brisingr | Page 7

the largest of
animals, and even those but faintly. He proceeded
with caution, ready to withdraw at a second’s notice if
he happened to brush against the minds of their prey:
the Ra’zac and the Ra’zac’s parents and steeds, the
gigantic Lethrblaka. Eragon was willing to expose
himself in this manner only because none of the

19 | P a g e Brisingr – Christopher Paolini
Ra’zac’s breed could use magic, and he did not believe
that they were mindbreakers—nonmagicians trained
to fight with telepathy. The Ra’zac and Lethrblaka had
no need for such tricks when their breath alone could
induce a stupor in the largest of men.
And though Eragon risked discovery by his ghostly
investigation, he, Roran, and Saphira had to know if
the Ra’zac had imprisoned Katrina—Roran’s
betrothed—in Helgrind, for the answer would
determine whether their mission was one of rescue or
one of capture and interrogation.
Eragon searched long and hard. When he returned to
himself, Roran was watching him with the expression
of a starving wolf. His gray eyes burned with a
mixture of anger, hope, and despair that was so great,
it seemed as if his emotions might burst forth and
incinerate everything in sight in a blaze of
unimaginable intensity, melting the very rocks
themselves.
This Eragon understood. Katrina’s father, the butcher Sloan, had betrayed
Roran to the Ra’zac. When they failed to capture him,
the Ra’zac had instead seized Katrina from Roran’s
bedroom and spirited her away from Palancar Valley,
leaving the inhabitants of Carvahall to be killed and
enslaved by King Galbatorix’s soldiers. Unable to
pursue Katrina, Roran had—just in time—convinced
the villagers to abandon their homes and to follow
him across the Spine and then south along the coast
of Alagaësia, where they joined forces with the rebel
Varden. The hardships they endured as a result had
been many and terrible. But circuitous as it was, that
course had reunited Roran with Eragon, who knew
the location of the Ra’zac’s den and had promised to
help save Katrina.

20 | P a g e Brisingr – Christopher Paolini
Roran had only succeeded, as he later explained,
because the strength of his passion drove him to
extremes that others feared and avoided, and thus
allowed him to confound his enemies.
A similar fervor now gripped Eragon.
He would leap into harm’s way without the slightest
regard for his own safety if someone he cared for was
in danger. He loved Roran as a brother, and since
Roran was to marry Katrina, Eragon had extended his
definition of family to include her as well. This
concept seemed even more important because Eragon
and Roran were the last heirs of their line. Eragon
had renounced all affiliation with his birth brother,
Murtagh, and the only relatives he and Roran had left
were each other, and now Katrina. Noble sentiments
of kinship were not the only force that drove the pair.
Another goal obsessed them as well: revenge! Even as
they plotted to snatch Katrina from the grasp of the
Ra’zac, so the two warriors—mortal man and Dragon
Rider alike—sought to slay King Galbatorix’s
unnatural servants for torturing and murdering
Garrow, who was Roran’s father and had been as a
father to Eragon.
The intelligence, then, that Eragon had gleaned was as important to him as to Roran.
“I think I felt her,” he said. “It’s hard to be certain,
because we’re so far from Helgrind and I’ve never
touched her mind before, but I think she’s in that
forsaken peak, concealed somewhere near the very
top.”
“Is she sick? Is she injured? Blast it, Eragon, don’t
hide it from me: have they hurt her?”

21 | P a g e Brisingr – Christopher Paolini
“She’s in no pain at the moment. More than that, I
cannot say, for it required all my strength just to
make out the glow of her consciousness; I could not
communicate with her.” Eragon refrained from
mentioning, however, that he had detected a second
person as well, one whose identity he suspected and
the presence of whom, if confirmed, troubled him
greatly. “What I didn’t find were the Ra’zac or the
Lethrblaka. Even if I somehow overlooked the Ra’zac,
their parents are so large, their life force should blaze
like a thousand lanterns, even as Saphira’s does.
Aside from Katrina and a few