Eragon coasted back to shore deep in thought. Everything Harry said about prophecy, secrets, and the things he'd opened up about in his life. Saphira was deep in thought too. Eragon gazed towards the shore as Teirm drew near. Saphira once again looked wrought from glass. Harry had the same spell on him, flying just overhead. If Eragon focused just right, he could see the wizard's form, bent over the broomstick and coasting along with Saphira's wingbeats.

Harry had almost given him too much information, and Eragon felt like it had all run together and ended up meaningless. Worry about Angela's fortunetelling, ignore it, choose to run from it, he just didn't know.

For now, there was nothing Eragon could do but agonize over it, or put it out of his mind. He would try to do the latter.

When they reached the cliff where Saphira was staying, Eragon was reluctant to part ways. Nevertheless, the sun was nearly touching the horizon and the city gates would be closing soon. Eragon said his goodbyes and jogged with Harry down to the gates.

They reached the wall huffing and puffing, just as the last sliver of orange sun was sinking below the horizon.

The guard at the gate recognized them and waved them in right as the iron portcullis began creaking shut. He whistled. "Cutting it a bit close, aren't we boys?"

Eragon bent over and put his hands on his thighs, catching his breath. "Sorry. Won't happen again."

The guard grinned. "It won't be me sleeping outside if you mistime it. Hope you resolve your family spat."

"Thanks," Harry smiled.

Teirm was a different place in the evening. The taverns were filling up with men out to drink, weary from a work day and ready to meet up with friends. Candles, torches, and bonfires cast windows and streets with the warm glow of firelight. Eragon was glad of his bug repellent ring, for they too were out to feast, yet none ever bit him.

Eragon did not have the energy to appreciate Teirm's vibrant nightlife. They'd only made it into the city that morning. Coupled with all he'd learned, Eragon was bone-weary not just in body but in mind. He didn't want to confront Brom and be dragged into a long fight. He just wanted to sink into his bed and sleep.

Jeod's butler opened the door when they knocked and waved them in. "The master has already eaten, but there is food left over if you are still hungry."

Eragon took him up on the offer; he was ravenous. He'd almost forgotten how much he missed meals with meat. It was pulled pork with a sweet, tangy sauce on thick, buttered buns. There were vegetables and fruit, too, but never as fresh as the stuff Harry had, which felt like it had been picked from the vine only minutes before going into the container.

He was too weary to really appreciate the luxuries of Jeod's house, too. The opulent theme was spread throughout all the rooms, but a mahogany backed bed with embroidered pillows and three piece covers felt the same as a twin bed with a scratchy blanket when one's limbs were leaden with fatigue.

The next morning, the butler knocked on the door to the bedroom to rouse Eragon. Sunlight streamed through the curtains covering the glass windows. For a blissful moment as he woke, Eragon was carefree.

Then everything that had happened yesterday came crashing back down and suddenly, Eragon no longer wanted to get out of bed. He dragged his feet in getting dressed (with clothes Jeod's butler brought) and bitterly trudged down the hallway to the stairs. Saphira had to be even further out hunting, for she was too far away for Eragon to get much more than a sense that she was enjoying herself.

It was impossible not to notice little details of Jeod's house, things he'd never seen before. Glass sculpted candle holders, with candles that were lit, even during the day. Such a waste of wax would never occur to anyone from Carvahall. The walls were painted, too. And not just a pleasant color made from local pigments. It was a detailed pattern of wallpaper stenciled over and over again, an ocean horizon that extended all the way down the hall above the paneled trim. Thin gold leaf trimmed the edges like sand. Painted on the aquamarine waves, little ships dotted the wallpaper here and there, sails unfurled and rippling pennants trailing behind their crow's nests.

Everywhere Eragon went, he felt like he should hardly dare breathe. Touching the walls with their beautiful wallpaper, treading on the rich, woven carpets, running his hand along the carved bannister down the stairs, he felt like at any moment he might accidentally destroy some gorgeous piece of art just by being.

He found the dining room with his ears. Chatting and laughter came down the hallway. Eragon peered in. Jeod and Brom were sitting across from each other, eating fresh pastries and laughing. Helena sat at the head of the table, eating with dignified motions, like she was dissecting each piece of her meal.

"I swore up and down the river, but he refused. It was policy," Jeod uttered the word like a profane swear. "So I got all seven of the sellers together, in person, and had them waiting for Tallard, in his office."

"And so Bureaucracy was defeated once more," Brom chuckled.

Eragon sat without a word. Harry glanced up briefly when he entered. He had his head down, poking a breakfast sandwich around with a sterling silver fork.

"Eragon," Brom greeted. "This is Helen, Jeod's wife."

Eragon nodded stiffly to Helen. "Pleasure to meet you," Helena said, with a cadence and tone that felt utterly prescripted, from the perfunctory smile to the rhythm of the syllables. He sat silently at an empty place with a serving already prepared, and ate mechanically.

Brom squinted at him, then shrugged and went back to exchanging tales with Jeod.

Eragon wasn't used to how heavy real silverware was. The utensils had noticeable weight to them, wrought with flowery designs and polished to a gleaming finish.

The merchant waved him off. "Enough about me. What did the two of you get up to yesterday?" he smiled. "Explore the city? Teirm has a lot to do, especially with a pocket full of gold and no reputation to uphold."

Helen made a tiny noise of disappointment in her throat.

"We both wound up at the herbalist's shop across the street," Harry offered.

"Angela?" Jeod grinned. "A very odd, mysterious woman. Certainly entertaining."

Eragon finally couldn't take it anymore. "I eavesdropped."

Brom raised a brow. "Really? On who?"

"On you!" Eragon exploded. "Why didn't you tell me you knew who my mother was before we even started!"

Brom and Jeod were both caught flatfooted. Jeod opened and closed his mouth a couple times. Brom just scowled. Eragon thought he spotted the tiniest hint of a smile touch Helen's lips.

"What did you hear?" Brom sighed.

Eragon was about to deliver a scathing retort when Harry looked up from his plate. "Does it matter? He has questions on extremely relevant information to him that you really have no excuse for hiding."

Brom put a hand to his forehead. "If you started listening in immediately after you were supposed to go and explore Teirm, I assume you heard Jeod and I mention that Selena was a deadly assassin."

"Yes," Eragon said shortly.

"And judging by your reaction, do you see why I did not mention it right away?" Brom tried. But Eragon was not going to let him weasel out of it so easily.

"Maybe not when I was a little kid in Carvahall, but certainly before we left on a quest to discover the very information you already knew and were keeping secret," Eragon said. "You said you stayed in Carvahall for me. Were you watching me? Wary that I'd turn out like my mother?"

Brom snorted. "Assassins are made, not born. You'd have had about as good a chance of becoming one as Roran does. I have secrets, Eragon. More than you'd know, and things I can't tell you for good reason. Selena is tangled up in one of the most convoluted nets of secrets, lies, and danger, of my whole life."

"What, did she come after you?" Harry wondered aloud. Helen leaned in, listening intrigued as Eragon pressed Brom for answers.

Brom shook his head. "No." He pinched his brow. "Jeod, can you explain this?"

The man gave Eragon a sympathetic look. "Nobody was ever sure where Selena came from. Are you familiar with Morzan?"

Eragon nodded. "The first and greatest of the Forsworn."

Jeod bobbed his head. "And you're familiar with his reputation?"

Swallowing, Eragon nodded.

"Well, one day Morzan returned from some mission or another with a woman in tow. Selena," Jeod explained. "He had an estate, a castle in the southern part of the Spine, northeast of Kuasta, northwest of Leona Lake. Galbatorix gave it to him after the Fall. In any case, he took Selena there and later found she could use magic. There-" he hesitated. Jeod took a sip from his glass.

"Suffice to say there were many bloody, creative, and terrifying legends about Selena," he said finally. "Her reputation was well-earned. She was the tool Morzan used when he wanted subtlety, instead of a crimson dragon and an infamous face. Morzan called her his 'Black Hand.' The moniker stuck." Jeod sat back. "I'm sorry, Eragon, but this is what I know about her. I suspect it's no secret between us here that Brom and I both oppose Galbatorix. For those of us who work against the King and his servants, Selena was a nightmare. The shadowy figure who might just kill you without anybody ever seeing her. You always had to worry that Morzan would catch wind of you and send her in his stead."

Eragon was not sure what to think. She was Garrow's sister. She'd grown up in Carvahall. She couldn't be all bad, right?

A terrible notion fell over Eragon like a shadow. With shaky certainty, he asked, "Morzan is my father, right?"

Brom shook his head.

"How can you be sure?" Eragon insisted miserably. "They lived together."

"Plenty of people have lived together and not had a baby with each other," Brom said.

"Who else could it be? Surely having a child with Selena would invoke Morzan's wrath!" Eragon insisted.

Brom spread his arms and did a little bow in his seat. "And now you know why I never told anybody."

"But he's long dead," Harry defended. "Before we left, there was still time to speak up."

Brom sighed. "Galbatorix knew about her, too. And this is exactly the kind of thing he would pursue. He loves poetic irony, coincidences, shit like that," Brom said dismissively. "If he knew Selena's son lived in Carvahall, well, he might actually fly out to pick you up personally."

Eragon struggled to imagine what that would have been like. The King himself, flying to a sleepy little village in the north to come and make him a prince. It was the sort of story little children dreamed of. Some mysterious secret circumstance vaulting them into the circles of royalty. He lost himself dreaming of enormous black dragons, palaces, and courtly intrigue for a moment.

But he realized that if he had become that person, Saphira might never have hatched for him.

"I still don't think that was worth not speaking up back in Carvahall," Eragon insisted.

Brom shrugged. "That is your right. In hindsight, I should have told you. But these are secrets I kept utterly silent for sixteen years. I was, and still am, in the habit of keeping deadly secrets."
"How can you be certain that Morzan's not Eragon's dad," Harry suddenly interrupted.

Brom waffled for a moment before conceding. He glanced at Jeod and Helen. Helen sighed in resignation and left the dining room. Jeod followed right after her. Brom muttered something under his breath. Eragon caught Harry whispering muffliato under his breath.

"Galbatorix managed to salvage three dragon eggs from the Fall. The Varden and I made an attempt to steal them back. Our thief only managed to get one. Hefring broke from the plan and missed the dead drop," Brom explained in a low voice. "Morzan recovered the egg and brought it to the estate Jeod mentioned. I was the one to steal it back. It took me over a year of passing as a gardener before I managed it. I know he's not your father."t

Eragon realized with a rush of vertigo, exactly which egg he was talking about. Brom had practically made his life, despite being nearly a stranger for sixteen years.

"Then who is?" Eragon demanded. "You were there, you have to know."

Brom kept his lips tight.

"You owe me answers," Eragon snapped.

"I owe you nothing of the sort, boy," Brom snapped back. "These are secrets men have fought over, killed over, died to keep."

Eragon glared at him. He looked to Harry to back him up, but the wizard only gave him a sympathetic gaze.

"Tell him to tell me," Eragon pleaded. "This all concerns me!"

Harry winced. "I've been in your shoes and I know how terrible it feels, but there exists good reasons to stay quiet. I- well, I had to keep some secrets from even my friends, people I implicitly trust."

"Even from me?" Eragon asked in disbelief. "I wouldn't tell anybody."

"You don't always get to make that choice," Brom said gruffly. "It's too easy to pluck information from somebody's mind. Our enemies have the advantage of brute force in every single way. The only way we win is by being clever, sneaky, and never making a mistake."

Eragon stared between the two men. "So, that's it?" he wondered. "We came all this way for nothing? I should just give up?"

Brom shook his head, but Eragon did not want to hear it. He stood up so quickly the handsomely carved and upholstered chair behind him fell over. He left the dining room and then, worried that Harry might try to come after and console him, went even further, stepping out onto the street outside.

Eragon went to the docks. Something about the ocean had calmed him yesterday. He spared a thought to wishing he'd brought Zar'roc with him, or at least his bow or a knife, but he'd left too quickly to arm himself.

The docks were fishy and salty, and the rumble of the ocean was even louder than inside the city walls. Eragon went to find Jeod's ship, and Tarence, the ship's captain. Tarence wasn't there, but Arne was, and directed him towards the Green Chestnut.

"Isn't it early in the day to be in a tavern?" Eragon asked.

Arne scoffed. "There's nothing for him to do now. 'Cept wait for Ristheart to get off his pansy ass and approve the shipping manifest."

Eragon shrugged and headed to the tavern in question. It felt a bit less friendly than Morn's. Most of the tables were empty, but the people who were eating breakfast did not appear to know each other as everybody in Carvahall did, and the barkeeper felt less like a friendly manager and more like an overseer.

Tarence recognized him when he walked in the door. He beckoned Eragon over.

"Change your mind about the job?"

Eragon entertained the idea for the briefest moment, sailing away from Brom and Teirm and all the tangled secrets they held. Only for a moment before he realized Saphira could hardly accompany him, he did not want to abandon Harry (much) and he was already on an adventure, so going on another one didn't make any sense.

"Jeod said his ships were disappearing," Eragon said instead.

Tarence scowled. "Aye, that's true. A couple of 'em."

"You're not worried about that?" he asked.

He slid his mug in a circle on the scratched tabletop. The beer inside sloshed around a bit. "I wouldn't set sail if I didn't think I could handle some cloudy weather. Captain Mondred was a reckless moron, and Ifrund could have fallen to bad luck. We're stopping at Kuasta, too. It's not so far. We'll have time to resupply and wait out any storms that might blow through."

Eragon sat. "Tell me what you know about the ships that got lost."

Tarence gave him a gimlet eye. "Aren't I supposed to be doing the interviewing? What is there to say? Both ships left Teirm bound for Kuasta, then Feinster, then Aroughs, then finally Reavstone in Surda. Kuasta never heard from either of them." He leaned back in his chair until it tipped back a bit, balancing himself upon the wobbling points of his back chair legs.

"Knock it off," the bartender snapped from across the tavern, glaring at Tarence. Scowling, the short captain let the chair tip back to level. He shifted his weight and let the chair wobble from corner to corner.

"Not like I can ever put all four legs on the ground," he scowled mulishly. "It's a shit chair." He looked across the table at Eragon. "Now that you're asking, I remember a storm blew in a week after Mondred's departure. That could've sank a ship, I suppose. If it was crewed by recruits and captained by an idiot. But I never knew Ifrund to be a fool, and the weather was beautiful for weeks after he left. Nice breeze, clear skies, perfect conditions. Had to be something else."

Tarence shrugged. "Sailing's not always safe. If your fears consume you, stay on land and farm or some shit." He said 'farm' like it was a pathetic calling for cowards. Irritated, Eragon wanted to tell him off, convince him that farming was a noble calling, but it wasn't worth the breath. Farming was just what people did.

"So do you want a job?" Tarence asked, after a lengthy moment of Eragon's contemplations. Eragon startled. "On my ship. Have I soothed your worries?"

Eragon shook his head. "I don't want to work on your ship. I wanted to figure out what happened to the last ones for Jeod."

Tarence shrugged. "Well, the offer's open if you reconsider. Until we cast off. With Lord Ristheart, can never be sure when that will be. Maybe ages from now."

Eragon rolled his eyes. "I'll find you here?"

"Here or in Kuasta," Tarence agreed.

Eragon had cooled off enough to go back to Jeod's after speaking with Tarence. He'd had time to think through Brom's reasons and choose which to accept and which to reject.

Brom and Harry had cleared a bit of space behind Jeod's house to spar, and had drawn a modest crowd of children and servants. They were back to using the mock swords. It was probably not worth risking why they were fighting with live steel to some city guardsman.

"Better," Brom praised, toweling the sweat from his forehead. Harry was panting, propping himself up on the cobbles with the hilt of his wooden sword. "You have the talent, you just need to apply yourself."

Harry still wore a sour look, but evidently he was still making acceptable progress to Brom. "Another round?" Harry asked. Brom was about to nod when he caught sight of Eragon.

"His turn," Brom decided. "This might be an excellent way to work through his frustrations."

Harry grinned and stepped back, handing Eragon the wooden sword.

Eragon stared at the weapon in his hand for a moment. Spitefulness and stubbornness suggested that because Brom appeared to want to spar, he ought to refuse just to be contrary, but the idea of whaling on the older man for a while held a certain appeal. He donned the pads Harry gave him and gave Brom a good showing.

Anger elevated his strength, but clouded his thinking. Eragon's bouts were brutish and dragged on. Brom seemed more interested in defending himself than scoring touches on Eragon. He struck at Brom with heavy, telegraphed looping blows that Brom should have easily been able to punish, but never did.

Some subconscious part of his mind recognized that Brom was doing this for him. The realization gradually took the wind out of his sails until Eragon was the one panting, and Brom only looked a bit worn out.

Eragon had thought he'd fought sloppily, but the servants and children all looked suitably impressed when Brom called for a halt. "Let's take this inside," Brom said, when they were finally done.

The onlookers realized the show was over and dispersed. Harry made his excuses to head out into Teirm to get some vaguely stated 'business' done, and vanished, leaving Brom and Eragon alone. Eragon followed Brom inside. Jeod's servants prepared them lunch. It was wonderful now that he was alert enough to appreciate it.

Afterwards, Brom led Eragon upstairs to a room he had not yet seen, a sort of study with big glass windows that let daylight stream in and illuminate the desk, chairs, and many bookshelves lining the walls.

Eragon had never seen so many books in one place. He had never seen so many books, period. They were everywhere, stacked in piles and rows across the shelves, extra books stuffed sideways atop the rows in the bit of space between the tops of some books and the top of each shelf. Some were bound with handsome leather and gold leaf embellishments, some were bound with two thin boards and some rough twine. Some were little more than a pile of papers bound by a ring or three.

Jeod, it seemed, did not discriminate when it came to books. He had them in every shape and flavor, and there was hardly a space left on any of the floor-to-ceiling shelves not occupied by some form of the written word.

"Jeod's at Ristheart's keep," Brom explained, unfazed by the trove of a library he'd just stepped into. "Trying to get his ship out of port. It's something I actually wanted to talk to you about."

Eragon sat down silently and crossed his arms.

Brom stood awkwardly by Jeod's desk. "I apologize, Eragon, for my reticence. I should not have kept the knowledge from you that I did. I can't promise I won't do it again, but for what it's worth, I should have told you." He hesitated. "There's- other things I need to tell you, too. But not now."

Eragon curled his lip. That was not surprising.

Brom plopped into the chair behind Jeod's desk resignedly. "Hellfire. This is so much easier when you don't owe anybody answers. If you want to move on, I'll accompany you wherever. But I thought you might like to see where Selena lived when she was away from Carvahall."

"Morzan's castle?" Eragon asked guardedly.

Brom nodded. "It's in the mountains to the north of Kuasta, hidden in a treacherous spot northwest of Leona Lake."

"We can take Jeod's ship," Eragon decided.

Brom looked taken aback. "Not that it's a bad idea, but may I ask why?"

Eragon shrugged. "Jeod's ships are disappearing. Probably because he's supplying the Varden through Surda, and the Empire is stopping him. That means it's not bad weather sinking Jeod's ships, it's Empire ships or magicians or saboteurs, right? I talked with the captain this morning. He convinced me it was the Empire doing this. The ship is going to stop at Kuasta on its way. The other two vanished right out of Teirm, before ever making it to Kuasta. If we go with, we can defend the ship for Jeod, help the Varden, keep Jeod's business afloat, and get a free ride to the closest city to Morzan's castle."

Brom blinked. "Succinctly put. I'll tell Jeod as soon as he gets back. Have you given thought to what Saphira will be doing while we do this?"

Eragon was suddenly uncomfortable. Saphira already disliked having to hide while they were in Teirm. She would not appreciate being a spectator to this new adventure. "Maybe Harry can disillusion her."

"What's that?" Brom asked.

"Invisibility spell," Eragon explained. "She can follow us and help sink the enemy ship when it attacks."

Brom sat back, thinking. Eragon watched guardedly. This was usually the point where Brom called his plans hare-brained or shortsighted and decided himself what the group was going to do.

Except it was taking longer than usual, and the expression on his face suggested Brom hadn't rejected Eragon's proposal.

"Let's do it," Brom said finally.

"Really?" Eragon asked in disbelief.

Brom nodded. "It's a well thought out plan. You have the next few steps identified, this helps fulfill multiple goals of yours, you're not likely to pit yourself against any horrifically dangerous foe, it's a good plan."

"Well, good." Eragon said.

Brom gave him a strange look. "Did you expect me to shoot down your proposal for no reason? When your student does something right, you're best served rewarding their success. It's a good plan. Excellent, even."

That left Eragon feeling strangely flattered.

There wasn't much else to do but wait for Jeod to get back to make further plans. Harry was still out doing something. Eragon found himself perusing the thick, artfully bound books in Jeod's study. He took down a thick tome with a glittering spine that caught his eye and let it fall open in his lap.

The pages were made from thick white parchment filled with beautiful lettering and some rough traced sketches. He flipped slowly through the pages, taking care to treat the book like the piece of art it was. So many pages were nothing but letters. When he found a picture, Eragon spent minutes tracing the sketch with his eyes, wondering what the accompanying words told about the image.

For the second time, it bothered Eragon to be unable to read. There were important things in this book he held, he was sure of it. Even if he was wrong and it was worthless, he still thought he'd like to be able to read what it said. Somebody had taken great care to write, illuminate, and bind this book. For no other reason than the effort invested in creating it, the book had to have value.

Hours he spent cross legged on the floor of Jeod's study, slowly paging through and examining sketches of Urgals, humans, villages, castles and towers, and a couple of races he was less familiar with.

There were drawings of what had to be elves. Tall with pointed chins and tapered ears and slanted eyes, they had a similar look to them as the tortured elf in his dreams. Those dreams had tapered off as of late. Eragon wondered why.

There were also drawings of short, burly and hairy folk that had to be dwarves. Eragon spent a while examining those drawings, too. He had never seen one in real life. The drawings had braided beards, creased faces, and massive muscles. One or two had weapons and stout armor, but others were craftsmen. Craftsdwarves? Eragon didn't know which was better. There was a drawing in particular that he lingered on for a long time.

It took up a whole page and unlike most, was rendered in breathtaking color. It was a dwarf working on a gargantuan gemstone, many many hundreds of times larger than the diminutive dwarf. The dwarf was suspended on ropes over the center of the gem, currently in the process of being carved into a colossal rose. He was on a harness just inches over a petal, upside down against the rosy pink gemstone.

The next page was much closer up to the dwarf, depicting him with a look of utmost concentration, wielding jeweler's tools as he hovered above the gigantic gemstone.

Eragon turned back and forth between the two pages and wondered exactly what the story there was. Curiosity burned at him. He had to know what the flowing inked symbols meant. Several pages back, Eragon managed to piece together another part of the story of that huge gemstone. It was a rough sketch of a mountain covered in buildings, terraces, archways and platforms. At the very top, the same pinkish-red rose gemstone capped the mountain city.

Jeod returned towards sunset. Saphira still wasn't close enough to Teirm to communicate with. Eragon wanted to go out and see her, but the gates would already be closed. Tomorrow, he promised himself he would visit.

Eragon heard Jeod and Brom coming up the stairs speaking with each other through the walls. Jeod opened the door to the study. Brom raised a brow when he saw Eragon sitting with the enormous book.

"Domina Abr Wyrda," Jeod remarked. "Excellent taste. That must be one of the rarest books in my collection."

Brom looked surprised. "Truly? I had thought most copies were burned, along with Heslant the Monk."

"I was very fortunate to rescue this one before it met a similar fate," Jeod agreed.

"Who is Heslant the Monk?" Eragon asked.

"The author of the book you're reading," Jeod said. Eragon heard the respect in his voice. "He wrote the Dominance of Fate as a complete history of Alagaesia and its peoples, since as far back as eight thousand years, when the dwarves claim it began."

Eragon felt the heat of embarrassment on the back of his neck. "I can't read," he mumbled, looking away from Jeod.

"Really?" Brom cursed. "Of course Garrow didn't teach you. He probably thought you'd never need it."

"He knew how?" Eragon asked. "I learned my numbers and sums."

Eragon felt the need to defend Garrow; as a farmer, of course he would not need to be able to read. But he found that he couldn't, because Eragon badly wanted to read, and Garrow not teaching him was different when he'd thought Garrow couldn't read, either.

"Yes, he knew how," Brom said.

"It's a travesty," Jeod said solemnly. "We must teach you this skill."

"Now?" Eragon asked.

Jeod swept his arms across the bookshelves laden with spines covered in letters Eragon did not understand. "These are not just things. They are vessels for the thoughts of long dead men. Heslant the Monk was burned at the stake for his book. The Empire called it heresy and killed him. Yet his message lives on in the thing you hold in your hands. So long as one copy of Domina Abr Wyrda exists, Heslant the Monk's ideas will never die. When you read that book, you are reading the thoughts of a dead man. What legacy is greater than that?"

He pointed at the shelves again. "Each of these books contains the soul of its author. Hundreds of authors live on in this room. These books connect me to them across time itself. I can laugh with them, cry with them, learn what they have to teach. Learning to read and write is the greatest possible skill to learn, for it unlocks entirely new worlds for you."

If anything, it made the book in Eragon's lap feel even more precious.

"I'll learn it, if someone will teach me," he said.

"Good," Brom said, "because Jeod's flowery speech missed another crucial point: writing is a vector for information, and somebody who's in the business of knowing things should know as many ways to gather information as possible. Notes, missives, letters, journals, scribblings on walls, writing is too important not to know if you're going to do just about anything but farming."

And so that too, was added to his routine. Reading lessons started then and there with a slate and chalk. Like the rest of Brom's lessons, they were direct and moved on exactly as quickly as Eragon managed to keep up. He was introduced to the twenty-six characters that comprised the common tongue, and the handful of punctuation marks that together with the letters and numbers, allowed any person to record their thoughts such that they would endure long after their death.

By the time Jeod's butler came and called Brom and Eragon down for supper, symbols and lines swam behind Eragon's eyes, arrangements and sounds and meaning all tangling up in his brain as it stretched to accommodate this new skill.

"It will be worth it," Jeod swore solemnly, when Eragon came down the stairs rubbing his forehead. "Just wait. When your eyes can fly across a page and transport you to a new world sprung from an author's head, you'll remember this as the greatest skill you ever learned."

"Greater than magic?" Eragon wondered.

Jeod frowned. "I can't speak to that. But I can tell you that reading transformed my life more than magic seemed to alter Brom's. Magic is a tool and a weapon. Reading is a new way to think."

"You knew Brom before he had magic?" Eragon asked, suddenly curious.

Brom coughed loudly beside them.

Jeod shook his head. "No, I only ever observed how he used it when we were living together."

"I got more use out of it when I was out of sight of the Empire, and didn't have to hide it so stringently," Brom scowled. "It's become a tool of dire need out of the paranoia any sane magician ought to have nowadays."

In the dining room, Harry was back. He was chatting with Helen – something about preserving food – and brightened when he spotted Eragon. He wasn't sure what had put Harry in such a good mood. The wizard chatted all throughout dinner (roast duck with fried rice and tangy sweet sauce) and well after they had all finished eating.

"The markets down by the docks are brilliant," he was telling Helen. "Stuff from all over the place. I was surprised how cheap things were."

Helen dabbed the corner of her mouth with an embroidered silk napkin. "Every set of hands an item passes through on its way from the producer increases its price. Buying straight off the ship is always cheaper than from street vendors."

"What did you get?" Eragon asked.

"Another tent, for starters," Harry said meaningfully. The electric realization of why that was important hit Eragon.

"I found nice boots I actually like. I got some other odds and ends, but the most important thing I got was a bunch of leather and buckles." Harry gave Eragon a significant look. Saphira's saddle! Harry had said he wasn't able to enchant it with conjured leather.

After a dessert of lemon cakes, Brom raised Eragon's proposal with Jeod. He left out any mention of Saphira, but explained that they were headed to Kuasta either way, and that Eragon had suggested they hitch a ride with Jeod's ship and guard it on the stretch that his ships kept disappearing at.

Jeod sat back. He looked at Eragon. "You'd do that for me?"

Eragon put down his lemon cake. "Finding out who Selena is was supposed to be a side quest. Freelancing was going to be my mission, whenever the trail went cold."

Jeod seemed touched by the offer. "You know that might be a voyage you don't come back from?"

Eragon nodded. He was not worried.

"I certainly won't say no," Jeod said finally. "But please make sure you're certain you want to risk it. I don't want to see my oldest friend and his proteges dead on a mission to save me some money. I'll try to wrangle a departure date from Tallard, Lord Ristheart's foremost paper pusher."

They began their magic lessons in Harry's room while he set out the leather he'd bought during the day. The curtains were drawn tight and both Harry and Brom had put up privacy magic so nobody could eavesdrop or peek in. Brom was teaching them how to bend light – probably a response to Eragon mentioning Harry's invisibility spell – but both of them were only giving half an ear to Brom's explanations. Harry was working on cutting the leather into straps and a seat for Saphira's new saddle. Eragon had somebody else on his mind.

"So if light is like a river which flows instantly from source to endpoint, you can still bend the eddies in its path. How much effort does it take to manipulate light?" Brom asked suddenly. "Either of you."

Harry was counting inches under his breath, tapping the strap in increments to bore holes for the buckles to fasten on the forearm straps. "Sorry, what was that?"

Brom growled. "Neither of you are paying attention. What is so much more important than magic lessons that neither of you are listening?"

"Eragon told me he needs a way for Saphira to go from visible to invisible at will," Harry said absently. "I'm trying to figure out how that'll work."

"And you?" Brom turned to Eragon.

He sighed. He was thinking about Roran. Since blowing up at Brom, he couldn't shake the concern he had for his cousin. Harry spiriting away Garrow would bring attention to Carvahall, and that attention would eventually get around to asking Roran questions he would have no way of answering. Eragon actually regretted telling Roran about his magic, for now he had an incriminating secret his stubborn cousin would get hurt trying to keep.

"I want to check on Roran," Eragon said finally. "I don't know what happened to him after we left. He might not even be back from Therinsford yet, but I can't stop worrying."

It occurred to Eragon that there had to be a way to check in on Roran in Therinsford with magic. Despite the tension between Brom and- well, everybody, actually, the man was still their teacher.

"There is a way to do so," Brom said. "It is called scrying, and it has many rules which restrict its usefulness to a very specific sort of circumstance. It allows you to see things at any distance, and can find anything not deliberately hidden by wards, but crucially, you can only scry things you've seen before."

"Even should you be familiar with an object or person you scry, if they are somewhere you've never laid eyes upon, it will seem like they are standing against a featureless white background. And scrying can only reveal what is visible. If you scry something that's in a dark room, you'll only manage to see darkness. Likewise if you try to scry a page in a closed book, you won't be able to read it in darkness."

"That makes no sense," Harry announced.

Brom raised a brow.

"If you see a book, can you scry every page, or just the one you saw?" Harry asked.

"Just the one page," Brom confirmed.

The wizard frowned. "Bad example. What about the table in Jeod's dining room? We've all seen it enough to be familiar, but none of us have crouched underneath it to see the underside. Does that mean if we scry it from below, it will be invisible?"

Brom frowned. "I'm not sure. What are you getting at?"

Harry shrugged. "It's a philosophical thing. In transfiguration, a lot of what you can and can't do boils down to ideas and how the caster mentally relates to them. There are some cases where changing your perspective allows you to break certain 'rules' of transfiguration. For example, you can't conjure food, but you can conjure plants. So conjuring a berry bush and then plucking the berries works, while conjuring a bowl full of just berries can't be done. If I was a bee, I'd think that flowers were food and thus orchideous should violate Gamp's Law."

"Now imagine thinking of the world differently. Imagine I saw a tree in a forest. Somebody cuts it down, but I can still scry the felled log. A carpenter cuts that log into boards. Can I still scry the boards without having seen them, since I saw the tree? What about when that tree has been made into a table that I've never seen?"

He asked Brom more questions. "Suppose I see only one end of a really long table. Can I scry it and see the whole thing? If you can see sides of something you've never seen, it seems like I should be able to. What if I'm blindfolded and you bring me to a massive mural painted on a great big wall. You take me right up to it until my nose is touching the paint, take off the blindfold, and let me see a tiny spot of the wall right in front of my eyes, then blindfold me again and take me away. Can I scry the whole mural with just the tiny spot I saw?"

Harry made an encircling motion with his hand. "One key concept in transfiguration is the Fundamental Oneness of All Things. We're standing on top of a whole planet. I've never seen most of it, but I have seen the ground beneath my feet, the slopes facing towards us in the mountain ranges we've passed, and all the grasslands I flew over. So I've seen some bits of the planet. Shouldn't it work the same as that long table or mural, and let me scry the whole planet? With the right mental focus, everything is the same, just more or less spread out and clumped atoms and bits of matter that were once all the same before the Big Bang."

Harry caught his breath. Eragon watched him wide eyed. Brom had a different expression, almost nostalgic.

"It's just, I've recently been learning to explore and push the boundaries of the rules I learned about magic. This is an easy one. When the restriction doesn't make sense, you're probably missing the key part to it, the bit that you can work around to break the rule."

Eragon thought about that. Getting the most out of his magic. Creatively approaching the ability to alter the world with a word. Brom interrupted his musings with a dire warning.

"Among all the professions in the world, few have shorter lives than those who experiment with magic," Brom said quietly. "Be wary of being too creative for your own good. Once a spell is cast, for good or ill, it will see itself through. Even if it sucks the last iota of strength out of you and leaves you a burnt husk of a corpse to do it. The world is littered with the bones of people who thought they were so much cleverer than everybody else."

Brom left the room for a moment and returned with three bowls full of water, each balanced precariously in a pyramid between his hands. Carefully, he set the three of them on the ground in the bedroom.

"Draumr Kopa," Brom repeated, enunciating slowly and deliberately. "And focus on the object of your search. Fix it in your mind when you speak the words. You will project the resultant image onto the reflection of the water. It can be done with any medium, including thin air, but water is reliable and doesn't take much power. Mirrors are obviously best, but rare, expensive, heavy, and not so great an improvement on water as to be worth all the trouble."

Harry scooted up to his bowl with a pensive expression. Eragon was equal parts eager and dreading what he'd see. His own reflection looked up at him from the bowl, slightly dimmer than reality. His brows were drawn in concentration, eyes locked on himself. Eragon drew up an image of Roran in his mind, focused on his cousin, reached for the energy, and murmured the words.

The reflection changed instantly. It was still as dull as a reflection on water usually was, but the reflection was not his own. It was Roran on a pure white background, like his spell had forgotten to put his cousin into the world and he was instead seeing Roran in some perfect void.

Eragon squinted to make out the details through the dim reflection. Roran's stance was tense, as if he'd recently spent a lot of time being very angry and the shadow of those emotions had yet to leave him. Eragon felt a pang of guilt at that. All that he'd done was so unfair to Roran. His cousin deserved an explanation in person as to why Garrow had vanished, their home was leveled, and the Empire would probably eventually show up asking questions about it all.

He glanced up. Harry was muttering under his breath, repeating draumr kopa over and over again like a mantra. His bowl produced a much brighter image. Eragon leaned over to peer into the reflection. Unlike his, it looked like the true reflection a mirror produced. But whatever was inside, it made no sense. It was like staring through a maze of warped mirrors at splotches of meaningless color, the color of skin and stone and grass and sky, all warped and frozen in place, jittering ever so slightly with each repetition of those powerful words.

"What's that?" Eragon asked.

Harry startled. The image faded from his bowl. "Nothing. Er, I was trying to scry my home. Didn't exactly come out brilliant."

Brom's piercing gaze was also on the wizard's bowl. "No, it didn't. I have only known scrying to fail in that manner once. And I suspect your unique magic has saved you from death once again, for this spell killed all of the casters which attempted it."

"Oh?" Harry leaned forward, chin on his fist. "What was it?"

Brom stroked his chin. "When a group of elves attempted to scry back in time."

The pronouncement sank in like a lodestone in a shallow pool. Not quite submerged, but instantly understood. Harry's expression was conflicted. He drew his knobbled wand and tried once more. To Eragon's eyes, the results looked the same, but Harry did not feel the same way. He knit his brows and pushed harder, excitement flitting across his face.

Eragon became aware of a throbbing in the room, not of the air or any physical thing. Arcane energies swirled in the room as Harry dug deeper, clenching his wand and growling. The power in the room was so stifling, Eragon was certain if Harry wasn't mysteriously immune to the cost of magic, he would die instantaneously from overuse.

Brom scowled. "If you continue, every magician in Teirm is going to know something happened."

Harry grit his teeth. The water in his bowl rippled, the metal bowl vibrating. It began to produce a clear tone that rose in pitch. Eragon began to become conscious of an inexplicable something giving way, something that nobody sane would want to see breached or broken.

"Stop!" Brom barked. Harry seemed not to hear. There was a rushing in the room, some great force swirling about.

All at once, Brom tackled Harry as the bowl shattered, erupting into green-magenta light. A shattering thunderclap rebounded off the walls of the bedroom. Eragon covered his ears and eyes, wincing as molten shards of metal pelted his skin. The stench of ozone and burnt metal assaulted his nose.

The room went quiet.

Warily, Eragon lowered his arm from his eyes and peered at the mess Harry had made. Urgent pattering footsteps approached from the hall of Jeod's house. Brom groaned and coughed up a lungful of that intense, powerful smell. Harry laid on his back in a daze, fingers loose and his wand a few feet away on the floor.

In the middle of the room was a great starburst of magenta embers and black soot, interspersed with shards of cherry red glowing metal dug into the carpet. Eragon thought it might have been his eyes playing tricks on him, but he could have sworn there was something wrong with the bit of air where Harry's bowl had been. Like looking through a lens that warped the light behind it, the seam where the floor met the ceiling on the other side of the room seemed just a tiny bit…bent. He blinked and it was gone.

"Are you alright?" Eragon asked, hissing as he picked out the tiny bits of metal shrapnel from his arm.

Brom coughed again, this time spraying a bit of blood between his lips and onto the carpet.

Somebody knocked rapidly on the door to the bedroom. "Alright in there?" Jeod's voice came. "I'm coming in."

The door opened. Jeod was stopped immediately in the doorframe by the sight. "Oh my," he whispered. "What happened?" his eyes flicked over Eragon and the sooty burst, then Harry and Brom. "Thank the powers above they're both still alive," Jeod murmured.

Eragon rolled Brom over. His shirt was a mangled scrap of cloth mixed with his minced and burnt chest. Shrapnel and burns covered all down his front. Harry was the only one untouched, saved by Brom's dive.

"Shit," Jeod said urgently. "Shit. Do you know enough magic to fix that?" he pressed Eragon.

Numbly, Eragon shook his head. "Shit. Does Harry?"

A nod.

Jeod crossed to Harry and shook him awake. "Harry, Harry! You need to heal Brom."

Harry woke as if from a trance, disoriented and looking for his bearings. "What-? I saw-"

"Brom needs your help now if he's going to recover," Jeod snapped, pointing at Brom's body, laying on its back, chest rising and falling with a faint bubbling hitch.

That brought Harry back. "Oh shit," he whispered. "What have I done?"

AN: Updates are going to come out slower. I have gone from working zero days a week to working 5 8hr days a week, which consequently means I have massively less time to write.

I only recently discovered that FFN is not formatting the way I expected. I've been using the big horizontal lines for POV changes, big scene changes, and time skips. But I've also been adding an extra blank space for smaller scene changes, and these aren't showing up on FFN. If you're confused on why there may be more lines going forward, that's probably why. I won't go crazy with them, but I do want to have something separating paragraphs between scenes, and evidently this is the best option on FFN.

Related peeve: why do paragraph indents not show up on FFN? Always bugs me. Maybe this is a sign that I should post my story on AO3.