your eyrie, and it hummed against my mind every step of the way. What is in there?"

Eragon did not answer at once. His eyes went to the bag, and Arya watched him, his jaw working, a frown deepening between his brows as if he were arguing with someone and losing—clearly the entities from the bag.

Then something touched her mind.

It did not batter at her walls, as Durza had, nor attempt to slip in sideways like the Twins. It simply waited at the edge of her thoughts, vast and patient and unbearably old—and it was a dragon. There was no mistaking it. She had carried Saphira's egg for twenty years, and she knew the feel of their minds the way she knew her own.

'You carried us down a broken stair, daughter of Islanzadí,' it said, 'and you asked nothing of anyone. That has earned you an answer. I am Obara. The Rider will tell you the rest.'

And then it withdrew, and Arya found she had taken a step back without meaning to.

"Eldunari," Eragon said quietly. "Hearts of hearts. A dragon carries a stone in its chest, and if it chooses, it can put…itself into it. Everything it is. When its body dies, the stone keeps it." He swallowed. "The Riders kept it secret, even from your people. Durza had these locked in a chest in the cellar at Gil'ead. They're the reason I came out of there still myself."

Arya said nothing for a long moment. She had grown up on songs of dragons whose spirits lingered on after death—had thought them poetry, the kind of thing a grieving people told itself after the Fall. She had heard the spectral spirit released by the twin guardians on the Agaetí Blödhren. She looked at the bag between his feet and thought of the hum she had felt through the leather, every step of that broken stair, and felt the hair rise along her arms.

"You told me the tale of Gil'ead," she said at last, "and you left them out."

"Yes."

"Who else knows?"

"Murtagh did," Eragon said, meeting her glare without flinching. "They asked it of me—and you had a sword on me not ten minutes before." He sighed. "I'd do it again. I'm sorry for it anyway."

It was an honest answer, she thought, but she had bigger things to worry about. Namely, “How did the Shade come by them?"

"Galbatorix gave them to him. To make…" His hand moved toward his own chest, and fell. "For what he did in the cellar. For the strength required for it."

Arya went cold. The Black King had hearts to spare, then—hearts enough to lend a handful to a servant. Islanzadi needed to be informed, but she dared not trust magic over such distances…it would need to wait till they were past Gilderien.

"Then hear what I left out, and we are even," she said. "The thing that drove Murtagh from this hall. You felt where it came from?"

"North."

"North. Across the whole breadth of the Hadarac, from the heart of Du Weldenvarden." She had said it to herself so often in three nights that it had worn smooth, and still it caught on the way out. Her eyes narrowed as she turned her eyes towards her home, imagining the distant forest and its inhabitants. "I was born in that forest. I have walked it for a hundred years. I have stood in its councils. And there is something under those trees with the strength to reach across half the world and close its hand on a dragon's mind, and no one…no one…ever thought I should be told."

She heard her own voice rising then, bitter and raw, and stopped. Eragon was watching her with those sunken purple eyes, and there was no pity in them—for which she was grateful. There was only recognition.

"They kept it from you too," he said.

"Yes."

"I asked them." He jerked his chin at the bag. "They know what it was—is. However, they won't say, and have just commanded us to reach the Elven Forest as soon as possible.”

Arya looked at the bag, and for a moment she reached for that ancient mind again, the question already shaping itself in her thoughts—and found it closed to her, gently and completely, as courteous as a shut door.

"No," she said. "I do not imagine they will." She breathed out slowly. "So we shall go and ask the ones who can be made to answer. I have sent word to Ellesméra. When she can travel…"

She did not finish, and neither of them looked at Saphira.

It was then that Orik came through the shield-ring at something near a run, his helm under his arm and his face grim, and Arya let the ward fall.

"On your feet, the pair of you," he said. "Hrothgar's coming. He's not sending for you, he's coming himself, with the grimstborithn at his back and that bastard Vermûnd walking at his right hand." He spat in the dust. "They've finished counting the pieces."

They came without horns.

Eragon had expected horns, or drums, some dwarvish thunder to tell him that he was being judged. Instead there was only the sound of boots, a great many of them, and the butt of a hammer striking the marble at every second step. The sorters along the pillars rose from their drifts and stood with their heads bowed and bare.

Hrothgar came first and alone. He wore no crown, only mail the colour of ash, and Volund hung from his fist. Behind him walked the chiefs of the clans in the plate they had fought in, and behind them their housecarls, with a long chest slung on poles between every four of them. Eragon counted nine chests before he stopped counting.

One of the chiefs wore a veil.

It hung from the rim of his helm to his breastbone, purple silk so dark it was nearly black. The end of a grey beard jutted out beneath it, and the fist below that held a warhammer. Eragon had never seen him before—but Arya plainly had, for she had gone still beside him in a way he was beginning to recognise.

"Az Sweldn rak Anhûin," Orik muttered out of the side of his mouth. "The Tears of Anhûin. The Forsworn hunted them near to the last child in the Fall, and they have never forgiven anything with scales on it, nor anyone who sits on one. The veil is so he need not foul his eyes with you." His jaw worked. "He left it off three nights ago, when he came for you both. He has had time to think since."

Hrothgar stopped at the ring, and Orik's dwarves opened to him without being asked. He walked through and stopped again, and for a long time the King of the dwarves did not look at the Rider, or the dragon, or the elf at all.

He looked at the floor. He looked at the drifts along the pillars, and at the grey light falling. Then he tilted his white head back, slowly, and looked up into the place where there had been a ceiling of living rose since before his grandfather's grandfather was born.

"I was born under that light," he said, to no one in particular. His voice was rock on rock, as it had been in his throne room, but something had gone out of it. "My mother laid me down on this floor when I was a day old, as hers did her. The first thing a knurla of Tronjheim sees with open eyes is the Star." He lowered his head. "Was."

Volund struck the floor once, and the hall went still.

"Speak, Vermûnd. You have asked for it loudly enough."

The veiled dwarf stepped forward. He did not turn toward Eragon, instead addressing the air a yard to his left, as though a place had been set there for someone decent.

"Fifty-seven years Dûrok Ornthrond gave to the Star Rose," he said, his voice like splitting stone. "Fifty-seven years, and when he had cut the last petal, he laid down his chisel and died where he stood. Kings have been crowned under it and carried out beneath it. It stood through Galbatorix. It stood through the Forsworn. It did not stand through one night of sheltering a dragon." A low murmur ran through the chiefs behind him. "And what is it we sheltered? I will say it, since Dûrgrimst Ingeitum will not. Morzan's whelp, who came to us wearing Morzan's sword. Brother in blood to the oathbreaker who put steel in Ajihad's lung, another son of Morzan. Our own warriors saw the fire that came out of his hands, and it was no Rider's fire. They saw the colour of his eyes when the beast was struck. I saw what crossed this floor three nights ago, grimstborithn, and I know what to call it."

"Your price, Vermûnd," Hrothgar said flatly.

"The Star had a worth beyond gold, so I will not insult it with gold." Now the veil turned—turned past Eragon, and stopped on Saphira. "The beast cannot fly. Good. Let it not walk, either. Collar it. Chain it in the deep halls under the eye of the clans until the Star's debt is worked out in whatever coin a crippled worm can pay, and put the Shade-spawn out of the mountain in the clothes he stands in. That is the mercy of Az Sweldn rak Anhûin. Our justice is shorter."

Collar it. Chain it.

For a moment, Eragon was not in the hall at all.

He was on his belly on a slab in Gil'ead with his wrists in iron and the reek of Seithr oil in his nose, turning his head as far as the manacle would let him—and what he saw past his own shoulder was a muzzle. A leather muzzle, buckled over a blue snout, and a boot planted on it.

The rage came up in him like bile. There was none of the cold in it, none of the craft—it was the Shade in him, the part of himself that had crossed the hall on all fours and laughed, and it had been waiting three days in the dark for someone to say that word. It showed him, lovingly, how the veil would look with a fist through it. How short a way it was to that throat. How the purple silk would darken. The Eldunari raged in his mind, hidden behind a ward from everyone’s senses, and he felt Saphira’s anguish and anger both—but Eragon was tired, dead tired…and he had nothing to give.

That was the only mercy. He was still weak, his side still a lance of hot iron, and he had enough sense left to not lose himself instantly. So when the thing surged up to the very backs of his eyes and what power he had shifted the dust at his feet…the nearest chief took a step back, a housecarl's hand went to his axe, and Vermûnd, behind his silk, said softly, "There."

Orik's hand clamped down on his forearm.

And across the ring, where she stood with the sorters' lanterns behind her, Arya looked at him. Only that. She did not shake her head or say a word. She had told him, not an hour since, exactly what he sounded like, and she did not need to tell him twice.

All of it, Eragon thought, gritting his teeth. Let it come. All of it. Garrow, grey on Horst's table. Brom, under the sandstone. The muzzle. The wing. Ajihad kneeling in the mud to help his murderer stand. He let the whole weight of it rise, and then he took it in both hands, as he had facing Durza, and pressed it down. Flat. Flatter. Cold.

His eyes dimmed, and he felt murder recede from his thoughts, lurking just beneath the words he spoke.

"I am what Durza made," Eragon said, his voice steady, "and what she unmade. I have never hidden my face behind a cloth to say so.” A beat passed, and Eragon looked the dwarf in its eyes, purple irises shining with promise. “And hear this, grimstborith. Ingeitum and the Varden may be my allies, but put a collar on her, and I will tear out your heart myself.”

The murmuring stopped.

Behind him came the sound of grit running off scales.

Saphira had lain down again while Arya talked, to rest the leg, and now she got up—as she had an hour ago with every dwarf's back turned, the wing bound tight to her ribs by nothing but will, the tail thrust out, the slow, canted heave. Only this time no one's back was turned. The chiefs and their king and a hundred housecarls watched the last free dragon in Alagaësia climb to her feet in pieces and stand there crooked beside her Rider, the stump of her wing lifted—bare and blue and plain in the grey light, like a hand with the fingers gone.

She had bared her teeth at her own Rider sooner than be watched. Now she stood and showed it to her enemies.

A few of the chiefs looked away. Vermûnd's veil did not move.

Hrothgar looked for a long time, and what crossed that seamed old face, Eragon could not have named. When he finally spoke, it was not loud.

"You will not threaten a grimstborith in my presence again, Shadeslayer. Not under my roof."

"Then let no one under your roof speak of collars," Eragon said.

Something moved at the corner of the old king's mouth, and was gone. "You stood in my hall and told me nothing would stop you. A boy's boast, I thought, and I told you my folk weigh deeds, not words. So." Volund lifted, and swung, slow. "Here are your deeds. A Shade is ash, who would have opened my gates to the Black King. A Forsworn's get and his dragon came into the heart of my mountain for you, and went home bleeding without you. That is one pan of the scale, and it is not light." The hammer came to rest pointing at the nine chests. "And there is the other—every grain my people could find, swept from this floor on their knees. You have heard his price. What does a Rider set in the scale against the heart of a nation?"

Eragon had nothing. No gold, no land, no kin, no clan—one sword, and a bag of secrets he could not spend. He had exactly one coin in the world to offer, and it was not his alone to give.

He gave it anyway, in the only tongue that would make them believe him.

"Vel eïnradhin iet ai Shur'tugal," Eragon said, and heard Arya's sharp intake of breath from across the ring. Upon my word as a Rider. The rest came slower, and he built it word by word, as carefully as he had the blessing for the child in the market: that the Star Rose would be made whole. That not a grain of it would be lost. That Saphira Bjartskular, who had broken it, would mend it, and that he, Eragon, would not count his debt to the dwarves paid until she had.

The last word left him, and he felt it take hold—a small, cold weight settling behind his breastbone.

'Oh, you fool boy,' Jormun breathed. 'You young, bleeding, thrice-cursed fool.'

Obara said nothing at all, and that was a great deal worse.

"He has bound himself," Arya said into the silence, and her face was white. "In the Ancient Language, upon his name as a Rider, that Isidar Mithrim shall be restored by the dragon who shattered it. He cannot unsay it—and he could not have said it at all had he not meant it."

"Words," Vermûnd spat.

"Aye. Words." Hrothgar had not taken his eyes from Eragon. "In that tongue they are chains, Vermûnd, and you may trust an old dwarf who has watched Riders choke on them. You asked me for a Rider in irons—look at him. He has forged his own and locked them on before my whole court." Volund struck the floor. "I will take a Rider in chains of his own making over one in ours. Ours, he would break. Gil'ead has seen what he does to those who chain him."

"And if the worm cannot do it? It cannot even keep its feet!"

"Then he will spend a long life learning how it feels to owe the knurlan." The King turned at last to face the veil. "The fragments go to the vaults of Dûrgrimst Ingeitum, under my seal. The Rider and the dragon are under my guard, and they leave this mountain when they choose. That is my word, and I am not asking the clans for it. Does Az Sweldn rak Anhûin contest it here?"

No one spoke.

"Not here," Vermûnd said finally, and turned without bowing, his housecarls closing up behind him. The others followed by ones and twos. Some stopped at the chests first and laid a hand flat on a lid. None of them looked at the dragon again.

Hrothgar went last. At the gap in the shields he halted, and spoke without turning round.

"Dragon." Barely more than breath. "I called your kind savage, in my hall. I had forgotten what one of you will do for the thing it loves." The white head bent, the least fraction. "My folk will not forgive you the Star. I find I cannot hate you for it. That is all I have to give you today."

The slow beat of his hammer went away with him across the hall, and then there was only the grey light, and Orik's dwarves facing outward, and Arya standing very still with her hand pressed flat against her breastbone, as if she had felt the oath take hold too.

Eragon's knees gave, and he let them, sitting down in the dust at Saphira's feet.

That was when it hit him.

She had held it back while they watched. Now it came down the bond hot and headlong and without a single word in it. The fire pouring out of her in the cellar at Gil'ead, unbidden. A hillside of sandstone turning to diamond under her snout. Twice in her life, and never when she had called for it. The stump, lifting, reaching. And his own voice, small and ragged in a great hall, promising a nation the one thing she could not make her body do.

Under all of it lay a single furious thought. You have chained me. You. With your own mouth.

"I know," he said aloud. "It was that or theirs—a real one, with a collar." He leaned his head back against her foreleg, against the pale new scales, and shut his eyes. "I've seen you in a muzzle once, Saphira. I'll not see it twice. Be as angry as you like. I'd do it again."

The fury went on a while longer. Then, by degrees, it sank, and left only exhaustion behind.

Her head came down, a little off true, and settled in the dust beside him with a sigh that stirred his hair. One eye, blue and bloodshot, looked at him, and then past him, upward.

'Little one.'

Three days, and her voice was hoarse, as if she had been screaming. He supposed she had.

'Take me out from under this hole.' The great lid sank, and did not quite close. 'I do not want to see the sky.'

He looked up. Far above them, through the wound she had torn in the heart of the mountain, the mouth of Farthen Dûr held one small coin of morning. It was the exact blue of her scales.

Eragon got to his feet, went to find Orik, and asked him for somewhere dark.