“Consequences of what?” Merida swatted Brionn away.
“Of…not…ruining.” Feradach closed his eyes for a long second, and then opened them again, with obvious effort. His dark eyebrows were drawn close together. “Didn’t…ruin anything…since we last…since I saw…Cennedig.”
“You haven’t ruined anything since you saw me last?”
Feradach shook his head a little. “Wanted to…give…them…a chance…and I…”
He gave up talking and instead clawed his glove over his own heart, breathing with effort.
Merida found herself quite unsure what to do with this information. She felt angry, first of all. How dare he be her enemy and then turn around and do something like this. First the harp. And now this, whatever this was, breaking the rules beyond both of them, trying to do what she had said he ought to do, instead of what he had always done. He was supposed to be a god, and she was supposed to be a girl, and her words weren’t supposed to hurt him.
“This isn’t how I want to win the bargain,” she said.
Feradach’s head fell limply to the side.
“Merida!” Leezie’s voice carried. “Merida, what are you—Merida, that’s not safe!”
Leezie stepped cautiously into the dead clearing. Her hair was mussed and her eyes half-lidded with sleep; she looked, as ever, like she needed a bit of help. But her voice was wide-awake, and Merida, when she looked at Leezie, saw a little flash of the Cailleach’s green starlight in her eyes.
Oh.
The Sight. People who seek the magic.
Merida felt quite out of sorts indeed. “How did you find me?”
“I had a—I had a dream,” Leezie said. “I had a dream you needed me.”
And Merida did need her. She needed someone who knew something about gods to tell her what to do, and Leezie was the closest thing she had. “What do you see? What do you think I’m looking at?”
Leezie hesitated, and Merida could see that she was trembling a little, like Hamish. Leezie mouthed a word but didn’t say it out loud, just like when she had thought about trying to read the stone at Keithneil, but decided against it. Finally, she whispered, “I don’t want to sound like I’m chasing nonsense.”
“I’m not going to judge you for nonsense, Leezie, believe me, not this year of all years!” Merida said. “Tell me what you see! What is this here in front of me?”
Leezie shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe what she was going to say, and then she said, “A god. Or something mighty like. Nothing for the likes of us to tangle with!”
Merida looked up at her. She couldn’t say anything back at her because of the bargain, so she just implored Leezie with her eyes.
“But you have already tangled with it, haven’t you,” said Leezie. It wasn’t a question. “Och, och, Merida! What did you do?”
Merida couldn’t answer this, either. Her voice sounded more desperate than she meant it to. “I don’t know what to do.”
“This is a bad, bad, bad idea,” Leezie said, as she knelt down to study him. “You poor wee thing. Who are you, boy? Oh, you’re frightening…. Merida, look at his gloves. They’re like the monk that—oh.”
She looked at Merida, her pretty eyebrows knotted, her mind working over this information and trying to make it work out. She pressed her hands to her cheeks. She looked very much like she needed help, but help was what Merida wanted from her. Feradach’s borrowed face was beginning to look of a piece with the dead things around him, colorless and slack.
“Can you tell if there’s anything we can do, Leezie?” Merida asked. “Any of your rituals or your prayers or your potions or your Sight?”
“I don’t have anything that can help with this,” Leezie said. “I can’t see that well. I should get Ila.”
“Leezie, please,” Merida said. “We don’t have time. Please just try. For once don’t give up when it gets hard. I’m a person magic seeks, not the other way around. Please, it’s important and I can’t do it. I need you! Please!”
Leezie sort of steeled herself then, in a way Merida hadn’t seen her do before. She swept her wild helpless hair back defiantly, and then she stood up. She began to twirl in one of her Leezie-ish ways. Her hands seemed to be feeling the air. The sound of the leaves in the trees was a little like the moan of the Cailleach’s voice, and then she moaned along with it. She didn’t look silly. She didn’t look Leezie-like.
Her eyes glimmered again with the glow of the will o’ the wisps.
“He’s a god of…ruin,” Leezie said, under her breath, and Merida felt goose bumps rise on her skin. “Yes. He’s a young god, and he’s made a mistake.” Leezie opened her eyes. “And he’s dying.”
Merida snapped, “What else?”
“He is not the first god of ruin,” Leezie said, and she sounded awed at her own knowledge. “There were others before him. And if he doesn’t do his duty now, he will die, but there will be other gods of ruin after him.”
“As in, he’ll come back?” Merida asked. “Like your mum said? He’ll be reborn?”
Leezie looked perplexed at the question. “Another one will be.”
“But what happens to this one? The one in this body? Is that who comes back?”
Leezie hovered her hands over Feradach again, then dropped them down into her lap. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to say it, Merida! It’s not really for words. It’s just—he barely exists anyway, Merida. He only looks like this, he only has a body, just for us. So we have something to see. And when there’s no mortal to look at him, he’s just a…feeling again. All he is is his duty, and if he isn’t that, I just…What else is there of him?”
“He’ll just go away?” Merida said.
“And a new god will take his place, yes,” Leezie replied. “This one goes away. It’s not like us.”
Merida found this absolutely intolerable to imagine. She had goaded Feradach on the wall about how no one saw him more than once, and he had said that she did, and now, in his attempt to please her, he was going to have even that existence snuffed out. An existence only she had ever known of.
And of course the balance, the balance. She knew now that she believed him: he ruined for a reason, and it was important to keep that balance in place so that the renewal could move in.
But that knowledge didn’t feel as immediate as the dying god in his borrowed body. Dying because of her.
“What do you want to do, Merida?”
“We have to help him do his duty,” Merida said. “Help me take him to where he needs to be. Help me take him to whatever needs to be ruined.”
MAGIC was a very strange thing.
There would have been no way for Merida and Leezie to carry Feradach far in the body in which Merida saw him. Merida and Leezie were plenty strong, but the hills were steep and the woods thick.
But whatever Leezie saw him as was obviously quite small, because after they realized Merida could not carry him, Leezie did. And because magic was a strange thing, Merida saw him both as the Feradach she knew, but also as the Feradach Leezie must see. Just as the first night when she had chased him, he seemed to shift forms in the moonlight. When Leezie paused to shake out her arms and focus on where her Sight told her they were meant to take him, he appeared to Merida as the blond-maned young man she’d met. When Leezie carried him, he was a too-thin redheaded toddler with a pinched expression and permanently worried mouth that reminded Merida uncomfortably of Hamish.
In both forms he was clearly dying.
Merida tried to push down the bad feeling inside her by telling herself that the redheaded toddler was a child he’d killed, that was why Feradach had his face, but it was a complicated truth that no longer brought her easy relief.