Bravely(2)

This story belongs to the Princess Merida.

Merida was less like the mannered royal you’re imagining and more like a struck match, although matches did not yet exist. Red hair, keen eyes, quick brain, built to start fires but not to put them out. She was an absolute wizard with a bow and arrow. For over a decade, before the wee devil triplet princes arrived, she’d been the only child, and where other children might have had friends, Merida had her bow. She practiced her archery breathlessly, automatically, in every moment her mother hadn’t scheduled her for lessons in embroidery, music, and reading. There was a stillness to archery she couldn’t get anywhere else. Whenever she had a problem she couldn’t solve, she went out to practice. Whenever she had a feeling she didn’t understand, she went out to practice. Hour upon hour, she collected calluses on fingertips and bruises on forearms. At night, when she dreamt, she still sighted between trees and adjusted for strong highland winds.

In the months before the wedding, Merida took her bow and traveled the kingdom. In spring she’d gone with the villagers and their herds up to the temporary bothies in the shielings. In late summer she went down to Morventon to study letters and geography with the nuns. By fall, she was traveling with a handful of her father’s old confidants who had vowed to map the varied terrain of DunBroch.

In winter, she returned for Leezie’s wedding. She hung up her bow. How safe and unchanged she found DunBroch after her months of wandering.

She didn’t know that Feradach—and disaster—was approaching.

But the Cailleach knew. That wily old goddess.

She also knew that DunBroch had earned Feradach’s ruin. But the Cailleach was old, and she was biased, and she had a stake in the Clan DunBroch.

So she cheated.

This is that story.





MERIDA had been eating bread rolls for an hour when the first knock came.

The rolls were wonderful. Fresh baked. Crisp on the outside, pillowy and warm on the inside. Merida had finished off all the wonky-shaped ones, and had now moved on to some of the perfectly shaped ones. There were still hundreds of them piled on the rough-hewn kitchen table, far outnumbering the planned guests for the Christmas feast. The bread was destined for a silly wedding ritual: Leezie and the Cabbage were supposed to try to exchange a kiss over the top of a wall of buns. Merida was doing them a favor by making the wall just that bit shorter.

Leezie, getting married! Merida couldn’t really believe it.

As she munched bread in the dim midnight kitchen, she used her bare foot to trace her name through the flour dusting the stone floor. How pleasant to feel the chill of the floor on the bottom of her foot and the heat of the smoldering hearth on the top. How pleasant to feel the squish of the roll’s interior against the roof of her mouth and the crisp mountain crust against her tongue. How pleasant to just let her mind prattle, as her mother Elinor called it, to just let it play over nonsense like how her name spelled backward was Adirem, which wasn’t half bad, really. Adirem of DunBroch. Her mirror self, she thought. Her shadow self. As dark and pensive as Merida was bright and active.

Merida traced DunBroch into the flour. Hcorbnud didn’t look at all appealing backward.

Then came the first knock.

Tap-tap-tap.

Merida stopped chewing.

She listened.

Could it be one of the triplets? Hubert had had a mischievous look in his eye as Merida pinched the triplets’ candle out at bedtime.

But the castle was silent in the way that only castles can be. The stone stopped most sound dead in its tracks and the wall tapestries drowned the rest of it. Everyone besides Merida was dreaming of Leezie’s wedding and the Christmas feast to follow. The knock had probably just been one of the fireplaces popping.

Merida finished her roll. She took her time selecting another, resisting a somewhat triplet-like impulse to pull one from the bottom of the heap to watch it collapse across the floor. Picking a perfectly round one, she tore it open to admire the structured crevices and crannies inside. Over the past several months, she’d eaten a fair bit of bread, but none could compare to Aileen’s. Aileen, the family cook, was irritable, territorial, and foulmouthed, but Scotland’s kitchens had no better. Merida’s mother Elinor went to great lengths to find the most modern of recipes for Aileen, often all the way from France, and every time a new one came via messenger or pigeon, Aileen closed herself up in the kitchen for days, testing and retesting it before she was willing to let any of the royal family try the result. Well, most of the royal family.

This wasn’t the first time Merida had snuck down to sample Aileen’s handiwork.

As she ate this roll, she thought back over her grand homecoming earlier that day. There’d been hugs and tears, the works. DunBroch was very enthusiastic about stories, about legends, and Merida had delivered the Ballad of Merida’s Year, at volume, from atop one of the tables in the Great Hall, feinting around Christmas decorations. The triplets and her father and Leezie had hooted with delight, and her mother had pretended to look disapproving.

Ah, home! It was so nice to be back among DunBroch’s creature comforts: its bellowing fireplaces and plentiful candles, its worm-free snacks and discreet privy, its flea-free blankets and luxurious bedrooms. Nice, too, to find the little things unchanged: the herbal smell of the kitchen. The chaos of her triplet brothers caterwauling in the halls. The percussive clearing of her father’s throat as he sat in his chair by the fire. The ritual of kissing her mother’s cheek good night as Elinor wrote down the day’s events in her journal.