Eragon takes a paragraph to lament having to drop his sword to catch Roran as he falls.
Seriously.
Eragon holds his sword and his cousin in roughly the same esteem. That is fucked up. He does drop it and catch Roran, but that he actually had to think about it at all is still pretty damn cold.
Arya and Blodhgarm (who I will henceforth refer to as "Bloody" because I'm getting sick of typing the H after that D. Seriously, how do you even pronounce that?) are just suddenly there with him, because having them accompany Eragon in the previous chapter wouldn't have been as dramatic. Roran comes to immediately, thus rendering his unconsciousness completely pointless as anything other than a cheap excuse to end the previous chapter, when really there's no reason to have split these chapters apart in the first place. There's no time skip, no shift in perspective, no reason not to have just kept right on going except to try for a cliffhanger, which is obnoxious, as the chapter immediately before that chapter ended on the same cliffhanger, but with bigger stakes. We went from "Is Roran alive?" to "Is Roran hurt?" That's no way to build suspense.
Eragon drops his wards long enough to contact Saphira and tell her Roran's alright. Apparently he values Roran enough to need to let Saphira know immediately that he's alive, but he didn't value Saphira enough to drop his wards before to warn her that the soldier with the Dragonspear
was dangerous. You could make the case that Eragon can afford to be less cautious now that the enemy magician is dead, but on the surface it just looks inconsistent, especially considering that needing to cut off his Psychic Link with her is an inconsistency with the previous books in the first place.
Eragon comments on the other Varden soldiers with Roran, but Roran dismisses their chances of survival under the rubble, which seems rather hypocritical given that by all rights Roran should have been in the exact same situation. But Roran is a main character and the Varden aren't, so no more will be said on the matter.
Roran's wrist is broken, but he dismisses it as minor. This reminds me of his first commander, Martland Redbeard, who got his hand chopped off in the aftermath of a battle in Brisingr and told the healers to leave it for later. This is an incredibly stupid stance for a warrior to take, but it keeps coming up: real warriors ignore their injuries, because they're Just That Badass. In reality, Redbeard should have been in a state of shock from sudden blood loss, and probably would have bled to death through his stump without immediate healing. Roran dismissing a broken wrist isn't as immediately fatal, but it's still flat out stupid for him to be downplaying the injury.
Also, how the hell did he fight off three soldiers by himself, unarmed and with a broken wrist? Right, right, he's Just That Speshul.
Eragon asks Bloody to heal Roran's wrist, which Bloody is apparently unhappy to do for no apparent reason, nor is there any apparent reason why Eragon wouldn't do it himself. He has tons of stored up energy in his ring and belt even if he's personally exhausted, which he shows no signs of. Once healed, Roran suggests that they get on with deposing the enemy leader, Lord Bradburn, and asks if Arya agrees.
Wait, what?
Why is he asking Arya? I don't recall these two ever interacting with each other in any significant way, and certainly not to a degree at which Roran would defer to her instead of his cousin with both present, nor does Arya have any special relevance to the task at hand. There's no particular reason for him not to address Arya, but it just seems weird that he would specifically direct his comment toward her, when it has no particular relevance to her, nor does she have any particular relevance to him. It's just... out of place.
Roran dedicates their hunt for Bradburn to the Varden soldiers lost today, which might have more impact if the only Varden that have died so far in the book hadn't been killed by splash damage from Bloody's actions. This is not addressed.
They return to the hall where Eragon saw Bradburn in the last chapter and find nothing but a helmet rocking back and forth where it was dropped, which suggests that whoever dropped it should still be close enough that Eragon could hear them, especially if they're in a group, as a fleeing mob tends to be pretty noisy, but apparently this isn't the case, because they start climbing a random staircase and stopping at each floor so Bloody can mentally scan it for Bradburn. Um, why do they need to do it this way? Has this kind of limitation on scan range ever come up before? I can't recall it ever having done so.
Anyway, they eventually catch up to the back of the group, a whole bunch of soldiers in a staircase. Roran dives into their "thicket" of spears with Eragon behind him, grabbing spears out of their wielders' hands and throwing them back into the enemy, whittling their numbers down to a measly twelve. It's fight scenes like this that utterly convince me Paolini has no idea what he's talking about.
I have done LARP. I have stood in a field with my tower shield
◊ facing enemies armed with spears, and I have been slaughtered. Even with a large shield, it is hard to defend against a spear, let alone against a "thicket" of them, even with lots of room to maneuver and dodge in. I don't care how great a warrior Roran is supposed to be, there is no way a man can throw himself into more than a dozen spears in a tightly packed area like a stairwell and come out of it with only a couple scratches, which is exactly what Roran comes away with.
He also declines to have them healed in order to save time. Again, there is no sign that any of the three magicians present are in the least bit low on energy, and I would think that a few cuts would take much less time to fix than the broken wrist that was healed in the space of two sentences. Nor is there any indication that they are on a time limit; the city is basically conquered already, and it's not as if Bradburn could outrun the elves or Eragon. But Roran needs to show off how tough he is again, so the wounds go unhealed for no good reason, even though their sapping effect on Roran's already depleted strength could potentially get him killed if this weren't Paolini we were talking about here.
We also get this little gem during the fight scene:
Eragon gets off on killing people. He gets off. On killing people. Our protagonist, ladies and gentlemen!
The group catches up to Bradburn, who has fortified himself and some other higher-ups in the top of one of the towers rather than try to escape the obviously conquered city because then we couldn't have the big dramatic capture scene. Eragon is relieved that he only has to kill three more men before the rest lay down their arms, but there's no mention of Eragon giving them the chance to surrender before hacking three of them to bits, so make of that what you will. I certainly will.
Arya asks Bradburn to surrender, but he refuses to deal with elves, not trusting them since they allied with the urgals who, as you'll recall, have been known as nothing but monsters to humans for however many thousands of years it's been since both races came to Alagaesia. This having failed, Arya goes straight to breaking into his mind and putting him to sleep, which makes the people in the room think she's killed him, and "Eragon attempted to convince them otherwise* ," which is a very passive way to describe what should be a strong action. The people are angry and afraid, but then Paolini seems to forget they're there as Eragon and Arya look out the windows because they heard people cheering outside. It turns out the Varden are cheering because an army of werecats has just showed up on the horizon, and obviously they're here to join the Varden despite there being no actual evidence of this thus far.
Aren't werecats supposed to be rare and unique? So where did this army come from? Paolini's problem with consistency are as bad as his problems with pacing, which are very present in this chapter, too. This is another very short chapter in which Eragon and his friends capture the lord of the city, and a herd of werecats appear in the distance; that's it, and it's really not enough to justify its own chapter. This is something that bothered me a lot in Brisingr, and looking at the table of contents for this book, it looks like it's a trend being continued in Inheritance: short chapters in which nothing happens that couldn't be condensed into fewer pages without losing anything. In other words, Filler.
This chapter, for example, could easily have been rolled into the last chapter. Rather than having Eragon find Roran, and then the two of them join up with the elves to take down Bradburn, Paolini should have had the Varden troops capture Bradburn while Eragon went after Roran. Bradburn is a complete nobody; we've never seen him before now, we've never even been to his city before now, and he does nothing important in this chapter. There's no reason Eragon for to be the one to capture him personally except to make Eragon look more awesome by capturing the enemy leader. Letting the Varden troops capture him while Eragon goes after his cousin makes the Varden look like they're actually contributing something to the plot, because all they've done so far in this book is stand around watching Eragon and die, and save us several pages of meaningless action in the process.
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