Merida followed her gaze. There was Hubert! His wild red hair had been shorn as short as the other boys’ hair. Probably he had been among the boys last night, too, and she just hadn’t been able to tell, because he looked just like the others. Merida had a shivering memory of the first night they’d arrived, all the guards looking like the same person many times over. How strange that she’d never had a problem telling Hubert apart from Hamish and Harris, but now she could barely pick him out from all these strangers.
Regret stung her again, just as fiercely as it had as she thought about Leezie and secret passages. She’d waited too long to lose her patience with this place. Poor Hubert, smushed into this mold.
Hair will grow back, she told herself. Let’s just get out of here.
But there was only one problem.
Hubert didn’t want to go.
The guardsman in charge of his group looked bemused as they asked to pull Hubert from the exercises to speak to him, but he allowed it. Hubert wore a matching bemused expression, which turned absolutely cross when Merida informed him they were leaving at once.
“I don’t want to,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Merida asked in a low voice. “Are you just saying that? No one can hear you. Whisper in my ear.”
“We’ve only been here twelve days,” he said, glancing back at the rest of the boys and their exercises.
“Is that all,” Leezie murmured.
Twelve days, but hundreds of bells. Thousands of bells. Merida said, “I thought you’d be dying to go.”
“What? Why? It’s great! Look at it! Whoa! Wow! Yes!” He made some muscles and grinned at one of the other kids behind Merida’s back. “What don’t you like about it?”
Brrrronnnng! Brrrronnnng! Brrrronnnng!
Merida winced. Everything. “What do you like about it?”
Hubert’s attention was pulled once more to his group as they moved to another part of the courtyard, letting a second group take their place at the bars. “Everything!”
“Every single moment is scheduled,” Merida said.
“I know,” he said, but in a pleased way.
“Every single thing is training for war.”
“I know,” he said, but in a pleased way.
“They have your entire life planned out for you.”
“I know,” he said, but in a pleased way.
He looked so different with his short hair. Was that the only thing different about him? He seemed utterly unlike the boy who’d arrived just twelve days before. She felt stupid for having brought that little bear in case he needed comfort. Hubert had not been the little boy who needed that for a long time, and he was even further away from it now. She didn’t know what to say. Finally, she just exclaimed, “Your bum’s out the window! I wouldn’t have thought you would have liked someplace like this.”
“Me neither,” he confessed. “If you hadn’t brought me, I would’ve never known someplace like this existed, even.”
The two DunBroch siblings were identical in their bewilderment…that, for once, they weren’t exactly the same. Merida felt for just an instant, very unhappily, that she might cry, but then she didn’t.
“I don’t have to go, though, do I?” Hubert asked anxiously. “They said I could stay on as long as I liked. I thought we could stay till it was warmer, then we could have Dad come visit and see how well I was doing.”
No, he didn’t have to go. That was the worst of it. Of course he didn’t have to. Ardbarrach was all too delighted to fit him into the Hubert-sized hole in the game board. And Merida—Merida had to let him stay. It was clear he was changing, and that was what she wanted, wasn’t it? At least, it was what she needed. Surely it was better to lose him temporarily to this warlike place than to lose all of them to death by Feradach.
“I can’t stay, though,” Merida said finally. “I have to visit two other places still.”
“I know.”
“You aren’t going to miss home?”
Brrrronnnng! Brrrronnnng! Brrrronnnng!
The bell rang more insistently. Hubert looked up, and it was clear he wanted to go join his group again. “They’re calling me. Please, Merida? Please?”
Merida couldn’t quite believe that she’d come here for a quick journey, to see about maybe staying here herself, to perhaps open Hubert’s eyes to another way of living, and now was leaving without him. She felt like he’d managed to grow up too fast, too, just like Leezie, just like Merida herself.
“You better write,” Merida said, hating every bit of this. She hugged him. He was disgusting and sweaty, even in the cold. He grinned at her, visibly relieved that her face was no longer so serious, and then scampered off to join the others. He was just a boy, after all.
And because he was just a boy, Merida could not leave him entirely alone, even in a place like this, where she was sure they would watch his every move closely. Instead, she and Leezie wandered until they found Gille Peter in the barracks and asked if he’d be willing to stay with Hubert. He seemed enthusiastic about the prospect—or at least that was what Merida thought he was trying to say. He even helped them shovel Colban’s old bones into the back of the Friendly Box and capture Brionn, who’d been driving the stable boys mad with his chewing.
“Merida! Are you leaving us?”
Mistress mac Lagan’s voice came to them just as Leezie was doing her best to steer the Friendly Box back through the gate; she was letting the ponies boss her. Merida tilted her head back to see Mistress mac Lagan and the other young women on their way from the chapel via the walkway on the castle wall. They peered down at Merida and Leezie.
“I have two other kingdoms to visit this year,” Merida said.
Mistress mac Lagan’s expression pinched with disappointment.
The woman had done nothing but make Merida’s life difficult, but Merida nonetheless felt strange about letting her down. She had a thought, and she added, “Have to stay on schedule, you know?”
Mistress mac Lagan’s face cleared at once. “Oh, yes. I didn’t know, or I would have been happy to assist you with the timing. Well, I hope you’ll be back. You have promise. You could be a fine woman one day, with work.”
Merida managed to stretch her face into what she hoped looked like a grateful smile.
Behind them they heard the three chimes of the bells one more time.
Brrrronnnng! Brrrronnnng! Brrrronnnng!
When Merida thought of the journey back to DunBroch, it felt longer this direction than the other.
It hadn’t occurred to Merida she might not like her family changing.
THE weather turned wretched for several weeks after they got back to DunBroch, which was fine; it matched Merida’s mood. As the flat white sky pressed down low and ice layered over icicles outside and the wind howled like a betrayed lover, she moped around the castle. Ardbarrach, one of the least enchanting places she had ever been, nonetheless seemed to have extended an enchantment over her, because when she got back, she couldn’t stop seeing DunBroch through Mistress mac Lagan’s eyes. A little backwater kingdom; just a well-read family playing pretend with crowns and fake titles. For all that Merida had hated her time at Ardbarrach, she could see all the royal things Ardbarrach did that DunBroch didn’t. They trained an army to protect their people. They trained their dutiful women in scholarship about their history. They hosted visitors for trade and diplomacy. They fit into the world and exerted change upon it and themselves.
DunBroch had gotten so small. And the family DunBroch had shrunk to fit it.
How Merida despised that Feradach had made her see her home differently.
How Merida despised that Feradach had made her lose one of her triplets to Ardbarrach.
How Merida despised Feradach.
“You should sleep more,” Elinor told Merida. “You look like the mice have had their way with you. Come into the common room; I had Aileen make us a lovely cake with the last of the drowsy Christmas pears.”
Elinor and Fergus’s reaction to Hubert’s decision to stay in Ardbarrach had only worsened Merida’s poor mood. She wanted them to be horrified, like she was. But instead—
“I expect Hubert’s too busy to be homesick—thank you, Ila,” Elinor said, accepting a slice of the pear cake from the young girl, who was just as catlike and graceful as Merida remembered. “He has been saying for ages that he wanted to do more training.”
“He has?” demanded Merida. This felt like information that she could have used. “I don’t want any cake, thank you.”