She laughed again. Now Galbatorix was just trying to punish her.

Ignoring the oncoming enemies—whom she knew she would never be able to kill or escape—she sat cross-legged on the ground and began to hum an old dwarvish tune.

Galbatorix’s initial attempts to deceive her had been subtle affairs that might very well have succeeded in leading her astray had Murtagh not warned her beforehand. To keep Murtagh’s help a secret, she had pretended to be ignorant of the fact that Galbatorix was manipulating her perception of reality, but regardless of what she saw or felt, she refused to allow the king to trick her into thinking of the things she should not or, far worse, giving him her loyalty. Defying him had not always been easy, but she held to her rituals of thought and speech and, with them, she had been able to thwart the king.

The first illusion had been of another woman, Rialla, who joined her in the Hall of the Soothsayer as a fellow prisoner. The woman claimed she was secretly wedded to one of the Varden’s spies in Urû’baen, and that she had been captured while carrying a message for him. Over what seemed like the course of a week, Rialla tried to ingratiate herself with Nasuada and, in a sideways manner, convince her that the Varden’s campaign was doomed, that their reasons for fighting were flawed, and that it was only right and proper to submit to Galbatorix’s authority.

In the beginning, Nasuada had not realized that Rialla herself was an illusion. She assumed that Galbatorix was distorting the woman’s words or appearance, or perhaps that he was tampering with her own emotions to make her more susceptible to Rialla’s arguments.

As the days had dragged on, and Murtagh neither visited nor contacted her, she had grown to fear that he had abandoned her to Galbatorix’s clutches. The thought caused her more anguish than she would have liked to admit, and she found herself worrying about it at nearly every turn.

Then she had begun to wonder why Galbatorix had not come to torture her during the week, and it occurred to her that if a week had elapsed, then the Varden and the elves would have attacked Urû’baen. And if that had happened, Galbatorix surely would have mentioned it, if only to gloat. Moreover, Rialla’s somewhat odd behavior, combined with a number of inexplicable gaps in her memory, Galbatorix’s forbearance, and Murtagh’s continued silence—for she could not bring herself to believe that he would break his word to her—convinced her, as outlandish as it seemed, that Rialla was an apparition and that time was no longer what it seemed.

It had shaken her to realize that Galbatorix could alter the number of days she thought had passed. She loathed the idea. Her sense of time had grown vague during her imprisonment, but she had retained a general awareness of its passage. To lose that, to become unmoored in time, meant she was even more at Galbatorix’s mercy, for he could prolong or contract her experiences as he saw fit.

Still, she remained determined to resist Galbatorix’s attempts at coercion, no matter how much time seemed to go by. If she had to endure a hundred years in her cell, then a hundred years she would endure.

When she had proven immune to Rialla’s insidious whisperings—and indeed finally denounced the woman for being a coward and a traitor—the figment was taken from her chamber, and Galbatorix moved on to another ploy.

Thereafter, his deceptions had grown increasingly elaborate and improbable, but none broke the laws of reason and none conflicted with what he had already shown her, for the king was still trying to keep her ignorant of his meddling.

His efforts culminated when he seemed to take her from the chamber to a dungeon cell elsewhere in the citadel, where she saw what appeared to be Eragon and Saphira bound in chains. Galbatorix had threatened to kill Eragon unless she swore fealty to him, the king. When she refused, much to Galbatorix’s displeasure—and, she thought, his surprise—Eragon shouted a spell that somehow freed the three of them. After a brief duel, Galbatorix fled—which she doubted he ever would do in reality—and then she, Eragon, and Saphira started to fight their way out of the citadel.

It had been rather dashing and exciting, and she had been tempted to find out how the sequence of events would resolve itself, but by then she felt she had played along with Galbatorix’s false show for long enough. So she seized upon the first discrepancy she noticed—the shape of the scales around Saphira’s eyes—and used it as an excuse to feign a realization that the world around her was only a pretense.

“You promised you would not lie to me while I was in the Hall of the Soothsayer!” she had shouted into the air. “What is this but a lie, Oath-breaker?”

Galbatorix’s wrath at her discovery had been prodigious; she had heard a growl like that of a mountain-sized dragon, and then he abandoned all subtlety, and for the rest of the session he subjected her to a series of fantastical torments.

At last the apparitions had ceased, and Murtagh had contacted her to let her know she could once again trust her senses. She had never been so happy to feel the touch of his mind.

That night, he had come to her, and they spent hours sitting together and talking. He told her of the Varden’s progress—they were nearly upon the capital—and of the Empire’s preparations, and he explained that he believed he had discovered a means of freeing her. When she pressed him for details, he refused to elaborate, saying, “I need another day or two to see if it will work. But there is a way, Nasuada. Take heart in that.”

She had taken heart in his earnestness and his concern for her. Even if she never escaped, she was glad to know that she was not alone in her captivity.