On each of the snowy evenings he joined the family in the common room, partaking of their ritual of telling stories and drinking sweet creamy whipkull and enjoying all the recipes Aileen was testing in advance of the big Christmas banquet. Every evening Merida watched him hold his gloved hands tightly against himself as he listened to his name again and again: Feradach, Feradach, Feradach.
“You’re very good at this,” he said, a few nights in. He was playing a game of Brandubh with Merida, the first time she’d played the actual game in ages. They had a lovely new board now, to match the new castle. It had come along with the orphan girls of Eilean Glan.
“She’s banned,” Hubert said. “She always wins.”
“Always?” Feradach asked.
“Yes, she’s a cheater,” Harris murmured, not looking up from his book.
Merida, remembering very well what Feradach thought of the Cailleach’s cheating, said as she moved a piece, “I am not! I’m just very good at it.”
“I’m very good at it too,” Feradach said, moving one of his as well, his hands still safely gloved. “I’ve never been beaten.”
“Enjoy suffering,” Harris said.
But Merida did not win. Or at least, not right away. She played her pieces out as she usually did, and Feradach played his pieces, and there was some jaunting back and forth without reasonable gains on either side. Harris and Hubert gave up their own diversions and came to crouch on either side of the board to watch. The game went on.
Elinor arrived. “Who’s winning? Oh, Merida’s playing, I know who’s winning.”
“She’s not!” Hubert said.
“I’m not losing, though,” Merida said. She and Feradach battled back and forth.
Hamish and Fergus arrived with their drinks. Fergus saw Merida at the board and said, “So we’ve decided to drive Feradach into the snow, is that what we’re after?”
“She’s not won yet,” Elinor said. “It’s touch and go.”
Leezie appeared in the doorway with a great Yule shawl she’d made of prickly-looking plants wrapped around her. “I thought Merida was banned from this game! Oh! Is she not winning?”
At just the same moment, Merida and Feradach moved their pieces in such a way to unlock the Black Raven.
“Impossible!” Hubert and Hamish roared.
“Improbable,” corrected Harris.
Feradach lifted his gaze to Merida over the Brandubh board, eyes merry. “Evenly matched. What now?”
At just that moment, Brionn burst into the room. With an uncanny sense, he leapt straight at the object every human and god in the room was looking at: the Black Raven piece.
He snatched it up and darted from the room.
“Brionn!” Harris said, leaping up, as his brothers laughed hysterically.
“It looks like you’ve both been bested by a wolfhound,” Fergus said to Feradach and Merida. “Who knew just how to employ the Black Raven. Better luck next time.”
“It’s nice to see Merida evenly matched for once,” Elinor said.
That night, Leezie paused in Merida’s bedroom door and whispered, “Is Feradach the god, Merida? The one we rescued in the woods?”
“You recognize him?”
“Of course I do!” Leezie said, indignantly. “I’ve been studying about gods and magic. I’m starting to read a little about it.”
“You’re reading!” Merida was delighted.
“The letters still wander,” Leezie replied crossly, “but not as badly. Do you know why Feradach is here? Is he just grateful we saved him? Will he give us a wish? Sometimes grateful gods can give wishes.”
Of course Merida couldn’t answer the reason, because she couldn’t talk about the bargain. And actually she wasn’t sure that the bargain was the real reason he was still there at the castle.
“I don’t think he’s the wishing sort of god,” Merida said, because that seemed safe. “He has that stone, not the well.”
“Do you think he’d be offended if I asked him about the stone?” Leezie answered herself: “Probably I should pretend I don’t know what he is. In the stories they seem to prefer that unless they’re going about telling everyone who they are. I’m just going to leave an offering for him. They like that too.”
“Leezie—” Merida started. “Never mind. Do what you think is best. Do you like it up in the tapestry room, by the way?”
“Of course,” Leezie said. “The ghosts are very nice in there.”
She didn’t explain this; she simply twirled away, Leezie-like.
But in the morning, Leezie’s offering seemed to have done something, because Merida searched all over the castle and found Feradach only just in time; he was getting his cloak from behind the kitchen door and putting it over his shoulders. He hadn’t put it on in the last several days; there was something conclusive and fatal about how he put it on now.
“Are you going?” she asked.
He whirled at her voice, and she could tell he had indeed been intending to sneak out.
“You are going,” she said. “You stayed and stayed without a reason to stay and now you’re just going without so much as a word!”
“I can’t stand it,” he said, very simply. He went out into the snow.
Without hesitating, Merida snatched another cloak and leapt after him.
“You’ve got no shoes,” Feradach said, sounding quite agitated. “Why are you always chasing me through snow in your bare feet?”
“You’re not just going,” Merida challenged, keeping up with his long strides as he crossed the courtyard. Her feet were freezing, of course, but never mind that. “You’re running away!”
He ducked his head and continued to walk purposefully away from DunBroch, right through the gate. “I understand now. I understand why I didn’t look the same to anyone before. I can’t stay here. I can’t stand it.”
“That’s what it took? People knowing you? I told you that you didn’t understand family! I told you that you didn’t understand time, what it was like to exist. It’s not something you can learn by watching. It’s different when you’re in it.”
Now he whirled again. They were just a few yards outside of the gate, and he was partway into the woods she’d first chased him through. Only now he was still quite human looking, his ankles sunk deep into the snow. “And what of it, Merida? What good does it do me? I can’t not do my duty. Does it bring you joy to know now that it will hurt me? Imagine, if you will, that you win this bargain. Then you will go on with your life having escaped ruin, unchanged. Now imagine I win it. Imagine I have to put my hand on DunBroch now! Imagine the next village, the next person. Does it make you happy for me to know now what I’m destroying? Does it—”
Feradach fell silent. Sometimes, even gods are failed for words. And he didn’t look much like one then anyhow, his mane disheveled, his face tired and anxious. Before he hadn’t earned this face because he only wore it for the minutes he faced Merida, and then he was something else, something insubstantial, as soon as he turned away. But this was now a face that belonged to Feradach. A body, lived in. All the laughs he’d had over the past few days, all the sleep he’d shorted—it was becoming shaped like him.
Merida felt abashed again, even though she wasn’t the one who had somehow made him wear this face for more than one person to see. She felt as bad as when she had shamed him into not doing his duty.
“Of all the things I’ve seen you be this year,” she said, “a coward isn’t one of them.”
He drew himself up, recognizing his words.
“Are you going to be a worthy adversary or not?” Merida said. “If you don’t hold up your part, you’ll die, and it won’t matter, because another god will come along to render ruin after you’re gone. So it might as well be you, knowing what you know. Now you can go if you want, but you haven’t done your part of this visit yet.”
Feradach’s expression was threadbare. “And what part is that?”
“You came to see how much change happened here, but you didn’t show me your part. You’re supposed to show me something you’ve ruined as well.”
He simply let out a sigh.
“I want to see the scholar,” Merida said. “I want to know what happened to her.”