Bravely(60)

The hand of Feradach was all over the situation, minus the visible handprint.

Put together, it made sense.

But it also didn’t make sense.

Feradach hadn’t done a thing to save those dying people in Kinlochy. But he’d moved rivers to make sure Hamish’s change was well and truly complete before Merida left for Eilean Glan.

Why?

But deep down, she knew why. Just as clearly as she remembered the horrors of Kinlochy, she remembered Feradach’s shock when he saw her there at Kinlochy. His downcast face as she’d shouted at him on the wall. He knew what she could bear seeing and what she couldn’t, and he’d tried his best to shield her and failed.

What could he have said to Merida to change her feelings about how it had all happened?

Nothing.

But Feradach could do his part to help save one of her brothers. From him.

It was an odd little gift from an apologetic god.





IN THE end, Elinor astonished all of them.

All those days of planning on Merida’s part, all her worries that Elinor would back out at the last minute, all her preparations to hopefully keep Elinor comfortable enough to forget the woes of traveling—it turned out to be for nothing.

Because when Merida, Harris, and Leezie assembled to leave the following morning, they discovered that the courtyard was absolutely full to madness. There were horses, people, and carts everywhere. Soldiers milled. Women hurried by with supplies. Aileen bellowed orders.

And at the helm of this ship of moving parts was Elinor, queen of DunBroch, looking as effortlessly regal as she did while doing anything else. Only what she had done in this case was, for the past several weeks, quietly put together an enormous retinue of the shape and quality that would be appropriate for a royal traveling through the countryside.

This was not Merida’s slow trundle through the winter countryside with a pony cart. This was not Fergus’s off-the-cuff trip with two of his children. This was suitable for diplomacy, for looking at from the outside.

Elinor had assembled a contingent of soldiers to protect them from bandits and neighbors who might mean them ill (these were the soldiers who’d kept Merida from her game field). She’d hired a group of hunters to protect them from wolves (why hadn’t Fergus done that!). She’d had Aileen coordinate a mobile staff of women to carry and prep food. Stable boys stood at alert beside the pack ponies and the supply carts. Laundresses and their apprentices finished pressing the tools of their trade into rush baskets and wooden crates. An entire cadre of scouts had saddled up to check out the way ahead and set up the sleeping tents (tents! What luxury while traveling). There were ponies to carry heather mattresses and ponies to carry heather ale. Ponies to carry all the things they wanted to take with them and ponies to carry all the things they might want to bring back. At Elinor’s side during all of these preparations was catlike Ila, smiling her private smile and holding Elinor’s journals and ledgers for her.

Merida would have been more put out that all her own effort was for naught if she hadn’t been so impressed. She didn’t think there were that many people still even living in DunBroch. All the hustle-bustle in front of the newly renovated DunBroch made the entire castle seem brand-new.

Ardbarrach could not call this the work of a rural pretender, she thought.

She hadn’t known her mother could be like this.

“That’s my traveling queen,” Fergus said. “Don’t get into trouble.”

“I’ll be back before you know it,” Elinor said. She looked not at all like Merida was used to seeing her, but rather pink and flustered and excited. “And you’ll have Hubert back here in just a few days, just in time for the Hunt for the Unnamed.”

This last bit was perhaps the biggest, boldest evidence that Fergus had changed. There was quite a bit of hunting at DunBroch. They hunted for food: rabbits, deer, grouse. They hunted for fur, and to cull the weasel population lest they devour all the eggs in the henhouses. They hunted for protection, against the wolves, on the years when the mercenaries didn’t come to collect money for pelts. They hunted for justice: a few years back, a man down in the village was accused of smashing his brother-in-law’s head in with a rock, which was not ideal, and then a few months later he stabbed a bunch of villagers with a sword and then ran off into the woods shouting that he was going to raise an army of fairies to kill everyone else, which was even less ideal, and finally the sister came to DunBroch in hopes of bringing him to heel. Fergus put together a hunting party of several hundred men and eventually the villain was found in the bracken and brought to trial.

But for the longest time, the most famous hunting at DunBroch was the Hunt for the Unnamed, an annual tradition that had dwindled only to memory over the past few years. Neighboring kings and their men arrived, and for one day and one night, they hunted through the forest with their dogs, crawling all over and making a huge racket. They never returned with a carcass. They returned, instead, with stories of the Unnamed. Each year it seemed to have grown. It was the size of a pony, then the size of a horse, then the size of an ox. It had ten points then twenty then forty. Its rack was like an oak tree’s branches spied over a hill. No animal had existed like this. How cunningly the stag had evaded them this time, jumping over a fence, a boulder, the moon.

It had taken Merida a bit of time to realize that they never intended to catch the stag. It was possible the stag didn’t even exist, as men had been holding the Hunt for the Unnamed ever since she was small, and surely the stag would be old and feeble by now, eating gruel and complaining about the days of its youth rather than leaping over moons. But it didn’t matter. The point was the hunt. The finding. Not the catching.