Murtagh

Then he was in his cell beneath the citadel in Urû’baen. Stone walls wet with seeping moisture, black mold grown in veined maps across the crumbling mortar, ground mixed with droppings and urine and fallen crumbs from week-old crusts of bread. The jailers beat the bars of the cells and jeered at the prisoners—no sympathy from them, no help or kindness. And when the jailers left, terrors came crawling forth from cracks within the walls: fat-bodied spiders, pale and heavy, with furred legs and long feelers. They dragged their bloated stomachs across him and bit and bit him, and always it seemed he could feel the jittery touch of their clawed feet. The sounds of them moving about kept him awake nights, and never could he sleep in earnest.

A red egg before him, knee-high and shot through with white. Behind him, the unseen shadow of HIM. The egg cracked, and he watched, breathless, as a piece of shell fell free, and he saw the most delicate, beautiful, helpless hatchling: red and squalling and hungry, hungry, hungry. He reached for it, and snout and hand touched, and the contact was electric….

He yanked against his shackles, screaming, sobbing, as he felt the hatchling’s torment from the other side of the wall. HE bent over him—close-cropped beard like a black dagger, thin mouth distorted in angry delight—and said, “Swear to me, Murtagh. Swear to me, or I’ll have them strip every scale from his body. Swear fealty to me as your father did before you.”

He shook and shivered and raged, but he couldn’t hold out. The pain of the hatchling—the pain of such a perfect, innocent creature, a pain that he felt as if each fleck of agony were his own—it was too much. Of his own, he could have endured. But not this.

“I swear,” he sobbed. “I swear fealty to you.”

The evil smile widened. “In the ancient language now. Use the words I gave you.”

So he swore as instructed, and the words were ashes in his mouth.

Later came more oaths. And later still, HE spoke their true names, and then Murtagh and Thorn both were lost, lost, lost….

***

Awareness returned, hazy as a cloud.

Murtagh blinked, uncertain of himself, his place, and how he had gotten there. He felt stuffed full of wool: thick, slow, and heavy.

He sat up, befuddled.

Marble walkway beneath him. Curved tunnel walls around him. And before him…a woman with tumbling hair, a glowing spear in one hand, and the light of triumph in her hawk-eyed face. She was fierce and beautiful and terrible. No mercy or comfort was to be found in her features, only burning passion that would sweep aside anything that barred her way.

Bachel. Remembering the name was a struggle; speaking it, impossible.

The woman bent toward him. “Rise, Kingkiller,” she commanded, and her voice thrummed with power.

Her words were irresistible. In a daze, he rose to his feet, still unable to form a coherent sound.