Bravely(49)

This was the young man Merida been thinking she’d have to avoid? This was no potential suitor. This was a living statue.

Slowly, Rory lifted his gaze. Probably he had been handsome at one point, but it was hard to tell now, since his hair and beard hung limply around him and his skin was gray.

“We’re looking at the books,” he said. His voice had a recited, monotonous quality to it, as if instead of holding a conversation, he were repeating a poem or hymn he had heard many times before, one he was bored of. “We’re looking for those funds. We’ll get back to you. Take a table or a chair or sculpture if you need satisfaction before then. I’ll find you in the ledger. I’ll find you.”

“Rory, I’m not here about business!” Fergus said, slamming his big hands on the desk on either side of the book. “We’re here to have a royal visit of revelry and catching up! Don’t you remember me from that summer of fireworks? Where is your mother? Where are your kinsmen? Why is there no music, why is there no light?”

“There’s no light?” echoed Rory. He looked puzzled, and then he said in a dull tone, “We can’t afford it. We’ve had to give it away. Made a mistake in the ledger. Must have. Something marked down wrong. We owe everyone everything. Just take what you think you deserve.”

Coming round the desk, Fergus lifted Rory to his feet. “Get up, man. I don’t know what’s happened to you, but this is no way to handle it. Lead us to your father.”

Without even a whisper at this physical treatment, Rory just did as Fergus asked, his body stiff and unpracticed with movement. As they headed back into the hall, his eyes glanced off Merida and she shivered at what she saw. There was something flat and reflective about them, like an animal’s eyes seen by torchlight, and when the light passed, nothing remained but that dull apathy. He didn’t seem at all surprised that they were leading horses through his father’s halls. Instead he just trudged ahead of them without looking over his shoulder to ensure they were following.

Merida put her free arm around Hamish as they walked. She could feel his fast little heartbeat where her hand was against his neck, and it matched hers. Her mind wasn’t properly afraid, but her body was nevertheless prepping for an unseen battle.

They walked and walked, following Rory down vast hallways with soaring roofs. This castle! The tower they had seen was only one corner of it. The rest continued in great sweeping levels down toward the sea, which Merida could see out the windows. This dark maze must have been very grand indeed when Fergus was here, filled with hundreds of soldiers and traders and craftspeople and courtiers. They passed a room where children dozed with a nursemaid, and a room with a few elderly businesspeople slumped over ledgers, and yet more rooms of courtiers leaned against cushions and dusty chairs.

None of them lifted their gaze to the DunBroch party as they passed.

Eventually, they found themselves outside on a great stone patio that overlooked the sea far below. It was nearly as large as the entire village of beehive houses, and was paved with beautifully painted tiles. An arching stone handrail protected occupants from the steep drop of the rocky cliffs. At the end of the patio, hundreds of precarious carved steps led down to a white shoreline. There, half-sunk merchant ships were visible in the sand, as well as a handful of old rowboats. Over all of it was the smell of the sea. Not the clean, saline smell Merida had picked up when they’d first approached the ocean, but the rotten, mouth-puckering odor of spoiled fish.

Hamish took in a sharp, uneven breath. He’d never seen the ocean before today.

Rory had stopped. He passed a hand slowly over his temple, eyes confused and vague. “I’m sorry, I misremembered where…”

“Boy,” Fergus said, his voice worried. He put his hand on Rory’s arm. “Don’t lose hope.”

There was something so touching in the way Fergus spoke that both Hamish and Merida stared at him. It had been so long since Merida had heard her father not being blustery and loud and big and overtly cheery that she had convinced herself that he had always been that way. But now she remembered that there used to be more to him. Not a softer side, exactly, but a more complex side, like what had been slowly unfolding as they took this journey.

Hamish made his way over to him as he continued to try to break through Rory’s stupor. He was so clearly fascinated by the change in his father that Merida tried to remember if Hamish was old enough to ever remember the Fergus of her youth.

But before she could ponder it too deeply, she realized they were no longer alone on the patio.

A figure had just climbed up the last step of the precarious staircase from the shore far below. The ocean wind tore at his cloak, his tunic, and his mane of light hair.

On his hands he wore gloves with oxblood-red stitching.

As Merida watched, he took one off and pressed his bare palm flat onto the stone railing.





MERIDA cried, “What are you doing here?”

Feradach’s face was shocked.

He tore his hand away from the stone railing as if it were burning hot, but they both could see that his work was done: there was a deep handprint in the stone. In a voice completely unlike any she’d heard him use before, he snarled, “Get out now!”

And then things started to go very wrong.

This was nothing like the destruction of Keithneil that Merida had seen when she pressed her hand against the stone there. The disease and famine had taken weeks to ruin the villagers.