The fight began.
It wasn’t anything like any of the songs or ballads Merida had ever heard about war. In the sagas, there were leaders. There was reason. There was a pattern, a flow. There was a goal. This was destruction; chaos. The Dásachtach didn’t mean to take DunBroch as a stronghold; he meant to destroy it as a warning. There was the smell of fire from the woods; they were burning the trees, the woods, the game fields. Destruction for the sake of destruction.
At the base of the castle, the Dásachtach’s men gathered in knots, smashing battering rams against the doors and flinging grappling hooks up toward the windowsills. This was where Merida and the triplets and the girls came in. From the music room, they threw furniture from the windows at the intruders down below as Merida shot arrow after arrow into the dark, knowing she’d run out of arrows long before she ran out of men to shoot at.
Crash! A mirror went out the tower. Crash! A lion-footed chair. Crash! The game table they played Brandubh at.
Hamish clung to the big harp, trying to decide if he could bear to throw it from a window and crack someone’s skull with it. Merida couldn’t decide if she could bear to tell him to.
“Don’t, Hamish,” Harris said seriously. He’d wrapped a stone urn in a tapestry and now he lit it on fire. He did it with such skill that Merida suspected he’d thought about doing it for ages. “They’ll remember this more.”
His flaming stone dropped out the window. The shouts from below indicated he hadn’t been wrong.
But then another set of shouts rang out. A tower! One of the guard towers in the wall! It was falling, terribly, in slow motion, the stones cascading over one another. The wall where Merida had walked with her mother so often.
With a sinking heart, Merida saw the army carrying the battering ram they’d used to destroy the guard tower. It was enormous; it required dozens of men and horses to move it.
It inched toward DunBroch itself.
“You earned this!” roared the Dásachtach. How was he audible over all of this commotion? “I was nothing but fair!”
It felt hopeless.
Think, Merida, think.
In this game of Brandubh, though, she could not think of what the Black Raven might be. The Dásachtach had no interest in peace. He was only interested in proving a point. They might be able to win if they had the support of all the people from the surrounding towns, but there had been no warning. And even if someone could somehow get out to them, there wouldn’t be a way to get to them to gather any forces swiftly on a winter night like this.
It would take a miracle.
Merida thought about the story of the Cailleach saving her mother and the triplets. The Cailleach had worked hard this past year to make sure Feradach didn’t destroy them. Surely she didn’t want the Madman to do the job instead.
Maybe she had another miracle to spare.
What had Leezie’s mother done to ask for one? She’d given her precious things to the Cailleach’s well. Merida could do that.
“Stay here,” she told her brothers. “I’ll be right back. Leezie, if anyone but me comes to this door, don’t open it for anything!”
She hurried to her room. Her old familiar room, with all the things she’d had since childhood. She touched everything in it. But with each thing she picked up and put down in her room, she doubted that it was precious enough. Yes, she’d miss the toys her parents had carved, but they were just decorations now, and yes, she was fond of her old bow, but she could always get another. The scene on the tapestry was a memory that she’d still have even if the tapestry itself was gone. She had jewels to wear for public events, but she didn’t care about them. She had perfumes she’d been given and rocks she’d collected.
Nothing in here was important to her, she realized.
It had been important at one time, but it wasn’t important now. Nothing had been added to this collection for a long time. She hadn’t even brought back anything from her travels before this year began.
What’s precious to me? What’s precious enough to trade for a miracle?
Her family was the only thing that she could think of, and they were what she wanted to save.
With a shock, she realized there wasn’t anything else to her but how she felt about her family.
A storm that moved no roofs—
She could feel despair rising.
Think, Merida, think.
But she couldn’t think. She moved from her room to the stairs, looking for anything that might be used to win a miracle from the Cailleach. She looked in the tapestry room. The hall closet. She went to the Great Hall balcony, but she didn’t know what she was even looking for. Should she just go back to the room with the triplets, with Leezie and the orphan girls, to make a last stand there?
Hopeless.
To think that after all her work, this was how it would go. What a dreadful end. Ugly and desperate and very unmagical.
Then, in her quiet despair, over even the sound of chaos happening outside the castle, she heard hushed voices coming from the solar.
Feradach’s voice.
And the Cailleach?
Here in the castle?
She drew close enough just to peer in the crack of the open door, and sure enough, she saw the two gods standing in the midst of the room. The Cailleach looked as wild as before, her powers unchanged by the mundanity of being in guest quarters. The greenish starshine that lit her continued to light her, and her single eye was like a candlelight in the room.
Feradach, on the other hand, looked supremely human. There was no terrifying power to him as he stood, shoulders slumped, before her.
“I knew you were tricky,” he was saying, “but I never knew you were cruel.”
I am not being cruel. I offer in earnest.
“Me, a mortal?” Feradach asked. “How would that even work?”
You know how that would work. You can see it. You can feel it. That body you are in would become your body. Those hands would be your hands. Those gloves would belong to someone else who would perform your duty instead. Another Feradach, the god. You would become Feradach, a man named after the god. You would live a man’s life. You would die in the way all mortals do, at some point.
She paused and Merida drew back swiftly, silently, careful to stay out of sight.
“You would use your miracle for this?” Feradach asked. “Why?”
You have changed, Feradach. You have become something else. You have learned to love the continuity of humanity. You have learned to love belonging. You have learned to want to be seen as one person. You have learned to love that face you are wearing. You have changed the way you think about the world and that change, as you know, earns my attention. It is worthy of a miracle. I can make you human. You can have what you want.
“You cannot know what I truly want, Old Woman,” Feradach said.
Take this body, Feradach, flee with Merida tonight, and you both win the bargain, in a way.
Merida held her breath.
Feradach echoed heavily, “Flee with Merida.”
I know you have learned to love her.
Merida pressed a hand over her own mouth. It was to stop even the sound of her breath escaping, but instead, it made her think of the first time she’d seen Feradach remove his glove, the way it had been just an ordinary human hand beneath it.
Feradach again clasped his deadly hands to his chest. Merida could see them moving up and down with his uneven breaths.
In the silence, she heard the chaos of the army beating against her family.
“No,” he said, finally.
Merida silently let out the breath she was holding.
No?
“You say my change has earned your miracle, is that right?” Feradach asked. “Then I still want the miracle, but not to have this body, not to run away with her. I want your miracle to help them defeat the Dásachtach. They cannot do it alone. They will be dead in a few hours. I want your miracle to drive him back so that he does not return, or if he does, it is not for years and years and years.”