Bravely(52)

Merida couldn’t lift that rubble, but Feradach—he was immortal; he was magic. His hand could leave a print in stone. He could’ve saved them, all the people of Kinlochy, if he’d wanted to.

But he just looked at the outstretched hands of the dying people, the fire brightening and dimming his skin as it feasted.

One day, his face might be one of theirs instead.





THINGS were different at DunBroch after that.

Really, Fergus was different after that, and he was so big, such a huge part of DunBroch, that everything else had to be different to conform to the new shape of him. Normally he would have blustered and storied about what had happened at Kinlochy. Ballads and songs, epics and folklore, dramatic rescues and tragic escapes.

But he didn’t bluster this time. He wasn’t loud at all. Instead he simply went straight to work upon their return. He tore down all the tattered banners they’d been meaning to mend and rolled up all the tapestries that hadn’t been cleaned in ages. He brought in men from the fields to help him move all the furniture from the smoky common room to the music room, and then got yet more men to climb up into the chimney to find out what the source of the blockage was in the first place, and then he put yet more men to work on replacing the old roof shingles.

For weeks he barely said anything at all. But all the noise he would’ve normally made was replaced by the noise of industry. Everyone else complained of the soot and the hammering and the commotion, but he was relentless. The stables were to be cleaned and decluttered from peg to peg, he ordered. The wall guard towers were to be weeded and scrubbed down and opened up. The trough system that brought water from the loch to the castle was to be unclogged and made workable once more.

He never said it out loud, but the message was clear: DunBroch was never going to meet the fate he had seen at Kinlochy.

But as DunBroch looked better and better, Merida felt worse and worse.

She spent as much time as she could out in the games meadow—which admittedly looked splendid now that Fergus had had all the targets repaired and repainted—shooting arrow after arrow. But her mind never got still.

“You should ask the Ladies of Peace how to improve your sadness,” Leezie said, coming out with a dinner for her at one point (a touching gesture, even if she had snacked on it a bit during the walk there).

“I’m not sad,” Merida said. “I’m cranky! There’s so much noise. I haven’t had a second’s quiet to think over this year since coming back.”

She was a refugee from the noise, which had spread now even to Merida’s tower. Fergus had decided he didn’t care at all for the look of the wooden handrailing on the stairs to her room, and it was all being ripped out and reconstructed. At the same time, he’d gotten a craftsman to come from Keithneil to build Merida a new bed. Carved, like all the spoons on her mantel.

Merida knew she should feel grateful, but she felt haunted and off-kilter. She hid herself away from the sound as best she could and wrote a letter to the Dásachtach explaining that she had visited Kinlochy but it was for naught, because Kinlochy was gone. She walked the letter down to the blackhouse village to Comyn the messenger, and then she returned to the noisy castle. She went back out to shoot some more arrows. She tossed restlessly at night.

It felt like everything was changing so fast, which was what she wanted, but at the same time, she felt like she had never left that collapsing Kinlochy corridor. She couldn’t find solid ground to stand on. She’d returned home and home was gone.

“Ah, but it’s nice to see your father with his purpose again, isn’t?” Elinor remarked. She’d persuaded Merida to come with her, Leezie, and Ila to “take some air” down to the holy well, which was a longish walk from the castle, far enough to be out of the earshot of construction.

It was a lovely day. Generally it rained every day in DunBroch, but not all day, and it had already gotten its misting out of the way that morning. Everything looked bright and blown out in the way things get in late summer. All the grass had gone to seed, all the flowers were tall and weedy, all the tree leaves stretched as far as they could go toward the high, high sky, everything was as green as it could manage before the weather would begin to turn to plunge the world back into the winter dark. As they walked, pheasants flushed from the grass and deer bounded into the woods. It was all very idyllic. Good air to take.

“Can’t he find a quieter purpose?” Merida said. “Or do just one room or tower at a time? It’s madness! He’s bitten off too much! It’ll never be done by the bad weather.”

The harrowing trip had been enough to get Merida speaking to her mother again, but because there had been no proper making up and sorting out, she still felt sour, and all her words came out petulant, no matter how she meant them to sound.

“You’ve not seen your father when he’s got the bit between his teeth,” Elinor said warmly, as if Merida had been pleasant. “When he gets it in his head to motivate people, he can move mountains.”

“And he has,” Leezie said. “Did you see they started paving the courtyard? First stones down today. I’m going to chalk runes on it.”

“Whatever will we do without all that mud tracked in?” Elinor murmured, and Merida could tell that she was happy.

Why couldn’t Merida be happy? Fergus had surely changed. Hamish, too. Merida would have expected the confirmation of his worst fears to make him more afraid, but instead, it was as if now that he’d seen how bad it could be, the shadows of the upstairs halls no longer had the same bite. He stood a little straighter. He crept a little less. He was braver every day, and she knew Feradach would see it when he came to check her work.