Bravely(67)

Finally they came to a small room where just three girls were bent over worktables, laboring with intense concentration. One was carving. One was painting. Another was carefully fitting together intricately shaped pieces of wood. To Merida’s delight, she realized they were constructing a Brandubh board.

The older woman who sat in this room with them wasn’t carving alongside them; she was writing in fluid, familiar handwriting, each letter precise and lovely. Even though she was quite old, she had a younger woman’s posture. That surety, that dignity, that strength. She still exuded power. She had a thin, plain circlet of gold pinned into her hair; she must have been the queen of this place, if this place had queens.

“Máel Muire?” Elinor said, in a very different sort of voice than Merida had ever heard her use.

“Elinor, my child,” the woman said. “I got your letter only the other day, but I didn’t dare hope you would follow it.”

Standing, she held her arms out. She and Merida’s mother clasped hands tightly and Elinor’s eyes dropped down in a very abashed way and Merida realized—

Her mother had grown up here.

As Elinor and the woman talked in low voices, Merida did her best to piece together the time line in her head. She knew that Elinor’s parents had died before Merida was born, but somehow, from the half-heard stories, she had always thought it was when Elinor was already queen of DunBroch, not that long before Merida was born. She hadn’t imagined it might have been when Elinor was a girl. She hadn’t imagined that Elinor might have been an orphan.

Suddenly she thought of how quickly Elinor had taken in Leezie. How quickly she had taken to training up Ila.

But her mother had come from a royal family, she’d had tutors in France—

“Merida,” Elinor said. “Merida.”

“You never told her,” Máel Muire said.

Elinor said softly, “It’s not that I was ashamed—”

Máel Muire broke in, “I have no hard feelings, Elinor. The future will always be more important to study than the past. And you’re here now. Is it as you remember?”

“It’s even better,” Elinor said. “There are so many girls.”

“Too many,” the old queen remarked, leading them out of the little building. As she walked them to the buildings where the girls slept, she told her story to Merida. “When my husband the king died, I found myself with much to do on these islands and few hands to do it with. I decided to take on some of the orphan girls from Skara Brae, from Hoy, and then even from Tarvodubron. Then word got out that I was taking in girls and teaching them to read and write, to have a craft, to be ladies, and I began to get orphans sent from further and further on the mainland. I thought that hardship was confined to these islands, but it turns out that wherever there are children, there are parents dying. I got poor girls and lairds’ girls and even children like Elinor, the daughter of a recently widowed queen who died in childbirth. Do you know where your sisters ended up, Elinor?”

“France,” Elinor said.

“Yes, France,” Máel Muire said. “Yes, that makes sense. So I train them, and some stay and help me train more, and there are always more motherless daughters.”

Merida was staggered. She kept trying to fit this information against what she knew of her mother, and it kept bouncing off like an arrow that had lost its tip. Her mother, her perfect, queenly mother, had learned her love of reading and language and education not in a court in France but here. When she had spent all that time chiding Merida to do better and be more womanly, she was comparing her not to princesses and women in places like Ardbarrach, but to the hardworking and varied girls and women here. When she’d said she wanted the best future for Merida and tried to marry her off to have a family of her own, she was coming from a place that started with broken families with no gentle places to land.

And perhaps the most difficult part to process was the secret of it. It seemed impossible that there should be something this vast about her mother that Merida hadn’t even guessed at.

Merida thought of how she’d fought with her before she’d left for Kinlochy.

How can you be so cruel?

Her cheeks burned.

Máel Muire said to Elinor, “I know you came here to offer me Merida as help, and I will take her if she wants to come, but I have another proposal for you, if you will listen.”

They had come to a low, small building that was closer to the shore than the others. Beds were built into all the walls, and little sewn animals were tucked here and there on them. Elinor sighed deeply; her gaze was far away. “Oh, my old quarters.”

“Elinor, my fellow queen,” Máel Muire said, placing her hands on Elinor’s shoulders. “It would do me much favor in my old age if you would take some of these girls with you to DunBroch and raise them.”

Elinor spun to face her.

“I know you can do it,” the old queen said before Elinor could speak. “You were always fearfully good with a pen and paper. Your manners are impeccable. You are resilient as stone. I would not trust my girls with many, but I know you would do well by them if you had the room and the time.”

Elinor turned to Merida and Leezie. Her face was both shining and confused, warmed by the praise and overwhelmed by the request.

“Don’t even pause to think about it. Say yes,” said Merida. She looked back at this wonderful elderly queen who made her suddenly understand so much about her mother. “She’ll be ever so good.”