Bravely(38)
“I’m afraid the name would mean nothing to you,” Feradach replied. “I’m sorry.”
“She doesn’t want information,” Merida told him. “She just wants the juicy story.”
Leezie smiled breezily, looking pretty and helpless and appealing against the roses that grew around Keithneil’s marker stone. Merida wasn’t sure if this effect would work as well on a god as on mere mortals, but it must have, because Feradach said, “The story is a simple one, I’m afraid. I wanted something to cover my hands always, no matter the season, but there were no gloves that could do the job. A long time ago I met a man who had a special skill, and he said he thought he could manage the task. He made them for me and they have covered my hands ever since.”
He did not tell her why he wanted to have his hands always covered, and Leezie, to Merida’s great relief, didn’t ask. But Leezie did ask, “Does he still make them?”
Feradach folded his gloves tightly in each other. “He died shortly after he made them for me.”
There was a silence after the end of the sentence and Merida filled in the blank in her head: Feradach had killed the glove maker. It seemed obvious from the weight of the silence. From the way Feradach just stepped off and ended the story without any further niceties.
“I spoiled the story,” Leezie told Merida, “by asking for the end that came after the end. Never ask the minstrel what happened after the song ends, that’s what I’ve learned.” She looked suspiciously watery-eyed again.
“Is all this crying because you’ve changed your mind about the Cabbage?” Merida asked.
“Oh, no,” Leezie said. “It’s because I’m so sad I almost married him.”
“But you didn’t.”
“But I nearly did.”
“But you didn’t.”
Leezie sadly removed her wreath and put it on top of the Keithneil marker. She absently traced a mysterious little shape in the center of it and then burst out, “I wish I was like you, Merida. Your mum is always telling you what to do. I wish someone would just tell me what I was supposed to be doing and how to act and then just hand me the right man and tell me the right way to go instead of making me decide everything for myself.”
Merida was agog. Leezie had very succinctly summed up the source of every argument she’d ever had with her parents in the last decade. She would have traded for Leezie’s breezy, unfettered life in a moment. “Leezie, you don’t do what people tell you to do anyway.”
Both girls stared at each other for half a moment, and then they both burst out laughing. Then Leezie sang a little nonsense song as she sprang off to prance through the village.
“Well, go after her,” Feradach said. “Go look around. That’s why we’re here.”
“Ugh. I have looked around,” Merida said. “What am I looking for?”
“For what this place is like.”
Merida could not see how that would take much time at all, but rules were rules, she supposed. The Cailleach had told her she had to see his work, and even if she couldn’t understand it just yet, this was his work.
And Merida and Leezie actually had a brilliant time.
Even though the village was not far from DunBroch, the villagers had only the vaguest understanding of Merida’s being their princess, which made it better, since they didn’t bother with all the bowing and ma’aming; they just treated Merida and Leezie as two visiting young women with means. The girls got to see new lambs and new kids. Merida bought a scarf for Leezie, and in return, the weavers taught them a new weaving song. Merida made a bet with some of the older boys about who could shoot an arrow farther and truer and she won a carved wooden frog for her efforts, which she then lost almost at once betting on a game of nine-men’s morris. Leezie conspired to learn a flower language from some of the older girls and wrote coded poetry with assorted bouquets that made them all giggle.
At one point the villagers took Leezie and Merida out to see the old pointy-roofed structure on the crannog, an artificial island built into rivers. For all her traveling, Merida had never seen one in person, and she and Leezie took their time exploring it. Leezie, clumsy and vague, slipped off the edge and right into an empty boat floating alongside. She flailed prettily in the boat, gently moving downstream, until villagers—moved by the universal urge to help her—plunged into the river to retrieve her. Then they went a step further, everyone taking to the other boats to join her and teach her how to steer. This pleased everyone. Leezie loved to be helped; people loved to help her.
Feradach and Merida stood on the shore, watching this spectacle, and it occurred to Merida then as he stood there, the strong spring breeze lifting his mane of hair and crinkling his eyes, that he liked Leezie, that he liked people. He had brought Merida and Leezie here to admire this place, because he found it admirable.
But this didn’t make sense to Merida. His entire purpose was to destroy.
She asked, “Am I the only person who sees you the same every time I see you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Because of the bargain?”
“I assume so.”
“No wonder you don’t understand family,” she said. “How can you, if no one sees you as the same more than once? Apart from the Cailleach, I suppose, but does she count? You can’t ever have a conversation that lasts more than one day. You can’t fight with anyone for longer than a single encounter. You can’t ever be in love. No one can miss you. You don’t know what it is to miss someone, either. You don’t know anything about being human.”