Bravely(32)

“Ila has the Sight?” Merida echoed. She didn’t know why this seemed so surprising. Possibly because magic felt wild and unpredictable, and every time she saw Ila, she seemed just as she had when Merida had first seen her on Christmas Day: tidy, diligent, put together. She seemed quite unlikely to find herself following will o’ the wisps into the woods and getting herself into trouble. It would be like imagining Elinor having the Sight. “How do you know?”

“I sensed it deep within her and asked her,” Leezie said rapturously. “It was the first Sign. I think I’m learning.”

“Learning to be gullible,” Harris said. His tone had reached new levels of condescending judgment. “Only children believe in the Sight, and you’re old, Leezie. Old. Old enough to be married. Old. Do they have a religion for old people? That’s the one you’re after.”

Without any further warning, Leezie burst into tears. She fled the room. Her wails were audible as she proceeded down the hall.

Merida allowed this to be the excuse she needed to throttle Harris.

“You jam-handed scab!” she roared, and threw herself at him.

Really, she’d been wanting to throttle him for days. His attitude had already been terrible by the time she returned for the wedding, but now it was simply unbearable. Neither Harris nor Hamish had said anything about Hubert’s absence, but they’d been quarreling constantly. The triplets had fought before, but with Hubert involved, it usually ultimately exploded back into hilarity. But without him, it just went on and on. Hamish got more fraught. And Harris got more superior.

“Merida, that’s not princess-like!” Elinor called from deeper in the castle, managing, as she often did, to somehow sense that Merida was doing something she found disagreeable.

It was for naught, anyway. Even though Harris sounded snotty as a middle-aged lord, in the end, he was still a younger brother, and he had that secret talent of younger brothers to scramble and skitter away after only a few seconds of ear twisting.

After the commotion died down, she noticed that Hamish had been snuggled in his bed all along, his blanket around his shoulders as he drew on some already marked-up parchment.

“He had an ear-twisting coming,” she told Hamish.

“Yes,” Hamish agreed.

“Do you want to go see the passages?” she asked.

He shuddered. “No, they sound dark.”

Merida sighed noisily.



The gray frigid weather dragged on, the wind ceaseless and irritable against the walls. Hamish and Harris kept fighting. Leezie kept weeping. Elinor and Fergus kept not talking about Kinlochy because the time wasn’t right.

I’ve ruined things, Merida thought miserably. I changed one thing and now it’s all gone wrong.

But then the weather broke, quite beautifully, in the way it did sometimes at DunBroch, and just like that, it was spring. It was still frigid overnight, but the daylight sky became blue and deep instead of white and the trees got that warm color to them that meant buds were coming, and birds suddenly became brilliant and enthused in the mornings, which started coming earlier and earlier.

With the good weather came visitors, and DunBroch found itself hosting three in quick succession.

The first visitor was the pigeon Elinor had sent off to Ardbarrach at the beginning of the year. It returned to the dovecote with a letter from Hubert attached to its leg, for which it was given a grand treat of a buttered bun and some new young lettuce. Aileen had just made custards with the very earliest of spring berries, so the entire family gathered in the common room to hear the letter while puckering their lips over the barely ripe fruit, a tantalizing promise of what spring was to bring.

“‘Dear Mother and Father and Merida and Hamish and Hubert and Leezie, I recommend me to you,’” Elinor read from her chair in the common room, blinking through the smoke.

“That doesn’t sound like him,” Hamish protested.

“This is how you open a letter, my love,” Elinor said. “Look, it’s his handwriting.”

She turned the letter around for Hamish and Harris to see it for themselves, but the triplets waved their hands for her to simply go on reading. At Elinor’s insistence, all the family knew how to read and write (except Leezie, who said it was too hard because the “letters moved round” when she wasn’t watching them), but Elinor remained the most proficient. She had come from an educated family and had been taught quite young by good tutors in France; she could read and write in a half dozen languages. She was proficient enough that she could read aloud at normal speaking speed, as she did now, or she could write her Pasch letter to the villagers and hold a conversation at the same time, or play any of the word games they had in the cabinets that no one else was really good at. Fergus was very proud of her ability and sometimes had her read to him in the evenings, although he usually fell asleep during these tales.

She read on: “‘I am doing very well. You would not believe how strong I am or how well I can use the long sword.’”

“Ardbarrach is a place for sheep,” Harris sniffed from his seat on the floor cushion. “Hubert always did like being told what to do.”

“Shhh,” Hamish said.

“Shhh yourself.”

“I said shhh first.”

“And I said it second.”

Merida, annoyed that Elinor had not yelled at her brothers, took the liberty of doing it herself. “Would you two stop being such right scunners!”