Text Key

"Audible speech."

'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'

Chapter 3 - Frost and Fever

I'd studied the map of Alagaesia often as a kid - the product of having a limited bookshelf with Eragon and Eldest easily on tap, I supposed, but I'd always focused on how ridiculously large the Hadarac Desert had seemed; the great big blank splotch that swallowed up the better half of a two-page spread and continued to gape like it wanted to take even more of the land into its dry and grasping embrace.

Despite all other descriptions of Alagaesia - the marshes, the plains, the mountains, the forests… the desert was the one that overwhelmed them all when I thought of the continent.

And yet… here I was. Looking at anything but.

Palancar Valley almost the archetypal glacier valley - from the tall and harsh drop of Igualda Falls at the trough end to the striations in the stones too large to lug along even by the might of a mass of ice large and heavy enough to reshape a continent, even as the earth it dragged along behind it settled into drumlins, kame, and various types of moraines, the odd glacier erratic gleaming under moonlight to act as its own sort of signpost to anyone who knew that field of geology.

The layer of eternal ice was ages gone, obviously, but the cold remained, not just in the snow that caked the winter world, but soaked into the granite and gneiss bones of the land and coming out in full force under the frost pearl brush of full moonlight. And, down in the valley below, where there was once ice as blue as the sky, lay Carvahall, only a handful of houses - some, but not all marked by some manner of firelight in their windows - further out to give away that it was more than just an outpost.

It was… small. The kind of town people forgot about, both because of its scale but because it was out of the way, an afterthought to anyone anywhere 'better', if any thought was given at all. It was the place the success stories ran away from and made a footnote in their own history if it had to be mentioned at all.

Better yet, since it was nestled along the Spine, it was a place that Galbatorix would avoid by default - though he would not be above sending his men here, it would not be an exercise he'd partake in himself.

All in all, not a bad place to hide, if one didn't want to go full hermit and live out in the wilds.

But that was a past tense sort of plan, with the plot looking to steamroll this place the moment Saphira was even suspected. Whatever guise of normality Carvahall held now was an illusion, pulled over their eyes like wool out of long habit.

"I wonder if the Ra'zac have been this way yet?" I mused as we made our way down a trail towards the town, me on horseback even as Selby lizard crawled along the cliffs.

There was something to be said for having an idea of what kind of timeline you were dealing with. In an era of horses and wagons, even those not dependent on that option wouldn't zigzag at random - but which way had my quarry zagged? Had the surviving Ra'zac bounced back this way after its encounter with me, only to latch back onto the tracks of the canon? Or had my encounter been an afterthought executed after ruining Eragon's mundane life?

A stab of pain lanced through my body, gouging phantom trenches across seemingly random areas of my body - torso, legs, arms, fingers - before digging into my lungs and squeezing a gasp out of me.

It was to Matsukaze's credit that the horse didn't so much as twitch at the reaction. Most horses would have panicked over far less.

"Hup," I wheezed. "Th-that's one question answered."

Selby immediately hissed, leaning forward. 'What happened?' xe asked.

"Empathy disorder got cranked up to eleven," I said. Someone was dying in town - slowly and painfully. Likely as the result of torture, given the shape of the pain. And if I remembered the events of the books right, there was only one man it could be with what I'd just felt.

Well, regardless of if we'd come first or second on the shopping list, we were definitely here in the immediate wake of the Ra'zac. Lucky us.

The grimace they made was tangible through our psychic bond. 'Do you need me to handle-?'

"No. It's livable. Really, it's not… just the old empathy disorder got cranked up."

It was only a mild lie, but it was one that Selby already knew was bullshit. The all-over itching compulsion to fixitfixitfixit had simply gained range and pinpoint accuracy - and the brick of wretched sensation in my stomach had tripled in weight to go with it. And this was in a normal village with normal - well, mostly normal - problems, not an active crisis zone.

And people wondered why Elva had been as much as she was.

"Just stay on the line, alright?"

'Always.'

I suppose I made for an interesting image to anyone looking looking out into the night; a mostly anonymous figure - squarely within the expectations of average height and frame, while other details were obscured by the sarape I'd wrapped myself in - astride a huge black horse with a silvered mane and feathered fetlocks that plowed through the snow like it was nothing, saddle strapped and wrapped with bedroll, weapons, and all the other trappings of a mercenary nomad.

The only way I could have drawn more attention was if I'd left the glowing Rider sword unwrapped and brought a brass band as an entourage… or started setting things on fire, possibly while screaming.

As it were… well, I'd just deal with the few stares aimed at me. I had a more important task to attend to than stealth.

It was easy to find where I needed to go - even without the empathy curse acting as a compass, Horst's house was one of the biggest in the town and all the taller for being parked on a hill; two stories, shale roofed, with dragon-mouthed waterspouts and all manners of intricate wood detailing that spoke of both the skill and passion of a man who loved to make things.

"Matsu. Stay. And no murder," I informed the warhorse as I dismounted.

Matsukaze merely snorted at me, apparently not willing to make that big a promise.

'I'm going in,' I told Selby. 'Do try to keep Saphira occupied while I work. I'm not interested in fighting a scaly flying toddler tonight.'

My partner scoffed. 'You act as if I cannot keep an infant entertained.'

'My worry is more on how you'll entertain yourself and you know it,' I responded. Selby, if dragon-shaped now, was never far from the trickster mischief of their true forest spirit nature, and both me and she knew that. 'Try not to give the baby dragon an existential crisis while I'm working.'

'Oh, fine. But I shouldn't be blamed if she does it on her own.'

I rolled my eyes before knocking on the door to Horst's house.

It was only a moment before a small woman with honey-blonde hair opened the door.

"If you're not well, our healer is in no position to help you - she has two patients already," the woman - Elain - said apologetically.

I'd spent time in the past - or in Verses that echoed it - but I could never quite get over the fact that my original form never ran the risk of being the smallest in the room when I was in there. Five foot six had never been tiny, no, but over this woman? I towered.

"No - I actually came to lend aid, rather than to beg it. Wounds that refuse to heal, right? Tricky business to handle." I said, making no effort to force myself into the space, instead waiting for a proper invitation.

Elain bit her lip before turning her head back towards the interior rooms. "I… I suppose it would do no harm, at this point," she decided. "Please. Come in."

I did, taking a moment to ask her preference on what I did with my boots and cloak before going any further into her home. I'd left my weapons on Matsukaze, just to make it clearer I wasn't here to make trouble, but Elain still tensed every time I shifted in a way she wasn't expecting.

This wasn't a town that particularly trusted strangers, and given that the last ones to come through the place were the Ra'zac, I wasn't exactly going to argue against the caution as she led me upstairs to where Garrow lay, his only company an old, stout woman.

"Gertrude," Elain said. "This person has come to see if she can help."

"Is that so?" Gertrude, the local healer, looked me over. "Well, you're clean enough to play the part," she allowed. "Though I doubt a face that fresh knows more than I do, 'less you're an elf."

"Check my ears if you like," I said, pulling my hair back to show the rounded tips. "But I am older than I look, if that helps any."

"It doesn't, but I suppose I'll see what you can do in the moment," Gertrude allowed. "Now, show me how you attend to a patient."

I bowed lightly before turning to the real focus of my mission.

Garrow was a very ordinary looking sort of man. While there was something to be said for not judging by appearances, he was very much what you expected a real, honest farmer to look like - worn-down and sparse, without any manner of excess because it simply wasn't sustainable with the profession. Any muscle was that which was needed to do the farm work, what little fat was a small plus that would leave as soon as a lean year - or a bad enough injury - hit.

And his current condition was definitely that - the man's sweat-slick, greying skin sagged off of his face was one of those things that promised dying if not treated with the best care… and that promise would only turn into a strong 'probably' even with that much.

Still, I was going to try and help. Even without the supernatural prodding raking at my ribs, it was still worth doing.

Checking his pulse - ignoring the wet paper texture of the skin and flesh beneath -, I didn't bother hiding my frown. Reedy. Not surprising, given the rest of his condition, but it was an unpleasant unsurprise all the same.

"How long has he been like this?" I asked Gertrude.

"I've been tending to him for two days. He may have been attacked the day before that - his nephew hasn't said much yet. He only woke up a bit earlier today and is downstairs."

Mmm. We'd come just in time then - if I remembered the book right (and I did, because my memory hadn't held flaw in ages), Garrow hadn't lasted long after that.

I took a bit of the residue from the wound, studying it against the candle light. It ran clear, but considering that the wounds themselves were white, I wasn't going to take it as a good sign beyond 'well there's probably no bacteria taking advantage of this'.

"I'm going to do a bit of magic," I warned Gertrude and Elain. Before the healer could say anything, I continued. "Specifically, I'm going to use it to remove whatever foreign body is in the wound, because there's absolutely something in the way of us making any progress."

"Ah- I suppose that's… that's reasonable enough," the old woman said. There was a sheen of nervousness to her now - not that I could blame her. Magic was frightening if you didn't have any of your own. "Is there…"

Composing my thoughts, I rolled up my sleeves, exposing forearms littered with old scars and a set of tiger-dragon brands earned ages past. The dragon was different to any they'd know here - no wings, all serpentine - but it would still draw the eye.

"I need a metal or glass vessel - if this is what I think it is,-" Or rather, what I knew it was. "-it will destroy all material that lives or ever lived on contact. Even if my spell renders it inert, I'm still not the gambling type when it comes to something as dangerous as this."

I waited for Elain to come with what I asked for - a metal cup, roughly beaten, but good enough for the cause, spending the time scripting the spells I intended to use.

Verbage was vital. To be chosen with precision, if you wanted the spell to do what it was meant to. I could free cast, I had the talent… but silent magic was complicated. Squirrelly. And I wasn't interested in playing with a man's life unless there was more risk in an absence of the right words.

"Brakka du za'roc," I began, waving a hand over Garrow's face. It was unconscionable to operate without anesthetic, even if the man was unconscious. I waited until my sympathetic pain eased before moving onto the next - and ultimately more important stage. "Utdragan du eitrum, malthinae du eitrum unin du koppr."

Beads of oily liquid, distinguished by their sheen, began to pull away from his body, floating upwards to gather in the cup I was holding. I wasn't forcing the spell to rush - I wanted it to go slow, so that the oil didn't rip its way out of a body already taxed to the limit.

"Something funny," I said, looking at the captured oil slowly building up in the cup. "If you bring the word for 'poison' and 'cup' together, you end up with a word for 'spider'. Alarmingly direct, isn't it?"

"I suppose," Gertrude said. "Those wounds still don't look healthy."

"No, they don't," I agreed.

The exposed tissues were still ghostly white - likely just empty cellular scaffolding at this point - but the sickly floral smell had gone with the seithr oil and the 'painkiller' spell was still active. Now…

I closed my eyes and focused. There were no words in the Ancient Language for 'cells', much less 'decellularization' - at least not any that I knew beforehand, and I didn't have the time or patience to weave the words that it did have into new ones for the concepts -, so I had to work wordlessly.

'Need my help?' Selby asked.

I exhaled. 'It wouldn't be remiss.'

We opened my eyes, twinned focuses of two minds with two widely different skills and knowledge bases fixed on a singular goal.

A green-gold opaline matrix of light spun from my hands as I slowly moved them over Garrow's wounds, Selby pulling on the threads of time and 'remember how this should be' while I worked on pure healing, the combination of forces returning color and blood to the body while the gaps closed and sealed.

There would be marks. Most wounds left them. But this would work.

"So this is magic," Elain breathed as we finished our work and Selby peeled away from my mind.

Gertrude, for her part, allowed herself to look a bit impressed. "Complicated magic, I wager."

"Yes. Very," I admitted as I exhaled - too tense to even try breathing while literally holding a man's life in my hands, I was free to do so now. "But necessary, given how bad things were. There's little more to be done besides the typical 'food, rest, avoid stress, and perhaps don't do the thing that put you in that bed again' advice. Though I doubt that anyone reasonable would willingly go for a second round with a torturer."

Both women sucked in their breaths.

"You gathered that much from the wounds?" Gertrude asked.

"Less the wounds and more of what was in them, though it is true that those sort of cuts are rarely made for any other purpose than causing pain." I gestured to the cup. "This stuff? Is used by exactly two professions in the world. And out of them, a farmer wouldn't require or justify hiring that level of assassin. So, that leaves an interrogator chasing down every possible lead on…" I gestured vaguely. "Whatever thing they're after. Which may or may not have been something our little eavesdropper was involved with."

There was a vague noise from the door, an awkward shuffling as Eragon realized he'd been caught. Even without Aura painting the boy's outline blue, pulsing in time with his heartbeat, it would have been impossible to miss him.

Or the near identical, bar being larger blue Aura that had paused in its orbit around town the minute I'd pinned onto Eragon's presence.

"Nobody's going to bite you, kid," I told him through the door. "Come in and see your uncle."

Eragon was a very average looking teen; average height, a bit of baby fat still lingering around the edges of his face and body, messy hair, and the first stumbling attempt at facial hair was starting to sprout from his face. The one thing that wasn't 'generic teenager' about him were his intense brown eyes that held the promise of a fight if you got in his way - and not the kind that could be carelessly brushed off either.

He was limping of course - even without the empathy curse or book knowledge, there was enough to tell from his hesitant crawl of a cowboy walk to know that he'd done something to absolutely violate his thighs, though most people wouldn't have had the necessary information to jump to 'rode a dragon without the right protection'. Still, he was young, and that gave him a lot more tolerance for such things than someone even a few years older.

"He's fine?"

"He will be," I corrected, standing up. "He's not going to be running around immediately, but he shouldn't be too long in the sick bed… which works out fine because I've yet to meet a farmer who had much inclination to stay in one, regardless of the season."

Gertrude huffed a laugh. "Now that is an eternal truism. I'm not even sure being brought back from the dead would slow down the likes of this one."

Eragon stared at me, a look of half disbelief and half terror fighting over his expression. "You brought my uncle back from the dead."

"I didn't bring him back from the dead. He was almost dead. And like any good miracle worker can tell you, there is a big difference between mostly dead and all dead - mostly dead is still slightly alive. You can do something with that, if you know what you're on about."

Gertrude nodded. "I might not be magic, but I've managed a few miracles of my own in my time. It's the knowing that does it, not the magic."

"Doesn't hurt knowing how to use the magic though," I added, stopping Eragon before he could sit down. "Waíse heill."

He twitched as I repaired his legs, the agony that came from him just standing easing within moments. "What was that?"

"Healing magic. Even if you did have a talent for it, you shouldn't try it without a complete command of magical basics. It's more than just words and it will kill you if you handle it carelessly. Kind of like fire. Not a toy."

As I descended the stairs with Elain, I hoped that the kid would remember that.

Saphira, in her own mind, had always been a kind of one. It was a bit of arrogance that she'd never quite understood to question, despite the comical wrongness of it; she was aware that other dragons had been, had tastes of memory from before - within the egg, too small for anything more than muffled noise and shadow, waiting for her Bonded, she'd still gathered the sense of Others Like Her - but it was the sort of thing that was like… like the idea of summer.

She had only known winter and had only Eragon's thoughts and words to confirm that any weather beyond different levels of 'cold' and 'snowy' could be. Another dragon? Similarly impossible to imagine.

In her world, there had always only been winter and there had only ever been her.

So, perhaps that would let her be forgiven for her fright at another dragon abruptly appearing in her territory.

'Well, aren't you careless, flying about where just anyone can see you, without a single trick to make them look somewhere else,' they had announced in her mind. 'You're mighty confident for a fledgling.'

Saphira had stumbled mid flight before catching herself with a few hurried flaps. 'What- who are you?'

The new dragon was green - the color of pines and… and tinted snow, but not - and, more importantly and with words she did have, large.

Was this a dragon full grown, perhaps? Saphira had no measure for what that meant beyond the fact that - he? She? - they were larger than she was by a very large metric and that she herself had grown much over her short life. The same applied to gender; were they male? Female? There was… she should have the answer, being a dragon herself - and not so silly as Eragon, who has so easily assumed that Saphira was male because to him, females were the opposite of extraordinary -, and yet this identification evaded her.

Had she… chosen to be female? Was it not so much decided by the body but by the mind? The spirit? Was it allowed, for someone to be something outside of that binary? Was that normal for dragons?

Saphira was belatedly realizing that the condition of being barely three months old probably didn't lend itself to knowing that much about the world or even dragons, even if she was one herself. And that, in perhaps a linked statement, Eragon wasn't much better off in his own regard.

'A passerby,' the other dragon said as they'd found a large stone to perch on, as if finding one of the only other dragons left in existence was an utterly boring chore. 'My human has business in town and I've got little enough to do - so I get to bother you! Joy of joys.'

'You have a human? A Rider?'

'She rides sometimes,' the strange dragon replied. 'Sometimes they do not. Delaine doesn't like heights that much.'

'You chose poor-'

There was a snarl of warning that was less of a true noise and more of a clawlike pressure upon Saphira's mind. 'Do. Not. Insult. My. Chosen.'

'I'm sorry, I won't!' Saphira quickly apologized.

'Good. I am called Selby, if you have a need for names,' the dragon - Selby now, what a strange name indeed - said before quirking their head to the side.

Saphira heard nothing. 'What is it?'

'I'm helping my human with something, don't interrupt,' Selby said before closing their eyes.

She waited, flying slowly in circles around where the other dragon sat, claws tapping as they did… something that Saphira could just detect the edges of. Some… conveyance of being, of thought and intent…

'What were you doing-' Saphira started again as Eragon startled from the long silence on the other end of their connection, his fear spiking. 'Eragon?!'

'Ssh, fledgling,' the older dragon scolded. 'A human was broken. He is no longer such.'

Saphira needed but a moment to realize what human that was. 'My Rider's uncle. I thought he was dying. As good as dead.' She had told Eragon as much. Forced him away from his own death in a pointless fight.

'He was. He isn't now.' Selby shook their head, sceathers rattling faintly in the night. 'You may thank me for my magnanimous nature.'

Saphira was about to ask how that worked - magic, she knew magic was but the specifics eluded her, how could so certain a death be so deftly avoided? - when the pain she felt from Eragon eased to nothing, marked by their combined surprise.

'Your human is a healer. Not just you,' she realized.

'My human is everything. Healer, helper, fighter, rider. Though,' Selby said, slipping into smugness, 'probably not the kind you were expecting.'

Author's Notes

Selby: how many layers of power trip are you on
Saphira, three months old and full of dragon ego: idk, like five or six.
Selby, time travel nature god with incredible psychic power and a few millennia worth of experience being annoying even before the dragon part came in: you are like little baby. Watch This.

Also giving Saphira the same gender adventure a friend had is fun. Gender+ for your girl.

Experience with small towns and farming family members was relevant. As were a tendency towards wikiwalks and retaining a shitload of information about everything ever.

When writing Ancient Language stuff, if I can't find the word I need or an acceptable substitute in the available dictionaries (related to wikiwalk tendency - I love a good research hole), I go looking for other options in Old Norse and Old Irish. That's where 'utdragan' and 'koppr' ended up coming in. Also numbers.

And, technically, that is 'attercop' comes from - though 'cup/cop' in both just tracks back to the proto-Germanic kuppaz, which means 'round thing'. Which I suppose covers both spiders and cups.

Direct spell translation

'Reduce the misery.'

'Pull out the poison, confine/bind the poison in the cup.'