Bravely(9)

“Get off!” howled Merida, which did nothing but get a dog tongue in her mouth and provoke some boyish sniggers from somewhere within her bedroom. The triplets. Merida’s younger brothers were often little devils, particularly together. Hubert was the unthinking feet of most operations. Hamish was the uncertain hands. And Harris was the brains.

I hate those little monsters! she’d told her father once, knowing it was untrue the moment she said it.

You’re thistlekin, her father had replied, with amusement. You’ve all got wee spines all over you, so you stick together even if you prickle each other sometimes, too. Me and my brothers were like that too as lads.

Thistlekin indeed! Why couldn’t the triplets come up with a nicer Christmas tradition? Last year it had been a bucket of flour dumped on her head—who knew how they’d stolen it from under Aileen’s watch. The year before that, three geese, all mad as Merida—who knew how they’d gotten up the stairs. And next year—who knew what it would be next year.

If there was a next year.

But it was hard to hold the truth of last night in her thoughts as she heard the vomity dog making some experimental vomity noises from somewhere on her bed. A clatter sounded as a whipping tail knocked something off her bedside table. Her blanket twisted as they jumped up and down. She gripped it tightly. If the dogs pulled it free, the triplets would really have it coming, since she’d hung her snow-damp dress before the fireplace to dry last night, and underneath the covers, she was currently clothed in just Merida.

One of the dogs stepped hard enough on her hair that her head turned along with it, just in time to see the three ginger brats standing in her doorway, wearing matching grins.

This was the final straw.

She yelled. It began as a wordless howl and resolved into: “AyyyyyyyyyyyyyyIiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii hope you got swan turds for your gifts, you wee maggots!”

The boyish sniggers turned into proper howling laughter as the triplets took to their heels. One called “Happy Christmas!” That had to be Hamish, because surely Hubert was still laughing, and Harris would never say something as sentimental as Happy Christmas!

With a grumble, Merida climbed out of bed, wrapping her blanket around herself and wading through dogs. She realized there was a new member of the pack since she’d gone: A lanky, wiry hound puppy with a friendly-looking sparse beard, brindly stripes, and little, intense eyes that never focused on any one thing in particular. Unlike the rest of the dogs, he wasn’t trying to lick her, but only because he already had ahold of something small in his mouth.

She asked, “Who are you now? And what have you got?”

The brindly dog made a great deal of fuss as he tried to show her the thing in his mouth while at the same time not wanting to give it up.

“I don’t think this was meant to be your Christmas gift,” Merida told him, once she wrested it free. His treasure was all that remained of a decorative wooden spoon; among the leaves carved intricately on the handle, she spied the name Merida. Or rather: Merid. The a had been eaten. “Unless your name’s Merida, too.”

The dog began to bark, the high, resentful yelps of a teen hound that felt he had been wronged.

She sighed. It wasn’t that she wanted another carved spoon (somewhere along the way, her parents had gotten it into their minds she was collecting them, which she wasn’t, and they’d given her so many she had to line them up on the mantel, which made it look even more like she was collecting them, which only generated more, a never-ending cycle of spoons), but she would have rather had the choice of deciding whether or not she wanted it.

Ordinarily, this would be the part of Christmas Day when she began to plot her revenge on the triplets, something to be enacted after the holiday’s frantic hubbub. Unlike the days of family festivities leading up to it, Christmas Day was a public affair. Before the sun rose, cooking and cleaning and decorating began, filling the castle with activity. Once the sun set, the castle opened itself to villagers, crofters, tacksmen, and wanderers to eat until they couldn’t eat any more and dance until they couldn’t stand. The DunBroch royal family told stories and made merry and generally made certain everyone had a good time as they pretended for at least one night that they, too, lived in the castle. It was ever so much work, and that was without Leezie’s Christmas wedding on top of it.

And today, Merida had a family to save. She didn’t have time for revenge.

“Out, wolves, out!” She shoved the dogs into the circular stairwell and slammed the door. “Michty me.”

She also didn’t have anything to wear.

A quick examination revealed that her dress was still wet. Leezie hadn’t bothered to stoke the fires in the early morning as she was supposed to (she didn’t bother with many of her assigned duties), so the remaining sullen embers had only made the back of the dress lukewarm. Moreover, it was filthy. The chase through the woods had needled the off-white fabric with dried thorns and barbs. Merida didn’t have another one. Like her mother and Leezie, Merida wore the same garment day in and day out; formal attire simply meant putting a fancier layer over it. She had to wash it.

But of course her kettle was missing, and there was no firewood in the rack. Supplying all this was Leezie’s job, but Leezie hadn’t done it.

Merida just stood there for several long minutes. The process of acquiring the kettle and remembering wherever her little bit of soap had gone since her last bath and getting the fire going hot and picking all the twigs from her hair so her mother could twist it into wedding-appropriate knots that would fit beneath a wimple seemed like an impossible amount of effort. It wasn’t as if she could ask for help, not without explaining how the dress had come to be in its current state, which was impossible under the terms of the bargain. How ridiculous! And she’d thought it such a simple part of the bargain last night.