“My, how far we’ve come from that day in Teirm,” Angela murmured. Then she raised her voice again: “Two reasons. First, because I’m currently on a take-around with Elva. I thought it would do both her and me some good to leave the human parts of Alagaësia for a time. Especially seeing as how Nasuada’s pet spellcasters in Du Vrangr Gata are making life difficult for harmless, innocent hedge witches such as myself.”
“Harmless? Innocent?” Eragon raised an eyebrow.
“Well,” said Angela, and her lips quirked with a smile, “perhaps not so harmless as all that. In any case, we’ve been to Du Weldenvarden. We’ve been to the dream well in Mani’s Caves, and we’ve stopped over in Tronjheim. Fell Thindarë seemed the next natural destination. Besides…” She fiddled with the trim of her cloak. “It occurred to me that Elva might be able to help you soothe the minds of some of the Eldunarí.”
Eragon nodded, reading the meaning between her lines. “That she might. And…were I to venture a guess, I would say she might learn something by it also.”
“Exactly,” said Angela with unexpected force. She wiped the water off the fur of her hood, not meeting his eyes. “Exactly.”
A deeper concern began to form in Eragon. Of all the people and creatures he had met since discovering Saphira’s egg in the Spine so long ago, Elva was perhaps the most dangerous. His badly worded blessing had forced her to become something more than human: a living shield against the misfortune of others. As a result, Elva had gained the ability to foresee and thus forestall impending hurts. Nor was that the end to her powers. She could perceive the most painful thoughts in those around her, which was an intimidating—even frightening—prospect. And for a young child to bear that burden: overwhelming.
It never ceased to amaze Eragon that, despite his spell, Elva had retained her sanity. She was still young, though, and risks remained.
“What are you not saying, Angela?” he said, narrowing his eyes and leaning forward. “Has something gone amiss with Elva?”
“Amiss?” The herbalist laughed, bright and merry. “No, nothing amiss. You have an overly suspicious mind, Shadeslayer.”
“Hmm.” He wasn’t convinced.
The rasping of Solembum’s tongue continued unabated.
Then the herbalist reached under her cloak and removed a thin, flat packet wrapped in oilskin. “Second: my other reason for coming.” She handed Eragon the packet. “In light of my impending dotage, I decided to put pen to paper and write an account of my life. An autobiography of sorts, if you will.”
“Your impending dotage, eh?” The curly-haired woman didn’t look any older than her early twenties. Eragon hefted the packet. “And what am I supposed to do with this?”
“Read it, of course!” said Angela. “Why else would I traipse across the whole of Alagaësia and beyond but to get the informed opinion of a man raised as an illiterate farmer?”
Eragon eyed her for a long moment. “Very funny.” He unwrapped the packet to find a small collection of rune-covered pages, each written with a different color of ink. Shuffling through them, he saw several chapter titles. The numbers appended to them varied wildly. “There are parts missing,” he said.
The herbalist fluttered her hand, as if the matter was of no consequence. “That’s because I’m writing them out of order. It’s how my brain works.”
“But how do you know that”—he squinted at a page—“this is supposed to be chapter one hundred twenty-five and not, say, one hundred twenty-three?”
“Because,” said Angela with a superior expression, “I have faith in the gods, and they reward my devotion.”
“No, you don’t,” said Eragon. He leaned forward, feeling as if he’d just gained the advantage in a sparring match. “You don’t have faith in anyone but yourself.”
She made an expression of mock outrage. “Here now! You dare question my conviction, Shur’tugal?!”
“Not at all. I just question where it’s directed. Even if I took your word at its face, what gods do you have faith in? Those of the dwarves? The Urgals? The wandering tribes?”
Angela’s smile broadened. “Why, all of them, of course. My faith is not so narrow as to be restricted to a single set of deities.”
“I imagine that would be quite…contradictory.”
“You’re far too literal-minded for your own good, Bromsson, as I’ve told you before. Expand your conception of what is or isn’t possible.” She eyed him with an aggravating amount of amusement.
“Perhaps you’re right,” he said, attempting to indulge her. “Still, the gods didn’t write these pages.”
“No, I did. But now we’re getting distracted by theology, and while it makes for delightful conversation, that’s not my intent….Are you familiar with the puzzle rings the dwarves make?”
Eragon nodded, remembering the one Orik had given him during their trip from Tronjheim to the elven city of Ellesméra.
“Then you know how, when they’re disassembled, they look like a patternless bunch of twisted bands. But arrange them in the right sequence, and hey ho! there you go—a beautiful, solid ring.” Angela gestured toward the papers in his hand. “Order or disorder: it depends on your perspective.”
“And what perspective is yours?” he asked softly.
“That of the ring maker,” she answered in an equally soft tone.
“I—”
“Stop asking so many questions and read the manuscript.” She picked up her mittens and stood. “We’ll talk after.”
As the herbalist left the eyrie, Solembum stopped his licking, stared at Eragon with his slitted eyes, and said, Beware of shadows that walk, human. There are strange forces at work in the world.
Then the werecat left as well, padding away on silent paws.
Annoyed and a little disquieted, Eragon settled back in his chair and started to read from Angela’s papers. The contrary part of him was tempted to read them out of sequence, just to spite her, but he behaved himself and started as he should, from the beginning….
CHAPTER V
On the Nature of Stars
PREFACE
Many have deemed me a frivolous person, and that is just as I like it. When I was young (and yes, dear reader, I was once young—disregard the foolish words to the contrary from those followers of the Doctrine of the Residue), I made the error of showing myself to others. And in my youthful enthusiasm, I repeated the mistake a grave many times.
Do you wish to poke and pry, to see and know, to taste my soul? I am no capering child. No. Now I make mistakes rarely, and do not repeat them, for the mistakes of my profession come with a price measured in blood and flesh and lives.
So.
The tales contained in this volume are all true, and every one is false. I leave it to the discerning reader to untangle the contrary strands of history, memory, facts, and lies. I will say this: care has been taken to provide an accurate telling of the most well-known—and hence, most misunderstood and ill-reported—events here recounted.
The truth rarely lies in the middle, somewhere between two opposing viewpoints. In my experience, it is far more likely to be found a good deal above and to the left of the apparent, much-proclaimed “truths.” Look up from the plane of human dealings and you may see a dragon flying overhead—or at least an informative sky that warns you to take cover before the arrival of a storm.
Many will advise you to dig for the truth, but you must never, never do that. I have dug. I have seen what lies below, and I would not wish that upon the worst of you.
Strive for wisdom! Or at least a decrease in idiocy.
—Angela of Many Names
CHAPTER 7
The stars move across the night sky.
When I was a child, this was an obvious truth, something not even worth thinking about—like the rise of the sun or the change
of the seasons.
I vividly recall that night spent lying on my back in the high hill pasture, eyes wide open to the celestial show. The burning stars brought a cold glow across the whole clear sky, so far from the smoke of the town-fires and the light of the searchers’ torches.
The stars trace their nightly paths over the land. They move. It is so obvious; how could it not be true? But the obvious is often an illusion.
The seeding grass and late spring flowers were black silhouettes against the star-bright sky. The greenery was high enough to hide a heifer, thus giving the impression that I was peering up from the bottom of a hole. Even if the searchers came to this pasture, they could not have seen me from mere feet away.
As hours passed, the stars turned above, night chill drew the heat from my body, and I fell into a curious trance, not asleep—I did not dare close my eyes—but not fully awake. Thinking of it now, it is obvious what natural processes were affecting my body, but for many years, they were mysterious to me.
The world altered.
In a moment, I felt as if everything—the earth beneath my back, under my outstretched arms and palms pressed flat against the damp ground—became insubstantial. I was falling away from nothing and into nothing. My body had no weight and was both plummeting and floating and yet was still pressed into the ground. My perception of time changed. The stars seemed to speed across the sky, until I suddenly felt as if they were static and I was moving. The ground, the trees and mountains, everything was moving.
I had no concept of “planet” then, but that was the right word, had I known it.
Dawn brightened the sky, and still, I had no perception of time passing. Then, with the first rays of sunlight, the trance broke and I returned to myself with a shaken understanding of the world, and a new resolution to face the inevitable troubles…consequences that were soon to strike.
CHAPTER 23
The stars are stationary;
the rotation of the planet
creates the illusion of stellar motion.
With the barest touch of a single finger, the globe silently spun on nearly frictionless dwarven bearings. It was a beautiful, glittering thing of near-microscopic details incised into some unknown pale metal. Even the grandest geographical features of the world were reduced to tiny bumps and dips of cold metal under my fingertips. Doubtless, my careless touch grazed over many a place I have since visited.
I had felt a powerful fascination with the globe from the time I first set eyes on it. I had longed to study it for hours and days, to compare its features with familiar maps and learn about the different methods of representing a round object on a flat surface.
Though the globe was—I now know—a hopelessly incomplete depiction of our planet, it nevertheless was a captivating work of art, and I regret its destruction. A small price to pay…but still, art should be protected.
But in that moment, the globe was a mere distraction that stole precious seconds.
Time was limited. The library could Shift at any moment, and the longer I lingered, the greater the probability that I would be stranded in some unknowable hinterland, some other space, neither here nor there.
The inner door of the library only coincided with the outer door at particular moments, and I did not yet have the skill to perform the obscure computations required to predict the times of safe passage. It was an ingenious system for protecting the most precious of secrets. Regardless of the dangers, I was determined to take those first steps down the path to true knowledge.
Overstaying the window of time that the library and the tower were connected was not my greatest fear, though. I was preoccupied by the possibility of being discovered in the library by him.
The Keeper of the Tower had bought my apprenticeship with the promise of education, but the initial trickle of information had slowed to an occasional drip, just enough to wet my lips, and I needed to drink deep, to plunge and swim and drown.
My disgust at that betrayal and desire for justice outweighed my dread of the consequences of being caught, but just barely. I needed to know, and stolen freedom is still freedom.
Without the Keeper present, doling out simple books full of concepts I had long since mastered, the library felt far larger than I remembered. The carvings on the towering shelves seemed to move ever so slightly at the edges of my vision, though never when directly observed.
I searched swiftly, without further distraction, but with increasing desperation and lack of attention to my carefully prepared plan. I tipped back book after book: plain and gilded, narrower than a finger and wider than a hand, some improbably heavy for their sizes.
click
It was an unremarkable tome that triggered the hidden drawer in a nearby bookcase—along with the thrill that accompanies something unpredictable but much anticipated. I lunged toward the drawer and, in my haste, toppled a flameless lantern from its stand.
It did not break.
It did not activate an alarm.
But it did cost precious seconds as I struggled to right it with excitement-clumsy fingers. My terror of leaving any evidence of my intrusion was poorly weighed against the danger of being trapped.
Would there have been enough time without that error? Without the momentary contemplation of the globe? Or perhaps the venture was doomed from the start by my inexperience.
All the gold in the world is worthless if you are wandering in an endless desert without a supply of water. What value do the secrets of the universe have if you are lost somewhere beyond the influence of known powers?
The library Shifted. And it felt like nothing and everything. The library looked exactly as before, but my entire body ached in resonance with the sudden wrongness in the underlying fabric of the universe. I was in the same place and yet vastly elsewhere.
I was trapped.
CHAPTER 125
All matter in the universe is in motion;
all motion is relative.
“It is time.”
“It is always a time.”
I nodded. Elva invariably saw things in such a pleasantly askew way. After the heartbreak with Bilna, the idea of trying to teach another had long repulsed me. But more and more, I had been thinking of Elva’s potential to be my apprentice, and obversely, of what she could become without guidance.
The walls, ceiling, and floor of her chambers in the citadel of Ilirea were lavishly draped with fabrics, giving the impression of being within a tent, or perhaps the belly of some textile beast. She sat in a nest of pillows, comfortably threatening. She had grown sharper and longer since my last visit.
“You know why I have come,” I said.
“Of course. You have heard of the latest…intrigues.” She imbued the word with poison.
I sat opposite her, on the overlapping carpets that covered the entire floor of the chamber. “I heard that Nasuada no longer allows you to go into the city. Perhaps you are banned from parts of the citadel. Perhaps your world is restricted to just these rooms.”
The girl eyed me with something akin to contempt. “No one can keep me imprisoned. You know that. I stay in my quarters because I prefer it. I can leave whenever I want.”
“Theoretically, but then you would have the annoyance of constant pursuit. It wouldn’t take much for a member of Du Vrangr Gata to catch you unawares—while you are sleeping, for example—and bring you back.”
“Bah. You don’t understand. Begone and good riddance to you.” She waved a hand at me and turned away.
“I have heard stories—no doubt expanded in the telling—of your little outbursts, your…demonstrations. I cannot blame Nasuada for trying to contain you. Trade negotiations set back by weeks, fights breaking out, the most important food supplier to the army found dishonoring the dwarven chapel—”
“He was waiti
ng for a friend.”
“He had forgotten his clothes.”
“It could happen to anyone.”
“Making the elven ambassador cry? In front of the Urgals?”
Elva laughed. “That was fun.”
“You show them too much, and they will use it against you. I come here with an offer of help, if you want it.”
Elva just stared, a wise conversational technique that I recommend in a great many situations.
I continued: “If I could take you from this place without anyone knowing, would you come?”
Her chin lifted. “Why? So you can spy on me for Eragon? So you can treat me like a dangerous animal that needs to be kept on a chain? So you can use me for some petty little plans? I’ve learned so much, so quickly. People are fragile—poke them here or there and watch them crumble. I don’t need your help.”
“Oh, you wish to be persuaded, is that it?”
Again, an unblinking stare was her only response.
“Very well. Eragon removing the compulsion to help did not improve your life as you wished. You are stretching your wings, testing your abilities, and trying to find a place in the world. But with each expansion and experiment, you are reminded again that you will never fit in and just be seen as you.” Not a question, a statement. A needle to prick and provoke. An effective one: Elva’s face hardened, revealing only the tiniest spark of the raging flames behind her eyes.
“Everyone wants things they can’t have, don’t they? Even you?”
“Oh yes.” I couldn’t help but smile, though it doubtless incensed her further. “Elva…you know the game, but just the opening moves. I can show you so many things and keep you safe until such time as you choose to return to this life. The span and depth of existence is far greater than anyone can know—not even the oldest dragon or the wisest elf. I have seen more than most, but even that is less than a particle of dust, smaller than the smallest thing, and then smaller still.”
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