Bravely(43)

“I’ll go on the next one,” Elinor had said, right before they left.

Of all of the things she could have said, this one stung Merida the most. She wouldn’t go, of course. She was never going to go. Why did she keep saying it, if she didn’t mean it? And if she meant it, why didn’t she do it?

Merida had left without answering.

“What a glorious country, what a noble land!” Fergus continued.

“It is gorgeous,” Merida admitted.

She was annoyed at the delay in their departure, but it was true that they were now riding through the most tender version of Scotland. These long northern summer days stretched out forever and ever, turning into a short gray night for just a few hours before rolling right back into another bright day. The trees were every color of green: the warm ashes, the blue pines. Birds were everywhere. Since they’d left the castle, they’d encountered dramatic capercaillies with their high-spread tails, V-tailed kites, long-legged corncrakes, dire-faced rooks, and cheery little swallows.

Unlike the trip to Ardbarrach, this time they moved swiftly, with no pony cart to slow them down. They didn’t even have any attendants or guards. Traveling with her father, Merida required no maid for propriety, and Fergus didn’t need a guide to tell him how to get to Kinlochy. He had left his soldiers guarding DunBroch and urged Merida and Hamish to dress austerely on the road, not as royals. He didn’t want to draw any more attention than was required to the fact that the king was away from his castle and his queen.

So they rode swiftly, unadorned with royal trappings, through the best days Scotland had to offer, toward an exciting city Fergus loved.

Merida could not complain, really.

An enormous shadow fell across the Midge’s neck.

“Look!” Merida cried, and pointed overhead. An enormous white-tailed eagle, big as one of the triplets, swooped low. It got close enough that the Midge, always eager for an excuse to spook, skittered sideways, and that Merida could pick out every one of its brown wing feathers and see its great yellow beak, which was parted opportunistically.

“What a champion. Fellow king. King of the air. You have the sky, fellow, and I’ll keep this down here, right? Hold on to the saddle, Hamish!” Fergus laughed. “You’d be a tasty snack.”

Hamish squeaked in fear.

“It’s a joke,” Merida told him. “Hamish. It’s a joke.”

This was one thing Merida probably could complain about. Just a bit. Hamish had already been frightened once that day by Brionn leaping out of the brush suddenly. He’d been riding Humor, a pony who generally couldn’t be bothered to be frightened, but Hamish had screamed with such convincing fear that Humor had thoroughly believed him and taken off galloping. Merida had had to fetch him back. Now Hamish rode in front of Fergus on Sirist while Merida led Humor behind the Midge, which was part of why they could move so quickly. There was no pausing to make sure Hamish was keeping his seat or steering his pony; Humor was just an unburdened pack pony at this point. There had been a time in the past when Fergus would have gotten quite cross over all this, but now Hamish had been this way long enough that Fergus had accepted that this was just Hamish.

The short list of what Hamish was afraid of: everything.

Hamish was afraid of the dark. He was afraid of loud noises. He was afraid of weasels and wolves. He was afraid of insects with stingers. He was afraid of earwigs, which didn’t have stingers, but looked like they might. He was afraid of getting thorns stuck in his skin. He was afraid of getting food stuck in his throat. He was afraid of heights. He was afraid of depths. He was afraid of thunder. He was afraid of lightning. He was afraid of large groups of people. He was afraid of small groups of people. He was afraid of Harris.

These were all things Merida could mostly understand. These were all things that could possibly hurt or startle. She could try to comfort him about all of these fears. But Hamish was also afraid of things that she couldn’t understand: concepts and situations that didn’t seem to have any particular terror to them. He was afraid of the third stair that led up to the music room, so he always skipped it. He was afraid of the suit of armor displayed on the second-floor balcony over the Great Hall, so he always cried quietly if asked to fetch something from the second floor. He was afraid of how the swans left the loch every summer to spend the year elsewhere, and hid in his room for days after the last one had gone. He was afraid of turning the last page of a book, and so never knew how any text ended unless it was read to him.

Merida didn’t know how to comfort someone with these fears.

The strange thing was that she didn’t think he’d always been afraid; he’d just gotten afraid. And even stranger was that she couldn’t think of anything that had happened to make him afraid. It felt like he should be less afraid, not more, because his life was so safe.

Instead, he was afraid of eagles.

He had never been carried away by an eagle.

“Dad,” Merida asked pensively, as they rode along the well-worn path to the east. “When did Mum stop going places?”

“What,” blustered Fergus. “She goes places.”

Merida did not dignify this with a response.

“Your mother likes the finer things in life,” Fergus said eventually. “Traveling doesn’t always offer those.”

“She took me to the shielings,” Merida protested. “There’s no creature comforts there.”