“No, just—”
“Whush dooyer mutter widish worm!” Gille Peter said, with some suspicion, as he finally rode right up to them on Angus. Merida noticed with some anxiety that their shadows, already long because Gille Peter and Angus were tall, were getting very, very long indeed as they lost even more daylight hours.
“I mean no harm,” Feradach said respectfully.
“Whart bees nish haften?” Gille Peter demanded.
Feradach looked amused. “Your companion tells me you are going to Ardbarrach. Are you headed by way of the old oak copse?”
There was the briefest of pauses, and then Gille Peter’s face went completely white, and Merida knew that Feradach had been telling the truth. Gille Peter had forgotten their way.
In a smaller voice, Gille Peter admitted, “Ah ahmosh toot me all quegg ittoo flop.”
“Could have happened to anyone,” Feradach said, with a glance at Merida. It was not quite a told you so, but it was very, very close.
“Kweet fannish!” Gille Peter replied. “Goch shave, yung wonk.”
“I’m not as young as I look, but I appreciate the thought. Do you think you know your way from here?”
Gille Peter put on a brave face. “Narf enkerly…”
“If you’ll allow me,” Feradach said, looking at Gille Peter but clearly speaking to Merida, “I can describe a more direct route that might get you there before nightfall if you are quick about it.”
He theatrically clasped his two gloved hands together, letting his cloak partially fall over them, displaying his intention to let them touch nothing but one another. Merida regarded his carefully contained hands and his earnest expression. She didn’t want to be a fool and trust a god who was doing his best to win the right to kill them all in a year. But Gille Peter obviously could not be trusted to put them back on the right path in time.
“Fine,” Merida said, in such a bratty tone that Gille Peter looked at her with surprise. She took a deep breath and said, in a more princess-like fashion, “That would be welcome.”
Feradach and Gille Peter engaged in a brief descriptive conversation, which ended up with Feradach drawing several diagrams in the dirty snow and Gille Peter drawing several others in the air.
“Coweron, Merida!” said Gille Peter. “Lecket todders.”
With brisk enthusiasm he set off back toward the others.
But Merida did not immediately follow. Instead she kept the Midge dancing in place long enough to narrow her eyes at Feradach, who once again stood quietly in the snow, hands folded inside each other, tucked away inside his cloak, looking for all the world just like an ordinary young man, albeit one deep in a vast forest in the middle of nowhere.
She said, “I would say thank you, but I’ll believe it when I see Ardbarrach.”
Feradach shrugged.
“And stop following us,” Merida added. “It’s off-putting.”
Feradach shrugged again.
“And stop shrugging,” Merida finished. “Say something.”
“Enjoy Ardbarrach,” he said.
MERIDA had given quite a bit of thought to how the triplets might change. Before the bargain, she would have thought growing up was change enough. Merida felt as if her childhood had been one massive change after another. First her father had lost his leg to a bear—a bear! Then the triplets had come along after years of her being an only child. Then the fight with her mother over marriage, the tousle with a witch. Nursemaid Maudie moving off to the village. Leezie coming to stay with them. The trip to the shielings with her mother.
But she supposed the triplets had had a very different childhood than she. They were over a decade younger; Fergus and Elinor were different people. Plus there was the sameness of them, the threeness of them, the way they shared a life as “the triplets” instead of as Hubert, Hamish, and Harris. Where are the babies, Elinor would say, someone should take them on a walk. The triplets need to get some writing practice in. Let’s get the triplets their dinner and then we’ll do our dinner after. Merida, show the triplets how to play Whips and Hounds. The triplets’ room, the triplets’ hobbies, the triplets’ schooling.
They were always being compared to each other. Always bouncing off each other. Always finishing each other’s sentences, each other’s pranks. If they had any specific traits, they were always expressed in relation to one of the other boys. Hubert was louder than Harris. Harris was cleverer than Hubert. Hamish was sweeter than Harris. So on, so forth. Maybe just spending some time being one boy instead of part of a three-headed monster would be enough.
Her father had suggested Hubert for this journey because he thought he’d like Ardbarrach, and Merida was glad, in retrospect, to have him as her first task. Hubert was the easiest of all the triplets. Not because he was the best behaved—that would have been Hamish—but because he was the most like her. Neither was good at focusing on a task for too long unless it was physical, like Merida shooting arrows or Hubert banging nails into boards. Neither minded if things were messy or loud; in fact, sometimes messy and loud made it easier to think. Both were happy to go wandering in the woods by themselves but also wanted to return home to fiddle music and good company.
It meant Merida could almost certainly predict how Hubert would feel about Ardbarrach because of how she felt about it.
And this was how they felt:
“Whoa,” said Hubert and Merida in the same breath.
Merida thought she’d traveled quite a bit this year, but she hadn’t seen anything that looked like Ardbarrach.
Feradach had been as good as his word, because even with the pony cart slowing them down, they arrived at the stronghold only about an hour after dark. The landscape had slowly transformed from DunBroch’s rolling, snowing terrain into a snow-free, colorless landscape, empty of trees. The path had changed from an arduous single track to a wide, beaten road broad enough for three carts to travel wheel to wheel. When Merida had been with the mapmakers, they had come across only one road like this: the main trade road that led clear on down to Gowrie. It was the only one traveled by enough feet to keep it that bare and wide.
But this road was even more impressive. It had clearly been scraped and graded to perfection. Water did not pool on this road; it ran off to the edges, where channels wicked it away out of sight. This road had not been built. It had been engineered.
Ardbarrach stood at the end of it, and like the road, it did not seem built, but rather engineered. The fortress was as unlike Castle DunBroch’s soft, ivy-covered form as one could imagine. DunBroch’s eroded stones seemed to have been around for ages; Ardbarrach’s sharp, clean walls had clearly been built in this generation. DunBroch’s towers were round and organic; Ardbarrach’s were sharp and geometric. DunBroch’s green banners were tattered and worn; Ardbarrach’s red and gold were crisp and certain. Candles glowed welcomingly in DunBroch’s mismatched windows. Ardbarrach’s narrow arrow slits were dark and brusque.
“It looks ugly,” Leezie said from the cart, her voice shivering with the rest of her.
“It looks strong,” Hubert said.
“Es veffid so,” confirmed Gille Peter.