Hundreds upon hundreds of servants – all unwilling, all weak with hunger and pain – had been dragged down these halls, straining against chains, screaming for one last glimpse of sunlight. Once the entrance doors closed behind them, most servants never stepped outside again, and as long as the rule of Galbatorix continued, most would die quietly and pitifully in their beds of coarse linen. It was sometimes days – weeks – before the bodies were removed, and when they finally were, they were not granted respect or honor in death. No…it was the Ra'zac who came to retrieve the bodies. Sometimes, they were so eager that they began feeding on the molding flesh even before out of earshot of the slave quarters.
A slave stood behind a pillar, her face dimly revealed in the ever-wavering light of the nearest torch. In her hands was a platter of sweet bread rolls, and it was clear from the firm set of her mouth that she had no intention of going to the outer pavilion, where everyone was currently gathered. Even the king himself was there, as he found obvious pleasure in the public torture – and eventual execution – of a traitor. The young man had been caught trying to escape, with several secrets of the Empire written on a tablet so he could give it to outsiders; presumably the rebels that called themselves the Varden.
The slave's age was indefinable, as she was clad in a shapeless dress – she was so slender, it was difficult to determine whether it was purely the cut of the dress that provided the shapelessness or if it was her lack of feminine growth – and her long, reddish-brown hair was pulled in a harsh bun at the base of her neck, making her features appear pained and weathered.
Her eyes were dark and liquid in the firelight, and when they flickered to face the light, within the depths of those eyes shone the fierce, calculating coldness of a caged beast; a beast that has just discovered a way to free itself, and was biding its time…waiting for the opportune moment.
The slave had been waiting for as long as she could remember. She had never been taught to count the days, months, or years – she could barely grasp the concept that time could be measured in such a way – and so the girl had nothing to go on but her own impatience. The girl had been taught when she was still free how to count up to a hundred, and so she could count in that way. But the idea that each sunrise signified a day, that each full moon signified a month…it was too much.
For this opportunity she had waited through many dinners, more than could fit in her brain, more than could fill the span of her thoughts. She had served the king in his quarters, as many times as there were notches on her little wall space near her cot. She had been shorter than the old woman who worked with her in the kitchens then, and now she looked down at the woman, significantly taller.
Why the king saw it pleasant to have her serve him in his quarters was beyond her comprehension, and she instead used it to her advantage. Her familiarity with the king's quarters and the magician who guarded the door all day and night would prove crucial to her plan.
Tonight, she would escape. If she did not succeed, she would be executed.
It was a simple juxtaposing of outcomes, as comparable as the smell of bread baking beautifully and the arid scent of burning flesh. She had smelled both, on multiple occasions, and heartily preferred the former.
Cloaked in shadow save for her face, the slave straightened her shoulders, and an astonishing calm settled over her form. Her eyes became soft and weak, the perfect impersonation of a shy slave who would do anything to please. She held the platter in one hand, and used the fingers of her other to untie her hair. Long, wavy hair spilled down her shoulders, settling in the small of her back. It framed her face innocently, and with a brief closing of her eyes, the young woman – with her hair down, her features became unmistakably youthful – began to walk down the hall, down the familiar path to the king's quarters.
Her stride was purposeful and brisk, but not in a way that would arouse suspicion. No one was around to observe her, in any case, but she dare not drop her façade. Not all eyes needed a warm, living body to observe her. That, along with plenty else, had been proven time and time again in her time in the castle.
An older slave named Elris – when the younger woman had first arrived in the castle, bereft of her parents, she had laid up all night crying, and Elris was the only one with enough compassion to come and comfort her – did not stop to greet the younger woman, but instead reached out to touch her shoulder as she passed.
"Evelyn…" Elris whispered in greeting, and Evelyn flinched at the use of her name. It was her name, yes, but it also reminded her of times better forgotten. With her name came memories of her life back in the village – the name was a hazy glimpse of a dream, it eluded her even in her most coherent moments – and with the memories came the grief. She had been ten years when the village was taken. She had served in the castle ever since, and she had not bothered to keep track of her age since then, because it only led to more grief. If she knew exactly how much time passed, it would only encourage thoughts of lament that so much had been taken from her. She would not lament, she would not weep.
This was not the time.
Evelyn did not acknowledge the woman, but something in her heart softened at the thought of leaving the woman behind. Elris had been a mother to Evelyn, a friend, a confidant. But there were too many secrets to share, too much at risk. Evelyn straightened, and her conscience iced over once more. For the freedom that was so close that Evelyn could almost taste it, she would risk anything and everything.
Guilt welled up at the thought, but Evelyn forcibly pushed it aside. There would be time – in both outcomes – to grieve, but not now. Not when she was so close.
Evelyn did not meet any one else in the halls, and for that she was glad, as it gave her ample time to clear her mind and fill it with innocent orders from the kitchen supervisor. She pictured the angry man, with his sickly brown eyes, the stains of sauces and blood on his apron as he hummed and groaned over a pot or a pan. Evelyn pictured him turning to her, and barking in his curt way, telling her that she was being lazy, just standing there. He would turn, and give her the platter. Bring it to the king's quarters, he would say. These are his favorites, he will appreciate them.
Evelyn kept thinking it, and when she spotted the magician standing stoically outside the quarters she removed the look of concentration on her face and replaced it with a placid, innocent one. Her shoulders hunched a bit, unconsciously, trying to sink lower into the role of a submissive slave, and her lips pouted as she glanced at her feet.
The magician was a tall, lanky man, with eerie violet eyes and a cruel cast to his face. His head was covered in thick, black hair, and the hair bounced around his shoulders as he turned to face her. A look of recognition crossed his brow, and he relaxed, taking his hand off of his sword. Evelyn did not relax – a slave never relaxed, not when they could be beaten at any moment, and for the slightest infraction – and kept her head down as she stopped before him.
The thick, jagged dagger – sharpened against the whetting stone in stolen moments, when the cook left to retrieve an ingredient from the storeroom – was blazingly hot against the skin of her arm, and she hoped that its heat was not potent enough to be felt through the fabric of her sleeve.
The magician nodded at her, a rare motion, and she bowed low to the ground, speaking in soft tones.
"Harcan has baked these for the king, he ordered that I place them in his chamber. May I do so, sir?" she asked, and did not dare look up to meet his eyes, letting her hair fall so that it swathed the area around her down-turned. The magician peered at the rolls, and she felt a small surge of magic – she had felt the magic many times, especially when the lesser spell-casters wanted to have a bit of fun, and decided to control slaves (including Evelyn, thankfully only one time) as though they were living puppets. The man appeared to find nothing amiss, and hesitated before nodding once more, turning to mutter some words in the Ancient Language.
Evelyn listened, and was pleased to find that she understood the phrase perfectly.
"Door, open."
The large wooden doors creaked open, and Evelyn walked inside, the man close behind her.
Being manipulated by magic, it seemed, aroused a peculiar obsession within Evelyn. From that first time – she had been tortured for accidentally dropping a bowl of soup – she noticed that the spell-caster used some strange words for the spell. Later on, she noticed some of the magicians studying in the large library, and when they left, she (with the excuse of cleaning) snatched up several of the scrolls and hid them away. Evelyn knew how to read – rare, among slaves – and so the real trick was make sense of this strange, flowery script that made all sorts of strange angles and had numerous symbols and dots. Luckily, the scroll had a key on pronunciation, and so Evelyn learned to read and speak the Ancient Language. Granted, the scroll was incredibly lengthy and full of depth, but it only brushed upon the subjects of an ancient and unnamed battle that had occurred along the Ramr River a long time ago. Not anything about spells or magic.
But Evelyn was content with the fact that she could understand and speak the language adequately, so that she would know what was going to happen when the surge of magic occurred.
The room was familiar to Evelyn, and so her eyes only gazed at the lushness of the interior out of habit more than real curiosity. A dominant color was red, which wasn't surprising, seeing as Galbatorix seemed to have a deep pleasure in creating bloodshed. To the far west of the room was the door to his sleeping chambers, in which – thankfully – Evelyn had never been. A table pilled high with maps and notes rested in the center of the room, and beside that table was an enormous cushion that was the resting place of his onyx-scaled dragon. The dragon terrified Evelyn, but what terrified her more were its eyes, which were filled with wicked intelligence and a lust for pain.
The magician hovered as she slowly lowered the platter onto the small table beside the maps, and with head bowed she spotted a thick metal spike that served as a paperweight. Her hair continued to hide her face, and she glanced back to see that the magician was staring in the opposite direction, apparently having heard some noise.
She grasped the weight, and with a silent prayer quickly smashed it against the man's head. He fell with a gasp, and lay limp, his face pressed into the carpet. Evelyn stood, breathing hard, her hair in an array, and her eyes wide.
But she knew that he wasn't dead. She could see his chest rising and falling faintly, and felt a sick feeling of dread rise up into her throat, choking her. Part of her wanted to get what she was looking for and flee, but the more reasonable side stopped her in her tracks.
If she left him alive, the king would find out who had escaped, and would surely hunt her down. Even if she was just a slave, she was still his property, and he hated traitors more than anything.
And so the only option left was to kill him. Evelyn wasn't the only slave to bring Galbatorix his meals, there was no reason to remember her face. His dragon would recognize the scent, no doubt, but the name? There were too many girls in the castle, too many for her to stand out. She knew this, and steeled herself.
Evelyn swallowed, her eyes flickering from the door to the unconscious magician on the floor. The slave knew that killing was wrong, but she had done many wrong things in order to escape. She had done terrible, terrible things…what was one more act of evil in the face of freedom?
Fingers gripped the handle of the knife, and with a gust of air she lunged, plunging the knife into the back of the magician's head. Bone crunched and flesh rebelled against the intruding weapon, and once it was lodged in his head Evelyn rolled away as if she was burned. The blood was pooling around his head, and she felt some of it soak into her dress. She gasped, and backed away, her mouth wide as she stared at the man.
Then, she came to herself.
The key was in plain sight, on the top of a shelf near a curtained depression in the wall. It was Galbatorix's idea of a joke, watching as slaves came into the room, only to see their ticket to freedom, just sitting there with no protection. Some had tried lunging for it, but the dragon was quicker. Evelyn had a theory that the carpet was red just to Galbatorix could hide the blood. Or have it out in plain sight, taunting anyone who dared rebel against him.
You could be next, the crimson stain of the carpet seemed to hiss.
Evelyn crept toward the key, and reached for it, alert to any magic that might surround it. But it seemed that Galbatorix had become lazy, thinking that his quarters were his sanctuary, the place that was so safe that it needn't be guarded. No one was foolish enough to come in here and steal; no one was ready to die.
That was what separated Evelyn from the rest. For so long she had been waiting for her chance, so long that all attachments to her own life had withered. If she was destined to escape, than it would be so. If not, Evelyn would accept her fate with dignity, with no regrets, no fears.
The small form of the key was icy in her clammy grasp, and she frantically lifted up her skirts, revealing a small metal band that surrounded her ankle. It was magically affected to inflict death if the slave went outside the outer castle walls, and it was such a constant omen of slavery that Evelyn nearly cried when the key clicked, and the band fell away.
Free. She was free. At last…
She placed the key back on the shelf, and was about to leave when she noticed a strange pulsing beneath her, behind the curtain of cloth. It was glowing, and Evelyn fell to her knees before it, her heart pounding in the face of the magic that was brewing through the floor, through her mind, her toes, and her soul.
Evelyn felt her hands push aside the curtain, and she gasped at what lay before her.
Resting gently in the warm yellow sand were two eggs. Smooth, beautiful, innocent eggs that were at least twice the size of a newborn infant. Evelyn didn't have to guess twice as to what they held. The closest egg – it shone a pure, vibrant green – was only inches away from her trembling fingers, and with a soft cry she touched it with her fingertips, ignoring the warning her mind screamed at her.
Before she could full comprehend what she was doing, she lifted the egg, and held it close to her chest. It seemed to fit there, warm and deliciously heavy, and she crooned under her breath, pressing her cheek to its smooth surface.
An ear-splitting roar filled the air, and Evelyn jumped up, egg still in hand, and bolted out the door, tucking the egg down her dress and covering it with her cloak – it was cold in the castle, so it was customary for slaves to have ragged cloaks they made out of the blankets of the deceased. Evelyn didn't stop to wonder if the dragon was roaring in pleasure at the torture or in fury that an egg – one of the last dragon eggs in existence – had been stolen.
Evelyn ran, heart pounding, arms curled protectively around the egg. Her legs pumped furiously, and her brain was wonderfully bereft of fear. She didn't have time to question her sanity. If she lived to see the next sunrise, she would devote several hours to that very task. She reached her escape route – a small tunnel servants used to reach the stables – heard the king's dragon roar again, but this time it was softer, more pleased. A powerful rush of joy pounded through her chest as she realized that she hadn't been found out. How this was possible, how Galbatorix had seemingly forgotten to place spells and shields over the eggs…was Galbatorix really that powerful? Was he so completely confident that his walls and his solders and magicians and dragon could protect his most prized weapons in the battle against the rebels?
The young woman ducked into the tunnel, closing the door securely behind her and locking it for good measure. The passageway was dark, but Evelyn had practiced running so many times that her feet instinctively knew the way. She had planned for this, she was ready, she was going to make it.
The darkness was fading; the smell of dark, musty shadows was melting away into the sweet scent of nighttime and straw. The slave, who had traveled this route so many times, was crying now, her eyes gazing at the block of blue that was the night sky with such longing, such desperate desire.
Evelyn had nearly forgotten what being free felt like.
The slave – the former slave – reached the dark stables, and for a moment, all she could do was stare at the stars. They were so much brighter now, so much warmer and sweeter and oh the smell of the freedom on her tongue! It was intoxicating, and she lifted a single hand to the sky as if to grasp the moon and hug it to her breast. The other hand was carefully cradling the egg, as tenderly as if it were a child in her womb. In the dark, creating a maternal bulge in her dress, one would be inclined to believe that Evelyn was holding the unborn form of her child as she stood there.
The horses were unknowingly standing, snorting and snuffing, unaware of the tears that wet the skin of the human's neck as she silently sobbed. Her hair was swept back from her face, falling to below her buttocks as she tilted her head back, gulping in the sweetness of the night sky that she had never really seen until this very moment.
It was a few more timeless moments later that the woman seemed to come to herself, and she was Evelyn once more.
The woman seemed to realize that she still had the egg, and quickly pulled it out her dress, staring down at it. There was no question that she was taking it with her, such a warm feeling had welled through her at the contact, and even if it wouldn't hatch for her, the Varden might find some use for it.
Evelyn hastened to mount a horse, hiding the egg in a saddle-pack, and galloped out of the castle, her hair streaming behind her and her eyes burning pieces of amber in the starlight. Later, hours later, the king would discover what had been stolen, and such a rage would never be seen again on the face of Alagaësia. But by the time that happened, Evelyn was miles and miles away, with no way to possibly track her – she discarded her dress, having packed the dress and gloves of a recently killed servant away so that her scent would be disrupted.
And so as she fled Urû'baen, she couldn't help but ask the question that burned ceaselessly at the forefront of her thoughts.
Would the egg hatch for someone like me?
She had killed a man knowingly; she had sent a poor young man to his death just so that she would have the opportunity to escape. She had stolen, she had lied, and she was suicidal enough to steal a dragon egg from King Galbatorix himself.
Could it?