“But you didn’t.”
Leezie sadly removed her wreath and put it on top of the Keithneil marker. She absently traced a mysterious little shape in the center of it and then burst out, “I wish I was like you, Merida. Your mum is always telling you what to do. I wish someone would just tell me what I was supposed to be doing and how to act and then just hand me the right man and tell me the right way to go instead of making me decide everything for myself.”
Merida was agog. Leezie had very succinctly summed up the source of every argument she’d ever had with her parents in the last decade. She would have traded for Leezie’s breezy, unfettered life in a moment. “Leezie, you don’t do what people tell you to do anyway.”
Both girls stared at each other for half a moment, and then they both burst out laughing. Then Leezie sang a little nonsense song as she sprang off to prance through the village.
“Well, go after her,” Feradach said. “Go look around. That’s why we’re here.”
“Ugh. I have looked around,” Merida said. “What am I looking for?”
“For what this place is like.”
Merida could not see how that would take much time at all, but rules were rules, she supposed. The Cailleach had told her she had to see his work, and even if she couldn’t understand it just yet, this was his work.
And Merida and Leezie actually had a brilliant time.
Even though the village was not far from DunBroch, the villagers had only the vaguest understanding of Merida’s being their princess, which made it better, since they didn’t bother with all the bowing and ma’aming; they just treated Merida and Leezie as two visiting young women with means. The girls got to see new lambs and new kids. Merida bought a scarf for Leezie, and in return, the weavers taught them a new weaving song. Merida made a bet with some of the older boys about who could shoot an arrow farther and truer and she won a carved wooden frog for her efforts, which she then lost almost at once betting on a game of nine-men’s morris. Leezie conspired to learn a flower language from some of the older girls and wrote coded poetry with assorted bouquets that made them all giggle.
At one point the villagers took Leezie and Merida out to see the old pointy-roofed structure on the crannog, an artificial island built into rivers. For all her traveling, Merida had never seen one in person, and she and Leezie took their time exploring it. Leezie, clumsy and vague, slipped off the edge and right into an empty boat floating alongside. She flailed prettily in the boat, gently moving downstream, until villagers—moved by the universal urge to help her—plunged into the river to retrieve her. Then they went a step further, everyone taking to the other boats to join her and teach her how to steer. This pleased everyone. Leezie loved to be helped; people loved to help her.
Feradach and Merida stood on the shore, watching this spectacle, and it occurred to Merida then as he stood there, the strong spring breeze lifting his mane of hair and crinkling his eyes, that he liked Leezie, that he liked people. He had brought Merida and Leezie here to admire this place, because he found it admirable.
But this didn’t make sense to Merida. His entire purpose was to destroy.
She asked, “Am I the only person who sees you the same every time I see you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Because of the bargain?”
“I assume so.”
“No wonder you don’t understand family,” she said. “How can you, if no one sees you as the same more than once? Apart from the Cailleach, I suppose, but does she count? You can’t ever have a conversation that lasts more than one day. You can’t fight with anyone for longer than a single encounter. You can’t ever be in love. No one can miss you. You don’t know what it is to miss someone, either. You don’t know anything about being human.”
“I watch them, though,” Feradach said, and she noticed that, as he did, he unconsciously fisted his destructive hands in their gloves against his body as she had seen him do before.
“Is that enough?”
“I watch them a lot. And I have a very good memory. I remember almost everything I see.” He fell silent. Then: “Will you tell me what I look like to you now?”
She glanced over at him, thinking to herself that what she was seeing was not quite a lie, but not quite true, either. It was technically his appearance, because it was the appearance he always had for her. But it was also not his appearance, because he had not had to live with the consequences or benefits of it. He had not worked for those muscles; he had never had the pain of whatever pocked that small scar on his jaw; he had not chosen to wear his hair like that; he did not know what effect his handsomeness had as he grew from boy to man. He had not earned that face. He had not lived in it. He had not been formed by it in any way.
So really it was not his appearance at all.
She shook her head.
He didn’t seem to have expected her to, because he said, “Then let us get on with showing you my work here before we lose daylight for the journey back.”
“What else is there for me to see?” She glanced at Leezie, who was still well occupied in the middle of the river with the villagers.
“Magic,” Feradach said. “Leezie’ll be all right; this will not take long.”
He led Merida back to the big old stone carved with the village’s name. The sun had progressed through the spring sky and, along with it, so had the shadow behind the stone. Now it left the opposite side of the stone clearly visible instead. In the middle of it was was a handprint, sunk deep into the rock as easily as into potter’s clay.
Feradach pointed to the handprint.
If it were anyone but Feradach standing beside Merida, she would have assumed that the handprint had been carved from the rock with tools, just the same as the name on the other side.
“I suppose that is yours,” she said.
“Aye.”
A hand that could sink straight into stone. Impossible. But so was a hand that could summon a winter storm to immediately kill a tree. Merida tried to sound light. “I would ask you to put your hand in there to prove it fits, but I assume it was a different hand you had back then?”
Feradach inclined his head. “It’s your hand that will go in there now, in any case. Put your palm flat against it.”
Merida hesitated.
“It will not hurt you,” he said. “Aside from being the truth, which can sometimes be more painful than we expect.”
Merida still hesitated.
“It is only magic,” he said.
That didn’t make her hesitate any less.
“Merida of DunBroch,” Feradach said, “of all the things I have seen you be since I have begun to watch you, a coward is not one of them.”
Merida put her hand into the print. It was not that much larger than her fingers after all. Somehow that seemed more daunting.
“Stone,” Feradach ordered, “show her what you’ve seen.”
ALMOST immediately Merida felt she was somewhere else.
Some when else.
She was looking at this stone, this river, this landscape, but there were no buildings.
The trees were vaster. The animals were stranger. The river was wilder.
Nights became days became nights again; time was moving fast before her eyes.
People moved in. First they had rudimentary camps, sleeping alongside the cattle they drove. Then they built little round bothies from rocks. They planted, fished, built more houses. Barns to save their livestock from the weather. Places to worship gods Merida didn’t recognize. Crannogs out into the river to fish from. It was a hard place to get a foothold, but they did it; they built a community.
For quite a few days and nights and days and nights this went on, and the community thrived.