Bravely(80)

Merida knew she’d miss home. She didn’t think home would miss her.

She didn’t think Harris would miss her.

“Don’t say anything fake,” Harris said.

“I won’t,” Merida said. “I’m sorry.” Then she said, “Please let me hug you.”

“It will only make you feel better, not me.”

Merida sniffed. “I know. But I need to feel better.”

He let her hug him. He was very unpleasant to hug, like hugging a chair, but he permitted it.

Afterward, he said, “You know what the Dásachtach told me that day? When you couldn’t hear? That he was going to kill all of you. He said he was going to kill all of you no matter what you did, all of you except for me; I would watch, and then he would take me back to his castle, and I would be the best warrior he ever had, and I would hate him and love him for it because he could see it was what I was made for.”

Merida fell silent. “Why didn’t you tell anyone what he said?”

“He said if I told, he’d know, and he’d come back even sooner and kill everyone faster.”

“Harris!”

He had been carrying this weight since that day by the destroyed village. Sometimes she forgot that he was just a kid, and that kids could easily get outsmarted by evil men whispering in their ears. “You’re probably much more clever than any of us, and we don’t understand you. And you probably will be a great man, and they’ll sing ballads about you. But you’re an idiot! You should have told me. Or someone. There’s no way he could have known you told anyone. How would he know?”

Harris murmured, “There are all kinds of ways of knowing things. How am I supposed to know what he can see or can’t see?”

“It would have been impossible for him to see you telling us that,” Merida said. She tried to keep her voice soothing, but her mind was racing. Did this mean Wolftail had been lying—his visit earlier had been a sham? Was all of this just a game before the Dásachtach came to teach them a lesson? To make a lesson of them? Merida needed to get back to the castle to make a plan at once. “He can’t see inside your head. People can’t see inside other people’s heads.”

Harris pulled back.

“This,” he said, and his face had gone just as cool and distant as before, “is why I never talk to anyone.”

She didn’t understand what she’d said wrong.

All she knew was that she’d had an opportunity to reach him, and somehow, he’d slipped between her fingers.

“Harris, we used to talk,” Merida said again.

Suddenly her eyes were caught by shifting movement overhead.

A green glow was beginning to light the sky.

Across the field, blue orbs began to light the dry grass, just as they had risen through the pools a year before. They bobbed eerily, invitingly. She was meant to follow.

It was time for the bargain to be decided.





THE orbs led them through the night. Or rather, they led Merida through the night. She supposed they could be seen only by those with the Sight. But Harris followed Merida when she gestured for him, too, so they were still together when they reached their destination: the holy well.

Merida supposed that felt right.

Just as the waterfall and its shallow pools had been transformed under the moonlight and na Fir-Chlis a year before, the area around the Cailleach’s well also looked very different from when Merida had visited it with her mother during the day.

The well itself was lit with starry wonder. The will o’ the wisps that had led them there hung around it as if they were waiting to make their own wish, but there were also ever so many in the well, getting dimmer and dimmer as they got deeper and deeper, making it seem as if the well had no bottom at all. Perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps it went straight through to a strange ocean that was only there on this night of all nights.

Merida followed Harris’s gaze to Feradach’s stone. As light as the well was, the stone was dark. It was as if none of the light could reach it. The stone towered, a black silhouette against the green-lit night sky, casting no shadow in the moonlight.

I can’t bear it.

“It looks cursed,” Harris whispered. He had his hand knotted in the fur at Brionn’s ruff again. What did this look like to him? Merida didn’t want to ask; she was still afraid of violating the terms of the bargain, even at these very last minutes.

He didn’t sound afraid, because Harris would never let himself sound anything other than sure, but Merida held her hand out to him and ordered, “Take my hand, Harris.”

Harris hesitated, and then he took it. He lifted his chin up as if he had meant to do it all along, as if it were ritual instead of terror that had led him to it.

“I’m glad you came here, finally,” said a voice. “Harris of DunBroch.”

A little catlike frame stood opposite the well from them, appearing bright and shining in the night. Like the well, lit from within.

“Ila?” Merida said, disbelieving. “What are you doing out here tonight?”

“It’s time, isn’t it?” Ila said. “For the bargain to be decided. To see if all the work you’ve been doing this year, Merida, has been successful, to see if you have changed DunBroch’s fate. To see if you have managed to change enough to escape…” She looked at the dark, sinister stone that stood off by itself. “Feradach.”