“What?” Merida asked.
“I was counting them for their meaning. Five dogs. Their four, plus Brionn under the wagon, that makes five. You’re still really red.”
“Thanks. What does five dogs mean?”
“Usually it means rain, I think.”
They both looked at the weeping sky.
“See?” Leezie said. Then she ducked out of the window and back into the castle.
Merida stayed where she was at, watching her father, who also stayed where he was at in the rain, watching the departing company. It was hard to tell what he was thinking. She saw his head turn to look at the split rain barrel and then at some of the roof tiles. Then he spit and retreated indoors.
Maybe, Merida thought, he was feeling a little bit like her. Which was to say: bad.
She spit out the window like her father. Ugh, Wolftail.
So that was the second visitor.
And the third visitor, who arrived on a much nicer day, with much less fanfare, was Feradach.
FERADACH had arrived at the castle while Merida was practicing her archery in the game fields, although she didn’t realize it right away. She knocked the mud from her boots just outside the door, tramped inside, leaned her bow against the wall, and headed toward the kitchen to find something to snack on. She had that free and cheerful feeling one has after a good practice session, and all things seemed possible. She thought after she got something in her belly, she would get out the maps and see about firming up the route to Kinlochy.
To her surprise, as she approached the kitchen, she could hear Aileen speaking musically. This was unusual. If one met Aileen anywhere besides the kitchen, she was perfectly civil, but try to talk to her in front of the stove or next to a bowl—she became a screaming gamecock. But on this particular day, Merida could hear her describing how to make a certain sort of vegetable stew in great and pleasant detail.
And when Merida got to the threshold, she realized she recognized the voice murmuring in reply.
“You!” she said.
Because of course it was Feradach—Feradach in his gloves with their oxblood stitching, with his tree brooch and his light mane of hair, looking very real and close in the low-ceilinged kitchen beside Aileen and her cut-up vegetables on the board before her. Both of them were lit by the newly warm light through the wee window that looked out just a few inches above the ground, and in that gentle light, one would have been hard pressed to say that one seemed any more uncanny than the other.
Merida stood askance in the doorway. “What are you doing here?”
Feradach regarded her without malice. He was holding a turnip.
“Why, Merida, that’s very rude,” Aileen said.
Merida didn’t care if it was rude or not. She cared that she had only so many more months to sort this out and she did not like having Feradach here among her family, talking to Aileen as if he were just an ordinary man, holding one of their turnips.
“I know this man—” started Merida.
“Who knows a man who knows me,” Feradach interrupted smoothly. “Thank you for the recipe, Aileen. I’ll try it now that spring onions will be coming in.”
“I’d be so pleased to hear how it turned out, madam!” Aileen said. “Is your business with Merida, then?”
Madam?
“Yes,” Feradach said. “She’s the one I was told to see.”
Aileen turned to Merida, still looking far more pleasant than she would have ordinarily. “Will you be seeing the lady in the Great Hall or the common room, Merida? I will have Ila send a tray.”
The lady?
Feradach was looking at Merida quite intently, waiting for her to put it together. Finally she remembered what he had told her: everyone saw him as someone different. This magic had seemed like a strange but unimportant wrinkle when it was just him and her and Gille Peter out in the middle of nowhere. But the castle was full of people in close proximity.
This could get messy very quickly.
Merida told Aileen, “No tray is necessary. I won’t be seeing the lady for long.”
She ushered Feradach into the dim back hallway. Strangely, it still smelled of wedding buns and Christmas, even though much time had passed. She and Feradach were as close as they had ever been, and this close, it seemed impossible that other people might see him as anything other than what she was seeing. The details seemed too precise. His eyes were dark gray with a darker gray ring. His mane of hair was dark at the roots, faded to nearly white at the ends. He had a small pock scar underneath his chin; every time he pursed his lips, his mouth looked suddenly youthful and boyish; two of his bottom teeth were slightly crowded together so they had to turn sideways to both fit. And those gloves, of course, with their bright red stitching, wondrously formed to his hands so that the shape of them was quite clear beneath. Such thorough details for an illusion. But illusion it was nonetheless, as obviously Aileen had been thoroughly convinced by whatever she saw, too.
“I told you to stop following me,” Merida hissed.
“I cannot stop doing that,” he said, “because you still smell of rot.” Merida’s mouth came open right away to protest this and so he went on, “But that’s not why I came today. Have you already forgotten the Cailleach requires you to show me your work, and vice versa?”
“No,” lied Merida. How embarrassing that she’d forgotten both the message-sending part of the bargain with the Dásachtach and this part of the bargain with the gods. She’d never been marvelous with the more fiddly, boring details of a project. In her loftiest voice, she added, “I was just hoping you had. I was not overeager to see you again.”
“Mmm,” he murmured. “I would have thought you would be pleased to gloat about your brother Hubert’s change.”
Her heart lurched. It was a multipurpose lurch. It lurched because this was acknowledgment that Hubert truly had changed, which meant this entire game was winnable. But it also lurched because—again—this was acknowledgment that Hubert truly had changed, which meant he would never again be the brother he had been when she took him to Ardbarrach in the first place.
Elinor’s voice rose. “Merida, who is this visitor?”
Both Merida and Feradach turned abruptly to see Elinor standing at the end of the hall. Even in silhouette, she managed to look both very royal and very suspicious, the line of her spine straight and proper, the tilt of her head wary and imperious.
There was no way of telling what her mother saw Feradach as, so Merida considered several answers before landing on a neutral one. “Aileen chased us from the kitchen.”
“Why is he being greeted here of all places? It is hardly…appropriate.”
There was no way of telling if it was inappropriate because Feradach appeared too highborn to be greeted in a hallway, too lowborn to be allowed into the castle, or too eligibly bachelor-ish to be standing so close to Merida alone. And Feradach was no help in solving the puzzle of how Elinor saw him, either. He simply stood there, his gloved hands clasped together, looking from mother to daughter.
Merida applied cunning to the situation. “Where do you think would be more appropriate?”
Elinor’s silhouette managed to look aggravated. “Merida, don’t be saucy. Both you and this young man must know that anywhere is more appropriate than a dark hallway, no matter the discussion.”
Understanding crystallized. Merida said, “He’s not a suitor.”
“And yet you’re still a young woman and he’s still a young man,” Elinor said, stepping close enough that Merida was now able to interpret her expression as distrust. It was hard to tell if this meant she didn’t trust Merida, or didn’t trust whomever Feradach looked like. Since their giant argument about marriage years ago, she and her mother had simply avoided the topic of matchmaking altogether, so neither knew the other’s opinions on it. “Now please take this conversation to the Great Hall; it’s terribly dingy back here. Don’t judge us by this, sir. Lovely hat, by the way. Have you been to France?”