Chapter 29: Records

Brom heard a thump and muffled cursing through the door to Jeod's study. He glanced at his friend rather concernedly and pushed through the doorway. The butler was dragging Harry and his own son down the hallway. He could smell the alcohol on their breaths from the door. The wizard was sweating and looked miserable even in his unconscious look. Eragon looked similar.

"What's going on- oh." Jeod peered over his shoulder. "Well," he supposed, "they'll be out of trouble for a while?"

Brom grumbled some unkind words under his breath–which Jeod of course caught since he was right next to him. Arya followed them later and entered the office. The old rider shot her a questioning look. "Eragon had the knucklebones cast," she explained.

"That bad, huh?"

She winced. "Worse, actually. Apparently he fell in love with- with someone who does not reciprocate, he will experience great loss eminently, and he'll be betrayed by blood soon–at least, that's what I gathered from their drunken rambling."

Brom moaned. "I guess we'll be seeing Murtagh soon, huh?"

Arya shrugged. "Or Roran." He rolled his eyes. "People who feel certain of the path of the future often become its pawns," she warned.

He waved his hand dismissively. "Did you learn anything new about our friend?"

The elf glared at him. "Has he not earned our trust?"

"Yes," he said unashamedly. "Now spill."

"Fine, his parents were killed when he was a baby, I'm pretty sure there was a prophecy about him, and he was betrayed by someone named Peter Pettigrew," she ticked off on her fingers. "If you want to know more, just ask him," she said stiffly. "I'm done sating your paranoia at the potential cost of a very powerful ally." Arya swept out of the room regally and deposited the bag from Angela in his room.

"Woman problems?" Jeod asked wryly.

Brom held his head in his hands and groaned. "No, just foolish mistake problems, my friend."

Eragon woke with a pounding headache. His mouth felt filled with cotton and his head with lead. He felt motherly concern through his bond with Saphira, but she did not remark on it with words. On the bedside table next to him was a tiny vial of purple smoking liquid. It sat on a note which he could not read. He sent Saphira an image of it, but she had no suggestions.

He gripped the vial and brought it to his lips then paused. What would Brom say about him drinking a strange liquid without knowing what it was or who it came from. Eragon shivered. His father would probably scream and rant about how unbelievably stupid he was. He imagined how humiliating it would be if the stuff was soap or something.

Gingerly, Eragon made his way from the comfortable bed. It wasn't quite as luxurious as Harry's but then, nothing was. He was fairly sure there was a judicious application in the luxurious bed. Every soft scrape of his feet against the polished floorboards or rugs felt like the deafening scrape of metal on slate to his overly sensitive ears. Eragon carefully kept himself on the balls of his feet to avoid jarring his throbbing head with each step.

The creaking of the door swinging on its hinges sounded like a thousand men screaming at the top of their lungs and left him feeling his heartbeat acutely in his ears. Thump, Thump, Thump.

Harry's room was adjacent to him. Eragon knocked, wincing with each rap. "Come in!" the wizard said cheerfully. He was tending to a steaming cauldron set upon a brilliant white flame which licked at the pewter's sides.

"What's this say?" he asked Harry self consciously. Silently, Eragon bemoaned the fact that Garrow had not taught him his letters.

The wizard spotted the vial in his grasp and frowned. "It's a hangover cure. Drink it, you'll feel better." Dubiously, Eragon downed the vial. It tasted strange. Like some unfamiliar sweet fruit with a spicy aftertaste. As soon as he swallowed, a rush of energy flooded him. It actually reminded Eragon of the feeling of immersing oneself in the flood of magic. "I wrote that label in common, did I not?" Harry asked, examining the empty glass vial.

The wrapped loop of parchment had the generic runes of the common tongue in Alagaesia. 'Hangover Cure,' Harry spotted on the label in his handwriting. "I can't read," Eragon admitted.

"Damn," Harry cursed softly. "That's not something you can avoid learning, kid." He patted the rider's back. "Good luck asking your dad to teach you." The wizard returned to tending to his cauldrons.

Eragon left feeling sour. He supposed the wizard probably had better uses for his time than teaching a farm boy literacy. Sighing, he made his way to Jeod's office and knocked. "Come in," two men's voices said in unison. He pushed open the door.

"Harry sent me to you to learn how to read," he admitted, annoyed. "Says it's something I can't avoid learning."

"Well he's right!" Jeod exclaimed, affronted. "My friend, there are so many things to be learned which are written between the pages of books." He gazed at his shelves longingly. "These are my friends, they make me laugh, cry, and everything in between." To be honest, learning how to read and write was something Eragon looked forward to. Something about reading the thoughts of men long dead was thrilling. He could immortalize his thoughts on parchment with ink.

"Nothing for it, you'll just have to learn," Brom grunted in annoyance. "Even if Harry brought us to the records room every day for a month, we'd never get through it all alone. We'll need your help. Arya's too. Plus," he grimaced. "Illiteracy is a liability, Eragon. What is a man who can carry the orders to his execution unknowingly but a pawn? Better to learn this skill now than be unprepared when you desperately need it. Damn Garrow and his stubbornness," he cursed.

It was as if someone had lit a fire beneath Jeod. At first, Brom made to instruct Eragon, but Jeod's eagerness and enthusiasm was a force of nature. The gleam in his eyes was almost scary. Every day the merchant would sit with him, carrying a pair of slates and chalk. And thus, Eragon was introduced to the world of literacy.

The days in Teirm passed in a blur. In the morning, Eragon would wake and cram letters and words into his head until they swam behind his eyes everywhere he went. After lunch, he would explore the large port city and its interesting sights. Upon returning for an hour before dinner, he and Harry would spar in a courtyard behind Jeod's manor. After victuals, he would seal the curtains to his room tightly and practice magic.

He found that magic and literacy were far more taxing than even swordplay. Eragon was essentially learning two separate and very different languages at once. While he could afford to make a few mistakes learning common, it was not so with the ancient language. Brom had delegated his magical education to Arya who–in his opinion–was a much better teacher. She did not get impatient or cranky when he failed to grasp a concept quickly enough.

As a native speaker, her understanding of the language was unparalleled except maybe by Harry, whose time was monopolized by the everchanging projects and experiments he got up to in the tent. The wizard could nearly always be found crouched over a row of simmering cauldrons, hammering reddened steel, singing to the growing grove of trees outside the cabin, or any other of a myriad of activities.

Arya seemed off somehow, slightly uncomfortable around Eragon during their lessons. Despite her strange behavior, he did not let that affect his performance. Eragon thrust himself into his lessons with great enthusiasm. He'd realized during a lesson with Jeod: he was getting taught by some of the best minds in their fields. Brom was a swordmaster of rare caliber, able to keep up with Eragon despite being well past his prime. He and Arya were powerful and clever magicians with wide vocabularies in the language of power. And Jeod was a brilliant scholar who seemed to know something about just about everything. They were all giving him their time, the least he could do was respect that and learn diligently.

Plus, a rebellious part of his mind whispered, I could use these skills to bend my course of fate. Though Eragon was pretty sure he'd drunkenly rambled on to his friends about his impending doom, he knew no matter how drunk he got, he'd not spill the worst parts of his future. "You will leave Alagaesia, never to return. This is inevitable, you cannot avoid it." Angela's haunting words echoed through his head. Had he mentioned the betrayal from his family? Eragon couldn't remember. If he did, he'd regret it. Eragon knew he only had two relatives left; Brom and Roran. And Roran did not seem like the type to betray him.

But Brom? He thought incredulously. The man was his father, yet he had an undeniable ruthless streak about him. Brom would do anything to topple Galbatorix. Saphira sent waves of reassurance to him over their bond. "What will be, will be. And should the old one try to harm you, kin or not, he will regret it." That helped. Eragon shifted deeper into the bed, comforted by his dragon's mental presence.

"You managed to make it inside?" Brom interrogated Harry.

"Yeah, I saw through the tiny barred window on the door."

"Excellent! We can begin tonight." Harry sighed but did not argue. Every evening after the keep was locked down for the night, Harry would take Brom and Arya arm-in-arm and apparate them to the keep. He tried to pretend to read the ledgers, he really did, but it was so boring. Even Binns couldn't do this to him. The ghost could put anyone or anything to sleep, but at least his lectures were about bloody wars. The ledgers were just endless rows of numbers. Harry would commit some pretty gruesome crimes for an Excel spreadsheet. He froze. Could it be that simple?

Hastily, Harry shelved the ledger he was ignoring–ahem, perusing. He withdrew his wand and swept it in a wide arc at the entire room. "Geminio," he whispered softly. Brom was not even disturbed by the quiet whisper, white haired head bowed over a ledger unmoving. Arya glanced at him curiously. Every tome shimmered before an identical copy formed next to them. Even Brom's ledger was not spared, though the duplicate spawned floating above his head. Harry directed them into his backpack and quietly sealed it. He winked at Arya and retrieved the book before resuming the act of pretending to read it.

He did not see her blush.

"What are you working on?" Arya asked curiously. Harry was down in the lab with a pile of books in a stack, three opened to different pages with diagrams and cramped script. Enormous swathes of blank white parchment were spread across a large table. Four inkpots in a column along the left side of the parchment swirled and glittered with colored ink without being stirred. They were black, magenta, cyan, and yellow..

Harry set a new phoenix-feather quill upright at the top corner of the sheet and murmured an incantation. The plume stayed straight up despite the wizard removing his hand. She watched as it suddenly began racing across the parchment, spreading black ink behind it. Perfectly straight lines formed behind it, creating boxes, columns, graphs, and diagrams. Once the framework was finished, It was as if someone spilled a million colors of ink across the sheet of parchment. Circles with odd slices of color, jagged lines broken up with dots, and all sorts of words and numbers scrolled across the canvas.

A blank rectangular square in the top right corner drew her attention. Harry upended his backpack on the right side. A stream of heavy leather tomes thumped down on the ground in a pile. She recognized them as the trade ledgers from the record room. He picked one at random and pressed its spine against the narrow-ish rectangle. "Yes!" he cheered. A line of green raced across the parchment, turning sharply this way and that to avoid crossing any of the strange colored shapes, crashing into a glittering cube of what looked like countless razor-thin sheets of diamond.

The entire green line sunk into the cuboid gem array. As the line moved inwards, every graph changed slightly, letters and numbers flickering rapidly. The wedges in the colored circles grew and shrunk slightly until the line ended, at which point everything more or less froze again.

"Search: Seithr Oil," Harry vocally commanded. An empty rectangle blinked and showed a tabulated list of Seithr oil transactions. Each row had a merchant, source, destination, and quantity as well as dates, dues, taxes and other such information in a more cramped script. "Sort by: Quantity," he specified. The rows shuffled themselves around for a second before settling. The top row was inked in red text, showing three flasks from some tiny northern island to Dras-Leona by one Eoburn. If that wasn't enough, the tax on the transaction was well below legal.

"Well done, Harry Potter." A voice sounded from behind her. Arya whirled around in surprise. A ghostly figure stood behind her wearing wireframe glasses, a black turtleneck shirt, and blue jeans.

"Thanks, Steve," Harry said in satisfaction. "Now that I've got the basics down, I'm sure I'll be able to put your company out of business when I return home."

The figure laughed. "Good luck! Those assholes have it coming. Removing the headphone jack, idiots," he muttered angrily before fading away.

Harry picked up another ledger and pressed it into the rectangle. The green line raced out again. "Disable: Elegant animations." The green line vanished and instead the black square flashed green. He removed the ledger and grabbed another. Ever time he pressed a spine into the square, all the graphs seemed to blink and shift slightly. The changes grew less dramatic after every tome copied.

He seemed to realize manually and physically moving every ledger would be unreasonably tedious and sat in his chair. "Wingardium Leviosa, Hey, Arya," he greeted. Harry conducted the ledgers in a long floating row which slowly drifted left. Every tome dipped and touched the input square when it passed over.

Arya watched the process, rather impressed. Harry furrowed his brows in focus, then relaxed and stowed his wand. The books continued their march. "What's up?"

"Supper is approaching."

"Ah, I'll be right with Eragon." Harry stood with a sigh. A series of pops sounded as he twisted and stretched. He strode over to the forge and picked up a sword Arya had not seen yet. It had a lighter gold colored hilt with the typical diamond inset in the crossguard, as well as the hilt. Surprisingly, they were clear rather than the green she'd come to expect. Golden glowing symbols drifted along the spine of the blade which was cut like a channel on both sides. Five feet long, it was clear this was the greatsword Harry intended to use himself.

He spotted her gaze. "The hilt's not really gold. It's aluminum brass, a pretty strong alloy. I made the hilt out of wood so I could connect the enchantments to a tree, but it's not enough wood to really take advantage of the connection. And the diamonds–I tried green but it looked pretty terrible. The only other color that would work was sapphire, and I figured I'd leave that theme to Eragon," he joked.

Harry strapped a strange scabbard to his back. It looked like a generic scabbard but by the glint of his eyes, she knew that was not the case. He brought the sword close to the scabbard–though the tip was nowhere near the mouth–and grinned when it snapped to the sheathe. Rather than sticking to the outside, it was sucked through the surface and into the scabbard. "I didn't fancy carrying a big honking sword that weighed a ton everywhere, but this way it looks like I have one even though it's currently in a dimensional fold connected to the mouth. This way-" he grasped the protruding hilt and heaved, drawing the massive weapon with a satisfying 'shinng' "I can pull it out around Empire folks without giving up any secrets."

Eragon eyed him warily. Children and women assembled in a circle around them. Since their daily spars in the square, Harry and Eragon had drawn a bit of a crowd when they practiced. Harry smiled widely. He held the greatsword diagonally across his torso. Eragon's own sword was pointed at him, the tip making small circles in his steady grip.

Suddenly, he exploded into action. Eragon had grown familiar with the weakness of the greatsword and fought to maximize the weakness. Likewise, Harry knew how to best fight a bastard sword. Zar'roc's red blade came in an arc towards him. Harry blocked by raising his hand enough to change the angle of the blade in such a way as to block the stroke. With great effort, he made a mighty swing, putting enormous force behind the strike.

Eragon angled his blade to send Harry's skittering into the stone pavers. Some kid cheered at the exchange. They circled warily. Eragon needed to push his advantage with quick deft strikes and feints. Harry needed to wear him down or push through his guard with overwhelming force or keep him out of effective range. His silver arm was glamored but still glinted unnaturally to perceptive watchers.

Brom watched from the crowd. The fight grew more heated as Harry switched to looping overhead strikes and wide slashes designed to keep Eragon out of his vulnerable space. Eragon ducked and deflected whenever he could, only blocking when he was cornered. The rider made his way closer and closer. Every strike he was forced to stop with Zar'roc upset his balance as his arm shook from the force of the powerful stroke.

Harry sweated and gave some ground to keep Eragon back, but the rider pressed onwards, ducking and rolling to get closer. It seemed like the matchup was over; Eragon was well within Harry's effective guard and the wizard was forced to block his strikes lower on the blade and closer to the hilt. If he could press the advantage- Eragon lunged with Zar'roc extended in an attempt to get his blade next to Harry's neck. Surprisingly, Harry reached his hands above his head, keeping his hilt high above and the point near the ground. He took Eragon's blow at the very base and plunged downwards. The tip of the sword buried in the cobbles, unsettling the rider just long enough. In a quick motion, Harry drew a knife from his hip and lunged around the enormous sharpened fencepost, ducking a head-level swipe and ending up with his blade against Eragon's neck.

The crowd exploded into cheers. Harry stowed his knife and bowed obnoxiously. "Yes, yes," he announced. "I know, I'm the greatest swordsman to ever live!" Even more cheering. "And this fool is fortunate enough to spar with me," he grinned impudently, pointing at Eragon. He turned nervous when a guard in full armor elbowed through the crowd with his sword drawn.

"You taking challenges?" the man asked.

Harry sighed minutely. "Sure!" he said brightly. He heaved the swordpoint out of the road and resumed his ready position. "Lettuce begin!" He thought he heard Angela laugh in the crowd.

He handily defeated the guard but applauded the man anyways for the valiant effort. "Any other challengers?" he asked eagerly. The evening wore on as Harry and Eragon fought undefeated through an even dozen men-at-arms. After the last, the crowd had grown rather significantly. Harry clasped arms with his latest conquest and helped heave the man off the ground. "Your name, sir?"

"Garrick, good man," the guy said good-naturedly. "Good fight."

"Good fight indeed, Garrick." Harry complimented the man. "That's all for tonight, folks!" he announced to the crowd.

"Oh is it?" A chilling and familiar voice asked.