Bravely(4)

One moment she was chasing a man, his cloak twirling.

And then she was chasing a deer.

Or something like a deer, something large as a deer, its flanks silvery in the starlight as it leapt over the bracken into the snow-light woods.

No, she thought, she was mistaken. It was a fox, surely. She saw its tail whipping gray through that black-and-white landscape.

A wolf, ears pricked as it cleared a creek.

A stretched, lanky hare, incredibly spry.

A sinewy mink, teeth flashing in the moonlight.

A floppy rabbit pillowing into the brush.

Oh, she thought. It is magic after all.

Scottish magic was not much different than Scottish wildcats: both were pretty rare, and a person could go their whole life without encountering either, if one wasn’t paying attention. Most people paid magic (and wildcats) as much thought as they did songbirds or fruit that grew in funny shapes; there were more concrete things that required their attention. Some people didn’t even believe in magic (or wildcats).

Merida believed. She had to. A few years before, it had called to her, she had answered it, a world of trouble ensued, lessons were learned. It had turned out for the best, but ultimately, she understood that the world of humans and the world of magic were separate for good reason. They followed different rules. Her mother had told her there were two kinds of people with the Sight: people who were interested in magic, and people magic was interested in. After the last experience, Merida had decided she was certainly not the first.

Yet here she was again, chasing magic through the woods.

Could she turn back?

You can’t stop me, he’d said.

She had to know what he was doing in the courtyard in the middle of the night.

But it was clear she was never going to catch him in a one-on-one chase, so she turned her attention to trapping him instead. This was her DunBroch. She knew the low boggy areas and the sudden rises. She knew where the mossy boulders became untraversable and where the trees were knit too close for fast travel. She knew the way to a treacherous burnside, a place where the river cut through the ground so swiftly that the banks were steep and unforgiving. Impassable.

A good trap.

The two of them angled and circled, bounded and shifted. Her shimmering quarry thought he was being pursued. But he was being driven. He fled right to the field that ended at the burnside, and not a moment too soon, because her lungs were bursting with this cold air and her feet stinging from running over the rough ground.

Drawing to a halt, hand pressed to the stitch in her side, she watched the stranger, now vaguely hound-shaped, leaping away across the field. Over the thump of her heartbeat in her ears, she could just barely hear the complicated sound of the cold river charging fast in the burn beyond, and she doubted he could hear it at all over his progress through the dry grass.

Sure enough, the burnside took the stranger by surprise.

He slid, slid, slid, legs wheeling, then: stopped. Just in time, right at the edge.

Slowly, he turned to face her.

Now he was neither a stag nor a fox, hare nor rabbit, mink nor wolf. He was a comely young man with a blond mane of hair like a wild pony’s. His heavy cloak, powdered with snow, was held shut by a brooch engraved with a tree with both the branches and the roots visible. He had no visible weapon.

“You’re—you’re trapped,” Merida gasped. She was still too out of breath to sound commanding, but she gave the fireplace shovel a threatening sort of twirl. “I’ve seen two cows drown in this river, and they weren’t wearing a cloak to drag them down. Now: who are you?”

His gaze dropped to her bare feet, which were bright red from the cold, then back to her makeshift weapon.

“I am not a thing you fight,” he said. “Why do you think you can?”

“Why were you in our courtyard?” Merida shot back.

“How did you know I was there?”

“You knocked!”

“Knocked? I certainly did not.”

“Someone knocked!”

“It wasn’t me!”

“Why did you run from me?”

“Why did you run after me?”

“I thought you knocked!”

“I wouldn’t knock! You weren’t supposed to see me doing my work.”

“What work?”

He didn’t answer.

With a great pwang against the cold rock, Merida knocked the head of the shovel right off, exposing the rather pointier metal end. She directed this pointy end at him. Not like a sword, but like an arrow without a bow, drawn back and resting on her shoulder, waiting for her to send it right through his eye. “I demand you tell me what your business was at DunBroch.”

The stranger shook his head as if he were clearing cobwebs from it. “No. No, this is a distraction. This is a trick.” He didn’t seem to be talking to her. “I told myself I’d be wiser.”

He leapt neatly over the edge into the roaring burn below.

Just like that, not a bit of hesitation; he’d never been trapped at all. He had simply let himself be stopped out of what—curiosity? And now he was gone.

Maybe she should just go home. Maybe it would be all right.

But the knock, she thought.

It hadn’t been the stranger, according to him, and she couldn’t imagine why he would lie about that. If not him, then who? Someone who wanted her to see him out there, to catch him in the act of—what? You can’t stop me, he’d said. She had to know. That’s all there was to it.