Bravely(3)

Tap-tap-tap.

Was that a second knock?

It seemed like it might have been. A soft triple tap, just like she thought she’d heard before.

“Hubert, I hear you,” she whispered.

But it didn’t seem to be Hubert. Was it coming from the door? The castle gate was barred at nightfall, so no one could have gotten into the courtyard, and even if they could, the closest civilization was the wee blackhouse village, which was a twenty-five-minute walk even when the road wasn’t bad-tempered with snow and ice as it was that Christmas Eve.

Merida waited. She listened. There was nothing.

She got another piece of bread.

The strange restlessness that had driven her out of bed in the first place was beginning to rise again.

Why was it even there?

She should have felt marvelous. She loved her family. She loved her home. She loved it more than she had words to say. It was wonderful to be back, to find it almost exactly as she’d left it.

But up in her tower bedroom, she’d lain awake in the cold moonlight that snuck around the window tapestry and wished desperately that it wasn’t dark so that she could go outside to the exercise fields and shoot her bow until her body and mind felt perfectly still. Instead, she fidgeted, her feet itching to take her away on an exciting journey.

Exactly how she’d felt the night before she’d left months before.

But she’d gone on the journey already. Something should have changed. She should have changed.

Then came the third knock.

Tap-tap-tap.

This one was definitely not coming from a fireplace. It was coming from the door. Not the main one, but the little ugly one around back, for deliveries, where the carts wouldn’t tear up the grass. But who would be out there on a night like this?

Merida had a sudden, hideous thought that perhaps it was one of the triplets, somehow trapped outside for hours, able to manage only that feeble tap. Leaping across the kitchen, she turned the enormous key in the lock and heaved the heavy door open.

Outside, the courtyard was brighter than she’d expected. The huge moon, although out of sight behind the castle, lit all the snow to daylight brilliance. Freezing air, scented with woodsmoke, blew into the kitchen around Merida. Every star was so bright and shimmering that they seemed as if they’d be wet to the touch.

There was no one standing on the doorstep. There weren’t even footprints in the snow. But she knew she had not imagined the knocks.

A very peculiar and particular prickling was rising inside her. She could tell that this feeling had been hiding among her other restlessness all along, only now it had become big enough for her to recognize its unmistakable timbre. It was like the wet, sharp shimmering of the stars overhead, but in her chest.

Magic, it whispered. Magic is near.

It had been a very long time since she’d felt that call.

And that was when she saw him.

In the deep blue shadow near the castle wall stood a hunched figure, although he couldn’t have been the one who knocked—there were no footprints leading from him to the door. He was paused in the act of tugging one of his gloves off, absolutely motionless, hoping she wouldn’t notice him.

This was no visitor. This was an intruder.

“Hey!” she called. “I can see you!”

The figure didn’t move.

Merida would have preferred her bow and arrow for effect, but she used what she had in her hand already: bread. With her perfect aim, she railed it right off the figure’s head.

“Hey!” she said again. “Announce yourself, stranger!”

He turned his head. What was his expression? Merida couldn’t see; it was hidden in shadow.

Merida snatched up a weapon; the closest to hand was a fireplace shovel. She crossed the courtyard in several massive strides. “I said, announce yourself!”

The stranger’s voice was scornful. “You can’t hurt me—ow!”

Merida hit him right behind his knees, a trick she’d learned not from battle training, but rather from her fiendish brother Hubert, who’d hidden for weeks beneath the Great Hall table, perfecting the technique on Merida and anyone else foolish enough to wander close.

It worked just as well on mysterious strangers. He fell to his knees. His gloved hands disappeared right up to his wrists in the snow. He shot Merida a single, astonished look.

“You can’t stop me,” he told her.

This was not at all the reply she’d been expecting. “Stop you from what?”

But he simply took off running.

Around DunBroch, Merida was considered hot-tempered. She felt this was unfair and only because she was a girl, as she had three redheaded triplet brothers who were far more likely to pop off in anger than she was, and they never got called hot-tempered. What she was, she felt, was quick-witted. She didn’t take a lot of time to put her reactions together. Sure, sometimes that reaction was a blunt reply, but sometimes, that was what was deserved. For instance, sometimes you were a stranger in the night and what was needed was a fireplace shovel to the back of the knee and then a pursuit.

In the back of her head, she heard a tiny voice that sounded a lot like her mother’s saying, Merida, princesses do not chase strangers barefoot through the night!

Merida narrowed her eyes.

She gave chase.





MERIDA realized very quickly this was no ordinary pursuit.