Thorn shrank back, but there was nowhere to run or hide.
“Please,” said Murtagh, gritting his teeth.
“No.” The king’s breath was warm against his ear.
The wolves circled Thorn. The dragon was longer than they were, but the wolves outweighed the hatchling by a significant amount.
After a few false starts, the wolves began to dart in and nip at Thorn’s wings and tail.
The dragon twisted round to face each new threat, but he wasn’t fast enough, and the wolves moved together with silent understanding. Within seconds, drops of steaming blood dripped from rents in Thorn’s wings, and he held his left forefoot off the ground, unable to place his weight on it.
Each drop of blood struck like a drumbeat of doom.
Murtagh felt as if he were about to explode. He tore down the barrier he’d erected in his mind and sent his thoughts hurtling toward the dragon’s small but fierce consciousness.
Thorn flinched, distracted, and the wolves closed in.
Jump! Murtagh shouted in his mind, including an image of what he meant.
Thorn hesitated, still uncertain, and one of the wolves bit his tail. With a yelp, Thorn spun to face his attacker.
It was a mistake. The other wolves rushed toward him, jaws parted, foam-flecked fangs ready to close on Thorn’s slender legs and delicate wings.
Murtagh forced his will onto the dragon’s as-yet-unformed mind and again shouted, Jump! To his relief, Thorn jumped, and he used his wings to gain a few extra feet of height before dropping down on the other side of the arena. The walls were too high for Thorn to surmount, which meant he had to fight.
The wolves raced after Thorn, and Murtagh fed the dragon more instructions. Thorn was, like all of his kind, a natural fighter, and it took only seconds before he started to understand and respond.
Thorn sprang onto the back of the nearest wolf and sank his teeth into the beast’s neck. With a sharp, vicious gesture, he tore out a chunk of hide and muscle—releasing a spray of blood—and then jumped onto a second wolf.
The wolf twisted nearly in half, snapping at the dragon, but Thorn dug his claws in and bit at the wolf’s head until the creature’s legs buckled and it collapsed to the ground.
The fall knocked Thorn onto his side, and before Murtagh could do anything to help, the other two wolves darted in and began to savage Thorn.
“No!”
For a few seconds, the dragon was barely visible, lost beneath a twisting knot of grey fur, legs, and tails. Growls and snarls and yelps of pain filled the arena, and fans of blood sprayed across the packed sand. Murtagh felt sharp pangs from Thorn, and he feared all was lost. He couldn’t understand. Why would Galbatorix allow his newest prize to die?
“How could you?” he said, barely able to form the words.
“Watch.”
The wolves fell apart. One dragged itself away, hind legs limp and useless, fur matted with spit and foam and blood. The other rolled onto its side and kicked helplessly, its belly ripped open and a pile of grey intestines spilling out. The kicking slowed.
Between the wolves stood Thorn. The small dragon was battered and torn—his wings shredded in several places—but fire burned in his sparkling eyes, and blood dripped from his razor-sharp fangs and from the large claws on his hind feet.
With a small roar, he sprang after the wolf with the paralyzed hindquarters. He bit and held the back of the wolf’s neck, and the animal shuddered and went limp, dead.
Then Thorn crouched low over his kill and began to tear at the corpse, ravenous in his hunger.
“Do you see?” said the king. “He is a dragon, and dragons are meant to kill. It is what they are. It is who you are. If you learn this now, the coming days will be that much easier for you, O son of Morzan. Now go to your dragon and heal him as you will.”
“I’ll kill you for this.”
A deep chuckle behind him. “No, you shall not. You will dream of killing me, you will plan for it, you will desire my demise with all your heart, but in the end you will see the rightness of my ways and realize that there is no opposing my power. You are mine, Murtagh, as is Thorn, and you shall serve me as your father did before you.”
To that, Murtagh had no answer. He went to attend Thorn’s wounds.
Nor was that the only time they visited the arena. Every time Thorn grew hungry, Galbatorix forced him to fight for his food, and Murtagh had no choice but to watch, helpless, as the young dragon killed and killed again. Even when Thorn grew larger than the largest bear, the king still insisted on making him face his prey in mortal conflict.
Murtagh saw the sands of the pit soak through with blood, and outside the citadel, he seemed to see the sky turn red. All around he heard the sounds of prisoners shrieking and yammering their torment, and he turned and ran and ran and ran through a warren of rocky tunnels, but they kept leading him back to the charnel grounds of the arena, and each time, he saw Thorn sitting hunched over his kills, alone, frightened, covered in blood, and desperately eating.
As Thorn had his trials, so too did Murtagh have his own. And they were just as long, bloody, and inescapable.
And beneath it all—beneath the overpowering images and emotions brought forth from the unwelcome past—lay the yawning void, and within it…a core of slow-turning madness centered upon some unknown yet implacable purpose.
And Murtagh wept and cried out with fear.
CHAPTER XIV
Uvek
Murtagh woke.
There was no slow return to reality. No gradual brightening of light, no ramped awareness of his senses. One moment, nothing. The next—
A grey stone floor lay beneath him, inches from his nose. The stone was cracked, and small filigrees of moss had infiltrated the tiny crevices in the materiaclass="underline" a tracery of green in an otherwise bare, grim surface. The smell of moss and stone combined was like that of a high mountain stream, or else a deep cave filled with a sunless lake.
His body was cold. He was lying face down on the hard floor. His left knee throbbed, and his right arm was numb from being folded underneath him.
As for his mind…his thoughts were clearer, more focused than before, although he still felt strangely muzzy, and there was a sickly-sweet taste at the back of his throat that he felt he ought to recognize….
He remembered the caves beneath the village, and the glowing slime, and finding the grated well where Bachel and Grieve had confronted him.
Alarm rushed through him. Thorn!
With his left arm, he pushed himself upright. His head swam, and he braced himself against the floor and closed his eyes until his balance returned and his right arm stopped tingling. Then he looked around.
He was in a dark cell, not dissimilar to the one he’d been confined in under Urû’baen. A narrow wooden cot sat against one wall, with a bucket for relieving himself next to it. His cloak lay beneath him, crumpled and wrinkled. There were no windows, only three blank stone walls, and iron bars where the fourth would have been. (He noted the bars especially; they represented an unusual amount of metal for such a small village.)