Dawn was beginning to lighten the sky by the time they arrived at the place he was supposed to ruin, the place he had been resisting. Even though the strange, waxy feeling that had marred the dead clearing was still hanging over everything, it was a lovely scene.
A wide river cut through the woods. Willow trees dangled their fingers into the surface as swans floated in slumber. Russet grass and tall wildflowers sighed in the breeze beside a stone hut. It looked like a home out of a story, quiet and peaceful.
As Leezie carried Feradach (Leezie was starting to complain a lot by now: “My arm is falling asleep!”), and Brionn circled anxiously around her, Merida crept to the hut. She peered inside.
It was a scholar’s hut. The walls were lined with shelves of books and scrolls. A table was spread with manuscripts, inks, quills. Books were worth a fortune; manuscripts took forever to ink. It was years of work visible just in the dim light of the window. The scholar was visible, too—a woman, to Merida’s surprise, as she knew few women who could read and write as well as her mother, certainly not enough to have done all this. But this woman clearly belonged to this scholarship, and vice versa. She was sleeping at the desk, long hair streaming over her shoulders, her ink-stained fingers not far from her quill.
Merida wondered what the scholar had done to bring Feradach to her. She wondered, too, what her fate was going to be.
All she knew was that it would be fair.
“I’m sorry,” Merida whispered, her breath fogging the window for just a moment.
“Is there someone in there?” Leezie hissed.
“Put him down here,” Merida hissed in return, intentionally not answering the question. “And then take Brionn and stand back. Far back. I don’t know how to do this part. Don’t look at me like that! You’ve done so much and I don’t want you to get hurt because of doing your job well.”
Feradach was laid beside the hut, within reach of the wall, both forms of him mingling in Merida’s view. Leezie retreated far, far back, barely visible on the edge of the river plain.
Merida took a deep breath to give herself courage, and then reached for Feradach’s glove.
“No!”
She flinched. The protest was the first indication he’d given that he had any awareness left at all.
Feradach’s eyes had come open, and Merida saw him once more as just the man she’d come to know. With effort he said, “Don’t.”
“We brought you to where you’re supposed to be,” Merida whispered angrily. “I understand what you were trying to do, but it won’t work. The balance won’t let it. I understand. Do your duty. I want you to do what you are meant to do.”
“I will,” Feradach said, voice thin and strained. “But don’t…touch…”
She realized what he meant and sat back. With agonizing slowness, he began to worry off the glove himself. It took forever, and for a while, it did not at all seem like he would ever manage it, as he had to keep letting his hands fall to his chest to rest before trying once more.
Finally, as the sun just came over the trees and lit one thousand bright diamonds of light across the wide pacific river, he managed to get one glove off. Such an ordinary hand beneath it. Such a deadly hand.
He hesitated.
Merida reached for his elbow where it was safely covered by his sleeve, and lifted his arm for him.
Feradach pressed his hand into the side of the hut. His handprint sank deep into it.
Immediately Merida felt the day right itself. The strange, waxy feeling lifted, and everything seemed sharp and near again. Even though something dreadful was surely going to happen—she had helped make sure of that—the world no longer felt dreadful.
The birds kept singing. The swans kept floating. The river kept easing by. But it was different, somehow. What must it be like, Merida thought, to have a sense of this balance at all times? No wonder Feradach felt so compelled to right it. How strange it must be to endure DunBroch’s wrongness for an entire year; no wonder he had winced at the concept of the bargain.
When Merida turned back to Feradach, she found he’d already put his glove back on and pulled himself to crouch. Already he, too, was being righted. He gazed at Merida with a most peculiar expression.
“What will happen to her?” Merida asked, to hide the fact that she, too, felt most peculiar.
Feradach said simply, “The river will find its way in.”
He did not say thank you, and she did not say that they had saved him.
They just stayed there for a minute, caught in that peculiar feeling that had nothing to do with the shifting balance between ruin and growth and more to do with the shifting balance between a god and a girl, and then Feradach said, “You should go. There’s not much time left for you to do your work.”
EVERYTHING stayed peculiar after that, actually. It was not that it was bad; it was the opposite. Everything went perfectly. Logically, it seemed as if uncertainty should have set in the farther they got from home, the deeper they got into rural Scotland, the wilder the countryside became. Even if nothing had gone wrong at all, it was still a very long journey over very wild terrain, including a boat ride across a capricious autumn sea.
But instead it was idyllic. Timeless. Happy. Exciting. The royal retinue journeyed right to where the land ended, at a remote harbor called Tarvodubron, and then climbed into small boats for the crossing to Eilean Glan. Merida had never been on such a journey before and it seemed impossible, terrifying, wondrous, to be in the middle of the ocean with land visible on one side and land barely visible on the other and nothing but water and weather between. Creatures as large as Merida but with slick gray skin and small, clever eyes leapt alongside the boats, thrilling and delighting and horrifying passengers. It felt to Merida as if she had traveled not to another kingdom but to a dream.
It became obvious the moment they landed at Eilean Glan that it was not at all a kingdom in the same way that Ardbarrach or Kinlochy or even DunBroch were kingdoms. There was no massive castle here, no court, no lairds, no tacksmen. There simply wasn’t enough land or people for such a system. Eilean Glan was one of a handful of small bare islands rising from the ocean, their edges sheer pale cliffs. Everything was whipping grass and blazing sun and bare flat boulders. There were precious few trees; how could there be? The wind was continuous.
It was the most memorable part of the island, the wind.
But it didn’t seem to faze Elinor.
From the moment she stepped off the boat onto the shore, she floated. Her eyes were wide, taking everything in. With complete surety, she led them all from the harbor, to a road cut deep into the ground and edged with hedgerows and stone walls to offer a bit of a windbreak, and right up to a community of low houses and buildings dug into the ground to keep the wind from unmooring them. It was a convoluted layout, but Elinor seemed to know it intuitively. She took them directly to the main building, which was large, but like everything else, low. They had to duck to get into it.
Inside, rushlights illuminated rows and rows of girls, their hair all pinned neatly up, eerily matching the way Elinor’s hair was currently pinned, the way it was always pinned beneath her wimple and veil. They were all bent over books, fingers trailing along the words. Some of them were also writing as they went. Merida had never seen so many girls in one place and certainly never seen so many readers.
At the head of the room was a light-haired woman about Elinor’s age who was dressed just as neatly and tidily as the girls. She was tapping a dry quill in her palm absently, but when she saw Elinor, she said, “Oh! Elinor!”
To Merida’s surprise, the two of them embraced like sisters, and the woman laughed and wiped away a tear that had come out with her laugh.
“Look at you!” the woman said. “Has Máel Muire seen you yet?”
Elinor shook her head, laughing and crying too.