“If anyone says it in a mean way, I’ll pull their hair for you.” Merida tried to remember all the things Leezie had ever said about her mother. She had never really said much except that she’d been a midwife. “Your mum had the Sight?”
Leezie was quiet again for a long time, and again Merida thought perhaps she’d gone to sleep. But then she murmured, “She believed people came back again and again. To life. In different bodies. She heard about it from a bald man from somewhere in the south. She always said the first thing a bald man says when you meet him is always true and the last thing he says is always a lie.”
Merida was amused. “And the first thing he said was people come back again and again?”
“Yes, that Mum’ll come back in another baby and do it all over again, which sounds like a lot of trouble,” Leezie said. “But nice to get to taste things for the first time again, though, I think.”
“What was the last thing the bald man said to her? Did she tell you?”
“‘You’ll have a nice Christmas this year,’” Leezie said. “She died at Samhain.”
Two months before Christmas.
“I’m awfully sorry,” Merida said.
“Thanks. I always wanted to meet a bald man to see if it was true, but they’re harder to find than you’d think. Oh, that monk we went to Keithneil with—do you think he counts as bald?”
Feradach. Merida asked, “What was the first thing he said to you?”
“That Keithneil wasn’t far,” Leezie said. “That was true.”
“And the last?”
Leezie thought about it. “That he hoped we’d meet again. Well, that’s dull.”
The tent fell silent then. Merida turned on her side to go to sleep, but she didn’t go to sleep.
“Good night, Ms. Leezie,” whispered Merida.
“Good night, Ms. Merida,” whispered Leezie.
Merida kept turning the conversation over and over in her head. It felt important to understand Leezie and what she had been moaning about this year, but because she and Leezie were so different, putting herself in Leezie’s shoes was always a multistep process. By the time Merida understood what had motivated Leezie to do one thing, she was on to her next thing and Merida was having to understand her again. Until now, everything she didn’t understand was easy to sweep under the just Leezie heading.
If she wanted to help Leezie change, that wasn’t a good enough understanding of her.
I’m running out of time, I’m running out of time.
She thought she would never sleep, but she must have, because she got woken by a sound, and one can’t get woken without sleeping first.
She opened her eyes, but there was nothing to see but blackness in the dark tent.
Then the sound came again, from just outside: “Hsst.”
“HSST.”
It was a very intentional sound. A sound meant to pull the occupants of the tent outside. But who would be hssting to them? Harris was not the sort to hsst. Ila surely couldn’t manage to hsst without adding a ma’am.
Who could it be? she wondered. It’s almost the middle of the night.
It was exactly the middle of the night, actually.
Merida quietly got up. She didn’t need to get dressed or put on boots, as she had gone to sleep wearing everything she’d been wearing during the day. This was not only because it was cold overnight, but because she was used to traveling without Elinor’s comforts and fail-safes, which required one to be on one’s toes at all times. Perhaps Elinor was content leaving safety to the soldiers, but Merida couldn’t get used to it.
With a glance back at the other motionless bedroll, she pulled aside the tent flap and looked out at the camp.
There was no one there. The remains of the fire outside the largest tent smoldered red. The sounds of horses snorting in the night were nearly inaudible over the sound of the drying leaves on the trees hissing against each other in the breeze. Not too far off, Merida could hear one of the soldiers stamping his feet against the cold at his post.
So who had hssted at her?
In the woods, she saw a flash of movement, then a flash of light.
At first she thought it was na Fir-Chlis, that strange green glow of the Cailleach, of the will o’ the wisps, but then she saw that it was just the reflection of the firelight in an animal’s eyes.
Brionn.
“Brionn,” she hissed.
But of course he didn’t listen.
The wiry dog looked at her with that addlepated, distracted expression, his eyes pointing off in two different directions as usual. Then he turned and bounded into the woods. A few yards in, he paused, looking over his shoulder, waiting to see if she was giving chase.
Merida thought about going to get Harris, but then she also thought about that sound. Hsst.
Two types of people: the sort who seek magic, and the sort that magic seeks.
A hsst outside a tent was a little like a knock on a door.
These woods were different from the snowy forest she’d followed Feradach through at Christmas, the first time they’d met. These were crisp autumn woods, full of clawed branches and dry thorns. Her pursuit disturbed red deer and owls, and the sounds of their flight were loud as they sent dried leaves rustling. Every so often one of these stags let out their terrifying roar, loud as a bear. But like those woods, she was on the hunt. She was pursuing Brionn, who in turn was chasing—what? The Hunt for the Unnamed. What was he pursuing? She didn’t know. But she had to find out.
Brionn’s strides at last began to flag, and Merida realized with a shock that she had entered a dead clearing.
Not dead as in bare. Not dead as in worn down. Not dead as in cleared by man.
Dead as in dead.
Unlike the autumn woods all around it, this clearing seemed to have already proceeded well into winter. The ground was hard and frozen, and every tree had shed its leaves already, letting the moon light the scene.
Stepping farther into the clearing, she realized it was beyond winter dead. It was the dead of a drought, of a harrowing fire, of a disaster. Even the evergreen larches had dropped all their needles, and they should’ve kept them.
Merida shivered, but not with the cold. Tilting her head back, she looked up at the stars, half expecting to see the Nimble Men glowing early among them. But instead the stars seemed dull and far away. The entire night felt muted.
Brionn let out a little yelp as he found his quarry.
It was already downed, lying in a heap in the peculiar dead glen.
Merida recognized those fine gloves with their oxblood stitching, although she had not seen them like this before, the hands limp against the dead bracken.
“What are you doing on the ground?” she demanded.
Feradach made an unsuccessful effort to roll himself onto his back, because he was not just on the ground, he was on the ground on his face. That was quite the worst of it, that he had clearly fallen. No one lay down that way. No one even gently gave up that way. No, to lie like he was, his cheek against the ground, back to the sky, arms stretched down and hands palm up on either side of him—he had fallen on his face, and he hadn’t had the ability to hold his hands out to soften his fall.
“I thought you couldn’t be hurt,” Merida said accusingly. It was quite wrong to see her adversary like this, his mane of hair dusted with leaf litter, body weak.
She began to tug on his cloak to turn him over, to at least get him off his face.
“Don’t—touch—me—” he said. “My hands—”
“Don’t be stupid!” Merida replied. “You didn’t kill the horse you borrowed the day we went to Cennedig. You’ve got your gloves on still; I won’t touch your hands.”
It was a little nerve-racking to touch him, nonetheless, as she turned him over, but she was right, and it didn’t kill her. It took less effort than she had expected. His mane of hair and his big fur-lined cloak had made him seem bigger than he was, but the body he was in was truly just a young man’s, no older or weightier than she was.
She asked, “What happened to you? Were you attacked?”
She couldn’t see any wound. What she could see, though, was that the moss beneath him was dead, too, and so were the little shoots of grass that had been growing around it. Mushrooms were withered to dry straws, too.
“Consequences,” he whispered.