Most importantly, it looked like not freezing to death. The temperature had dropped precipitously as soon as the light was gone, and the wind had doubled, tripled, quadrupled. There were no hills or trees to interrupt it, so it boxed Merida’s ears without pause. Her cheeks actually hurt from her hair striking them with each gust. It was a deadly cold night.
Because of the lateness of the hour, Merida worried they wouldn’t be able to get anyone’s attention from outside the featureless wall, but the gate opened smoothly as soon as they approached, and behind it guards stood at the ready as if they had been waiting all along. Each guard was so identically uniformed and positioned that Merida couldn’t tell a difference between them in the flickering torchlight. Beyond them, she saw an open courtyard so huge and bare that its walls were lost in the dark. Everything was as flat and even and perfect as the road that had led there. Not even a shadow could be misaligned in this place.
“Merida and Hubert of DunBroch?” said the closest guard, as Merida dismounted to approach.
“Yes,” Merida said, surprised.
“Please wait a moment while we get an escort for you and your men. We apologize for the wait.”
The guard pulled a cord, and in the wall above him, a bell chimed three times. From somewhere further inside the castle, a matching bell chimed with precisely the same rhythm. From even farther away, Merida heard the same sound echo once more. There might have been even more after that that she simply couldn’t hear.
A moment later, more soldiers appeared, and a pack of page boys, and then some maidservants. Each class of person was neatly and identically dressed so that it seemed to be one soldier, copied many times; one page boy, copied many times; one maidservant, copied many times.
Hubert looked at Merida and simply mouthed Wow.
Wow indeed.
In just minutes, Merida and her party were entirely seen to. The Midge and Angus and the ponies were untacked and unhitched and taken away. Colban was tipped out of the Friendly Box, and he and Gille Peter and Hubert were bundled off to the men’s barracks. A good effort was put into catching Brionn, although eventually they gave up. Merida and Leezie were whisked to a room with two narrow beds, an inch of candle, and a simple dinner of bread and meat; presumably Hubert and the men had a similar meal in the barracks. If this had been DunBroch, everyone would have still been trying to figure out what to do with their guests, even if they had been expecting them, and they probably would have all ended up eating a dinner of leftover sugared Christmas plums in front of a fire and telling stories until dawn.
Was this how most castles ran? So far, Ardbarrach was even more efficient than the nuns Merida had stayed with over the summer, which was saying something. The sisters liked a good schedule, but they also liked talking, so living with them had been less like a military drill and more like living with a flock of coordinated, noisy birds.
Three soft bells rang, and the maidservant who’d brought their dinner warned, “There is no unnecessary talking after the candles are out; ring a bell if there is an emergency.”
And then they were alone.
In the last of the candlelight, Leezie’s eyes were heavy-lidded. “This was the longest day somehow.”
“We came a pretty long way,” Merida replied. “I wonder what this place will look like in the morning. Do you think they all look the same when the sun’s out?”
“I’m not in the mood for scary stories,” Leezie said. She yawned messily, looking suspiciously like she would need help getting to bed, as she always needed help. “However did you do this all the time? You traveled for ages.”
“I got lost less,” Merida replied, but she didn’t think that was it, exactly. She’d always seemed happier traveling than other people, and more frustrated sitting still. Even as Leezie crawled into bed gratefully, Merida thought about how she would have been happy to stay up talking after the hard day. In fact it might have improved her evening—it felt so odd to climb straight into bed now as the candle burned out and left them both in the dark.
Merida unbraided her hair so that it was finally free and used her veil as another layer on top of the blanket, which she’d already doubled over against the cold. Unlike back in DunBroch, this room didn’t have a fireplace, and it was cold enough that she could feel her nose going numb.
But it felt good to be traveling again, she thought. She was eager to see what Ardbarrach was like in the morning, to learn its culture. She wasn’t as tired as Leezie, she thought, because she was built to blow from place to place.
Some storms move no rooftops.
Blast it, she thought. Feradach was still in her head. She wanted to hate him properly, but the feeling was somewhat diluted that night. It was likely he’d saved their lives today on the road. She wondered if he really had gone to ruin a village after encountering them. Maybe at this very minute, he was creeping outside someone else’s door right now, tugging off one of his gloves.
“Merida?” Leezie whispered.
“Shh,” said Merida.
“I forgot to take my hair down.” Leezie didn’t care that they’d been told not to talk after the candle was out any more than she cared about being asked to tidy the common room. It had gone in and out of her head without even landing. “Do you think it’s all right to sleep in the veil?”
“Probably be warmer.” Merida thought about how Leezie had looked like she needed help getting to bed and had, in fact, actually needed help. It was all right. Leezie’s veil would be very rumpled after sleeping in it, but Leezie always looked rumpled. “Now shh.”
“Do you think Hubert’s all right?”
“Hubert can sleep anywhere,” Merida replied. “Now shh.”
“How many bells do you think they have here?”
“Lots. Now shh.”
Leezie persisted. “Do you think I’ll ever fall in love? And get married?”
Merida put her blanket over her eyes and pressed it hard enough that she saw little sparks of light. “Leezie, you were just about to get married.”
“I’d really like to be married.”
It was as if Merida hadn’t said anything at all, which was one of the most Leezie-ish things that she did; she carried on the conversation she wanted to have no matter what anyone else said. This was an old conversation, too. Leezie had always been talking about getting married. Merida couldn’t quite wrap her head around it; she herself had yet to meet a potential suitor she hadn’t gotten frustrated or bored with after a few hours or days, and she’d stopped imagining she might find someone who’d please her for longer. The closest Merida could come to understanding the intensity of Leezie’s devotion to the concept was remembering a brief stretch of time at the convent when Merida had been unreasonably infatuated with a wheelwright who came to mend things a few times a week. It embarrassed her hugely to remember how she had studied his movements, memorized his features, thought of him constantly. Her fixation on the wheelwright had been cured by the reality of the wheelwright, however. Every time he opened his mouth and actually spoke, the spell broke a little more, until eventually he was just a wheelwright and Merida was a princess trying to pretend she had never drawn the memorized line of his nose in the dust of the convent floor.
Opening her eyes, Merida stared sightlessly into the dark. “Why do you want to be married?”
“‘Ms. Leezie, good morning, are you ready for your cup of warm milk?’” Leezie said, her voice dreamy. “That’s what he would say when we woke up. And I would call him Mr. whatever his name was. ‘Yes, that would be very nice, Mr.—’”
“Cabbage,” interrupted Merida. “Mr. Cabbage.”
Leezie giggled in her messy, pretty way.
There was a warning drum of fingers on the outside of their door and both girls went still.
“Good night, Ms. Leezie,” Merida whispered, after a few minutes.
“Good night, Ms. Merida,” Leezie whispered back.
BRRRRONNNNG! Brrrronnnng! Brrrronnnng!
Another bell woke them in the morning.