Bravely(65)

MAGIC was a very strange thing.

There would have been no way for Merida and Leezie to carry Feradach far in the body in which Merida saw him. Merida and Leezie were plenty strong, but the hills were steep and the woods thick.

But whatever Leezie saw him as was obviously quite small, because after they realized Merida could not carry him, Leezie did. And because magic was a strange thing, Merida saw him both as the Feradach she knew, but also as the Feradach Leezie must see. Just as the first night when she had chased him, he seemed to shift forms in the moonlight. When Leezie paused to shake out her arms and focus on where her Sight told her they were meant to take him, he appeared to Merida as the blond-maned young man she’d met. When Leezie carried him, he was a too-thin redheaded toddler with a pinched expression and permanently worried mouth that reminded Merida uncomfortably of Hamish.

In both forms he was clearly dying.

Merida tried to push down the bad feeling inside her by telling herself that the redheaded toddler was a child he’d killed, that was why Feradach had his face, but it was a complicated truth that no longer brought her easy relief.

Dawn was beginning to lighten the sky by the time they arrived at the place he was supposed to ruin, the place he had been resisting. Even though the strange, waxy feeling that had marred the dead clearing was still hanging over everything, it was a lovely scene.

A wide river cut through the woods. Willow trees dangled their fingers into the surface as swans floated in slumber. Russet grass and tall wildflowers sighed in the breeze beside a stone hut. It looked like a home out of a story, quiet and peaceful.

As Leezie carried Feradach (Leezie was starting to complain a lot by now: “My arm is falling asleep!”), and Brionn circled anxiously around her, Merida crept to the hut. She peered inside.

It was a scholar’s hut. The walls were lined with shelves of books and scrolls. A table was spread with manuscripts, inks, quills. Books were worth a fortune; manuscripts took forever to ink. It was years of work visible just in the dim light of the window. The scholar was visible, too—a woman, to Merida’s surprise, as she knew few women who could read and write as well as her mother, certainly not enough to have done all this. But this woman clearly belonged to this scholarship, and vice versa. She was sleeping at the desk, long hair streaming over her shoulders, her ink-stained fingers not far from her quill.

Merida wondered what the scholar had done to bring Feradach to her. She wondered, too, what her fate was going to be.

All she knew was that it would be fair.

“I’m sorry,” Merida whispered, her breath fogging the window for just a moment.

“Is there someone in there?” Leezie hissed.

“Put him down here,” Merida hissed in return, intentionally not answering the question. “And then take Brionn and stand back. Far back. I don’t know how to do this part. Don’t look at me like that! You’ve done so much and I don’t want you to get hurt because of doing your job well.”

Feradach was laid beside the hut, within reach of the wall, both forms of him mingling in Merida’s view. Leezie retreated far, far back, barely visible on the edge of the river plain.

Merida took a deep breath to give herself courage, and then reached for Feradach’s glove.

“No!”

She flinched. The protest was the first indication he’d given that he had any awareness left at all.

Feradach’s eyes had come open, and Merida saw him once more as just the man she’d come to know. With effort he said, “Don’t.”

“We brought you to where you’re supposed to be,” Merida whispered angrily. “I understand what you were trying to do, but it won’t work. The balance won’t let it. I understand. Do your duty. I want you to do what you are meant to do.”

“I will,” Feradach said, voice thin and strained. “But don’t…touch…”

She realized what he meant and sat back. With agonizing slowness, he began to worry off the glove himself. It took forever, and for a while, it did not at all seem like he would ever manage it, as he had to keep letting his hands fall to his chest to rest before trying once more.

Finally, as the sun just came over the trees and lit one thousand bright diamonds of light across the wide pacific river, he managed to get one glove off. Such an ordinary hand beneath it. Such a deadly hand.

He hesitated.

Merida reached for his elbow where it was safely covered by his sleeve, and lifted his arm for him.

Feradach pressed his hand into the side of the hut. His handprint sank deep into it.

Immediately Merida felt the day right itself. The strange, waxy feeling lifted, and everything seemed sharp and near again. Even though something dreadful was surely going to happen—she had helped make sure of that—the world no longer felt dreadful.

The birds kept singing. The swans kept floating. The river kept easing by. But it was different, somehow. What must it be like, Merida thought, to have a sense of this balance at all times? No wonder Feradach felt so compelled to right it. How strange it must be to endure DunBroch’s wrongness for an entire year; no wonder he had winced at the concept of the bargain.

When Merida turned back to Feradach, she found he’d already put his glove back on and pulled himself to crouch. Already he, too, was being righted. He gazed at Merida with a most peculiar expression.

“What will happen to her?” Merida asked, to hide the fact that she, too, felt most peculiar.