Paolini, Christopher - Inheritance Trilogy, Book 2 - Eldest (v1.5) (81 page)

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your intention to leave us. I am displeased by this, but one cannot resist

the will of fate.”

“No, Your Majesty. . Your Majesty, we came to pay our respects be-

fore departing. You have been most considerate of us, and we thank you

and your House for clothing, lodging, and feeding us. We are in your

debt.”

“Never in our debt, Rider. We but repaid a little of what we owe you

and the dragons for our miserable failure in the Fall. I am gratified,

though, that you appreciate our hospitality.” She paused. “When you ar-

rive in Surda, convey my royal salutations to Lady Nasuada and King

Orrin and inform them that our warriors will soon attack the northern

half of the Empire. If fortune smiles upon us, we shall catch Galbatorix

off guard and, given time, divide his forces.”

“As you wish.”

“Also, know that I have dispatched twelve of our finest spellweavers to

Surda. If you are still alive when they arrive, they will place themselves

under your command and do their best to shield you from danger both

night and day.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty.”

Islanzadí extended a hand and one of the elf lords handed her a shallow,

unadorned wooden box. “Oromis had his gifts for you, and I have mine.

Let them remind you of your time spent with us under the dusky pines.”

She opened the box, revealing a long, dark bow with reflexed limbs and

curled tips nestled on a bed of velvet. Silver fittings chased with dogwood

leaves decorated the ears and grip of the bow. Beside it lay a quiver of

new arrows fletched with white swan feathers. “Now that you share our

strength, it seems only proper that you should have one of our bows. I

sang it myself from a yew tree. The string will never break. And so long

as you use these arrows, you will be hard-pressed to miss your target,

even if the wind should gust during your shot.”

Once again, Eragon was overwhelmed by the elves’ generosity. He

bowed. “What can I say, my Lady? You honor me that you saw fit to give

me the labor of your own hands.”

Islanzadí nodded, as if agreeing with him, then stepped past him and

said, “Saphira, I brought you no gifts because I could think of nothing you

might need or want, but if there is aught of ours you desire, name it and

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it shall be yours.”

Dragons, said Saphira, do not require possessions to be happy. What use

have we for riches when our hides are more glorious than any treasure hoard

in existence? No, I am content with the kindness that you have shown Er-

agon.

Then Islanzadí bade them a safe journey. Sweeping around, her red

cape billowing from her shoulders, she made to leave the gardens, only to

stop at the edge of the pleasance and say, “And, Eragon?”

“Yes, Your Majesty?”

“When you meet with Arya, please express my affection to her and tell

her that she is sorely missed in Ellesméra.” The words were stiff and for-

mal. Without waiting for a reply, she strode away and disappeared among

the shadowed boles that guarded the interior of Tialdarí Hall, followed

by the elf lords and ladies.

It took Saphira less than a minute to fly to the sparring field, where

Orik sat on his bulging pack, tossing his war ax from one hand to the

other and scowling ferociously. “About time you got here,” he grumbled.

He stood and slipped the ax back under his belt. Eragon apologized for

the delay, then tied Orik’s pack onto the back of his saddle. The dwarf

eyed Saphira’s shoulder, which loomed high above him. “And how, by

Morgothal’s black beard, am I supposed to get up there? A cliff has more

handholds than you, Saphira.”

Here, she said. She lay flat on her belly and pushed her right hind leg

out as far as she could, forming a knobby ramp. Pulling himself onto her

shin with a loud huff, Orik crawled up her leg on hands and knees. A

small jet of flame burst from Saphira’s nostrils as she snorted. Hurry up—

that tickles!

Orik paused on the ledge of her haunches, then placed one foot on ei-

ther side of Saphira’s spine and carefully walked his way up her back to-

ward the saddle. He tapped one of the ivory spikes between his legs and

said, “There be as good a way to lose your manhood as ever I’ve seen.”

Eragon grinned. “Don’t slip.” When Orik lowered himself onto the front

of the saddle, Eragon mounted Saphira and sat behind the dwarf. To hold

Orik in place when Saphira turned or inverted, Eragon loosened the

thongs that were meant to secure his arms and had Orik put his legs

through them.

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As Saphira rose to her full height, Orik swayed, then clutched the spike

in front of him. “Garr! Eragon, don’t let me open my eyes until we’re in

the air, else I fear I’ll be sick. This is unnatural, it is. Dwarves aren’t meant

to ride dragons. It’s never been done before.”

“Never?”

Orik shook his head without answering.

Clusters of elves drifted out of Du Weldenvarden, gathered along the

edge of the field, and with solemn expressions watched Saphira lift her

translucent wings in preparation to take off.

Eragon tightened his grip as he felt her mighty thews bunch underneath

his legs. With a rush of acceleration, Saphira launched herself into the az-

ure sky, flapping swift and hard to rise above the giant trees. She wheeled

over the vast forest—spiraling upward as she gained altitude—and then

aimed herself south, toward the Hadarac Desert.

Though the wind was loud in Eragon’s ears, he heard an elf woman in

Ellesméra raise her clear voice in song, as he had when they first arrived.

She sang:

Away, away, you shall fly away,

O’er the peaks and vales

To the lands beyond.

Away, away, you shall fly away,

And never return to me. ..

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THE MAW OF THE OCEAN

The obsidian seas heaved underneath the Dragon Wing, propelling the

ship high in the air. There it teetered on the precipitous crest of a foam-

capped swell before pitching forward and racing down the face of the

wave into the black trough below. Billows of stinging mist drove through

the frigid air as the wind groaned and howled like a monstrous spirit.

Roran clung to the starboard rigging at the waist of the ship and

retched over the gunwale; nothing came up but sour bile. He had prided

himself that his stomach never bothered him while on Clovis’s barges,

but the storm they raced before was so violent that even Uthar’s men—

seasoned tars each and every one—had difficulty keeping their whisky

down.

It felt like a boulder of ice clouted Roran between the shoulder blades

as a wave struck the ship crossways, drenching the deck before draining

through the scuppers and pouring back into the frothing, furrowed, furi-

ous ocean from whence it came. Roran wiped the salty water from his

eyes with fingers as clumsy as frozen lumps of wood, and squinted to-

ward the inky horizon to the aft.

Maybe this will shake them off our scent. Three black-sailed sloops had

pursued them ever since they passed the Iron Cliffs and rounded what

Jeod dubbed Edur Carthungavë and Uthar identified as Rathbar’s Spur.

“The tailbone of the Spine, that’s what it be,” Uthar said, grinning. The

sloops were faster than the Dragon Wing, weighed down with villagers as

it was, and had quickly gained upon the merchant ship until they were

close enough to exchange volleys of arrows. Worst of all, it seemed that

the lead sloop carried a magician, for its arrows were uncannily accurate,

splitting ropes, destroying ballistae, and clogging the blocks. From their

attacks, Roran deduced that the Empire no longer cared about capturing

him and only wanted to stop him from finding sanctuary with the

Varden. He had just been preparing the villagers to repel boarding parties

when the clouds above ripened to a bruised purple, heavy with rain, and

a ravening tempest blew in from the northwest. At the present, Uthar

had the Dragon Wing tacked crossways to the wind, heading toward the

Southern Isles, where he hoped to elude the sloops among the shoals and

coves of Beirland.

A sheet of horizontal lightning flickered between two bulbous thun-

derheads, and the world became a tableau of pale marble before darkness

reigned once more. Every blinding flash imprinted a motionless scene

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upon Roran’s eyes that lingered, pulsing, long after the brazen bolts van-

ished.

Then came another round of forked lightning, and Roran saw—as if in

a series of monochrome paintings—the mizzen topmast twist, crack, and

topple into the thrashing sea, port amidships. Grabbing a lifeline, Roran

pulled himself to the quarterdeck and, in unison with Bonden, hacked

through the cables that still connected the topmast to the Dragon Wing

and dragged the stern low in the water. The ropes writhed like snakes as

they were cut.

Afterward, Roran sank to the deck, his right arm hooked through the

gunwale to hold himself in place as the ship dropped twenty. . thirty. .

feet between waves. A swell washed over him, leaching the warmth from

his bones. Shivers racked his body.

Don’t let me die here, he pleaded, though whom he addressed, he knew

not. Not in these cruel waves. My task is yet unfinished. During that long

night, he clung to his memories of Katrina, drawing solace from them

when he grew weary and hope threatened to desert him.

The storm lasted two full days and broke during the wee hours of the

night. The following morning brought with it a pale green dawn, clear

skies, and three black sails riding the northern horizon. To the southwest,

the hazy outline of Beirland lay underneath a shelf of clouds gathered

about the ridged mountain that dominated the island.

Roran, Jeod, and Uthar met in a small fore cabin—since the captain’s

stateroom was given over to the infirm—where Uthar unrolled sea charts

on the table and tapped a point above Beirland. “This’d be where we are

now,” he said. He reached for a larger map of Alagaësia’s coastline and

tapped the mouth of the Jiet River. “An’ this’d be our destination, since

food won’t last us to Reavstone. How we get there, though, without be-

ing overtaken is beyond me. Without our mizzen topgallant, those ac-

cursed sloops will catch us by noon tomorrow, evening if we manage the

sails well.”

“Can we replace the mast?” asked Jeod. “Vessels of this size carry spars

to make just such repairs.”

Uthar shrugged. “We could, provided we had a proper ship’s carpenter

among us. Seeing as we don’t, I’d rather not let inexperienced hands

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mount a spar, only to have it crash down on deck and perhaps injure

somebody.”

Roran said, “If it weren’t for the magician or magicians, I’d say we

should stand and fight, since we far outnumber the crews of the sloops.

As it is, I’m chary of battle. It seems unlikely that we could prevail, con-

sidering how many ships sent to help the Varden have disappeared.”

Grunting, Uthar drew a circle around their current position. “This’d be

how far we can sail by tomorrow evening, assuming the wind stays with

us. We could make landfall somewhere on Beirland or Nía if we wanted,

but I can’t see how that’d help us. We’d be trapped. The soldiers on those

sloops or the Ra’zac or Galbatorix himself could hunt us at his leisure.”

Roran scowled as he considered their options; a fight with the sloops

appeared inevitable.

For several minutes, the cabin was silent except for the slap of waves

against the hull. Then Jeod placed his finger on the map between Beir-

land and Nía, looked at Uthar, and asked, “What about the Boar’s Eye?”

To Roran’s amazement, the scarred sailor actually blanched. “I’d not risk

that, Master Jeod, not on my life. I’d rather face the sloops an’ die in the

open sea than go to that doomed place. There has consumed twice as

many ships as in Galbatorix’s fleet.”

“I seem to recall reading,” said Jeod, leaning back in his chair, “that the

passage is perfectly safe at high tide and low tide. Is that not so?”

With great and evident reluctance, Uthar admitted, “Aye. But the Eye

is so wide, it requires the most precise timing to cross without being de-

stroyed. We’d be hard-pressed to accomplish that with the sloops near on

our tail.”

“If we could, though,” pressed Jeod, “if we could time it right, the

sloops would be wrecked or—if their nerve failed them—forced to cir-

cumvent Nía. It would give us time to find a place to hide along Beir-

land.”

“If, if. . You’d send us to the crushing deep, you would.”

“Come now, Uthar, your fear is unreasoning. What I propose is danger-

ous, I admit, but no more than fleeing Teirm was. Or do you doubt your

ability to sail the gap? Are you not man enough to do it?”

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Uthar crossed his bare arms. “You’ve never seen the Eye, have you, sir?”

“I can’t say I have.”

“It’s not that I’m not man enough, but that the Eye far exceeds the

strength of men; it puts to shame our biggest ships, our grandest build-

ings, an’ anything else you’d care to name. Tempting it would be like try-