Bravely(77)

It was easy to see everything about the situation when she was like this, because she didn’t have to see (she had no eyes), nor hear (she had no ears), nor feel (she had no skin). She didn’t have to translate any of those feelings into a story of what had happened in her mind, because, as a girl made of air, she was already aware of the entire tale, beginning to end and back again.

As Merida-the-girl-made-of-air, she saw the scholar’s hut once again. She saw how the hut had previously been full of not just letters, but calculations, observations, endless documents of studied truths about the natural world. Now, however, it held nothing. The peaceful river that had lived within its wide banks for decades had risen up at Feradach’s command and ruined the hut. All the precious parchment, all the precious data, had been scattered far and wide by the flood. Even if they could be gathered back up again, they were all out of order, and the water had soaked away much of the writing.

The scholar had lost all her work.

But she hadn’t died; her body wasn’t one of the things ruined in the flood. Instead, Merida-as-the-girl-made-of-air sought her out where she was now. It was a journey she’d made herself, in her physical body, not so long ago, and it had taken much longer. But as air, she made it to the island of Eilean Glan in no time at all. In a way, in fact, Merida-as-air was already there, as she was all places at all times.

She saw, in the way that she saw-heard-felt-was everything, what had happened to the scholar. The tattered scholar, having lost everything, had swallowed her considerable pride and come to these islands. Máel Muire knew her! She knew her very well; they were peers, though the scholar was much younger. They’d worked together while Máel Muire’s husband was alive. But then there had been a familiar, dull sort of story: an indiscretion, an improper kiss, a scandal, a shipwreck, a widow. The scholar and the queen feuded and the scholar, exiled, became a hermit. She had retreated into her studies and her bitterness, and both her heart and her scholarly conclusions had become narrow as a thread.

Until the flood ruined it all.

Now the scholar returned, resentful, broken, prepared to beg for mercy and a roof over her head. But years had healed everything in the same way that being air healed Merida of needing her sight and touch; she was above all that when she was air. All the past hurts likewise seemed unimportant. Máel Muire welcomed the scholar back and granted her rooms full of willing future scholars to listen to her. Just a few months before, there would not have been room for her and her studies, Merida saw, in the overrun island compound. But a queen named Elinor had only recently taken away close to a dozen orphans and made room for newcomers.

Merida found herself back in her body, standing back in the woods just outside DunBroch.

Her teeth were chattering. Her feet were freezing. Her mind was reeling with the experience of being outside her body. Her heart was thudding with the hugeness of the ruin and renewal that she’d just seen. That she’d been part of. Time was moving slow and mortal around her again.

Merida and Feradach looked at each other across the snow.

Finally, Merida said, “We make a good team, for enemies.”

Feradach nodded.

“You asked me if I understood why you did what you did,” Merida said. “At the beginning of all this. I didn’t. But I do now.”

Feradach swallowed. He nodded again.

“You asked me what you looked like to me,” she added. “At the beginning of all this.”

He stood as motionless as a hunted stag in the woods. He did not ask.

But she answered, “You look kind, Feradach. I didn’t want to tell you, because it made me angry. Why should you look like that when you do what you do, I thought? Yes, it’s not all you look like, of course. You have a bushy light mane like a highland pony, but your eyebrows are dark. Your eyes are blue. You’ve got a pock scar just there, and when you frown, your lower lip goes like this.” She demonstrated the pout. “You look like someone girls would fancy. But that’s just the body, isn’t it? The face you’re wearing. The kindness is you, though, no matter if you’re in that body or out of it. That’s Feradach. And now I understand, and I don’t mind telling you.”

Feradach had touched the brooch very lightly as Merida began to speak, and then, even more lightly, he touched just the pock scar, and she knew he remembered the face that he was wearing. She wondered if he remembered, too, the young man’s fate. Probably, she thought, remembering what it had been like to be Merida-as-air. Probably he remembered everything.

How strange his existence must be. How even stranger it must be now that he had walked for more than a week nearly as a mortal. Time moving slow as honey for her, swift as air for him.

“I understand now why you do what you do, too, Merida of DunBroch,” Feradach said. “But I am still your enemy, and I cannot stay, because I don’t care if it makes me a coward. I’m not as brave as you. I cannot bear it. Change your brother before it’s too late and I have to do what I was made for.”

And then she was alone in the snowy woods.





HARRIS, Harris, what to do with Harris? For as long as Merida could remember, Harris had been the chilly triplet. The know-it-all triplet. The calculating triplet. The snottily bored triplet. The triplet who was too grown-up to engage in the childish rough-and-tumble of his siblings. Everything seemed to be below Harris’s regard.