Christopher Paolini - Inheritance

“There will be time for that later, if need be,” said Galbatorix. “For now, I am curious to discover how brave you really are, Nasuada, daughter of Ajihad. Besides, I would prefer not to seize control of your mind and force you to swear fealty to me. Instead, I want you to make this decision of your own free will and while still in possession of your faculties.”

“Why?” she croaked.

“Because it pleases me. Now, for the last time, will you submit?”

“Never.”

“So be it. Murtagh?”

The rod descended toward her, the tip like a giant, sparkling ruby.

They had given her nothing to bite on, so she had no choice but to scream, and the eight-sided chamber reverberated with the sounds of her agony until her voice gave out and an all-consuming darkness enveloped her in its folds.

Eragon lifted his head, took a deep breath, and felt a portion of his worries recede.

Riding a dragon was far from restful, but being so close to Saphira was calming for both him and her. The simple pleasure of physical contact comforted them in a way few things did. Also, the constant sound and motion of her flight helped distract him from the black thoughts that had been dogging him.

Despite the urgency of their trip and the precarious nature of their circumstances in general, Eragon was glad to be away from the Varden. The recent bloodshed had left him feeling as if he was no longer quite himself.

Ever since he had rejoined the Varden at Feinster, he had spent the bulk of his time fighting or waiting to fight, and the strain was beginning to wear on him, especially after the violence and horror of Dras-Leona. On the Varden’s behalf, he had killed hundreds of soldiers-few of whom had stood even the slightest chance of harming him-and though his actions had been justified, the memories troubled him. He did not want every fight to be desperate and every opponent to be his equal or his better-far from it-but at the same time, the easy slaughter of so many made him feel more like a butcher than a warrior. Death, he had come to believe, was a corrosive thing, and the more he was around it, the more it gnawed away at who he was.

However, being alone with Saphira-and Glaedr, although the golden dragon had kept to himself since their departure-helped Eragon regain a sense of normalcy. He felt most comfortable alone or in small groups, and he preferred not to spend time in a town or a city or even a camp like the Varden’s. Unlike the majority of people, he did not hate or fear the wilderness; as harsh as the empty lands were, they possessed a grace and a beauty that no artifice could compete with and that he found restorative.

So he let Saphira’s flying distract him, and for the better part of the day, he did nothing more important than watch the landscape slide past.

From the Varden’s camp by the banks of Leona Lake, Saphira set out across the broad expanse of water, angling northwest and climbing so high that Eragon had to use a spell to shield himself from the cold.

The lake appeared patchy: shining and sparkling in areas where the angle of the waves reflected the sunlight toward Saphira, dull and gray where it did not. Eragon never tired of staring at the constantly changing patterns of light; nothing else in the world was quite like it.

Fisher hawks, cranes, geese, ducks, starlings, and other birds often flew by underneath them. Most ignored Saphira, but a few of the hawks spiraled upward and accompanied her for a short while, seeming more curious than frightened. Two were even so bold as to swerve in front of her, mere feet from her long, sharp teeth.

In many ways, the fierce, hook-clawed, yellow-beaked raptors reminded Eragon of Saphira herself, an observation that pleased her, for she admired the hawks as well, though not so much for their appearance as for their hunting prowess.

The shore behind them gradually faded to a hazy purple line, then vanished altogether. For over half an hour, they saw only birds and clouds in the sky and the vast sheet of wind-hammered water that covered the surface of the earth.

Then, ahead and to their left, the jagged gray outline of the Spine began to appear along the horizon, a welcome sight to Eragon. Although these were not the mountains of his childhood, they still belonged to the same range, and seeing them, he felt not quite so far from his old home.

The mountains grew in size until the stony, snowcapped peaks loomed before them like the broken battlements of a castle wall. Down their dark, green-covered flanks, dozens of white streams tumbled, wending their way through the creases in the land until they joined with the great lake that lay pressed against their foothills. A half-dozen villages sat upon the shore or close thereby, but on account of Eragon’s magic, the people below remained oblivious to Saphira’s presence as she sailed overhead.

As he looked at the villages, it struck Eragon just how small and isolated they were and, in hindsight, how small and isolated Carvahall had been as well. Compared to the great cities he had visited, the villages were little more than clusters of hovels, barely fit for even the meanest of paupers. Many of the men and women within them, he knew, had never traveled more than a few miles from their birthplace and would live their whole lives in a world bound by the limits of their sight.

What a blinkered existence , he thought.

And yet, he wondered if it was perhaps better to remain in one place and learn all you could about it rather than to constantly roam across the land. Was a broad but shallow education superior to one that was narrow but deep?

He was not sure. He remembered Oromis once telling him that the whole of the world could be deduced from the smallest grain of sand, if one studied it closely enough.

The Spine was only a fraction of the height of the Beor Mountains, yet the slab-sided peaks still towered a thousand feet or more above Saphira as she threaded her way between them, following the shadow-filled gorges and valleys that split the range. Now and then, she had to soar upward to clear a bare, snowy pass, and when she did and Eragon’s range of view widened, he thought the mountains looked like so many molars erupting from the brown gums of the earth.

As Saphira glided over a particularly deep valley, he saw at the bottom a glade with a ribbony stream wandering across the field of grass. And along the edges of the glade, he glimpsed what he thought might have been houses-or perhaps tents; it was hard to tell-hidden under the eaves of the heavy-boughed spruce trees that populated the flanks of the neighboring mountains. A single spot of firelight shone through a gap in the branches, like a tiny chip of gold embedded within the layers of black needles, and he thought he spied a lone figure lumbering away from the stream. The figure appeared strangely bulky, and its head seemed too large for its body.

I think that was an Urgal .

Where? Saphira asked, and he sensed her curiosity.

In the clearing behind us . He shared the memory with her. I wish we had the time to go back and find out. I’d like to see how they live .

She snorted. Hot smoke streamed out of her nostrils, then rolled down her neck and over him. They might not take kindly to a dragon and Rider landing among them without warning .

He coughed and blinked as his eyes watered. Do you mind?

She did not answer, but the line of smoke trailing from her nostrils ceased, and the air around him soon cleared.

Not long afterward, the shape of the mountains began to look familiar to Eragon, and then a large rift opened up before Saphira and he realized they were flying across the pass that led to Teirm-the same pass he and Brom had twice ridden through on horseback. It was much as he remembered it: the western branch of the Toark River still flowed fast and strong toward the distant sea, the surface of the water streaked with white mare’s tails where boulders interrupted its course. The crude road he and Brom had followed by the side of the river was still a pale, dusty line barely wider than a deer trail. He even thought he recognized a clump of trees where they had stopped to eat.