Bravely(39)

“I watch them, though,” Feradach said, and she noticed that, as he did, he unconsciously fisted his destructive hands in their gloves against his body as she had seen him do before.

“Is that enough?”

“I watch them a lot. And I have a very good memory. I remember almost everything I see.” He fell silent. Then: “Will you tell me what I look like to you now?”

She glanced over at him, thinking to herself that what she was seeing was not quite a lie, but not quite true, either. It was technically his appearance, because it was the appearance he always had for her. But it was also not his appearance, because he had not had to live with the consequences or benefits of it. He had not worked for those muscles; he had never had the pain of whatever pocked that small scar on his jaw; he had not chosen to wear his hair like that; he did not know what effect his handsomeness had as he grew from boy to man. He had not earned that face. He had not lived in it. He had not been formed by it in any way.

So really it was not his appearance at all.

She shook her head.

He didn’t seem to have expected her to, because he said, “Then let us get on with showing you my work here before we lose daylight for the journey back.”

“What else is there for me to see?” She glanced at Leezie, who was still well occupied in the middle of the river with the villagers.

“Magic,” Feradach said. “Leezie’ll be all right; this will not take long.”

He led Merida back to the big old stone carved with the village’s name. The sun had progressed through the spring sky and, along with it, so had the shadow behind the stone. Now it left the opposite side of the stone clearly visible instead. In the middle of it was was a handprint, sunk deep into the rock as easily as into potter’s clay.

Feradach pointed to the handprint.

If it were anyone but Feradach standing beside Merida, she would have assumed that the handprint had been carved from the rock with tools, just the same as the name on the other side.

“I suppose that is yours,” she said.

“Aye.”

A hand that could sink straight into stone. Impossible. But so was a hand that could summon a winter storm to immediately kill a tree. Merida tried to sound light. “I would ask you to put your hand in there to prove it fits, but I assume it was a different hand you had back then?”

Feradach inclined his head. “It’s your hand that will go in there now, in any case. Put your palm flat against it.”

Merida hesitated.

“It will not hurt you,” he said. “Aside from being the truth, which can sometimes be more painful than we expect.”

Merida still hesitated.

“It is only magic,” he said.

That didn’t make her hesitate any less.

“Merida of DunBroch,” Feradach said, “of all the things I have seen you be since I have begun to watch you, a coward is not one of them.”

Merida put her hand into the print. It was not that much larger than her fingers after all. Somehow that seemed more daunting.

“Stone,” Feradach ordered, “show her what you’ve seen.”





ALMOST immediately Merida felt she was somewhere else.

Some when else.

She was looking at this stone, this river, this landscape, but there were no buildings.

The trees were vaster. The animals were stranger. The river was wilder.

Nights became days became nights again; time was moving fast before her eyes.

People moved in. First they had rudimentary camps, sleeping alongside the cattle they drove. Then they built little round bothies from rocks. They planted, fished, built more houses. Barns to save their livestock from the weather. Places to worship gods Merida didn’t recognize. Crannogs out into the river to fish from. It was a hard place to get a foothold, but they did it; they built a community.

For quite a few days and nights and days and nights this went on, and the community thrived.

Then it changed: men who looked very like the men who drilled in Ardbarrach arrived in neat rows, with impeccable weapons. Fire raged through the village, and the things the men did to the villagers were so terrible that Merida had to close her eyes. When she opened them again, the village looked quite different.

The houses were more prosperous, decorated with things from far away. There were more of them. More people altogether. A more prosperous living was being pulled from the land by many more hands, because it was obvious now that the women and children who had not been killed in the attack on the village had been pressed into slavery instead.

The land gave up more and more.

The days and the nights continued to go by. Now the ground was ugly and stubbled, bitten to nothing by too many cattle in too close quarters. Slaves grew hay and carried it on their backs to keep the cattle alive. The village didn’t even need all that they had; pails of milk spoiled in the street even as children who had never been free carried in yet more pails on their shoulders from the fields.

Every so often there was a rebellion; every so often there was a public killing in the streets and blood mingled with the spilt milk.

It turned Merida’s stomach.

Then in the night came a figure. He did not look exactly as he did now, but Merida knew who it was anyway. She recognized those gloves with their oxblood stitching, gifted to him by someone who knew how to make them stick to a god of many faces, many hands.