Bravely(11)

Really this was a very Leezie way to handle things. She often simply didn’t do things she decided she didn’t like, or decided were too hard. Merida would have lost sleep thinking of all the half-finished projects and shoddily done tasks, the unsolved puzzles and unmarried Cabbages. But not Leezie. Leezie didn’t seem to get tangled in things as weightily as most people. She butterflied pleasantly from interest to interest, unfettered by obligation. Tasks, education, hobbies. And Elinor let her get away with it every time! That’s just Leezie, she’d say. Just Leezie! Merida was always expected to do things properly and thoroughly, even if they annoyed her. Even if they’d been Leezie’s job in the first place. No one ever said that’s just Merida! if she didn’t finish a task.

No, they only said it when Merida got a little hot around the collar, as if her losing her temper was the epitome of Merida-ness.

She was not often hot around the collar. People just never let her forget when she was.

She did feel a little hot around the collar after hearing about the wedding. She had only just come round to seeing how the wedding was actually a good thing for the bargain, and now she had to start from scratch.

Ila had seemed to anticipate Merida’s frustration, because she volunteered to take care of Merida’s dress while Merida “took in the news.” She’d even helped Merida find something to wear until the dress was dry—a man’s nightshirt, pilfered from the servants’ quarters. Then she took up Merida’s filthy dress while Merida gratefully got her bow and snuck outside to clear her mind with some archery practice.

The high field was frigid, even under the full sun, and the wind was too relentless for predictable shooting, but Merida could feel the ritual working its wonders on her even as she tramped across the snowy field to knock snow off the targets. She paced off her distance and turned around, fast, loosing an arrow from the quiver on her back without giving herself much time to aim. The arrow hit near the center of the target with a satisfying whuck! as the arrowhead dug itself into the wood. She knew these first shots would be the best. Her fingers would get too cold to feel exactly when she loosed the string, and her arm would get too tired to demand good distance from the shots, and her mind would wear out from adjusting for the wind over and over.

But that was how the archery calmed her. It emptied her mind by making it work too hard to fret. And somewhere in that calm emptiness, ideas would come from nowhere. She just had to wait long enough.

So she loosed arrow after arrow, trudging back and forth through the snow to retrieve them, making a pile of the ones too damaged to shoot again, and another pile of ones that would be serviceable again with some repair. She needed to repaint these targets, she thought. No one had touched them since she’d left, and they were faded with mildew and sun exposure. It didn’t matter on that short winter day, though. She knew the targets like she knew the Brandubh board; she could play it even without the markings for game play. And she did. The only things to interrupt her focus on the exercise were the distant smells coming from the castle; even from here, the lovely, oaky scent of that night’s feast roasting away was quite clear. She thought about that bread from the night before and her stomach rumbled.

There truly was nothing like nearly a year’s worth of travels to make her newly appreciative of DunBroch’s cooking.

That’s it! Merida thought.

She should get her family out of the castle. Not forever. But for a bit. The triplets had never traveled. Leezie hadn’t traveled since she came to stay with them, and it didn’t seem likely that her mother, a midwife, would have traveled far beyond the village and bothies. Merida could take her to see the nuns, maybe! Elinor had been trying to get Leezie to learn to read for ages and it had never stuck, but maybe the nuns could drive it into her. Maybe Leezie would even like the convent itself; how she loved collecting religions.

Bold Hubert would like the mapmakers, surely? It was hard work traveling with them because it was a different camp each night, but he liked lots of noise and action. Shy Hamish would like the bothies and their frolicking baby calves. Surely seeing different ways of life and new landscapes and experiencing the joy and hardships of the road would have to change them all in some fashion. And Harris—well. Harris could come along on whichever journey he was least likely to sneer over. No matter. She didn’t have to have all the plan in place, just the beginnings of it. She’d learned this from the mapmakers. Reach the northernmost point of this loch? Check. Verify these bridges hadn’t been washed out since last survey? Check. Arrive at the pub in time for plenty of drinks? Check. One step after another.

Under the already-waning winter sun, Merida loosed another arrow.

Bull’s-eye.



“Merida, there you are,” Elinor said to Merida as she joined them just a short while later. “Gille Peter said something very unusual that I’m sure can’t be true. He said he saw someone who looked a lot like you, but in a man’s nightshirt and one of the old hunters’ cloaks, out shooting arrows in the snow. I know it wasn’t you, because that would not be the sort of thing a princess would do on a feast day, but isn’t that funny?”

The Queen of DunBroch’s mouth was pursed just a little. In the past, this would have been the sort of thing that caused a fight, but Elinor and Merida tried their best to meet in the middle these days. Elinor couldn’t make Merida much more dignified; Merida couldn’t make Elinor much more playful.