She saw Cennedig travel to so many places that he could barely remember where he was at each. She saw him drinking and eating and talking and drinking and eating and talking and never, ever stopping. He was always making merry. He was always laughing. He was never quiet. He moved and moved and moved.
Then, as Cennedig was distracted, making merry with strangers he’d never see again, Feradach arrived. He did not look like what he looked like now, but Merida nonetheless recognized those fine gloves with the oxblood stitching.
Feradach removed a glove. He placed a hand firmly on the harp.
Things went wrong.
Not with sickness, like in Keithneil, nor with fire, as in Kinlochy.
Instead, it rained and rained. Cennedig, already on his way to the next place, bundled his harp into his cart and tied down blankets over it to try to protect it. Still it rained. It rained as he traveled north. It rained as he lost his sense of humor. It rained as the bridge beneath him and the cart washed right away in the rain-mad current.
The bridge joists went one way. The cart went another. The horse went a third way. Cennedig hesitated, trying to decide to swim for shore or for the harp. In the end, he picked the harp.
He had always picked the harp.
Cennedig swam against the current, his arm looped through the harp, and clung to the edge of the floating cart. He’d done it.
Just then, the current swirled capriciously. The cart spun. Cennedig clung on. The harp looped round his arm gave the spinning cart propulsion and weight. The current and the harp pushed the cart hard.
As the rain kept falling, the river smashed the cart up against the rocky shore, Cennedig crushed between heavy cart and immobile rock. Cennedig’s hands crushed between heavy cart and immobile rock.
The sound of them breaking was complete and terrible.
“Being forced to stop was the best thing to happen to me,” Cennedig said.
Merida leapt back guiltily from the harp.
Cennedig stood in the doorway watching Feradach and Merida. Merida saw now that the hands holding the basket of berries were still somewhat bent and misshapen, still shaped like the trauma Feradach had visited upon him. Her heart was beating fast. Just as before, time seemed to hang like honey in the air, slow and luxurious in comparison to the time line she’d just whipped through.
“It’s got a life of its own, that harp,” Cennedig said. He seemed to think Merida and Feradach had simply been admiring the instrument, which suited Merida fine. “To not be able to play it anymore…Well, the kind way of putting it was that I moped for months and then settled down here, and that’s when I finally remembered what it was like to be bored, and to train hard, and to fall in love. That’s when I got my family. I miss the music itself terribly, but being able to stop, having to stop, not having to wonder if I should be going back out on the road—I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was a miracle.”
A miracle. All that disaster, a miracle.
Merida did not know if gods gloated, but she didn’t look to find out. This whole trip had been set to make Feradach look as good as he had after the trip to Keithneil; none of the immediate agony, all of the happy ending. No screaming people, no hands reaching for the sky. If he thought she would so easily forget what she had seen him do in Kinlochy, he had another thought coming.
She stole a look anyway.
He was gloating.
She curled her lip at him before giving Cennedig a nicer smile. “It’s a beautiful harp.”
“It is,” Cennedig said, “with or without me. My old friend. Now why did you come all this way, princess? Was it for these berries?”
This time, Feradach didn’t answer for Merida. He simply gave up his gloating, lowered his gaze, and looked at his deadly gloved hands held inside one another. He offered up no excuse for why they’d be standing in this man’s house. It was up to Merida to come up with one.
An idea dawned on Merida. “How would you feel about taking on a student?”
MERIDA didn’t put it all together at first, and when she did, she felt very thick about not seeing it in the moment. Cennedig, the weather that came after she returned to DunBroch, all of it. But she was so busy preparing for the long journey to Eilean Glan that she’d barely had time to heed the weather, much less mull over connections. Later she would remember the spate of late afternoon summer thunderstorms and the blustering winds in a time when the weather was usually getting drier as autumn approached, but at the time, all she thought of was how best to pack as many creature comforts as possible so that Elinor would not be put off by the travel.
She didn’t want to be slowed down with a cart, especially since the roads to the far north were supposedly even poorer than in the rest of the country, so she enlisted the help of some of the craftsmen to help her construct cunning wicker baskets for the pack ponies to carry. Then she stocked them with blankets, feather pillows, and spare pairs of dry boots. She pressed the kitchen into coming up with ideas for food that would journey well. She planned on devoting one pack horse entirely to bringing ale and water in bladders. She tried to think of any time she had ever been uncomfortable while traveling and what would have improved the situation, and then she made a plan.
Merida vowed there would be nothing to make Elinor dread travel.
She also took her time to blackmail Harris into going with them on this last journey. She’d thought about it for a long time, how best to convince him, and ultimately decided to simply play his own game. It was easier than trying to imagine how to persuade him to talk. She’d collected all the precious things in DunBroch that Brionn had put chew marks in, beginning with her Christmas spoon and ending with her mother’s wedding shoes, and threatened to bring them to their parents with an assessment of Harris’s dog-training skills unless he came along and promised to take care of any errands Elinor might have during the trip.
Harris actually seemed grudgingly appreciative of her blackmailing efforts.
In any case, he agreed to go.
It was right in the middle of these preparations that the harp arrived.
“What is that?” Merida asked with astonishment.
The harp was set right in the middle of the Great Hall, and set right behind it was Hamish, his eyes shining with feeling. There were many other things in the Great Hall, too, like baskets of cloth and buckets of turnips, but mostly Merida had eyes for the harp. It was plainer than the one in the music room, but also newer, lighter, sturdier looking, a harp meant for going places. Behind it all, the grand doors to the hall stood open, revealing a merchant cart driving away through the early fall weather. The kitchen help trotted after it, throwing buns and joyful shouts.
“Little Bear’s new harp,” Fergus said grandly. “Just in time for his first trip to Cennedig of Fife!”
Merida was just as shocked by this as she was by the harp’s appearance. Harps took a very long time to build, and even if this harp had not been built specially for Hamish, things took a very long time to make their way across the countryside. “You arranged for a harp?”
“I wish I had, but I can’t take credit,” Fergus replied. “This one rolled in by accident. The merchants were headed to Moray and said the floods kept pushing them further and further off their path till finally they just washed up here and decided to see if we wanted anything they had. And did we, boy?”
Hamish’s smile was bigger than his face.
Harris, behind him, rolled his eyes. “Everything in this place is an accident.”
“Hold your wheesht,” Merida told him, “and spit those lemons out. You’ll be out of this place tomorrow.”
“Is it tomorrow we’re going?” Elinor asked, sounding quite harried.
Merida felt a pang of anxiety, and then a pang of irritation, and then another pang of anxiety. Elinor couldn’t back out now, could she?
Of course she could. She had fooled Merida before and she could still do it.