Hat?
Feradach replied, “It was a gift.”
“A lovely one.” Elinor turned. “I haven’t seen one since—Fergus! There you are.”
Fergus had just appeared at the bottom of the stairs with a breastplate of armor in each hand. “I’ve not been hiding, my love!” Catching sight of Feradach, he nodded his approval. “Looking fine, grandpa, but it’s late for mumming, isn’t it? Elinor, those ailettes are still missing and I canna find them anywhere.”
Grandpa? Mumming?
Elinor’s arched eyebrows became puzzled eyebrows as she processed Fergus’s words.
Michty me, Merida thought. Whatever Fergus saw Feradach as was obviously quite at odds with Elinor’s version. Merida really did need to get Feradach away before things got more tangled. The moment anyone guessed there was magic involved, it would get very difficult to avoid talking about the bargain.
“Great Hall,” Merida ordered Feradach, and he obeyed.
“So, Lady Madam Grandpa,” Merida said, as soon as they were out of her mother’s earshot. She kept her voice low, because even though the Great Hall was empty, the high walls wanted to take her words and throw them around. “A domestic woman to Aileen and a suitor to my mother and a mummer to my father, and who knows what you’ll be next.”
“I told you I look different to each person who sees me,” Feradach said. “What do I look like to you?”
“You don’t know?” When he shook his head, she asked in disbelief, “Your magic changes your face but doesn’t tell you what it looks like?”
He peered up at the flags hanging from the ceiling of the Great Hall. It was difficult to tell if he was interested in them or deciding if they were rotting and required his ruinous attention. “I only know what I look like if the person looking tells me something about what they are seeing. Your mother mentioned a French hat. Your father mentioned my age, my costume. These are clues.”
A melodic plink drew Merida’s attention.
“Hamish!” she said, horrified. The smallest of the triplets was tucked away in the corner of the Great Hall, nearly hidden by one of the tables. In his hands was a lap harp Merida had definitely heard their mother say was not to be touched. When he saw Merida, he immediately tried to stuff it behind his back, but she wagged a finger at him. “What did you hear?”
“What?” Hamish whispered shyly.
“Did you hear us talking?”
He shook his head. He was still trying to slowly move the lap harp behind himself, as if Merida might forget she’d seen it at all if he got it out of sight. Merida knew the feeling exactly. Behind her back, she pointed aggressively at the door to the outside and hoped Feradach obeyed.
“I won’t tell,” Merida said. “But don’t break it. We’re going outside.”
But Feradach hadn’t moved toward the door as she’d indicated. This was because Hamish had stopped trying to squirrel the lap harp away and was instead staring at Feradach. It was so thorough a stare that it was like a string connected Hamish and Feradach, a string that would be unkind for Feradach to break. So Feradach stood there, letting Hamish stare at him, the triplet looking like a rabbit frozen in place.
Finally, not taking his eyes from Feradach, Hamish lifted one of his long spider fingers to touch his own cheek, almost like he didn’t realize he was doing it. Merida realized he must be seeing some kind of wound or mark on Feradach’s face, something major enough that he was completely transfixed. Elinor would have told him it was appallingly rude to stare and make a fuss over anything odd he might have seen, and Merida might have too, if she had any idea of what he was looking at.
“You can ask,” Feradach told him. “It won’t offend me.”
Hamish glanced at Merida, as if for permission. She shrugged. In his small voice, Hamish asked, “Does it hurt?”
Feradach’s fingers hovered over his own cheek, not quite touching. “What does it look like?”
“Like it hurts,” Hamish said in a low, reverent voice. His eyes were absolutely enormous. “Did a wolf get you?”
“A wolf…” Feradach gently ran fingers across his own cheek, tracing a shape Merida didn’t see, flinching and probing. Ultimately his fingers rested exactly where Hamish’s fingers had indicated on his own cheek. His eyes tightened, as if something had just occurred to him, and then he said, “Fighting dogs, not wolves. But it doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s only a memory now, and you know what, the other eye sees just fine. Try not to let your memories hurt more than the wound, friend.”
Hamish twisted his fingers round each other nervously. It was the longest conversation Merida had seen him have with a stranger; normally she would have been delighted to see him being so brave, but not with a god who intended to kill them all later.
“Put that harp back,” Merida ordered Hamish. She could see Ila moving around deeper in the Great Hall, and she was determined to get out before this happened again. “Don’t tell Mum we had this conversation, or I’ll tell her you were staring at people. Feradach, out.”
She practically vaulted across the room, pushing open not the Hall’s big doors, but rather the little door that was disguised within one of them. Outside, she hurried him through the bright overgrown spring courtyard, past the raised vegetable beds and the kennels and the chicken house.
Finally they were on the other side of the gate and on the outside of DunBroch’s wall. It was cool here in the shadows, but it was beautiful with its view down to the shimmering loch. And at least there were only the tall pine trees to see and hear them; they could speak freely.
The needles beneath Merida’s feet threw up their sharp scent as she turned on her heel to point at Feradach. “You just said you only knew what you looked like if people told you what you looked like.”
Feradach hovered his hand over the geometric bark of the closest pine tree but didn’t touch it. “That’s true.”
“But Hamish didn’t tell you what you looked like. He just said—what did he say? He just asked if you’d been bitten by wolves. Obviously you didn’t look like that to any of the others. Obviously you don’t look like that now. So what is the truth?”
Feradach touched his own face, ran his fingers over that blond mane, but it seemed as if he didn’t quite know the shapes beneath; he was guessing and missing. “It was enough for me to remember.”
“Remember?” she echoed.
He said, “I wear the faces of those I’ve brought ruin to.”
The beauty went straight out of the day, replaced by a bone-deep chill as thorough as the first day she met him. So the specifics of the face she saw now were simply a dead man’s portrait, worn by the god that killed him.
Merida refused to let Feradach see that she was bothered, though. She just made her voice very brash and careless and said, “So one day you might look like me.”
Feradach flinched. Or rather, the body he borrowed flinched. Merida wouldn’t let herself be fooled again. There was a monster inside that suit.
He said, “I thought you might be interested that I don’t forget any of them. Since you seem certain I delight in this task.”
“I’m not interested,” Merida said, “in what you feel at all. I’m only interested in winning this bargain.”
Feradach’s voice was cooler than before. “Well then, the sooner we fulfill the Cailleach’s requirements, the sooner I can be on my way.”
If he had been human—if he had been any of those humans whose faces he wore today—Merida would have felt bad for obviously offending him. But he wasn’t, so she just said, “Then let’s go see what you’ve ruined.”
DRAT and blast being a princess!
Merida only made it just out of the shadow of the castle wall before Elinor’s voice reached her and called her back into the courtyard. She had the nerve to sound suspicious—she thought Merida had been creeping off with the man she’d believed a suitor. When Merida said she was going for a long walk, Elinor demanded Merida take Leezie.