Will you go alone?

Murtagh gave Thorn a quizzical look. The red dragon sat crouched next to him atop the rocky hill where they had landed.

In the fading dusk, the sparkle of the dragon’s scales was subdued, tamped down like coals in a banked fire, waiting for a breath of wind to flare back to brilliance.

“What? You’d go with me?”

A wolfish grin split Thorn’s jaws, showing rows of sharp white teeth, each as long as a dagger. Why not? They already fear us. Let them scream and scurry at our arrival.

The dragon’s thoughts resonated like a bell in Murtagh’s mind. He shook his head as he unbuckled his sword, Zar’roc, from his waist. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Thorn’s jaws hung open wider, and his burred tongue ran across his chops. Maybe.

Murtagh could just picture Thorn stalking down a narrow street,

scraping the sides of buildings with his armored shoulders, breaking beams and shutters and cornices while folks fled before him. Murtagh knew how that would end, with fire and blood and a flattened circle of destruction.

“I think you’d best wait here.”

Thorn shuffled his velvet wings and coughed deep in his throat. His way of laughing. Then perhaps you should use magic to change the color of my scales,

and we could pretend to be Eragon and Saphira. Wouldn’t that be fine sport?

Murtagh snorted as he laid Zar’roc across a patch of dry grass. He’d been surprised to discover that Thorn had a trenchant sense of humor. It hadn’t been readily apparent when they’d been bonded, partly because of Thorn’s youth and partly because of…attending circumstances.

For a moment, Murtagh’s mood darkened. No? Well then, if you change your mind— “You’ll be the first to know.”

Mmm. With the tip of his snout, Thorn nudged the sword. I wish you would take your fang. Your claw. Your sharpened affliction.

Murtagh knew Thorn was nervous. He always was when Murtagh left, even for a short while. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

A puff of pale smoke rose from the dragon’s flared nostrils. I don’t trust that shark-mouthed skulker.

“I don’t trust anyone. Except for you.” And her.

Murtagh faltered as he went to one of the saddlebags that hung along

Thorn’s side. An image of Nasuada’s almond eyes flashed before him. Cheekbones. Teeth. Parts and pieces that failed to sum the whole. A memory of her scent, accompanied by a yearning and a sorrow, an aching absence for what might have been and now was lost.

“Yes.” He couldn’t have lied to Thorn even if he wanted to. They were too closely joined for that.

The dragon was kind enough to return the conversation to safer ground.

Do you think Sarros has scented anything of interest?

“It would be better if he hasn’t.” Murtagh excavated a ball of brown twine from the saddlebag.

But if he has? Do we fly toward the storm or away?

A thin smile stretched Murtagh’s lips. “That depends on how violent the storm.”

It may not be obvious. The wind can lie.

He measured a length of twine. “Then we’ll continue sniffing about until it becomes obvious.”

Hmm. As long as we can still change course if need be. “One hopes.”

Thorn’s near eye—a deep-set ruby that gleamed with a fierce inner light

—remained fixed on Murtagh as he cut the twine and used it to tie Zar’roc’s crossguard to belt and scabbard so the crimson sword couldn’t slide free. Then he placed Zar’roc in the saddlebag, where it would be safe and hidden, and returned to stand before Thorn.

“I’ll be back before dawn.”

The dragon hunkered low on his haunches, as if braced to take a blow. He kneaded the ground with his curved claws, like a great cat kneading a blanket, and small rocks popped and cracked with explosive force between his talons. A low hum, almost a whine, came from his chest.

Murtagh laid a hand on Thorn’s jagged forehead and strove to impress a sense of calm and confidence on him. Dark chords of distress echoed in the depths of Thorn’s mindscape.

“I’ll be fine.”

If you need me—

“You’ll be there. I know.”

Thorn bent his neck, and his claws grew still. From his mind, Murtagh felt a hard—if brittle—resolve.

They understood each other.

“Be careful. Watch for any who might try to sneak up on you.”

Another bone-vibrating hum emanated from the center of Thorn’s chest. Then Murtagh pulled the hood of his cloak over his head and started down the side of the hill, picking a path between jags of solitary stone and

clusters of prickly hordebrush.

He looked back once to see Thorn still crouched atop the crest of the hill, watching with slitted eyes.

A man with a dragon was never truly alone.

So thought Murtagh as he headed west with a long, loose-limbed stride. No matter how many leagues separated him and Thorn, a part of them would always remain connected, even if the distance kept them from hearing each other’s thoughts or feeling each other’s emotions. Magic of the oldest kind joined them, and never would they be quit of it until one of them died. Yet magic was not their only bond. The experiences he and Thorn had shared—the hardships, the mental attacks, the torture—had been so intense, so singular in nature, Murtagh didn’t think that anyone else could truly

understand what they had endured.

There was a certain comfort in the knowledge. Wherever he went, and whatever he did, Thorn would always be there for him. What’s more, Thorn would understand. On occasion disapprove, perhaps, but even then with empathy and compassion. And the same was true in reverse.

There was also a sense of confinement to the knowledge. Never could they escape one another. Not really. But Murtagh didn’t mind. He was well sick of being alone.

The land sloped away beneath him until, after several miles, it arrived at the Bay of Fundor. There, at the water’s edge, lay the city of Ceunon: a rough-walled collection of buildings, dark with shadow, save for the occasional lamp or candle—warm gems set against the encroaching night. Rows of fishing boats with furled sails floated alongside the stone wharves, and with them, three deep-sea vessels with tall masts and broad hulls, ships capable of surviving passage around the northern tip of the peninsula that separated the bay from the open ocean.

Across the bay stood the mountains of the Spine, sawtoothed and ridge-backed behind a bank of obscuring haze, and the salt water between appeared deep and cold and unfriendly.

Grey clouds lay low upon bay and land alike, and a muffled stillness softened the sound of Murtagh’s steps.

A cold touch on his hand caused him to look up.

Thick flakes of snow drifted downward: the first snow of the year. He opened his mouth and caught a flake on his tongue; it melted like a pleasant memory, fleeting and insubstantial.

Even this far north, it was unseasonably early for snow. Maddentide had been two days past, and that marked the first run of bergenhed, the silvery, hard-scaled fish that invaded the bay every autumn. The shoals were so large and dense you could nearly walk on them, and Murtagh had heard that, during their height, the fish would throw themselves onto the decks of the boats, driven to insanity by the intensity of their spawning urge.

There was a lesson in that, he felt.

Snow didn’t usually arrive until a month or two after Maddentide. For it to be this early meant a bitter, brutal winter was on the way.

Still, Murtagh enjoyed the soft fall of flakes, and he appreciated the coolness of the air. It was the perfect temperature for walking, running, or fighting.

Few things were worse than struggling for your life while so hot as to pass out.

His pulse quickened, and he tossed back his hood and broke into a quick trot, feeling the need to move faster.

He kept a steady pace as he ran onto the flats surrounding Ceunon, past creeks and copses, over stone fences and through fields of barley and rye ripe for harvest. No one marked his passage save a hound at a farmhouse gate, who gave him a perfunctory howl.

And the same to you, Murtagh thought.

His connection with Thorn thinned as he ran, but it never vanished. Which was a comfort for Murtagh. He felt as nervous as Thorn when they were apart, although he worked to hide the feeling, not wanting to worsen the dragon’s concern.

Murtagh would have preferred to land closer to Ceunon. If he needed help, every second would count. However, the risk of someone spotting Thorn was too great. Best to keep their distance and avoid a potential confrontation with local forces.

Murtagh rolled his neck. Being on his feet—lungs full of clean, crisp air, pulse pounding at a quick, sustainable beat—felt good after spending most of the day on dragonback. His knees and hips ached slightly; he wasn’t bowlegged like so many of the cavalrymen of Galbatorix’s army, but if he

continued to spend most of his time on Thorn, it could yet happen. Was that an inevitable part of being a Dragon Rider?

A crooked smile lifted his lips.

The thought of far-famed Riders—especially the elven ones—walking around with legs as bent as those of a twenty-year veteran lancer was amusing. But he doubted that had been the case. The Riders likely had a way to counter the effect of being in the saddle, and at any rate, once a dragon was large enough, it became impossible to sit on like a horse. Shruikan—Galbatorix’s mountainous black dragon—had been like that. Instead of a saddle, the king had installed a small pavilion on the hump of Shruikan’s enormous shoulders.

Murtagh shivered and stopped by a lightning-struck tree. A sudden chill washed his arms and legs.

He took a deep breath. And another. Galbatorix was dead. Shruikan was dead. They had no hold on him or anyone still living.

“We’re free,” he whispered.

From Thorn came a sense of comforting warmth, like a distant embrace. He pulled his hood back over his head and continued on.

When Murtagh arrived at the coastal road south of Ceunon, he paused behind a nearby hedgerow and poked his head over the top. To his relief, the road was empty.

He pushed through the hedge and hurried north, toward the wide, slumped bulk of the city. The faint light that penetrated the clouds had nearly vanished, and he wanted to be in Ceunon before full dark fell.

Deep wagon tracks ridged the well-worn road, and pats of cow dung forced him to switch lanes every few steps. The snow was gathering on the ground in a soft, thin layer that reminded him of the decorative lace that ladies would wear to high events at court.

He slowed as he approached Ceunon’s outer wall. The fortifications were stout and well built, if not so high as those of Teirm or Dras-Leona. The

blocks of rude-surfaced blackstone were mortared without gaps, and the wall had a properly angled batter at the bottom, which he noted with approval.

Not that any of it mattered if you were facing a dragon or Rider.

A pair of watchmen leaned on their pikes on either side of Ceunon’s southern gate. Murtagh glanced at the battlements and machicolations above. No archers were posted on the wall walk. Sloppy.

The watchmen straightened as he neared, and Murtagh let his cloak fall

open to show that he was unarmed.

A clink sounded as the watchmen crossed their pikes. “Who goes?” asked the man on the left. He had a face like a winter rutabaga, with a fat nose cobwebbed with burst blood vessels and a yellow bruise under his right eye.

“Just a Maddentide traveler,” said Murtagh in an easy tone. “Come to purchase smoked bergenhed for my master.”

The man on the right gave him a suspicious once-over. He looked as if he could be the cousin of fat-nose. “Says you. Where do you hail from, traveler? An’ what name might you use?”

“Tornac son of Tereth, and I hail from Ilirea.”

Mention of the capital put some stiffness into the watchmen’s backs. They glanced at each other, and then fat-nose hacked and spat on the ground. The gob melted a patch of snow. “That’s an awful long way on foot w’ no pack an’ no horse fer a few bushels of fish.”

“It would be,” Murtagh agreed, “but my horse broke her leg last night.

Stepped in a badger hole, poor thing.”

“An’ you left yer saddle?” said the right-hand man.

Murtagh shrugged. “My master pays well, but he’s not paying me to lug a saddle and bags halfway across Alagaësia, if you follow.”

The watchmen smirked, and fat-nose said, “Aye. We follow. Have you lodging secured? Coin fer a bed?”

“Coin enough.”

Fat-nose nodded. “Aight. We’re not wanting strangers sleep’n on our streets. We find you mak’n use of ’em, we’ll see the backside of you. We find you mak’n trouble, out you go. From midnight t’ the fourth watch, the gates are closed, an’ they’ll not open for aught but Queen Nasuada herself.”

“That seems reasonable,” said Murtagh.

Fat-nose grunted, and the watchmen moved their pikes aside. Murtagh gave them a respectful nod and passed between them to enter the city.

Murtagh scratched his chin as he moved deeper into Ceunon.

He had grown a beard at the beginning of the year, to help conceal his identity. He thought it was working; so far no one had accosted him. The beard was itchy, though, and he wasn’t willing to let it get long enough that the hair became soft and pliable. Untidiness bothered him.

Trimming the beard with his dagger had proved impractical, and he was reluctant to resort to magic, as shaping the beard with nothing more than a word and an imagined outcome was an uncertain prospect. Besides, he didn’t trust a spell to remove the hairs but not his skin, and there was a craftsman-like satisfaction in attending to the task by hand.

He’d bought a pair of iron clippers from a tinker outside Narda. They worked well enough, as long as he kept them sharp, oiled, and free of rust. Even so, he found maintaining the beard almost as much trouble as shaving.

Maybe he would remove it after leaving Ceunon.

The main street was a muddy strip twice the width of the southern road. The buildings were half-timbered, cruck-framed structures with lapstrake siding between the wooden beams. The beams themselves were stained black with pine tar, which protected them against salt from the bay, and many were decorated with carvings of sea serpents, birds, and Svartlings. Iron weather vanes sat idle atop every shingled, steep-sided roof, and a carved dragon head decorated the peak of most houses.

Murtagh forced himself to stop scratching.

He could have recited the whole history of the city, from its founding until the present. He knew that the carvings were in the style commonly called kysk, which had been invented by some anonymous craftsperson over a century past. That the blackstone in the outer walls came from a quarry not two dozen miles northeast. And that the good folk of Ceunon had a

deathly fear of the elves’ forest, Du Weldenvarden, and went to great lengths to keep the ranks of dark-needled pinetrees from encroaching on their fields. All that and more he knew.

But to what end? He’d received the finest education in the land, and then some, and yet his life was now one of rough travel, where sharpness of hearing and quickness of hand meant more than any scholarly learning. Besides, understanding what was and what one should do were two very different things. He had seen that with Galbatorix. The king had known more than most—more even than some of the oldest elves or dragons—but in the end, his knowledge had brought with it no wisdom.

Few people were out on the streets. It was late, and the days following Maddentide were full of feasting, and most of the citizens were inside, celebrating another successful harvest of bergenhed.

A trio of laborers staggered past, stinking of cheap beer and fish guts. Murtagh held his course, and they diverted around him. Once they turned a corner, the main thoroughfare again fell silent, and he didn’t see another person until he crossed the city’s market square and a pair of feathered merchants burst out of a warehouse door, arguing vociferously. A short, bearded figure followed them into the square, and his voice bellowed loudest of all.

A dwarf! Murtagh ducked his head. Ever since the death of Galbatorix and the fall of the Empire over a year ago, dwarves had become increasingly common throughout human-settled lands. Most were traders selling stones and metals and weapons, but he’d also seen dwarves working as armed guards (short as they were, their prowess in battle was not to be underestimated). Murtagh couldn’t help but wonder how many of them were acting as eyes and ears for their king, Orik, who sat upon the marble throne in the city-mountain of Tronjheim.

The backlit dwarf seemed to look his way, and Murtagh reeled slightly— another Maddentide drunk on his way home.

The ruse worked, and the dwarf returned his attention to the squabbling merchants.

Murtagh hurried on. The spread of the dwarves had made travel even more difficult for him and Thorn. Murtagh had nothing against the dwarves as a race or culture—indeed, he quite liked Orik, and their feats of architecture were astonishing. However, they held a deep and abiding hatred of him for killing King Hrothgar, Orik’s predecessor…and uncle. And dwarves were known for the tenacity with which they held their grudges.

Could he ever make amends to Orik, his clan, and the dwarves as a whole? Were it possible, Murtagh had yet to think of the means.

Unfortunately, his situation with the dwarves wasn’t unique. The elves maintained a similar animosity toward him and Thorn, on account of the role they had played in killing Oromis and Glaedr, the last surviving Rider and dragon from before Galbatorix’s rise to power.

Murtagh could hardly blame them.

The average human was no fonder of them, as it was widely believed they had betrayed the Varden to Galbatorix during the war. Traitors earned only contempt from both sides in a conflict, and rightly so—Murtagh himself had no sympathy for snake-tongued oathbreakers like his father—but that did not make it easy to be falsely branded as one.

No safe harbor for us, thought Murtagh. A hard, humorless smile formed on his lips. So it had been his whole life. Why should it be any different now?

The stench of fish, seaweed, and salt grew stronger as he moved along the wharves and past rows of drying racks set beside the street.

He glanced up. Midnight was still three or four hours away. Plenty of time to conclude his business and depart Ceunon. After so long spent out of doors, in the wild reaches of the land, the closeness of the buildings felt uncomfortably constraining. In that, he was becoming more and more like Thorn.

Music and voices sounded ahead of him, and he saw the common house that was his destination: the Fulsome Feast. The low, dark-beamed building had crystal windows set in its front-facing wall—a rare luxury in this part of the world—and petals of yellow light spread across the paving stones on the street: a welcome invitation to enter, rest, and make merry.

Sarros had picked the place as the location of their next meeting, and that alone made Murtagh wary. Still, the Fulsome Feast seemed innocuous enough—just one more disheveled, hard-run establishment like so many others. Aside from the crystal windows, the common house could have been in any seaside town or village throughout the land. But then, Murtagh had learned long ago that appearances were rarely to be trusted.

He steeled himself against the noise to follow and pushed open the door.