Then it changed: men who looked very like the men who drilled in Ardbarrach arrived in neat rows, with impeccable weapons. Fire raged through the village, and the things the men did to the villagers were so terrible that Merida had to close her eyes. When she opened them again, the village looked quite different.
The houses were more prosperous, decorated with things from far away. There were more of them. More people altogether. A more prosperous living was being pulled from the land by many more hands, because it was obvious now that the women and children who had not been killed in the attack on the village had been pressed into slavery instead.
The land gave up more and more.
The days and the nights continued to go by. Now the ground was ugly and stubbled, bitten to nothing by too many cattle in too close quarters. Slaves grew hay and carried it on their backs to keep the cattle alive. The village didn’t even need all that they had; pails of milk spoiled in the street even as children who had never been free carried in yet more pails on their shoulders from the fields.
Every so often there was a rebellion; every so often there was a public killing in the streets and blood mingled with the spilt milk.
It turned Merida’s stomach.
Then in the night came a figure. He did not look exactly as he did now, but Merida knew who it was anyway. She recognized those gloves with their oxblood stitching, gifted to him by someone who knew how to make them stick to a god of many faces, many hands.
Feradach strode through the streets, looking this way and that.
He took off his glove. He put his hand onto the stone. Merida watched it sink right down into it, just as she’d pictured it, soft as clay under his touch. Then he walked a few feet and, without flinching, put his hand where the blood and the milk ran together in the street. He walked a few more feet to where the body of the latest rebellion’s leader still lay on her face. He stood there for a bit longer than he’d stood by the stone and the pools of blood, just looking at the corpse, and then he put his hand on the back of her head.
Merida felt the ruin.
The night turned into day and Feradach was no longer there, but the ruin his hand had triggered was. Merida could feel the village’s doom. She heard the first cow cough and knew it was fatal. She saw the days and nights flip by and, with each, more death. First the cows, then the calves, then the bulls, then the weakest humans in the village, then the strongest.
And then the village fell into empty ruin for a very long time. Grass and roots tore down the houses, slow but steady. The rain and the river carried away the corpses. The seasons passed and the sickness that had begun with a cough slowly passed with it.
Slowly the people whose village it had been in the first place returned from the hidden burrows they’d made for themselves alongside the badgers and foxes. They cautiously rebuilt the first crannog, and waited for invaders. But the invaders were all dead. So they built up the main street again, and they fetched even more of their people from the hills, and slowly, as the days and the nights went by, they thrived again and became the village Merida and Leezie had just walked through. Keithneil.
The days and nights continued to cycle until it came to the day Merida was living and she saw herself standing there with her hand upon the rock. Her red hair curled down her back. The elbows of her dress were worn from her pulling arrows back and the right shoulder was worn from her carrying her quiver over it. She could see from here that she had grown up to have her mother’s mouth and her father’s eyes.
And then she was no longer in the vision. She was simply standing there with Feradach, looking at the stolen village that had returned to its builders.
She felt out of sorts. The breeze on her skin felt slower, somehow. Minutes went on forever now in comparison to what she had just experienced.
“Couldn’t it have been changed my way?” she asked. “Couldn’t it have been a leader who made the people see the error of their ways?”
“Don’t you think I waited for that?” Feradach asked. “Surely you see now how patient I am. Do you understand the value in what I do?”
“No,” Merida replied, even though she wasn’t exactly sure what she understood anymore. She felt like she wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t let herself in front of him. “But I at least see why you think you have to do it.”
Feradach said, “For now, that’s good enough.”
MERIDA studied DunBroch in a different light after returning from Keithneil. She had seen the entire progression of a village from birth to death to rebirth in just a few minutes, and once she got back to the castle, she couldn’t stop trying to decide at which stage of its life span DunBroch was. Clearly Feradach thought it was ready for ruination, so he must look at it and see it in the same way she had seen that overcrowded stolen village.
But that village had been overrun with wickedness and selfishness. DunBroch’s supposed crimes seemed gentler. Yes, the courtyard was no longer as neatly planted with spring herbs as it had been at one time. The Great Hall had not hosted a festival for some time. The smoky common room had not been repaired nor its contents swapped to the music room. But these were faults of omission, surely. Plus, there were plenty of run-down things in Keithneil, too, and Feradach hadn’t seemed wild to tear through it now.
His desire to destroy DunBroch felt, to Merida, capricious.
Still, it was hard not to see Feradach in a different light, too. She wanted to see him as cruel and villainous, but he never behaved quite as she imagined him. She’d thought he would force her to look upon death and destruction and admire it, but instead, he’d shown her a perfectly lovely, living place. Before he put his hand on it, he’d stood over that dead rebel’s body with something that seemed very much like regret. In the end, maybe they did want the same thing.
Merida was finally ready to take the trip to Kinlochy.
Now that the weather had at last decided to stay spring, plans had begun in earnest. Merida had proposed they leave as soon as it was clear roads would stop being regularly washed out by snowmelt; Fergus had counterproposed a day just after Pasch, so that “everyone would be feeling more hospitable.” It was true that everything got very austere and churchy in the forty days leading up to Pasch (essentially the opposite of Hogmanay in every way), and everything was looser and more celebratory after, so Merida saw his point.
She was growing excited.
She knew the real reason for the trip was inciting change in her family, but her heart was just happy to be traveling again. The only part she wasn’t looking forward to was having to banter with her father about this prince there, the one he thought would make a good match. Otherwise, she couldn’t wait to get back on the road and adventuring again.
“Merida, you’re making me nervous with your pacing,” Elinor told her, rising from her chair in the common room. “Is it warm out? Shall we take some air? Yes, we should. Ila, you should come, too.”
Ila had been carefully and thoroughly wiping the soot out of the carvings around the fireplace, a process that took forever and only had to be repeated the moment the fire was set again, but she put her duster down and said, “Thank you, ma’am.”
Elinor gave the room a look.
This happened every time Ila was polite, which was always. It was as if Elinor would have very much liked to have said, See, children, this is how polite you could be, but knew how insufferable it would sound, so instead, she just did the look.
Harris rolled his eyes and went back to writing something in small letters at his place before the fire.
Hamish’s mouth made a very upside-down smile shape and he sulked off toward the music room, where petulant harp noises began to sound.
Merida let out a breath so that her lips went phbbbbbbbt.