Fat-nose grunted, and the watchmen moved their pikes aside. Murtagh gave them a respectful nod and passed between them to enter the city.
Murtagh scratched his chin as he moved deeper into Ceunon.
He had grown a beard at the beginning of the year, to help conceal his identity. He thought it was working; so far no one had accosted him. The beard was itchy, though, and he wasn’t willing to let it get long enough that the hair became soft and pliable. Untidiness bothered him.
Trimming the beard with his dagger had proved impractical, and he was reluctant to resort to magic, as shaping the beard with nothing more than a word and an imagined outcome was an uncertain prospect. Besides, he didn’t trust a spell to remove the hairs but not his skin, and there was a craftsman-like satisfaction in attending to the task by hand.
He’d bought a pair of iron clippers from a tinker outside Narda. They worked well enough, as long as he kept them sharp, oiled, and free of rust. Even so, he found maintaining the beard almost as much trouble as shaving.
Maybe he would remove it after leaving Ceunon.
The main street was a muddy strip twice the width of the southern road. The buildings were half-timbered, cruck-framed structures with lapstrake siding between the wooden beams. The beams themselves were stained black with pine tar, which protected them against salt from the bay, and many were decorated with carvings of sea serpents, birds, and Svartlings. Iron weather vanes sat idle atop every shingled, steep-sided roof, and a carved dragon head decorated the peak of most houses.
Murtagh forced himself to stop scratching.
He could have recited the whole history of the city, from its founding until the present. He knew that the carvings were in the style commonly called kysk, which had been invented by some anonymous craftsperson over a century past. That the blackstone in the outer walls came from a quarry not two dozen miles northeast. And that the good folk of Ceunon had a deathly fear of the elves’ forest, Du Weldenvarden, and went to great lengths to keep the ranks of dark-needled pinetrees from encroaching on their fields. All that and more he knew.
But to what end? He’d received the finest education in the land, and then some, and yet his life was now one of rough travel, where sharpness of hearing and quickness of hand meant more than any scholarly learning. Besides, understanding what was and what one should do were two very different things. He had seen that with Galbatorix. The king had known more than most—more even than some of the oldest elves or dragons—but in the end, his knowledge had brought with it no wisdom.
Few people were out on the streets. It was late, and the days following Maddentide were full of feasting, and most of the citizens were inside, celebrating another successful harvest of bergenhed.
A trio of laborers staggered past, stinking of cheap beer and fish guts. Murtagh held his course, and they diverted around him. Once they turned a corner, the main thoroughfare again fell silent, and he didn’t see another person until he crossed the city’s market square and a pair of feathered merchants burst out of a warehouse door, arguing vociferously. A short, bearded figure followed them into the square, and his voice bellowed loudest of all.
A dwarf! Murtagh ducked his head. Ever since the death of Galbatorix and the fall of the Empire over a year ago, dwarves had become increasingly common throughout human-settled lands. Most were traders selling stones and metals and weapons, but he’d also seen dwarves working as armed guards (short as they were, their prowess in battle was not to be underestimated). Murtagh couldn’t help but wonder how many of them were acting as eyes and ears for their king, Orik, who sat upon the marble throne in the city-mountain of Tronjheim.
The backlit dwarf seemed to look his way, and Murtagh reeled slightly—another Maddentide drunk on his way home.
The ruse worked, and the dwarf returned his attention to the squabbling merchants.
Murtagh hurried on. The spread of the dwarves had made travel even more difficult for him and Thorn. Murtagh had nothing against the dwarves as a race or culture—indeed, he quite liked Orik, and their feats of architecture were astonishing. However, they held a deep and abiding hatred of him for killing King Hrothgar, Orik’s predecessor…and uncle. And dwarves were known for the tenacity with which they held their grudges.
Could he ever make amends to Orik, his clan, and the dwarves as a whole? Were it possible, Murtagh had yet to think of the means.
Unfortunately, his situation with the dwarves wasn’t unique. The elves maintained a similar animosity toward him and Thorn, on account of the role they had played in killing Oromis and Glaedr, the last surviving Rider and dragon from before Galbatorix’s rise to power.
Murtagh could hardly blame them.
The average human was no fonder of them, as it was widely believed they had betrayed the Varden to Galbatorix during the war. Traitors earned only contempt from both sides in a conflict, and rightly so—Murtagh himself had no sympathy for snake-tongued oathbreakers like his father—but that did not make it easy to be falsely branded as one.
No safe harbor for us, thought Murtagh. A hard, humorless smile formed on his lips. So it had been his whole life. Why should it be any different now?
The stench of fish, seaweed, and salt grew stronger as he moved along the wharves and past rows of drying racks set beside the street.
He glanced up. Midnight was still three or four hours away. Plenty of time to conclude his business and depart Ceunon. After so long spent out of doors, in the wild reaches of the land, the closeness of the buildings felt uncomfortably constraining. In that, he was becoming more and more like Thorn.
Music and voices sounded ahead of him, and he saw the common house that was his destination: the Fulsome Feast. The low, dark-beamed building had crystal windows set in its front-facing wall—a rare luxury in this part of the world—and petals of yellow light spread across the paving stones on the street: a welcome invitation to enter, rest, and make merry.
Sarros had picked the place as the location of their next meeting, and that alone made Murtagh wary. Still, the Fulsome Feast seemed innocuous enough—just one more disheveled, hard-run establishment like so many others. Aside from the crystal windows, the common house could have been in any seaside town or village throughout the land. But then, Murtagh had learned long ago that appearances were rarely to be trusted.
He steeled himself against the noise to follow and pushed open the door.
CHAPTER II
The Fulsome Feast
The inn was a warm, homey place, neat and well tended. Fresh-cut rushes covered the floor, the tables were clean, and the casks, bottles, and mugs behind the polished bar were arranged in mannered rows. A crackling fire warmed the great room from behind a blackstone hearth free of soot, and by the fire, a goateed man with extravagant, double-belled sleeves was plucking at a lute.
Whatever he sang was hard to hear over the clamor of conversation rising from the packed room. Maddentide was over, and the folk of Ceunon were happy of it.
The innkeep was a short, balding man with a dirty apron and a sweaty forehead who bustled from table to table, delivering drinks and plates of smoked herring. Not, Murtagh noted, smoked bergenhed.
They must have eaten enough of it to last the year, he thought.
He shook a scattering of snow from his cape and moved toward the one open table by the fire. As he sat, the innkeep hurried over and said, “Sigling Orefsson at yer service, Master…”