Bravely(12)

“Very funny,” agreed Merida. “I’m sure it was an illusion.”

Elinor patted the seat beside herself without pressing the question further and Merida sat down in her still slightly damp, soap-smelling dress without explaining herself further.

The entire DunBroch family was currently gathered in the smoky common room, as was tradition. The music room was just as warm with none of the smoke, but Merida’s mother preferred the chairs and light of the common room, which meant every Christmas they sat in a romantic haze, eyes watering, enjoying a personal feast before the official public one. This year, Merida saw rashers, poached eggs in a fragrant sauce, canceled wedding buns spread with a bit of dripping butter, boar meat made into warm, onion-scented drinking broth. Tarts golden and fragrant with cheese and scraps of pastry, mushrooms simmered in broth and browned with leeks in goose fat. Preserved pears in bowls, figs soaked in whisky, even little biscuits with rabbits stamped on them.

Their private feast was always all the bits and bobs and failed experiments left over from preparing the public one. If this was the odd-ends, Merida could only imagine what the proper feast would be like later. Cranky Aileen was a wonder.

The triplets piled a plate for Merida and returned to bantering with Leezie over a game of Whips and Hounds that was missing a few pieces. It was all very like an ordinary Christmas Day, as if the wedding had never been on the schedule at all.

“Leezie,” Merida said. “Wasn’t he very upset?”

Leezie was dressed in some sort of gauzy flowing dress that she had put together herself. It seemed likely it had been either a curtain or a horse sheet before she’d co-opted it. She also wore an outlandish headdress, a brimming bay leaf crown studded with dried flowers and berries. She’d nearly managed to get her hair up by herself—braids followed rules, and Leezie wasn’t big on rules—and just a few dusty locks escaped in an attractively messy fashion. She always looked as if she needed help, which always somehow ended up making people help her, even though she never asked for or even seemed to realize she needed it. All of this was what it meant to be Leezie. Like a fancy table, she was more decorative than useful.

That’s just Leezie.

“Who?” Leezie asked. “Oh, John?”

“Yes, John!” repeated Merida. “The Cabbage! Husband to be! Master Leezie in Training! Who else? Wasn’t he upset?”

“The Cabbage is fine,” Merida’s father Fergus boomed pleasantly. “I gave him two heifers for his trouble and he was well satisfied.”

“Two heifers,” echoed Merida. “As in, two cows.”

“One would have been rude,” her father said.

Merida’s father was spread enormously in his equally enormous chair, his big wooden leg on one side, his big flesh-and-bone leg on the other. He had been crowned already with a voluminous green Christmas wreath pebbled with red holly berries. He was a big person. Big beard, big body, big personality, big stories. To meet Fergus of DunBroch was to meet the hugeness of him. You don’t get to be a king by staying small, he liked to say. In his hand was a mug of one of the best Yule traditions, whipkull, a drink made with lots of eggs, sugar, rum, and cream, and in his beard were the crumbs of one of the biscuits. Like Merida, he thought of his appearance only after Elinor pestered him.

“I think two was perfectly fair, especially in the middle of winter,” Elinor said. The queen was perched in the chair closest to the fireplace, a place won for her by Fergus, who won everything his queen desired. Unlike her redheaded children and redheaded husband, Elinor’s smooth hair was a heathered gray brown. She was quite the opposite of Fergus, all slender and precise, not a single bit louder or more unpleasant than she needed to be. Quite the opposite of Merida, too, come to think of it. She was regal perfection; hard for Merida to imagine what she could possibly need to change.

“How many cows do you think I’m worth?” Merida asked, voice tense.

Elinor dipped a toast soldier in her egg with regal splendor. “I pray we never have to find out.”

“They’d probably give us cows to keep her.” This was a whisper from one of the triplets, though Merida couldn’t tell which. Their voices remained mostly identical even though their appearances had begun to diverge. Their personalities, too. Aileen had just complained to Merida that they were impossible to tell apart, but to Merida, they seemed distinct now more than ever.

Hubert had a big heart, and big feelings, and a big voice, like Fergus. Since Merida had left for three seasons of wandering, he’d grown nearly a hand taller and also plaited his fiercely red hair like a Norseman. He’d told her when she returned that he planned to also grow a Norseman’s huge beard, and then plait that as well. When Merida looked too disbelieving, he assured her he’d already picked out the two blue beads he intended to use to finish the plaits.

Hamish, on the other hand, had stayed small. His fingers were delicate things, spiderlike, and colorless as a dead man’s, and in the winter, if he put them against Merida’s neck when she wasn’t looking, she was forced to scream from the cold of them. His red hair, finer than Hubert’s and Hamish’s, was fluffed up high like a downy seed head. He was a very feathery sort of person altogether, and Merida had an abnormal number of nightmares about him getting broken in some way, an attribute they seemed to share.

Harris looked neither big nor small; he looked old. Mature. This was because he always sat very straight and because he wore his long red hair slicked back from his forehead, which made his head look smaller. Between that and his pointy features and slender shoulders, his proportions looked less like a sweet little boy ready for a hug than a conniving thirty-year-old lord come to take your dinner right out of your mouth for lack of tithing. He was also a know-it-all, which was never an attractive trait, particularly when one did know it all, as Harris often did. Once upon a time, he and Merida had had long, thoughtful conversations, but yesterday, when she returned, he had only seemed scornful of her attempts to start one with him.