“I’ll get you another spoon,” Fergus said.
“Oh, you don’t have to,” Merida interjected quickly. “It’s not that munched. With a li’l bit of—”
“Ma’am, sir,” interrupted a familiar voice. The new girl, Ila, stood in the doorway of the common room, her gaze firmly fixed on Elinor and Fergus. She still looked catlike, only now she seemed more like when cats have their ears pressed back and tails set to thrashing warily. “There are some men here to talk to you. They demand it, ma’am.”
“Demand?” Merida’s mother raised a courtly eyebrow. “They can wait by the bonfire in the courtyard, and we will give them an audience before the feast.”
“They took the feast.” This voice came not from Ila, but from Aileen, who had joined Ila in the doorway. There was nothing Aileen liked less than coming out of the kitchen, so the situation couldn’t be good. Her hands tensely knotted and unknotted a kitchen rag as she explained, “They threw it to their dogs. Gille Peter got the castle dogs into the armory before there was a fight.”
Merida, Leezie, and the triplets all looked at each other. Hubert and Leezie’s faces wore two different genres of bewilderment. Hamish looked terrified, of course. Harris, to Merida’s surprise, appeared merely pensive.
Violence was not shocking by itself; the kingdom, for all its pleasures, was a dangerous place, as all wild, hard places are. But violence inside the castle? Unheard of.
Merida thought, First Feradach and then Leezie’s wedding and now this! Does this count as change?
But she knew what Feradach had said. External change wasn’t the same as internal change.
Fergus rose from his chair. “Did they say who sent them?”
“The Dásachtach, sir,” Aileen said. “About—”
Elinor swept the rest of the words away with her hand. “We will see them in the Great Hall. Aileen, please take the children to the tapestry room. Ila and Leezie, please let the other servants know where we are and tell them not to take orders from anyone but us.”
The Dásachtach? An ominous-sounding word, Merida thought. The Madman.
“Come along,” Aileen said in her brusque way as Elinor and Fergus went one way and Leezie and Ila another. “Up we go.”
It took Merida a moment to realize that they’d counted Merida as one of the “children.” After she’d been roaming about all this time, she still got lumped with the babies. Maybe she was beginning to see what Feradach meant about stagnation; they were set in their ways. Leezie canceling her wedding and returning to the way she always was, Merida returning here and becoming a child once again.
She started the opposite way down the hall.
Aileen demanded, “Where do you think you’re going, then?”
Merida said, “To eavesdrop, of course.”
ONE of the wonderful things about DunBroch was that it was full of secret passages. They were in the walls. The ceilings. The floors. Some you had to crawl through. Some you had to climb to. Some had obviously been put in during the original build, behind secret shelves, and others had obviously been opportunistically added when parts of the castle were expanded over the decades. Some of them were so haphazard or small that it was difficult to tell if they were intended to be secret passages or even passages at all, but regardless, if one was not afraid of either heights or tight spaces, one could do a credible job of getting nearly anywhere inside DunBroch without leaving the walls. When Merida had been no bigger than the triplets, she’d lost many an afternoon to getting pleasantly turned around in them, emerging only late in the day to get a good talking-to from her mother, who couldn’t understand how she’d managed to make herself so filthy without leaving the castle. Merida wondered if the triplets had found any of them yet. Harris seemed like the secret-passage type, but Hamish was afraid of places where things could hide and jump out at him, and Hubert wouldn’t know a door unless it opened into him.
Merida used one of these smelly, ratty corridors to sneak into the wall behind the common room and eventually pop out on the third-floor balcony of the Great Hall.
The Hall was the centerpiece of DunBroch Castle, a massive, soaring space to greet fellow royals and to host massive feasts. When Merida had passed through it on her way to the common room, she’d found it nearly ready for the public celebration. Each fireplace had been set to merry blaze, as had every candle in every massive chandelier. Each table held colorful centerpieces and bowls for discarded rinds and bones. Bread and meat were piled in artful arrangements, and servants stood watchfully by to keep the dogs from stealing any morsels. Elinor’s harp had been brought down from the music room to crouch in the corner, waiting for other musicians to arrive. Everything had been hushed and anticipatory in the way of all late-night feasts. It had all made Merida quite wistful; she’d wanted to be hushed and anticipatory, too, but this year was spoiled by the Cailleach’s moaning voice and Feradach’s oxblood-stitched gloves.
And now the Great Hall looked very different. The tables were in disarray. Some of them were turned on their sides. Food was ground into the rugs and smeared across the stone floor. And instead of a room full of revelers, there was a tense standoff. On one side were her parents in their thrones and their royal guards still festooned in Christmas wreaths and sashes. And on the other were the six armed strangers from the Dásachtach, all impressively dressed in new armor and good boots.
The intruders’ big, thick-skinned dogs loudly tore the fine Christmas boar to pieces in front of one of the fireplaces, which was burning a tapestry. Her mother’s winter tapestry, actually, the one with the Cailleach stitched on it.
Merida knew nothing about these men, but she hated them already.
“These men have terrible energy,” Leezie remarked.
“Leezie!” Merida twitched with shock as she realized she’d been so focused on the scene below that Leezie had managed to kneel close beside her. How many people were going to sneak up behind her this Christmas? “What are you doing here? How did you even get here?”
Leezie made a little crawling motion with her fingers across the floor to demonstrate her technique. This disrupted her headdress, which Merida couldn’t help straightening for her. Ridiculous that even in moments like this Merida could not but feel like she ought to help her. Ridiculous that even in moments like this she also noticed that Leezie had managed to drench herself in some sort of perfume, so strong that it felt like the scent alone should be loud enough to give away their hiding place. Ridiculous that even in this moment, Merida was glad that Leezie hadn’t gotten married and that they were together, looking over the edge of the balcony at these usurpers, shoulders pressed together.
“What terrible timing to come on Christmas,” Leezie whispered.
But Merida knew this was intentional. These men had known the Clan DunBroch would be home feasting at Christmas. The destruction of the celebration was part of their weapon.
“We’re not leaving until we have a show of loyalty to Lord mac Alpin,” a voice growled from down below. Only one of the Dásachtach’s henchmen spoke; the others simply watched him. This spokesman had an impressive cloak made entirely of wolf tails, which made him look nearly as broad as Merida’s father, and almost as wild as the wolves killed for the cloak. His voice always sounded close to a snarl. “We don’t want to make things unpleasant.”