Eldest

by Christopher Paolini

  “See that you don’t. You will be tested tomorrow on what the other learned.” Oromis revealed a round wood bauble nestled in the middle of his palm. “So long as you take care to wind it regularly, this device will wake you at the proper time each morning. Return here as soon as you have bathed and eaten.”

  The bauble was surprisingly heavy when Eragon took it. The size of a walnut, it had been carved with deep whorls around a knob wrought in the likeness of a moss-rose blossom. He turned the knob experimentally and heard three clicks as a hidden ratchet advanced. “Thank you,” he said.

  UNDER THE MENOA TREE

  After Eragon and Saphira had said their farewells, they flew back to their tree house with Saphira’s new saddle dangling between her front claws. Without acknowledging the fact, they gradually opened their minds and allowed their connection to widen and deepen, though neither of them consciously reached for the other. Eragon’s tumultuous emotions must have been strong enough for Saphira to sense anyway, though, for she asked, What happened, then?

  A throbbing pain built up behind his eyes as he explained the terrible crime he had committed in Farthen Dûr. Saphira was as appalled by it as he was. He said, Your gift may help that girl, but what I did is inexcusable and will only hurt her.

  The blame isn’t all yours. I share your knowledge of the ancient language, and I didn’t spot the error any more than you did. When Eragon remained silent, she added, At least your back didn’t cause any trouble today. Be grateful for that.

  He grunted, unwilling to be tempted out of his black mood. And what did you learn this fine day?

  How to identify and avoid dangerous weather patterns. She paused, apparently ready to share the memories with him, but he was too busy worrying about his distorted blessing to inquire further. Nor could he bear the thought of being so intimate right then. When he did not pursue the matter, Saphira withdrew into a taciturn silence.

  Back in their bedroom, he found a tray of food by the screen door, as he had the previous night. Carrying the tray to his bed—which had been remade with fresh linens—he settled down to eat, cursing the lack of meat. Already sore from the Rimgar, he propped himself up with pillows and was about to take his first bite when there came a gentle rapping at the opening to his chamber. “Enter,” he growled. He took a drink of water.

  Eragon nearly choked as Arya stepped through the doorway. She had abandoned the leather clothes she usually wore in favor of a soft green tunic cinched at the waist with a girdle adorned with moonstones. She had also removed her customary headband, allowing her hair to tumble around her face and over her shoulders. The biggest change, however, was not so much in her dress but her bearing; the brittle tension that had permeated her demeanor ever since Eragon first met her was now gone.

  She seemed to have finally relaxed.

  He scrambled to his feet, noticing that her own were bare. “Arya! Why are you here?”

  Touching her first two fingers to her lips, she said, “Do you plan on spending another evening inside?”

  “I—”

  “You have been in Ellesméra for three days now, and yet you have seen nothing of our city. I know that you always wished to explore it. Set aside your weariness this once and accompany me.” Gliding toward him, she took Zar’roc from where it lay by his side and beckoned to him.

  He rose from the bed and followed her into the vestibule, where they descended through the trapdoor and down the precipitous staircase that wound around the rough tree trunk. Overhead, the gathering clouds glowed with the sun’s last rays before it was extinguished behind the edge of the world.

  A piece of bark fell on Eragon’s head and he looked up to see Saphira leaning out of their bedroom, gripping the wood with her claws. Without opening her wings, she sprang into the air and dropped the hundred or so feet to the ground, landing in a thunderous cloud of dirt. I’m coming.

  “Of course,” said Arya, as if she expected nothing less. Eragon scowled; he had wanted to be alone with her, but he knew better than to complain.

  They walked under the trees, where dusk already extended its tendrils from inside hollow logs, dark crevices in boulders, and the underside of knobby eaves. Here and there, a gemlike lantern twinkled within the side of a tree or at the end of a branch, casting gentle pools of light on either side of the path.

  Elves worked on various projects in and around the lanterns’ radius, solitary except for a few, rare couples. Several elves sat high in the trees, playing mellifluous tunes on their reed pipes, while others stared at the sky with peaceful expressions—neither awake nor asleep. One elf sat cross-legged before a pottery wheel that whirled round and round with a steady rhythm while a delicate urn took form beneath his hands. The werecat, Maud, crouched beside him in the shadows, watching his progress. Her eyes flared silver as she looked at Eragon and Saphira. The elf followed her gaze and nodded to them without halting his work.

  Through the trees, Eragon glimpsed an elf—man or woman, he could not tell—squatting on a rock in the middle of a stream, muttering a spell over the orb of glass clutched in its hands. He twisted his neck in an attempt to get an unobstructed view, but the spectacle had already vanished into the dark.

  “What,” asked Eragon, keeping his voice low so as to not disturb anyone, “do most elves do for a living or profession?”

  Arya answered just as quietly. “Our strength with magic grants us as much leisure as we desire. We neither hunt nor farm, and, as a result, we spend our days working to master our interests, whatever they might be. Very little exists that we must strive for.”

  Through a tunnel of dogwood draped with creepers, they entered the enclosed atrium of a house grown out of a ring of trees. An open-walled hut occupied the center of the atrium, which sheltered a forge and an assortment of tools that Eragon knew even Horst would covet.

  An elf woman held a pair of small tongs in a nest of molten coals, working bellows with her right hand. With uncanny speed, she pulled the tongs from the fire—revealing a ring of white-hot steel clamped in the pincers’ jaws—looped the ring through the edge of an incomplete mail corselet hung over the anvil, grasped a hammer, and welded shut the open ends of the ring with a blow and a burst of sparks.

  Only then did Arya approach. “Atra esterní ono thelduin.”

  The elf faced them, her neck and cheek lit from underneath by the coals’ bloody light. Like taut wires embedded in her skin, her face was scribed with a delicate pattern of lines—the greatest display of age Eragon had seen in an elf. She gave no response to Arya, which he knew was offensive and discourteous, especially since the queen’s daughter had honored her by speaking first.

  “Rhunön-elda, I have brought you the newest Rider, Eragon Shadeslayer.”

  “I heard you were dead,” said Rhunön to Arya. Rhunön’s voice guttered and rasped unlike any other elf’s. It reminded Eragon of the old men of Carvahall who sat on the porches outside their houses, smoking pipes and telling stories.

  Arya smiled. “When did you last leave your house, Rhunön?”

  “You should know. It was that Midsummer’s Feast you forced me to attend.”

  “That was three years ago.”

  “Was it?” Rhunön frowned as she banked the coals and covered them with a grated lid. “Well, what of it? I find company trying. A gaggle of meaningless chatter that…” She glared at Arya. “Why are we speaking this foul language? I suppose you want me to forge a sword for him? You know I swore to never create instruments of death again, not after that traitor of a Rider and the destruction he wreaked with my blade.”

  “Eragon already has a sword,” said Arya. She raised her arm and presented Zar’roc to the smith.

  Rhunön took Zar’roc with a look of wonder. She caressed the wine-red sheath, lingered on the black symbol etched into it, rubbed a bit of dirt from the hilt, then wrapped her fingers around the handle and drew the sword with all the authority of a warrior. She sighted down each of Zar’roc’s edges and flexed the blade between
her hands until Eragon feared it might break. Then, in a single movement, Rhunön swung Zar’roc over her head and brought it down upon the tongs on her anvil, riving them in half with a resounding ring.

  “Zar’roc,” said Rhunön. “I remember thee.” She cradled the weapon like a mother would her firstborn. “As perfect as the day you were finished.” Turning her back, she looked up at the knotted branches while she traced the curves of the pommel. “My entire life I spent hammering these swords out of ore. Then he came and destroyed them. Centuries of effort obliterated in an instant. So far as I knew, only four examples of my art still existed. His sword, Oromis’s, and two others guarded by families who managed to rescue them from the Wyrdfell.”

  Wyrdfell? Eragon dared ask Arya with his mind.

  Another name for the Forsworn.

  Rhunön turned on Eragon. “Now Zar’roc has returned to me. Of all my creations, this I least expected to hold again, save for his. How came you to possess Morzan’s sword?”

  “It was given to me by Brom.”

  “Brom?” She hefted Zar’roc. “Brom…I remember Brom. He begged me to replace the sword he had lost. Truly, I wished to help him, but I had already taken my oath. My refusal angered him beyond reason. Oromis had to knock him unconscious before he would leave.”

  Eragon seized on the information with interest. “Your handiwork has served me well, Rhunön-elda. I would be long dead were it not for Zar’roc. I killed the Shade Durza with it.”

  “Did you now? Then some good has come of it.” Sheathing Zar’roc, Rhunön returned it to him, though not without reluctance, then looked past him to Saphira. “Ah. Well met, Skulblaka.”

  Well met, Rhunön-elda.

  Without bothering to ask permission, Rhunön went up to Saphira’s shoulder and tapped a scale with one of her blunt fingernails, twisting her head from side to side in an attempt to peer into the translucent pebble. “Good color. Not like those brown dragons, all muddy and dark. Properly speaking, a Rider’s sword should match the hue of his dragon, and this blue would have made a gorgeous blade….” The thought seemed to drain the energy from her. She returned to the anvil and stared at the wrecked tongs, as if the will to replace them had deserted her.

  Eragon felt that it would be wrong to end the conversation on such a depressing note, but he could not think of a tactful way to change the subject. The glimmering corselet caught his attention and, as he studied it, he was astonished to see that every ring was welded shut. Because the tiny links cooled so quickly, they usually had to be welded before being attached to the main piece of mail, which meant that the finest mail—such as Eragon’s hauberk—was composed of links that were alternately welded and riveted closed. Unless, it seemed, the smith possessed an elf’s speed and precision.

  Eragon said, “I’ve never seen the equal of your mail, not even among the dwarves. How do you have the patience to weld every link? Why don’t you just use magic and save yourself the work?”

  He hardly expected the burst of passion that animated Rhunön. She tossed her short-cropped hair and said, “And rob myself of all pleasure in this task? Aye, every other elf and I could use magic to satisfy our desires—and some do—but then what meaning is there in life? How would you fill your time? Tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” he confessed.

  “By pursuing that which you love the most. When you can have anything you want by uttering a few words, the goal matters not, only the journey to it. A lesson for you. You’ll face the same dilemma one day, if you live long enough…. Now begone! I am weary of this talk.” With that Rhunön plucked the lid off the forge, retrieved a new pair of tongs, and immersed a ring in the coals while she worked the bellows with single-minded intensity.

  “Rhunön-elda,” said Arya, “remember, I will return for you on the eve of the Agaetí Blödhren.” A grunt was her only reply.

  The rhythmic peal of steel on steel, as lonely as the cry of a death bird in the night, accompanied them back through the dogwood tunnel and onto the path. Behind them, Rhunön was no more than a black figure bowed over the sullen glow of her forge.

  “She made all the Riders’ swords?” asked Eragon. “Every last one?”

  “That and more. She’s the greatest smith who has ever lived. I thought that you should meet her, for her sake and yours.”

  “Thank you.”

  Is she always so brusque? asked Saphira.

  Arya laughed. “Always. For her, nothing matters except her craft, and she’s famously impatient with anything—or anyone—that interferes with it. Her eccentricities are well tolerated, though, because of her incredible skill and accomplishments.”

  While she spoke, Eragon tried to work out the meaning of Agaetí Blödhren. He was fairly sure that blödh stood for blood and, as a result, that blödhren was blood-oath, but he had never heard of agaetí.

  “Celebration,” explained Arya when he asked. “We hold the Blood-oath Celebration once every century to honor our pact with the dragons. Both of you are fortunate to be here now, for it is nigh upon us….” Her slanted eyebrows met as she frowned. “Fate has indeed arranged a most auspicious coincidence.”

  She surprised Eragon by leading them deeper into Du Weldenvarden, down paths tangled with nettles and currant bushes, until the lights around them vanished and they entered the restless wilderness. In the darkness, Eragon had to rely on Saphira’s keen night vision so as to not lose his way. The craggy trees increased in width, crowding closer and closer together and threatening to form an impenetrable barrier. Just when it appeared that they could go no farther, the forest ended and they entered a clearing washed with moonlight from the bright sickle low in the eastern sky.

  A lone pine tree stood in the middle of the clearing. No taller than the rest of its brethren, it was thicker than a hundred regular trees combined; in comparison, they looked as puny as windblown saplings. A blanket of roots radiated from the tree’s massive trunk, covering the ground with bark-sheathed veins that made it seem as if the entire forest flowed out from the tree, as if it were the heart of Du Weldenvarden itself. The tree presided over the woods like a benevolent matriarch, protecting its inhabitants under the shelter of her branches.

  “Behold the Menoa tree,” whispered Arya. “We observe the Agaetí Blödhren in her shade.”

  A cold tingle crawled down Eragon’s side as he recognized the name. After Angela told his fortune in Teirm, Solembum had come up to him and said, When the time comes and you need a weapon, look under the roots of the Menoa tree. Then, when all seems lost and your power is insufficient, go to the rock of Kuthian and speak your name to open the Vault of Souls. Eragon could not imagine what kind of weapon might be buried under the tree, nor how he would go about finding it.

  Do you see anything? he asked Saphira.

  No, but then I doubt that Solembum’s words will make sense until our need is clear.

  Eragon told Arya about both parts of the werecat’s counsel, although—as he had with Ajihad and Islanzadí—he kept Angela’s prophecy a secret because of its personal nature, and because he feared that it might lead Arya to guess his attraction to her.

  When he finished, Arya said, “Werecats rarely offer help, and when they do, it’s not to be ignored. So far as I know, no weapon is hidden here, not even in song or legend. As for the Rock of Kuthian…the name echoes in my head like a voice from a half-forgotten dream, familiar yet strange. I’ve heard it before, though I cannot recall where.”

  As they approached the Menoa tree, Eragon’s attention was caught by the multitude of ants crawling over the roots. Faint black smudges were all he could see of the insects, but Oromis’s assignment had sensitized him to the currents of life around him, and he could feel the ants’ primitive consciousness with his mind. He lowered his defenses and allowed his awareness to flood outward, lightly touching Saphira and Arya and then expanding beyond them to see what else lived in the clearing.

  With unexpected suddenness, he encountered an immense entity, a senti
ent being of such a colossal nature, he could not grasp the limits of its psyche. Even Oromis’s vast intellect, which Eragon had been in contact with in Farthen Dûr, was dwarfed in comparison to this presence. The very air seemed to thrum with the energy and strength that emanated from…the tree?

  The source was unmistakable.

  Deliberate and inexorable, the tree’s thoughts moved at a measured pace as slow as the creep of ice over granite. It took no notice of Eragon nor, he was sure, of any single individual. It was entirely concerned with the affairs of things that grow and flourish in the bright sunlight, with the dogbane and the lily, the evening primrose and the silky foxglove and the yellow mustard tall beside the crabapple with its purple blossoms.

  “It’s awake!” exclaimed Eragon, shocked into speaking. “I mean…it’s intelligent.” He knew that Saphira felt it too; she cocked her head toward the Menoa tree, as if listening, then flew to one of its branches, which were as thick as the road from Carvahall to Therinsford. There she perched with her tail hanging free, waving the tip of it back and forth, ever so gracefully. It was such an odd sight, a dragon in a tree, that Eragon almost laughed.

  “Of course she’s awake,” said Arya. Her voice was low and mellow in the night air. “Shall I tell you the story of the Menoa tree?”

  “I’d like that.”

  A flash of white streaked across the sky, like a banished specter, and resolved itself beside Saphira in the form of Blagden. The raven’s narrow shoulders and crooked neck gave him the appearance of a miser basking in the radiance of a pile of gold. The raven lifted his pallid head and uttered his ominous cry, “Wyrda!”

  “This is what happened. Once there lived a woman, Linnëa, in the years of spice and wine before our war with the dragons and before we became as immortal as any beings still composed of vulnerable flesh can be. Linnëa had grown old without the comfort of a mate or children, nor did she feel the need to seek them out, preferring to occupy herself with the art of singing to plants, of which she was a master. That is, she did until a young man came to her door and beguiled her with words of love. His affections woke a part of Linnëa that she had never suspected existed, a craving to experience the things that she had unknowingly sacrificed. The offer of a second chance was too great an opportunity for her to ignore. She deserted her work and devoted herself to the young man and, for a time, they were happy.