Bravely(76)

“Leezie—” Merida started. “Never mind. Do what you think is best. Do you like it up in the tapestry room, by the way?”

“Of course,” Leezie said. “The ghosts are very nice in there.”

She didn’t explain this; she simply twirled away, Leezie-like.

But in the morning, Leezie’s offering seemed to have done something, because Merida searched all over the castle and found Feradach only just in time; he was getting his cloak from behind the kitchen door and putting it over his shoulders. He hadn’t put it on in the last several days; there was something conclusive and fatal about how he put it on now.

“Are you going?” she asked.

He whirled at her voice, and she could tell he had indeed been intending to sneak out.

“You are going,” she said. “You stayed and stayed without a reason to stay and now you’re just going without so much as a word!”

“I can’t stand it,” he said, very simply. He went out into the snow.

Without hesitating, Merida snatched another cloak and leapt after him.

“You’ve got no shoes,” Feradach said, sounding quite agitated. “Why are you always chasing me through snow in your bare feet?”

“You’re not just going,” Merida challenged, keeping up with his long strides as he crossed the courtyard. Her feet were freezing, of course, but never mind that. “You’re running away!”

He ducked his head and continued to walk purposefully away from DunBroch, right through the gate. “I understand now. I understand why I didn’t look the same to anyone before. I can’t stay here. I can’t stand it.”

“That’s what it took? People knowing you? I told you that you didn’t understand family! I told you that you didn’t understand time, what it was like to exist. It’s not something you can learn by watching. It’s different when you’re in it.”

Now he whirled again. They were just a few yards outside of the gate, and he was partway into the woods she’d first chased him through. Only now he was still quite human looking, his ankles sunk deep into the snow. “And what of it, Merida? What good does it do me? I can’t not do my duty. Does it bring you joy to know now that it will hurt me? Imagine, if you will, that you win this bargain. Then you will go on with your life having escaped ruin, unchanged. Now imagine I win it. Imagine I have to put my hand on DunBroch now! Imagine the next village, the next person. Does it make you happy for me to know now what I’m destroying? Does it—”

Feradach fell silent. Sometimes, even gods are failed for words. And he didn’t look much like one then anyhow, his mane disheveled, his face tired and anxious. Before he hadn’t earned this face because he only wore it for the minutes he faced Merida, and then he was something else, something insubstantial, as soon as he turned away. But this was now a face that belonged to Feradach. A body, lived in. All the laughs he’d had over the past few days, all the sleep he’d shorted—it was becoming shaped like him.

Merida felt abashed again, even though she wasn’t the one who had somehow made him wear this face for more than one person to see. She felt as bad as when she had shamed him into not doing his duty.

“Of all the things I’ve seen you be this year,” she said, “a coward isn’t one of them.”

He drew himself up, recognizing his words.

“Are you going to be a worthy adversary or not?” Merida said. “If you don’t hold up your part, you’ll die, and it won’t matter, because another god will come along to render ruin after you’re gone. So it might as well be you, knowing what you know. Now you can go if you want, but you haven’t done your part of this visit yet.”

Feradach’s expression was threadbare. “And what part is that?”

“You came to see how much change happened here, but you didn’t show me your part. You’re supposed to show me something you’ve ruined as well.”

He simply let out a sigh.

“I want to see the scholar,” Merida said. “I want to know what happened to her.”

“Her quarters and her life are several days’ journey away, even without this snow,” Feradach replied. “And you don’t have that much time before the end of the bargain, and Harris is still unchanged.”

This stung, even though she knew it was true. “You said before there was a way you traveled quickly, though; you said you could beat me on one of the journeys if I went on horseback and you went that way.”

“Yes.”

“Can you travel like that and take me?”

Feradach frowned, judging. “I think so. But I will be taking you out of your body. Do you trust me to bring you back?”

“Can you do it or can’t you? You could have killed me many times before now, so trust is beside the point.”

Feradach’s face looked amused for the first time that day. “I can do it.”

“What do I have to do? Is it a thing where we have to spin, like a Leezie ritual, where we—”

But she didn’t say anything after that, because she had already been ripped right from her body and up into the sky.





THEY were air.

Merida couldn’t think of any other way to make it make sense to her. It wasn’t that she was an invisible body, floating, flying. She was simply present. Her thoughts, her self, her purpose. She was air. She was everywhere. She did not need to travel to the scholar’s hut, not exactly, because in a way, when she was like this, without a body, she was already there.