Bravely(55)

She wondered what Hubert was doing. He had sent several more letters about how he intended to return home with Gille Peter and Angus for Christmas, which was bittersweet for Merida. If she didn’t succeed, that would mean he’d arrive home just in time for destruction. She supposed Feradach would find it easier to do his job that way.

Merida pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. She had been traveling all year again, and yet she felt like she still needed to go somewhere and do something. This standing and waiting felt terrible. She didn’t know what was wrong with her, or what she wanted. She wanted to feel like she was doing something. But this was something. This was living, surely. Why couldn’t she just settle down and enjoy the few weeks she had here at beautiful DunBroch before the third journey? Why did she need to move again?

From her vantage point, she realized she could see Harris. He was a small figure down below, outside the wall, picking his way between the trees along the loch. A few yards behind him, Brionn tagged along, tail high, weaving back and forth in an aimless way.

Merida wondered what he was doing. Harris had somehow become even more irascible as the castle was being rebuilt. He always had a cutting or scathing remark about how he would have done this project differently or how that project didn’t make any substantial difference to their lives, so why bother. When he wasn’t sniping about the renovations, he was picking at Hamish or burying himself in a book. Merida couldn’t remember the last time she’d had any conversation with just him, let alone one of a meaningful variety.

He would have to come along to Eilean Glan. She knew it would be a fight. Why? Because everything was a fight with him now.

As if he could feel her eyes on him, Harris suddenly turned to look back up at the castle. The tiny little silhouette of him shielded its eyes as it scanned up the wall.

But as he stood there, posture erect and suspicious, she realized he wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he was gazing a little bit down the wall, and even from here, she saw him shake his head at whatever he saw before continuing through the woods.

Merida turned her head to see what he had been looking at on the wall, if anything.

What she saw, several yards down the wall, at the top of the next guard tower, was Feradach.

Her stomach twisted.

He was a dark, still figure in that long twilight, and it was easy to remember how he looked in Kinlochy, the embers lifting around him instead of the golden motes.

He was closing the distance between them.

How can you be so cruel?

I am not cruel, Merida. I am nature.

“Go away,” Merida told him. He stopped an arm’s length away, his hands folded neatly in their gloves. He looked more like the Feradach she remembered from the trip to Keithneil now and less like the silhouetted god of Kinlochy, but she felt no friendlier toward him. “I have no interest in talking to you, and you have no business here yet. If I had my bow right now I would shoot you right through the eye; I don’t care if you can be killed or not. I would do it for the satisfaction of pinning your face to the ground with an arrow.”

“Is that fair?” Feradach said. “Is that fair just because you saw me doing what you know I do? Do you judge the Cailleach for calling up the seeds out of the ground? Do I judge you for what you are trying to do with your family?”

“I don’t give a fig if it’s fair or not, actually. I don’t want to look at you. I don’t want to see your face and picture you standing by those people as they burned to death!” She spit out the final words.

“What would you have me do?”

“I don’t care what you do. I just don’t want to look at you.” She was angry to feel tears prickling at her eyes again, so she spun on her heel and marched back toward the guard tower she’d climbed up to get there. She had a horrible suspicion she had another big cry in her like the one she’d had by the well, and she couldn’t stand to do that in front of him.

“Merida, I have to come here,” Feradach said to her back. “The Cailleach says I must. That is part of the bargain, and not one I invented. And you—you have to see my work, too.”

Merida turned back around. “Don’t you think I’ve seen enough of your work this season?”

“You weren’t supposed to be there. At Kinlochy.”

“How could you not know that?”

“I don’t know everything,” Feradach said. “I only know the balance, unless I choose to go looking for answers, same as you. I don’t track your every movement.”

“You tracked me on my journey to Ardbarrach.”

“That was different. That was the beginning. I was curious. I wanted to see…” He looked away, down the edge of the bracken-covered slope outside the wall, all the way down through the willow trees to the glittering gold water of the loch visible between them, the silhouettes of the DunBroch geese moving in the forever-dim summer evening. There was no sign of Harris or Brionn now. “Before, I made sure to choose the ruin I knew you would understand to show you. I chose ruin that was in the past, so you could see what happened after. I knew you could not see the value in it as it happened; how could you? Only a monster would love the destruction for its own sake. There is no glory in ruin; it only matters because of what comes after. I did not mean for you to see that. I do not know why you were there. Of all the places. Of all the times.”