Three days after the Battle of the Burning Plains, Eragon and Saphira are still held to promises they made before they understood the cost. One of them takes them back to Helgrind, the Ra'zac's black spire, to free Roran's betrothed Katrina; another binds Eragon to the Varden and to Nasuada, who needs him elsewhere. Keeping one oath means breaking another, and the choice is the first of many in a book where every loyalty pulls against the next.
Brisingr is the third novel in Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle, and the volume in which the war stops being a campaign of raids and becomes a war of sieges. Eragon travels from Helgrind to the dwarf halls beneath the Beör Mountains, where a disputed election could decide whether the dwarves march with the rebellion at all, and on to Ellesméra, where the elf smith Rhunön holds the one secret he needs: how a Rider comes by a sword of his own. What he learns there about his parentage, and about the source of Galbatorix's seemingly limitless strength, reshapes everything he thought the fight was.
The story is told across three lives. Roran, flogged for insubordination and then handed a command, finds out what he is worth on a battlefield without a dragon to stand behind. Nasuada holds a rebellion together with the barest of resources. And Eragon, at Feinster, discovers the price of the answers he went looking for. Longer than either book before it — the volume that grew until a trilogy became four books — Brisingr takes its title from the ancient-language word for fire, the first word of that language Eragon ever learned, and the name of the blade that finally answers to him.