Bravely(29)

Children stay children longer in places like that, Mistress mac Lagan had told Merida, and perhaps she was right, because just then, thinking about how she had run out of years to show Leezie the secret passages felt awful.

But then the dark was over and Merida and Leezie were into the light: they emerged from the passage into the garden, and just as they did—

Brrrronnnng! Brrrronnnng! Brrrronnnng!

Merida and Leezie exchanged a triumphant look. They’d made it. Mistress mac Lagan’s handmaiden would open their door and be quite unable to fold them into the unending routine.

Moreover, in this first cold light of dawn, they could see they hadn’t done a half-bad job on their wimples and hair.

“Now we have to find Hubert,” Merida said. “It’s not going to be easy in a place like this.”

“I know where he is,” Leezie replied confidently.

Merida stared at her. Leezie preened, delighted to be the expert for once. “His group passed ours in the courtyard every morning when we were on our way to do the privies. This way.”

Quite smug, Leezie led them from shadow to shadow, avoiding knots of various Ardbarrach citizens all locked in their precise bell-driven schedules, and, sure enough, right to a group of page boys in a side courtyard. The boys were gracefully moving as one, like a dance, or like a school of fish, their breath puffing out in white clouds around them as they did arm lifts and jumps and dangled from bars set up in the courtyard. It seemed likely they’d been up since before dawn doing these war games. Because Merida knew that was what they were. She hadn’t seen them at this scale before, but she knew the techniques. It looked like dance or exercise, but it was all just play practice for when they’d be told to kill other people. They’d need those muscles and those moves in real battle.

It was difficult to see how this was any different from what the Dásachtach wanted out of the triplets. Trained up for war, knowing nothing else, turned into tiny soldiers, no childhood, no frivolity; just like Gille Peter, but much shorter.

“Oh, his hair,” Leezie said.

Merida followed her gaze. There was Hubert! His wild red hair had been shorn as short as the other boys’ hair. Probably he had been among the boys last night, too, and she just hadn’t been able to tell, because he looked just like the others. Merida had a shivering memory of the first night they’d arrived, all the guards looking like the same person many times over. How strange that she’d never had a problem telling Hubert apart from Hamish and Harris, but now she could barely pick him out from all these strangers.

Regret stung her again, just as fiercely as it had as she thought about Leezie and secret passages. She’d waited too long to lose her patience with this place. Poor Hubert, smushed into this mold.

Hair will grow back, she told herself. Let’s just get out of here.

But there was only one problem.

Hubert didn’t want to go.

The guardsman in charge of his group looked bemused as they asked to pull Hubert from the exercises to speak to him, but he allowed it. Hubert wore a matching bemused expression, which turned absolutely cross when Merida informed him they were leaving at once.

“I don’t want to,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Merida asked in a low voice. “Are you just saying that? No one can hear you. Whisper in my ear.”

“We’ve only been here twelve days,” he said, glancing back at the rest of the boys and their exercises.

“Is that all,” Leezie murmured.

Twelve days, but hundreds of bells. Thousands of bells. Merida said, “I thought you’d be dying to go.”

“What? Why? It’s great! Look at it! Whoa! Wow! Yes!” He made some muscles and grinned at one of the other kids behind Merida’s back. “What don’t you like about it?”

Brrrronnnng! Brrrronnnng! Brrrronnnng!

Merida winced. Everything. “What do you like about it?”

Hubert’s attention was pulled once more to his group as they moved to another part of the courtyard, letting a second group take their place at the bars. “Everything!”

“Every single moment is scheduled,” Merida said.

“I know,” he said, but in a pleased way.

“Every single thing is training for war.”

“I know,” he said, but in a pleased way.

“They have your entire life planned out for you.”

“I know,” he said, but in a pleased way.

He looked so different with his short hair. Was that the only thing different about him? He seemed utterly unlike the boy who’d arrived just twelve days before. She felt stupid for having brought that little bear in case he needed comfort. Hubert had not been the little boy who needed that for a long time, and he was even further away from it now. She didn’t know what to say. Finally, she just exclaimed, “Your bum’s out the window! I wouldn’t have thought you would have liked someplace like this.”

“Me neither,” he confessed. “If you hadn’t brought me, I would’ve never known someplace like this existed, even.”

The two DunBroch siblings were identical in their bewilderment…that, for once, they weren’t exactly the same. Merida felt for just an instant, very unhappily, that she might cry, but then she didn’t.

“I don’t have to go, though, do I?” Hubert asked anxiously. “They said I could stay on as long as I liked. I thought we could stay till it was warmer, then we could have Dad come visit and see how well I was doing.”