Bravely(72)

The entire castle was alive and bustling. It was changing, it was changing.

Except for Harris. She was no closer to knowing him than she had been at the beginning of this.

“You’re so fidgety,” Aileen complained one evening. “Why are you pacing round my kitchen?”

“I’m just looking for something small to eat,” Merida said.

“You’ve seen six somethings small to eat. Pick one. Pick them all. Just get out.”

Merida hovered her hands over the bread. The roasted nuts. This time last year, Leezie had been thinking she was about to get married. Merida wondered where the Cabbage was. She wondered if she needed to take Harris on another trip somewhere. She wondered if the Dásachtach would be satisfied with DunBroch taking in foster girls, or if he would be upset that she hadn’t yet picked a kingdom to move to.

If Harris doesn’t change, none of it matters, and I can’t ask anyone for help. I’m so—

“Merida!” Aileen snapped. “You’re wearing me out! Stop pacing! Pick something! What are you waiting for?”

What indeed? She felt exhausted with waiting. Strung out with waiting. She felt listless and faint with it.

“I tell you what, I am going to walk these drinks into that Great Hall and take my break and when I come back, I expect you to be out of here with whatever you put your mind to,” Aileen said, and she stormed out with the drinks.

Merida didn’t pick something to eat, though. Instead, standing in the pantry, she started to cry. Just a little. It was so unlike her to cry, to crouch in the pantry with the flour and the turnips and the barley and the little pantry moths, to be far away from the evening merriment of the rest of DunBroch, to be unable to turn her situation into a game or challenge of some kind; she had not cried since the day beside the well, months and months and months before.

It was just that the castle felt so full, and yet she felt so apart. They didn’t know that if she didn’t figure out Harris, they were all going to die. And this feeling inside her, this waiting, this waiting, this waiting.

Tap, tap, tap.

There was a knock at the door.

It was polite. Without urgency. Pardon me, the knock said, is there anyone there—?

She wiped the tears from her face. Leezie always said she enjoyed a good cry, but Merida felt as if her face had been kneaded and left to rise. Puffy and clumsy—when she rose, her sleeve caught a bag of oatmeal and knocked over a jar of cloves. Elinor and Leezie must have been putting them into oranges for centerpieces—Leezie never could be bothered to put the lid on anything tightly. The odor surrounded her. Christmas, it shouted, Christmas. Christmas and the end of everything, maybe.

The door.

She went to it, and before she put her hand on the door pull, she thought about that snowy night almost a year ago and she had half a thought that she would open it and there would be no one on the other side.

But tonight, when she opened the door, there was someone standing on the other side of it. A familiar figure: That mane of hair. The broad-shouldered cloak. The hands in their gloves with oxblood stitching held carefully in each other.

“You,” she said.

But her mind thought, Finally.

This was what she had been waiting for. This was who she had been waiting for.

The very first flakes of snow of the year swirled behind him. She could hear the wind howling something fierce, nearly as strong as it had been on Eilean Glan.

It was the beginning of the end.

“Will you show me what has changed?” Feradach asked.





“YOU don’t need me to show you,” Merida told Feradach. “You can just feel it, can’t you? You could probably tell me more than even I know just from standing in the courtyard.”

Feradach replied, “The Cailleach says you’re meant to show me, so I think you should show me.”

“I think you just want to come in out of the cold.”

“May I?” he asked.

Merida let him in. He stood in the kitchen, looking quite ordinary and mortal as he had when he had talked with Aileen two seasons before. His eyes flitted over all the things he saw there and she wondered if he remembered it well enough to see how even the kitchen had changed. She wondered if it mattered, anyway. External change wasn’t what interested him.

“Do you want some bread? Do you eat?” she asked him. She felt shy around him now for some reason. He had been dying when she saw him before.

“I eat,” he said. He looked around. “It’s warmer than before.”

“Glass in all the windows,” Merida said. “Doing it right this time, my father said, welcome to the modern world. All the candles are beeswax now, too—no more smoky cow-smelling tallow candles, and oil lamps in the Great Hall and common room. The future is brighter!” she joked.

“It has changed,” Feradach agreed. “Show me more.”

“There are many people here,” Merida warned. “You’ll have to be quick on your feet as they see your changing face.”

“I always am.”

Yes, she supposed he was used to it. “Do you want to hang your cloak there?”

“I have always wanted to know what it looked like,” he said, and then he removed it and looked at it as if seeing it for the first time.

And he was, Merida realized with an odd feeling in her stomach. He did not know what he looked like, he said, until someone told him enough to remind him whose face he wore. His appearance was in the eye of the beholder. Merida had made that cloak that now hung with the others behind the kitchen door, in a way.