insinuating herself into the most private areas of his being. He shivered at the contact and almost withdrew from it, but then Rhunon’s rough voice sounded within his skull:
Then Rhunon began to lift his arms, shift his legs, roll his head, and otherwise experiment with the abilities of his body. Strange as it was for Eragon to feel his head and limbs move without his direction, it was stranger still when his eyes began to flick from place to place, seemingly of their own accord. The sensation of helplessness kindled a burst of sudden panic within Eragon. When Rhunon walked him forward and his foot struck the corner of the forge and it seemed as if he were going to fall, Eragon immediately reasserted command over his faculties and grabbed the horn of Rhunon’s anvil to steady himself.
While they waited for the last of the light to fade from the velvet sky, Rhunon prepared the forge and practiced wielding various tools. Her initial clumsiness with Eragon’s body soon disappeared, although once she reached for a hammer and rammed the tips of his fingers into the top of a table. The pain made Eragon’s eyes water. Rhunon apologized and said,
Taking the pieces of hard and soft brightsteel she had decided to use, Rhunon placed them into the forge. At the elf’s request, Saphira heated the steel, opening her jaws only a fraction of an inch so that the blue and white flames that poured from her mouth remained focused in a narrow stream and did not spill over into the rest of the workshop. The roaring pillar of fire illuminated the entire atrium with a fierce blue light and made Saphira’s scales sparkle and flash with blinding brilliance.
Rhunon had Eragon remove the brightsteel from the torrent of flames with a pair of tongs once the metal began to glow cherry red. She laid it on her anvil and, with a series of quick blows from a sledgehammer, flattened the lumps of metal into plates that were no more than a quarter of an inch thick. The surface of the red-hot steel glittered with incandescent motes. As she finished with each plate, Rhunon dropped it into a nearby trough of brine.
Having flattened all of the brightsteel, Rhunon pulled the plates out of the trough, the brine warm against Eragon’s arm, and scoured each plate with a piece of sandstone to remove the black scales that had formed on the surface of the metal. The scouring exposed the crystalline structure of the metal, which Rhunon examined with great attentiveness. She further sorted the metal by relative hardness and purity according to the qualities the crystals displayed.
Eragon was privy to Rhunon’s every thought and feeling, by reason of their closeness. The depth of her knowledge amazed him; she saw things within the metal he had not suspected existed, and the calculations she made concerning its treatment were beyond his understanding. He also sensed she was dissatisfied with how she had handled the sledgehammer while flattening the steel.
Rhunon’s dissatisfaction continued to grow until she said,
Before Eragon could attempt to reason with her, Saphira said,
She did not explain the solution to either Eragon or Saphira but, one by one, placed the plates of steel on the anvil and cracked them into flakes no wider than rose petals. Gathering up half the flakes of the harder brightsteel, Rhunon stacked them into a brick, which she then coated with clay and birch bark to hold them together. The brick went on a thick steel paddle with a seven-foot-long handle, similar to those used by bakers to insert and remove loaves of bread from a hot oven.
Rhunon laid the end of the paddle in the center of the forge and then backed Eragon as far away as she could and still have him hold on to the handle. Then she asked Saphira to resume breathing fire, and again the atrium glowed with a flickering blue radiance. The heat was so intense, Eragon felt as if his exposed skin were crisping, and he saw that the granite stones of which the forge was made had acquired a bright yellow glow.
The brightsteel could easily have taken over half an hour to reach the appropriate temperature in a charcoal fire, but it required only a few minutes in the withering inferno of Saphira’s flames before it turned white. The moment it did, Rhunon ordered Saphira to cease breathing fire. Darkness engulfed the forge as Saphira closed her jaws.
Rushing Eragon forward, Rhunon had him transport the glowing brick of clay-covered steel to the anvil, where she seized a hammer and welded the disparate flakes of brightsteel into a cohesive whole. She continued to pound on the metal, elongating it out into a bar, then made a cut in the middle, folded the metal back on itself, and welded the two pieces together. The bell-like peals of ringing metal echoed off the ancient trees that surrounded the atrium.
Rhunon had Eragon return the brightsteel to the forge once its color had faded from white to yellow, and again Saphira bathed the metal with the fire from her belly. Six times Rhunon heated and folded the brightsteel, and each time the metal became smoother and more flexible, until it could bend without tearing.
As Eragon hammered the steel, his every action dictated by Rhunon, the elf woman began to sing, both with his tongue and her own. Together, their voices formed a not-unpleasant harmony that rose and fell with the beats of the hammer. A tingle crawled down Eragon’s spine as he felt Rhunon channel a steady flow of energy into the words they were mouthing, and he realized that the song contained spells of making, shaping, and binding. With their voices two, Rhunon sang of the metal that lay on the anvil, describing its properties — altering them in ways that exceeded Eragon’s understanding — and imbuing the brightsteel with a complex web of enchantments designed to give it strength and resilience beyond that of any ordinary metal. Of Eragon’s hammer arm Rhunon also sang, and under the gentle influence of her crooning, every blow she struck with his arm landed upon its intended target.
Rhunon quenched the bar of brightsteel after the sixth and final fold was complete. She repeated the entire process with the other half of the hard brightsteel, forging an identical bar to the first. Then she gathered up the fragments of the softer steel, which she folded and welded ten times before forming it into a short, heavy wedge.
Next, Rhunon had Saphira reheat the two bars of harder steel. Rhunon lay the shining rods side by side on her anvil, grasped both of them at either end with a pair of tongs, and then twisted the rods around each other seven times. Sparks shot into the air as she hammered upon the twists to weld them into a single piece of metal. The resulting mass of brightsteel Rhunon folded, welded, and pounded back out to length another six times. When she was pleased with the quality of the metal, Rhunon flattened the brightsteel into a thick rectangular sheet, cut the sheet in half lengthwise with a sharp chisel, and bent each of the two halves down their middle, so they were in the shape of long, shallow V’s.
And all that, Eragon estimated, Rhunon was able to accomplish within the course of an hour and a half. He marveled at her speed, even though it was his own body that carried out the tasks. Never before had he seen a smith shape metal with such ease; what would have taken Horst hours took her only minutes. And yet no matter how demanding the forging was, Rhunon continued to sing, weaving a fabric of spells within the brightsteel and guiding Eragon’s arm with infallible accuracy.
Amid the frenzy of noise, fire, sparks, and exertion, Eragon thought he glimpsed, as Rhunon raked his eyes across the forge, a trio of slender figures standing by the edge of the atrium. Saphira confirmed his suspicion a moment later when she said,
