Murtagh

It took a minute for his eyes to adjust well enough to make out even basic shapes. He was standing at the bottom of a great cylinder, which started at the base of the tower and rose right to the top. Lining the walls were hundreds of tiny wooden coops, each with a section of a bark-covered branch protruding from the front to serve as a perch. From inside the coops, he heard a thousand little murmurs—the sounds of sleeping birds—and the silky whisper of feathered wings shuffling and readjusting. The floor was soft with a thick layer of droppings, and there were crates and barrels and other objects piled along the bottom of the walls.

Murtagh stared. The tower was as curious a space as he’d ever seen, even including the catacombs under Gil’ead. It was a demented, oversized version of the dovecotes that Yarek the spymaster had built in Urû’baen for housing his homing pigeons. But what birds were these? Not pigeons or doves, he suspected.

He cast about on the filthy floor, looking for feathers that might help identify the birds. Instead, he stepped on something hard and felt it break beneath his foot. Holding his breath, he bent to look.

Half buried in the droppings was a beaked skull. The skull of a crow. Of course. The tower had to be where the Dreamers raised the birds that Bachel used to make her amulets. Murtagh straightened. The sheer number of crows in the tower made him wonder just how many amulets Bachel had enchanted.

How are they fed? he wondered. It would be no small task tending to so many birds.

Keeping a hand out for balance, Murtagh felt his way around the outer curve of the chamber, intending to make a circuit and then depart. What was he looking for? He didn’t know. Crows weren’t used for carrying messages. There would be no writing desk with secret messages lettered across slips of parchment. No maps or magical items used for enchanting, assuming he was correct about Bachel’s spellcasting. But he felt obliged to be thorough.

Three-quarters of the way around the tower, he stepped in a particularly slippery patch of droppings, and one foot slid out from under him. He flailed and caught himself with a hand on the floor. His right knee banged against the corner of a crate, sending a hot jolt through his leg, and the tip of Zar’roc’s scabbard knocked against a barrel.

A muted chorus of disquiet passed through the tower as the crows shifted in their sleep, their murderous minds for a moment disturbed.

Murtagh clenched his teeth, held his breath, and didn’t move. His knee throbbed. A spike of alarm came from Thorn, and Murtagh quickly reassured him: I’m fine. Don’t worry.

Then he whispered, “Maela.” It was said that the ancient language was the mother tongue all creatures had spoken at the beginning of time. Murtagh wasn’t sure if he entirely believed that—he had his own ideas about how the language might have been enchanted to influence living beings—but it was true that animals responded to the ancient language in ways they didn’t to other tongues.

Sure enough, the birds began to settle down, and shortly thereafter they were again quiet.

Murtagh made a face as he started to push upright and the droppings squished between his fingers. He uttered a single, soundless curse, as foul as the situation he found himself in.

The heel of his palm sank into the excrement and touched cold hardness buried within. He frowned. Huh.

Despite his disgust, he dug down until he could grasp the object. It felt like metal: oval, half the size of his hand, with carving on one side. A coin? But no, it was too large for that.

Keeping a firm grip on the object, he stood up and carefully made his way back out through the tower door.

Thorn wrinkled his snout and retreated several steps as Murtagh approached. “That bad?” said Murtagh, rueful, closing the small gate behind him.

If you don’t bathe before tomorrow, everyone for a league will know where you’ve been.

“Uh-huh.” Murtagh turned so the moon was behind him and held up the object he’d found. As he’d suspected, it was a flat piece of metal: electrum, by the looks of it (although it was hard to be sure in the moonlight; it could just as easily have been gold), with an iron hook on the back. It was a clasp for a cloak that would be fastened at one shoulder. Droppings were embedded in the design on the clasp’s face, and Murtagh spent the better part of a minute scraping the muck away with his thumbnail before he could make sense of it.

A shock of recognition passed through him, as a bolt of lightning through a drought-stricken tree.

What is it? Thorn asked.

Murtagh shared with him a memory of Galbatorix’s private dining hall, where crimson banners hung along the walls, banners embroidered with the crests of the Forsworn. The one opposite the middle of the table, facing the chair where Murtagh had so often sat, had borne the same design as the clasp.