Inheritance (65 page)

Nasuada wet her lips. Even though she knew her boldness might cost her, she said, “It seems to me you protest too much.… If the welfare of your subjects were your main concern, you would have flown out to confront the Varden weeks ago, instead of letting an army roam loose within your borders. That is, unless you are not so sure of your might as you pretend. Or is it you fear the elves will take Urû’baen while you are gone?” As had become her habit, she spoke of the Varden as if she knew no more about them than any random person in the Empire.

Galbatorix shifted, and she could tell he was about to respond, but she was not yet finished.

“And what of the Urgals? You cannot convince me your cause is just when you would exterminate an entire race in order to ease
your pain at the death of your first dragon. Have you no answer for that, Oath-breaker? … Speak to me of the dragons, then. Explain why you slew so many that you doomed their kind to a slow and inevitable extinction. And finally, explain your mistreatment of the Eldunarí you captured.” In her anger, she allowed herself that one slip. “You have bent and broken them and chained them to your will. There is no rightness in what you do, only selfishness and a never-ending hunger for power.”

Galbatorix regarded her in silence for a long, uncomfortable while. Then she saw his outline move as he crossed his arms. “I think the irons ought to be sufficiently hot by now. Murtagh, if you would …”

She clenched her fists, digging her nails into her skin, and her muscles began to tremble, despite her best efforts to hold them still. One of the iron rods scraped against the lip of the brazier as Murtagh pulled it free. He turned to face her, and she could not help but stare at the tip of the glowing metal. Then she looked into Murtagh’s eyes, and she saw the guilt and self-loathing they contained, and a sense of profound sorrow overcame her.

What fools we are
, she thought.
What sorry, miserable fools
.

After that, she had no more energy for thinking, and so she fell back to her well-worn rituals, clinging to them for survival even as a drowning man might cling to a piece of wood.

When Murtagh and Galbatorix departed, she was in too much pain to do more than gaze mindlessly at the patterns on the ceiling while she struggled not to cry. She was sweating and shivering at the same time, as if she had a fever, and she found it impossible to concentrate upon any one thing for more than a few seconds. The pain from her burns did not subside as it would have if she had been cut or bruised; indeed, the throbbing from her wounds seemed to grow worse with time.

She closed her eyes and concentrated upon slowing her breathing as she tried to calm her body.

The first time Galbatorix and Murtagh had visited her, she had been far more courageous. She had cursed and taunted them and done all she could to hurt them with her words. However, through Murtagh, Galbatorix had made her suffer for her insolence, and she had soon lost her taste for open rebellion. The iron made her timid; even the memory of it made her want to curl into a tight little ball. During their second, most recent visit, she had said as little as possible until her final, imprudent outburst.

She had tried to test Galbatorix’s claim that neither he nor Murtagh would lie to her. She did this by asking them questions about the Empire’s inner workings, facts that her spies had informed her of but that Galbatorix had no reason to believe she knew. So far as she could determine, Galbatorix and Murtagh had told her the truth, but she was not about to trust anything the king said when there was no way to verify his claims.

As for Murtagh, she was not quite so sure. When he was with the king, she gave no credence to his words, but when he was by himself …

Several hours after her first, agonizing audience with King Galbatorix—when she had at long last fallen into a shallow, troubled sleep—Murtagh had come alone to the Hall of the Soothsayer, bleary-eyed and smelling of drink. He had stood by the monolith upon which she lay, and he had stared at her with such a strange, tormented expression, she had not been sure what he was going to do.

At last he had turned away, walked to the nearest wall, and slid down it to the floor. There he sat, with his knees pulled up against his chest, his long, shaggy hair obscuring most of his face, and blood oozing from the torn skin on the knuckles of his right hand. After what felt like minutes, he had reached into his maroon jerkin—for he was wearing the same clothes as earlier, although without the mask—and drawn forth a small stone bottle. He drank several times and then began to talk.

He talked, and she listened. She had no choice, but she did not
allow herself to believe what he said. Not at first. For all she knew, everything he said or did was a sham designed to win her confidence.

Murtagh had started by telling her a rather garbled story about a man named Tornac, which involved a riding mishap and some sort of advice Tornac had given him regarding how an honorable man ought to live. She had been unable to make out whether Tornac was a friend, a servant, a distant relative, or some combination thereof, but whatever he was, it was obvious that he had meant a great deal to Murtagh.

When he concluded his story, Murtagh had said, “Galbatorix was going to have you killed.… He knew Elva wasn’t guarding you as she used to, so he decided it was the perfect time to have you assassinated. I only found out about his plan by chance; I happened to be with him when he gave the orders to the Black Hand.” Murtagh shook his head. “It’s my fault. I convinced him to have you brought here instead. He liked that; he knew you would lure Eragon here that much faster.… It was the only way I could keep him from killing you.… I’m sorry.… I’m sorry.” And he buried his head in his arms.

“I would rather have died.”

“I know,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Will you forgive me?”

That she had not answered. His revelation only made her more uneasy. Why should he care to save her life, and what did he expect in return?

Murtagh had said nothing more for a while. Then, sometimes weeping and sometimes raging, he told her of his upbringing in Galbatorix’s court, of the distrust and jealousy he had faced as the son of Morzan, of the nobles who had sought to use him to win favor with the king, and of his longing for the mother he barely remembered. Twice he mentioned Eragon and cursed him for a fool favored by fortune. “He would not have done so well if our places had been reversed. But our mother chose to take
him
to Carvahall, not me.” He spat on the floor.

She found the whole episode maudlin and self-pitying, and his weakness did nothing but inspire contempt in her until he recounted how the Twins had abducted him from Farthen Dûr, how they had mistreated him on the way to Urû’baen, and how Galbatorix had broken him once they arrived. Some of the tortures he described were worse than her own and, if true, gave her a slight measure of sympathy for his own plight.

“Thorn was my undoing,” Murtagh finally confessed. “When he hatched for me and we bonded …” He shook his head. “I love him. How could I not? I love him even as Eragon loves Saphira. The moment I touched him, I was lost. Galbatorix used him against me. Thorn was stronger than me. He never gave up. But I could not bear to see him suffer, so I swore my loyalty to the king, and after that …” Murtagh’s lips curled with revulsion. “After that, Galbatorix went into my mind. He learned everything about me, and then he taught me my true name. And now I am his.… His forever.”

Then he leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes, and she watched the tears roll down his cheeks.

Eventually, he stood, and as he walked toward the door, he paused next to her and touched her on the shoulder. His nails, she noted, were clean and trimmed, but nowhere near as well cared for as her jailer’s. He murmured a few words in the ancient language, and a moment later, her pain melted away, although her wounds looked the same as ever.

As he took his hand away, she said, “I cannot forgive … but I understand.”

Whereupon he nodded and stumbled away, leaving her to wonder if she had found a new ally.

s Nasuada lay on the slab, sweating and shivering, every part of her body aching with pain, she found herself wishing that Murtagh would return, if only so he could again free her from her agony.

When at last the door to the eight-sided chamber swung open, she was unable to suppress her relief, but her relief turned to bitter disappointment when she heard the shuffling footsteps of her jailer descending the stairs that led into the room.

As he had once before, the stocky, narrow-shouldered man bathed her wounds with a wet cloth, then bound them with strips of linen. When he released her from the restraints so that she could visit the privy room, she found she was too weak to make any attempt to grab the knife on the tray of food. Instead, she contented herself with thanking the man for his help and, for the second time, complimenting him on his nails, which were even shinier than before and which he quite obviously wanted her to see, for he kept holding his hands where she could not help but look at them.

After he fed her and departed, she tried to sleep, but the constant pain of her wounds made it impossible for her to do more than doze.

Her eyes snapped open as she heard the bar to the door of the chamber being thrown open.

Not again!
she thought, panic welling up inside her.
Not so soon! I can’t bear it.… I’m not strong enough
. Then she reined in her fear and told herself,
Don’t. Don’t say such things or else you’ll start to believe them
. Still, although she was able to master her conscious
reactions, she could not stop her heart from pounding at twice its normal speed.

A single pair of footsteps echoed in the room, and then Murtagh appeared at the corner of her vision. He wore no mask, and his expression was somber.

This time he healed her first, without waiting. The relief she felt as her pain abated was so intense, it bordered on ecstasy. In all her life, she had never experienced a sensation quite so pleasurable as the draining away of the agony.

She gasped slightly at the feeling. “Thank you.”

Murtagh nodded; then he went over to the wall and sat in the same spot as before.

She studied him for a minute. The skin on his knuckles was smooth and whole again, and he appeared sober, if grim and close-mouthed. His clothes had once been fine, but they were now torn, frayed, and patched, and she spotted what looked like several cuts in the undersides of his sleeves. She wondered if he had been fighting.

“Does Galbatorix know where you are?” she finally asked.

“He might, but I doubt it. He’s busy playing with his favorite concubines. That, or he’s asleep. It’s the middle of the night right now. Besides, I cast a spell to keep anyone from listening to us. He could break it if he wants, but I would know.”

“What if he finds out?”

Murtagh shrugged.

“He will find out, you know, if he wears down my defenses.”

“Then don’t let him. You’re stronger than me; you have no one he can threaten. You can resist him, unlike me.… The Varden are fast approaching, as are the elves from the north. If you can hold out for another few days, there’s a chance … there’s a chance maybe they can free you.”

“You don’t believe they can, do you?”

He shrugged again.

“… Then help me escape.”

A bark of hard laughter erupted from his throat. “How? I can’t do much more than put on my boots without Galbatorix’s permission.”

“You could loosen my cuffs, and when you leave, perhaps you could forget to secure the door.”

His upper lip curled in a sneer. “There are two men stationed outside, there are wards set upon this room to warn Galbatorix if a prisoner steps outside it, and there are hundreds of guards between here and the nearest gate. You’d be lucky to make it to the end of the hallway, if that.”

“Perhaps, but I’d like to try.”

“You’d only get yourself killed.”

“Then help me. If you wanted, you could find a way to fool his wards.”

“I can’t. My oaths won’t let me use magic against him.”

“What of the guards, though? If you held them off long enough for me to reach the gate, I could hide myself in the city, and it wouldn’t matter if Galbatorix knew—”

“The city is his. Besides, wherever you went, he could find you with a spell. The only way you would be safe from him would be to get far away from here before the alarm roused him, and that you could not do even on dragonback.”

“There must be a way!”

“If there were …” He smiled sourly and looked down. “It’s pointless to consider.”

Frustrated, she shifted her gaze to the ceiling for a few moments. Then, “At least let me out of these cuffs.”

He released his breath in a sound of exasperation.

“Just so I can stand up,” she said. “I hate lying on this stone, and it’s making my eyes ache having to look at you down there.”

He hesitated, and then he rose to his feet in a single graceful movement, came over to the slab, and began to unfasten the padded restraints around her wrists and ankles. “Don’t think you can kill me,” he said in a low voice. “You can’t.”