From her vantage point, she realized she could see Harris. He was a small figure down below, outside the wall, picking his way between the trees along the loch. A few yards behind him, Brionn tagged along, tail high, weaving back and forth in an aimless way.
Merida wondered what he was doing. Harris had somehow become even more irascible as the castle was being rebuilt. He always had a cutting or scathing remark about how he would have done this project differently or how that project didn’t make any substantial difference to their lives, so why bother. When he wasn’t sniping about the renovations, he was picking at Hamish or burying himself in a book. Merida couldn’t remember the last time she’d had any conversation with just him, let alone one of a meaningful variety.
He would have to come along to Eilean Glan. She knew it would be a fight. Why? Because everything was a fight with him now.
As if he could feel her eyes on him, Harris suddenly turned to look back up at the castle. The tiny little silhouette of him shielded its eyes as it scanned up the wall.
But as he stood there, posture erect and suspicious, she realized he wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he was gazing a little bit down the wall, and even from here, she saw him shake his head at whatever he saw before continuing through the woods.
Merida turned her head to see what he had been looking at on the wall, if anything.
What she saw, several yards down the wall, at the top of the next guard tower, was Feradach.
Her stomach twisted.
He was a dark, still figure in that long twilight, and it was easy to remember how he looked in Kinlochy, the embers lifting around him instead of the golden motes.
He was closing the distance between them.
How can you be so cruel?
I am not cruel, Merida. I am nature.
“Go away,” Merida told him. He stopped an arm’s length away, his hands folded neatly in their gloves. He looked more like the Feradach she remembered from the trip to Keithneil now and less like the silhouetted god of Kinlochy, but she felt no friendlier toward him. “I have no interest in talking to you, and you have no business here yet. If I had my bow right now I would shoot you right through the eye; I don’t care if you can be killed or not. I would do it for the satisfaction of pinning your face to the ground with an arrow.”
“Is that fair?” Feradach said. “Is that fair just because you saw me doing what you know I do? Do you judge the Cailleach for calling up the seeds out of the ground? Do I judge you for what you are trying to do with your family?”
“I don’t give a fig if it’s fair or not, actually. I don’t want to look at you. I don’t want to see your face and picture you standing by those people as they burned to death!” She spit out the final words.
“What would you have me do?”
“I don’t care what you do. I just don’t want to look at you.” She was angry to feel tears prickling at her eyes again, so she spun on her heel and marched back toward the guard tower she’d climbed up to get there. She had a horrible suspicion she had another big cry in her like the one she’d had by the well, and she couldn’t stand to do that in front of him.
“Merida, I have to come here,” Feradach said to her back. “The Cailleach says I must. That is part of the bargain, and not one I invented. And you—you have to see my work, too.”
Merida turned back around. “Don’t you think I’ve seen enough of your work this season?”
“You weren’t supposed to be there. At Kinlochy.”
“How could you not know that?”
“I don’t know everything,” Feradach said. “I only know the balance, unless I choose to go looking for answers, same as you. I don’t track your every movement.”
“You tracked me on my journey to Ardbarrach.”
“That was different. That was the beginning. I was curious. I wanted to see…” He looked away, down the edge of the bracken-covered slope outside the wall, all the way down through the willow trees to the glittering gold water of the loch visible between them, the silhouettes of the DunBroch geese moving in the forever-dim summer evening. There was no sign of Harris or Brionn now. “Before, I made sure to choose the ruin I knew you would understand to show you. I chose ruin that was in the past, so you could see what happened after. I knew you could not see the value in it as it happened; how could you? Only a monster would love the destruction for its own sake. There is no glory in ruin; it only matters because of what comes after. I did not mean for you to see that. I do not know why you were there. Of all the places. Of all the times.”
He fell silent.
“So you are here because the Cailleach demands it,” Merida said finally. “And what have you found?”
“I see that your father is changing the castle,” Feradach said. “And himself. I see that your brother Hamish has found himself. You are making progress.”
But Merida already knew both these things, so there was no satisfaction in hearing him acknowledge it. “And yet if the others don’t change in time, you’ll do the exact same thing to DunBroch that you did to Kinlochy.”
Feradach just shook his head, but not in the way that means no, the way that means what do you want me to say?
“Because the balance,” she said coldly. “Because your duty.”
“There are consequences to not keeping the balance,” Feradach said roughly. “There are consequences to not fulfilling this duty. I have executed this duty for centuries. I have lived with these consequences for centuries. I am Feradach. This is my role. I will not be chastised by a mortal.”
They stared at each other across the length of the high wall.
Feradach finally asked, “Will you come with me to see my work, as per the bargain? Tomorrow, if I return?”
“Do I have a choice?” But it wasn’t really a question, any more than his had been a question. She had to see it. He had to see hers. She was angry that she had to do it, though, so she said, “I saw your stone. Feradach’s stone.”
His body went very still. “Did you now?”
“Yes, and you know what? No one remembers anything except your name. No one knows who you are,” she said. “The Cailleach, they knew who she was. Not you. No one knows you exist.”
How can you be so cruel?
Feradach looked at her for quite a long time then, his expression unreadable, his gloved hands folded in each other, and then he said, “You do.”
MERIDA braced herself for Feradach’s return, but he didn’t come back the next day, nor the day after that. In fact, so many days went by that Merida began to wonder if she had succeeded in keeping him away, and if that would affect the bargain.
But nearly two weeks after she saw him on the wall, she woke in the morning (having had a ridiculous dream that foreheads were now considered vulgar and one had to brush one’s hair across it in order to be considered decent in public), got dressed in the new riding dress her mother had completed while she was gone to Kinlochy, and managed to pick her way downstairs (which involved climbing up the stairs to the tapestry room and wending her way across the attic and then down through the remodeled music room and triplets’ room, because of all the stairs under construction), and found that Feradach was not only already in the castle, but that he had already mingled with practically everyone.
In the kitchen, he had talked to her mother, who thought he looked like a nun and had talked to him about the holy well and his feelings on it.
In one of the stair towers, she discovered he’d had a spirited conversation on carpentry with the man who was working on her stairs, who had thought he looked like a very tall fellow craftsmen.
In the common room he’d played a game of Brandubh with Harris, who said he’d never seen an old woman so ruthless at the game and that surprise was the only reason why he’d lost.
In the music room Hamish had seen him, too, but as a fellow little boy who was also interested in the instruments and how their tuning had been disrupted by the changes to the space and to the weather.
To Leezie, he was an idle, unrecognized member of the kitchen staff, and had looked all through her pressed flower books with her, asking her about each.