MERIDA had been eating bread rolls for an hour when the first knock came.
The rolls were wonderful. Fresh baked. Crisp on the outside, pillowy and warm on the inside. Merida had finished off all the wonky-shaped ones, and had now moved on to some of the perfectly shaped ones. There were still hundreds of them piled on the rough-hewn kitchen table, far outnumbering the planned guests for the Christmas feast. The bread was destined for a silly wedding ritual: Leezie and the Cabbage were supposed to try to exchange a kiss over the top of a wall of buns. Merida was doing them a favor by making the wall just that bit shorter.
Leezie, getting married! Merida couldn’t really believe it.
As she munched bread in the dim midnight kitchen, she used her bare foot to trace her name through the flour dusting the stone floor. How pleasant to feel the chill of the floor on the bottom of her foot and the heat of the smoldering hearth on the top. How pleasant to feel the squish of the roll’s interior against the roof of her mouth and the crisp mountain crust against her tongue. How pleasant to just let her mind prattle, as her mother Elinor called it, to just let it play over nonsense like how her name spelled backward was Adirem, which wasn’t half bad, really. Adirem of DunBroch. Her mirror self, she thought. Her shadow self. As dark and pensive as Merida was bright and active.
Merida traced DunBroch into the flour. Hcorbnud didn’t look at all appealing backward.
Then came the first knock.
Tap-tap-tap.
Merida stopped chewing.
She listened.
Could it be one of the triplets? Hubert had had a mischievous look in his eye as Merida pinched the triplets’ candle out at bedtime.
But the castle was silent in the way that only castles can be. The stone stopped most sound dead in its tracks and the wall tapestries drowned the rest of it. Everyone besides Merida was dreaming of Leezie’s wedding and the Christmas feast to follow. The knock had probably just been one of the fireplaces popping.
Merida finished her roll. She took her time selecting another, resisting a somewhat triplet-like impulse to pull one from the bottom of the heap to watch it collapse across the floor. Picking a perfectly round one, she tore it open to admire the structured crevices and crannies inside. Over the past several months, she’d eaten a fair bit of bread, but none could compare to Aileen’s. Aileen, the family cook, was irritable, territorial, and foulmouthed, but Scotland’s kitchens had no better. Merida’s mother Elinor went to great lengths to find the most modern of recipes for Aileen, often all the way from France, and every time a new one came via messenger or pigeon, Aileen closed herself up in the kitchen for days, testing and retesting it before she was willing to let any of the royal family try the result. Well, most of the royal family.
This wasn’t the first time Merida had snuck down to sample Aileen’s handiwork.
As she ate this roll, she thought back over her grand homecoming earlier that day. There’d been hugs and tears, the works. DunBroch was very enthusiastic about stories, about legends, and Merida had delivered the Ballad of Merida’s Year, at volume, from atop one of the tables in the Great Hall, feinting around Christmas decorations. The triplets and her father and Leezie had hooted with delight, and her mother had pretended to look disapproving.
Ah, home! It was so nice to be back among DunBroch’s creature comforts: its bellowing fireplaces and plentiful candles, its worm-free snacks and discreet privy, its flea-free blankets and luxurious bedrooms. Nice, too, to find the little things unchanged: the herbal smell of the kitchen. The chaos of her triplet brothers caterwauling in the halls. The percussive clearing of her father’s throat as he sat in his chair by the fire. The ritual of kissing her mother’s cheek good night as Elinor wrote down the day’s events in her journal.
Tap-tap-tap.
Was that a second knock?
It seemed like it might have been. A soft triple tap, just like she thought she’d heard before.
“Hubert, I hear you,” she whispered.
But it didn’t seem to be Hubert. Was it coming from the door? The castle gate was barred at nightfall, so no one could have gotten into the courtyard, and even if they could, the closest civilization was the wee blackhouse village, which was a twenty-five-minute walk even when the road wasn’t bad-tempered with snow and ice as it was that Christmas Eve.
Merida waited. She listened. There was nothing.
She got another piece of bread.
The strange restlessness that had driven her out of bed in the first place was beginning to rise again.
Why was it even there?
She should have felt marvelous. She loved her family. She loved her home. She loved it more than she had words to say. It was wonderful to be back, to find it almost exactly as she’d left it.
But up in her tower bedroom, she’d lain awake in the cold moonlight that snuck around the window tapestry and wished desperately that it wasn’t dark so that she could go outside to the exercise fields and shoot her bow until her body and mind felt perfectly still. Instead, she fidgeted, her feet itching to take her away on an exciting journey.
Exactly how she’d felt the night before she’d left months before.
But she’d gone on the journey already. Something should have changed. She should have changed.
Then came the third knock.
Tap-tap-tap.
This one was definitely not coming from a fireplace. It was coming from the door. Not the main one, but the little ugly one around back, for deliveries, where the carts wouldn’t tear up the grass. But who would be out there on a night like this?
Merida had a sudden, hideous thought that perhaps it was one of the triplets, somehow trapped outside for hours, able to manage only that feeble tap. Leaping across the kitchen, she turned the enormous key in the lock and heaved the heavy door open.
Outside, the courtyard was brighter than she’d expected. The huge moon, although out of sight behind the castle, lit all the snow to daylight brilliance. Freezing air, scented with woodsmoke, blew into the kitchen around Merida. Every star was so bright and shimmering that they seemed as if they’d be wet to the touch.
There was no one standing on the doorstep. There weren’t even footprints in the snow. But she knew she had not imagined the knocks.
A very peculiar and particular prickling was rising inside her. She could tell that this feeling had been hiding among her other restlessness all along, only now it had become big enough for her to recognize its unmistakable timbre. It was like the wet, sharp shimmering of the stars overhead, but in her chest.
Magic, it whispered. Magic is near.
It had been a very long time since she’d felt that call.
And that was when she saw him.
In the deep blue shadow near the castle wall stood a hunched figure, although he couldn’t have been the one who knocked—there were no footprints leading from him to the door. He was paused in the act of tugging one of his gloves off, absolutely motionless, hoping she wouldn’t notice him.
This was no visitor. This was an intruder.
“Hey!” she called. “I can see you!”
The figure didn’t move.
Merida would have preferred her bow and arrow for effect, but she used what she had in her hand already: bread. With her perfect aim, she railed it right off the figure’s head.
“Hey!” she said again. “Announce yourself, stranger!”
He turned his head. What was his expression? Merida couldn’t see; it was hidden in shadow.
Merida snatched up a weapon; the closest to hand was a fireplace shovel. She crossed the courtyard in several massive strides. “I said, announce yourself!”
The stranger’s voice was scornful. “You can’t hurt me—ow!”