Bravely(22)

“Yes,” Feradach said. “Actually. Are you going to Ardbarrach?”

“Please don’t tell me that’s where you’re headed!”

“No, but neither are you,” he said. “You’re going the wrong way, did you know?”

Now Merida was completely flummoxed. She pulled the Midge to a complete halt. Both girl and horse stared angrily at Feradach. Merida demanded, “Why should I believe you?”

“Again, I have no need of tricks to win,” Feradach said. “And it would bring me no valor to win just because you’ve frozen to death on this road only a few weeks in. Don’t believe me. Ask your guardsman.”

“Ho! Fanfarich tol de parsesh!”

Both Merida and Feradach turned to see Gille Peter and the horse Angus picking their way slowly through the brambles the Midge had dashed through helter-skelter. Gille Peter’s words, as ever, were all squashed into something else, everything in an old dialect lost to time. “Drownt mootin dar!”

“This is about to be odd,” Feradach warned Merida in a low voice.

“How do you figure?”

“Everyone sees me as something different,” Feradach said. “I don’t know how you see me, but he will see me as something else.”

Merida frowned. “Like, as a bear or something?”

“No, just—”

“Whush dooyer mutter widish worm!” Gille Peter said, with some suspicion, as he finally rode right up to them on Angus. Merida noticed with some anxiety that their shadows, already long because Gille Peter and Angus were tall, were getting very, very long indeed as they lost even more daylight hours.

“I mean no harm,” Feradach said respectfully.

“Whart bees nish haften?” Gille Peter demanded.

Feradach looked amused. “Your companion tells me you are going to Ardbarrach. Are you headed by way of the old oak copse?”

There was the briefest of pauses, and then Gille Peter’s face went completely white, and Merida knew that Feradach had been telling the truth. Gille Peter had forgotten their way.

In a smaller voice, Gille Peter admitted, “Ah ahmosh toot me all quegg ittoo flop.”

“Could have happened to anyone,” Feradach said, with a glance at Merida. It was not quite a told you so, but it was very, very close.

“Kweet fannish!” Gille Peter replied. “Goch shave, yung wonk.”

“I’m not as young as I look, but I appreciate the thought. Do you think you know your way from here?”

Gille Peter put on a brave face. “Narf enkerly…”

“If you’ll allow me,” Feradach said, looking at Gille Peter but clearly speaking to Merida, “I can describe a more direct route that might get you there before nightfall if you are quick about it.”

He theatrically clasped his two gloved hands together, letting his cloak partially fall over them, displaying his intention to let them touch nothing but one another. Merida regarded his carefully contained hands and his earnest expression. She didn’t want to be a fool and trust a god who was doing his best to win the right to kill them all in a year. But Gille Peter obviously could not be trusted to put them back on the right path in time.

“Fine,” Merida said, in such a bratty tone that Gille Peter looked at her with surprise. She took a deep breath and said, in a more princess-like fashion, “That would be welcome.”

Feradach and Gille Peter engaged in a brief descriptive conversation, which ended up with Feradach drawing several diagrams in the dirty snow and Gille Peter drawing several others in the air.

“Coweron, Merida!” said Gille Peter. “Lecket todders.”

With brisk enthusiasm he set off back toward the others.

But Merida did not immediately follow. Instead she kept the Midge dancing in place long enough to narrow her eyes at Feradach, who once again stood quietly in the snow, hands folded inside each other, tucked away inside his cloak, looking for all the world just like an ordinary young man, albeit one deep in a vast forest in the middle of nowhere.

She said, “I would say thank you, but I’ll believe it when I see Ardbarrach.”

Feradach shrugged.

“And stop following us,” Merida added. “It’s off-putting.”

Feradach shrugged again.

“And stop shrugging,” Merida finished. “Say something.”

“Enjoy Ardbarrach,” he said.





MERIDA had given quite a bit of thought to how the triplets might change. Before the bargain, she would have thought growing up was change enough. Merida felt as if her childhood had been one massive change after another. First her father had lost his leg to a bear—a bear! Then the triplets had come along after years of her being an only child. Then the fight with her mother over marriage, the tousle with a witch. Nursemaid Maudie moving off to the village. Leezie coming to stay with them. The trip to the shielings with her mother.

But she supposed the triplets had had a very different childhood than she. They were over a decade younger; Fergus and Elinor were different people. Plus there was the sameness of them, the threeness of them, the way they shared a life as “the triplets” instead of as Hubert, Hamish, and Harris. Where are the babies, Elinor would say, someone should take them on a walk. The triplets need to get some writing practice in. Let’s get the triplets their dinner and then we’ll do our dinner after. Merida, show the triplets how to play Whips and Hounds. The triplets’ room, the triplets’ hobbies, the triplets’ schooling.