Inheritance (75 page)

asuada laughed as the starry sky spun around her and she fell tumbling toward a crevice of brilliant white light miles below.

Wind tore at her hair, and her shift flapped wildly, the ragged ends of the sleeves snapping like whips. Great big bats, black and dripping, flocked about her, nipping at her wounds with teeth that cut and stabbed and burned like ice.

And still she laughed.

The crevice widened and the light engulfed her, blinding her for a minute. When her eyes cleared, she found herself standing in the Hall of the Soothsayer, looking at herself lying strapped to the ash-colored slab. Next to her limp body stood Galbatorix: tall, broad-shouldered, with a shadow where his face ought to be and a crown of crimson fire upon his head.

He turned toward where she was standing and extended a gloved hand. “Come, Nasuada, daughter of Ajihad. Unbend your pride and pledge your fealty to me, and I shall give you everything you have ever wanted.”

She uttered a derisive noise and lunged toward him with her hands outstretched. Before she could tear out his throat, the king vanished in a cloud of black mist.

“What I want is to kill you!” she shouted toward the ceiling.

The chamber rang with Galbatorix’s voice as it emanated from every direction at once: “Then here you shall stay until you realize the error of your ways.”

* * *

Nasuada opened her eyes. She was still on the slab, her wrists and ankles chained down and the wounds from the burrow grub throbbing as if they had never stopped.

She frowned. Had she been unconscious, or had she just been talking with the king? It was so difficult to tell when—

In one corner of the chamber, she saw the tip of a thick green vine force its way between the painted tiles, cracking them. More vines appeared next to the first; they poked through the wall from the outside and spread across the floor, covering it in a sea of writhing, snakelike appendages.

Watching them crawl toward her, Nasuada began to chuckle.
Is this all he can think of? I have stranger dreams nearly every night
.

As if in response to her scorn, the slab beneath her melted into the floor and the thrashing tendrils closed over her, wrapping around her limbs and holding them more securely than any chains. Her sight grew dark as the vines atop her multiplied, and the only thing she could hear was the sound of them sliding against one another: a dry, shifting sound, like that of falling sand.

The air around her grew thick and hot, and she felt as if she was having trouble breathing. Had she not known that the vines were only an illusion, she might have panicked then. Instead, she spat into the darkness and cursed Galbatorix’s name. Not for the first time. Nor for the last, she was sure. But she refused to allow him the pleasure of knowing he had unbalanced her.

Light … Golden sunbeams streaming across a series of rolling hills patched with fields and vineyards. She was standing by the edge of a small courtyard, underneath a trellis laden with blooming morning glories, the vines of which seemed uncomfortably familiar. She was wearing a beautiful yellow dress. There was a crystal goblet of wine in her right hand and the musky, cherry taste of wine upon her tongue. A slight breeze was blowing from the west. The air smelled of warmth and comfort and freshly tilled land.

“Ah, there you are,” said a voice behind her, and she turned to see Murtagh striding toward her from a grand estate. Like her, he held a goblet of wine. He was dressed in black hose and a doublet of maroon satin trimmed with gold piping. A gem-encrusted dagger hung from his studded belt. His hair was longer than she remembered, and he appeared relaxed and confident in a way she had not seen before. That, and the light upon his face, made him appear strikingly handsome—noble, even.

He joined her under the trellis and placed a hand on her bare arm. The gesture seemed casual and intimate. “You minx, abandoning me to Lord Ferros and his interminable stories. It took me half an hour to escape.” Then he paused and looked at her closer, and his expression became one of concern. “Are you feeling ill? Your cheeks look gray.”

She opened her mouth, but no words came to her. She could not think how to react.

Murtagh’s brow furrowed. “You had another one of your attacks, didn’t you?”

“I—I don’t know.… I can’t remember how I got here, or …” She trailed off as she saw the pain that appeared in Murtagh’s eyes, and which he quickly hid.

He slid his hand down to the small of her back as he moved around her to stare out at the hilly landscape. With a swift motion, he drained his goblet. Then, in a low voice, he said, “I know how confusing this is for you.… It isn’t the first time this has happened, but—” He took a deep breath and shook his head slightly. “What is the last thing you remember? Teirm? Aberon? The siege of Cithrí? … The gift I gave you that night in Eoam?”

A terrible sense of uncertainty overcame her. “Urû’baen,” she whispered. “The Hall of the Soothsayer. That is my last memory.”

For an instant, she felt his hand tremble against her back, but his face betrayed no reaction.

“Urû’baen,” he repeated hoarsely. He looked at her. “Nasuada … it’s been eight years since Urû’baen.”

No
, she thought.
It can’t be
. And yet everything she saw and felt seemed so real. The motion of Murtagh’s hair as the wind tousled it, the scent of the fields, the touch of her dress against her skin—it all seemed exactly as it should. But if she was actually there, then why hadn’t Murtagh reassured her of it by reaching out to her mind, as he had done before? Had he forgotten? If eight years had elapsed, he might not remember the promise he made to her so long ago in the Hall of the Soothsayer.

“I—” she started to say, and then she heard a woman call out:

“My Lady!”

She looked over her shoulder and saw a portly maid hurrying down from the estate, the front of her white apron flapping. “My Lady,” said the maid, and curtsied. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but the children hoped that you would watch them put on their play for the guests.”

“Children,” she whispered. She looked back at Murtagh to see his eyes shining with tears.

“Aye,” he said. “Children. Four of them, all strong and healthy and full of high spirits.”

She shuddered, overcome with emotion. She could not help it. Then she lifted her chin. “Show me what I have forgotten. Show me
why
I have forgotten.”

Murtagh smiled at her with what seemed like pride. “It would be my pleasure,” he said, and kissed her on the forehead. He took her goblet and gave both glasses to the maid. Then he grasped her hands in his, closed his eyes, and bowed his head.

An instant later, she felt a
presence
pressing against her mind, and then she knew: it was not him. It could never have been him.

Angered by the deception and by the loss of what could never be, she pulled her right hand free of Murtagh’s, grabbed his dagger, and shoved the blade into his side. And she shouted:

Murtagh regarded her with a curiously blank expression, and then he faded away before her. Everything around her—the trellis, the courtyard, the estate, the hills with the vineyards—vanished, and she found herself floating in a void without light or sound. She tried to continue her litany, but no sound came from her throat. She could not even hear the pounding of her pulse in her veins.

Then she felt the darkness
twist
, and—

She stumbled and fell onto her hands and knees. Sharp rocks scraped her palms. Blinking as her eyes adjusted to the light, she rose to her feet and looked around.

Haze. Ribbons of smoke drifting across a barren field similar to the Burning Plains.

She was once more clothed in her tattered shift, and her feet were bare.

Something roared behind her, and she spun around to see a twelve-foot-tall Kull charging toward her, swinging an ironbound club as large as she was. Another roar came from her left, and she saw a second Kull, as well as four smaller Urgals. Then a pair of cloaked, hunchbacked figures scurried out of the whitish haze and darted in her direction, chittering and waving their leaf-bladed swords. Although she had never seen them before, she knew they were the Ra’zac.

She laughed again. Now Galbatorix was just trying to punish her.

Ignoring the oncoming enemies—whom she knew she would never be able to kill or escape—she sat cross-legged on the ground and began to hum an old dwarvish tune.

Galbatorix’s initial attempts to deceive her had been subtle affairs that might very well have succeeded in leading her astray had Murtagh not warned her beforehand. To keep Murtagh’s help a secret, she had pretended to be ignorant of the fact that Galbatorix was manipulating her perception of reality, but regardless of what she saw or felt, she refused to allow the king to trick her into thinking of the things she should not or, far worse, giving him her loyalty.
Defying him had not always been easy, but she held to her rituals of thought and speech and, with them, she had been able to thwart the king.

The first illusion had been of another woman, Rialla, who joined her in the Hall of the Soothsayer as a fellow prisoner. The woman claimed she was secretly wedded to one of the Varden’s spies in Urû’baen, and that she had been captured while carrying a message for him. Over what seemed like the course of a week, Rialla tried to ingratiate herself with Nasuada and, in a sideways manner, convince her that the Varden’s campaign was doomed, that their reasons for fighting were flawed, and that it was only right and proper to submit to Galbatorix’s authority.

In the beginning, Nasuada had not realized that Rialla herself was an illusion. She assumed that Galbatorix was distorting the woman’s words or appearance, or perhaps that he was tampering with her own emotions to make her more susceptible to Rialla’s arguments.

As the days had dragged on, and Murtagh neither visited nor contacted her, she had grown to fear that he had abandoned her to Galbatorix’s clutches. The thought caused her more anguish than she would have liked to admit, and she found herself worrying about it at nearly every turn.

Then she had begun to wonder why Galbatorix had not come to torture her during the week, and it occurred to her that if a week
had
elapsed, then the Varden and the elves would have attacked Urû’baen. And if
that
had happened, Galbatorix surely would have mentioned it, if only to gloat. Moreover, Rialla’s somewhat odd behavior, combined with a number of inexplicable gaps in her memory, Galbatorix’s forbearance, and Murtagh’s continued silence—for she could not bring herself to believe that he would break his word to her—convinced her, as outlandish as it seemed, that Rialla was an apparition and that time was no longer what it seemed.

It had shaken her to realize that Galbatorix could alter the number of days she thought had passed. She loathed the idea. Her sense
of time had grown vague during her imprisonment, but she had retained a general awareness of its passage. To lose that, to become unmoored in time, meant she was even more at Galbatorix’s mercy, for he could prolong or contract her experiences as he saw fit.

Still, she remained determined to resist Galbatorix’s attempts at coercion, no matter how much time seemed to go by. If she had to endure a hundred years in her cell, then a hundred years she would endure.

When she had proven immune to Rialla’s insidious whisperings—and indeed finally denounced the woman for being a coward and a traitor—the figment was taken from her chamber, and Galbatorix moved on to another ploy.

Thereafter, his deceptions had grown increasingly elaborate and improbable, but none broke the laws of reason and none conflicted with what he had already shown her, for the king was still trying to keep her ignorant of his meddling.

His efforts culminated when he seemed to take her from the chamber to a dungeon cell elsewhere in the citadel, where she saw what appeared to be Eragon and Saphira bound in chains. Galbatorix had threatened to kill Eragon unless she swore fealty to him, the king. When she refused, much to Galbatorix’s displeasure—and, she thought, his surprise—Eragon shouted a spell that somehow freed the three of them. After a brief duel, Galbatorix fled—which she doubted he ever would do in reality—and then she, Eragon, and Saphira started to fight their way out of the citadel.

It had been rather dashing and exciting, and she had been tempted to find out how the sequence of events would resolve itself, but by then she felt she had played along with Galbatorix’s false show for long enough. So she seized upon the first discrepancy she noticed—the shape of the scales around Saphira’s eyes—and used it as an excuse to feign a realization that the world around her was only a pretense.

“You promised you would not lie to me while I was in the Hall of
the Soothsayer!” she had shouted into the air. “What is this but a lie, Oath-breaker?”