Bravely(73)

Magic, magic.

But the cloak was not enough to tell him whose face he had, because she saw him furtively touch his fingers once more to his jawline before he turned from the cloaks, trying to identify it. She could see from his expression that he was unsuccessful.

“Come see what you’d like to ruin,” she told him.

“I don’t want—” he began, before he realized she was merely ribbing him. He caught a bread roll as she tossed it, and then let her lead him into DunBroch for a third time.

This was nothing like the first time, when she’d pulled him fearfully from Aileen in the kitchen, unsure of how the game was going to play out. Now, in many ways, he was her closest confidant. Certainly he was the only one who knew what she was living through. It was an odd push-pull. Familiarity; caution. Shared secrets; opposite goals.

Who knew of his existence? She did.

Who knew of hers? He did.

She gave him a proper tour.

In each room, she tried to describe how it used to look, and what had been improved with her father’s renovation, but she found she frequently got sidetracked. When trying to think of good ways to describe how the room had been in the past, she often remembered stories that had happened in it, instead, and only realized partway through she hadn’t said anything about change.

“That summer, Dad told the triplets he’d give them a lump of sugar for every rat tail they nailed to this board under their name,” Merida said, in one of the hallways. “Seems positively violent to tell it to you now, but you have to understand, that summer of rats, they were everywhere, they were under the blankets with you in bed, they were taking supper with you, you’d reach down to pet a dog and you’d be petting a pile of rats instead.” Hamish hadn’t killed a single one, she was sure, but nonetheless he’d had just as many rat tails nailed up for every inspection, and Merida had once seen Hubert and Harris carefully splitting up their spoils in order to section off some for Hamish’s board. “Who knew what they squeezed out of Hamish for such a favor, but I thought it was kind of them anyway.” Merida shook her head. “I haven’t told you what this room used to be like.”

“The stories are fine,” Feradach said. “I can see the change. I can feel it.”

So she continued to tell him a story in each room. In the common room she told him how Mum had first found Leezie sleeping in her comfortable chair, right next to the fire, one of Mum’s pressed flower books in her hands, back when they had first hired Leezie on as a housekeeper’s assistant. She told him how Harris had once climbed out the window of the tower to the music room and hung on a rope there, trapped, for several hours, too proud to call for help. In the tapestry room, she told him how she and her mother had fought viciously over her right to her own hand in marriage, and of the mended tapestry that still hung there on the wall as a vow they’d never let themselves be separated by anger like that again. In the Great Hall, she showed him where all the tattered animal heads used to hang on the wall, horribly maimed, as she had, as a child, brought her bow and arrow in there and secretly shot at them for hours every night when she was first learning archery. She told him stories of Fergus and stories of Hubert and stories of Hamish and stories of all of them together, and he listened to all of them as the night outside grew deeper and the wind began to howl louder.

And then a remarkable thing happened.

They didn’t realize it was remarkable until after, though.

At first, Elinor simply said, on her way up to the attic with the two orphan girls trailing behind her, “Merida, who’s this fellow here so late?” She squinted at his expression and Merida could see her suspicion wash away with whatever she saw.

Merida thought fast and went with a version of the truth. “This is a fellow we met on the road to Ardbarrach. He gave us directions; he was passing through DunBroch and wanted to see how we’d fared.”

The girls with Elinor had been looking at Feradach, too, as much as they could while remaining polite. Merida hoped that whatever they saw him as, it wasn’t a woman or blind beggar, at least, so that the story held.

“Well, make sure he gets some warm ale in him,” Elinor said. “It’s quite a night out there. Those are splendid gloves, sir.”

“Thank you,” said Feradach. “They were a gift.”

The remarkable thing had happened, but Merida and Feradach still hadn’t realized it. They didn’t realize it when they ran into Fergus and Hubert and Gille Peter in the armory, where they were all having a loud and boisterous time repairing handles on spears and telling tales round their lantern as the dogs gnawed bones (the castle’s dog was already in the process of vomiting her bone back up to chew it once more, as she always did).

“What can we do for you, my love?” Fergus asked as Merida held the door shut enough to keep the dogs from escaping past her legs (yes, there was a door now! Gone was the chest that had been pushed in front of it for years).

“Er, I,” Merida started.

“Oh, I didn’t see you there,” Fergus said to Feradach. “Your brooch—is that Breadalbane you’re from?”

Feradach followed Fergus’s gaze to his chest, and then his fingers touched the brooch Merida had seen him wear all this time, the circular pin with a tree on it, both its branches and roots visible. He felt it and only she could tell that he was feeling it for the first time, although it was clearly not a specific enough description to tell him whose face he wore. He just said the thing he had said many times: “It was a gift.”