“Harris,” hissed Merida.
“One of yours? What a fine-looking creature,” the Dásachtach said. He had calmed down his horse without getting flustered himself, and now he slid off and grabbed Brionn’s wide collar in one smooth motion. Brionn twisted, his expression silly as usual, eyes pointing off in all directions, tongue lolling, but he could not free himself from the Dásachtach’s grip. The warlord cast his eyes over the group and seemed to discern even at a distance of several yards who was at fault, because his gaze flickered to Harris and stayed firmly there. “It’s all right; come get him.”
Harris stalked across the expanse, his head up, shoulders back. If he was embarrassed about Brionn—and Merida knew he was—it wasn’t visible in his walk. As ever, he looked much older than his years as he strode across the expanse under the attention of both Elinor’s royal retinue and the Dásachtach’s men. He looked neither left nor right. His fingers did not twitch to betray uncertainty. That was not the Harris way. He simply walked straight up to the warlord who had just slaughtered an entire town and inclined his head in understated gratitude.
The Dásachtach did not immediately relinquish Brionn. Instead he stood there and cocked his head and took in the sight of Harris of DunBroch. Harris remained unflinching, wearing, as always, his cool, slightly superior expression that gave very little away.
“This is your dog?” the Dásachtach asked.
“He was a gift,” Harris answered in his distant way.
“Do you not think a dog’s behavior reflects its master?”
“I do.”
“And do you think this dog reflects you well, boy?”
It was a critique, and Harris did not generally take critique well unless he respected the giver very much, but all he said was, “He will.”
This made the Dásachtach smile. He held a hand out as if displaying Harris to his men. “Here now is a fine creature. I can see the quick mind shining out through the eyes.” He looked at Elinor. “Is this one of your sons? Boy, wouldn’t you like to ride with us now? We have a horse just your size.”
Merida thought she might throw up.
“Thank you for the offer,” Elinor said coldly. “But we have already sent one son to Ardbarrach and we must consider if we want to send off another, as we have our own borders to think of.”
“Indeed,” the Dásachtach said. “How well you illustrate my point. You send a son; I send a son. You will not be unprotected. Together we are a family. You would not think twice to send your son to family to spend time, nor would you be sad to receive and host family in his place for a time. Does family always get along? No, family does not always agree. But they take care of each other. I am making a family. Are you sure you do not want to send him along? We are doing quite a lot of work on this trip and I think he’d enjoy seeing it.”
At a subtle gesture from their queen, Elinor’s soldiers had stood at the ready, hands tight on hilts and spears. Her voice had metal in the back of it, too. “He is not coming with you.”
“Suit yourself,” the Dásachtach said. He leaned and whispered something to Harris, whose face did not change. Harris took Brionn’s collar and wrapped his fingers through it as Brionn panted and tried to lick him, and then he walked stiffly back to the retinue of DunBroch.
Then the Dásachtach snapped his fingers and said, “Thistlekin.”
“What did you say?” Elinor demanded.
“I was trying to think of where I had heard your name before,” the Dásachtach said. “Elinor of DunBroch. You were the diplomat queen, were you not? The Peacemaker. They still tell tales of you. And wasn’t that the phrase you used back then when you settled the tribes? Thistlekin. They stick each other, but they stick together. You and I are not that different.”
Merida, Leezie, and Harris looked to Elinor to see her reaction.
But just then she looked quite a bit like Harris. Remote and cold.
“Goodbye, Domnall mac Alpin,” she said in her most regal of voices. “I do not expect to see you again.”
The Dásachtach smiled.
MERIDA was not the only one who was quite shocked to hear of this other, famous side of her mother. First the surprise of her mother’s upbringing, as told by Máel Muire, and now this. Merida was beginning to feel like she didn’t know who Elinor was at all.
When they camped that night, just far enough away from the town so that they could not smell the awfulness of the Dásachtach’s work, she and Leezie were united in trying to find out more about it. They gathered at the fire just outside the main royal tent and tried to get Elinor to talk about herself.
She would not, at first. At first, all she did was deal with the fact of the encounter with the Dásachtach. She sent a scout galloping back toward DunBroch to tell Fergus, and another scout galloping south to inform Ardbarrach of the burnt town. She sent yet another to a village she said was near, to find out if they had survived and to arm themselves against the Dásachtach, if they had not, just in case.
She was a queen.
This wasn’t to say she wasn’t still very lofty and flustered during all of this, and she calmed herself down by giving Harris a lengthy lecture about his dog’s behavior and how badly that could have turned out and how it could have just as easily ended with his dog’s throat being cut before his eyes or his throat being cut before hers to teach a lesson, and if he had seen the things she had seen!
Harris endured all of this with his usual stillness, and finally Elinor was calm enough to be sat by the fire with some food before her and Ila sitting beside her carefully plucking thorns out of her skirt. Which was when Merida and Leezie set in asking about her past, and she set about not talking about it.
But then one of the soldiers leaning on his spear near the fire straightened a bit and said, “My sister’s named Elinor after your mum, Princess.”
“I still remember what she looked like riding through our village after it was liberated,” said one of the other soldiers.
“There’s a song in my hometown about how she made Clan Gregor and Clan Concobar stop murdering each other!” said one of Aileen’s kitchen helpers merrily as she refilled Elinor’s glass.
Elinor pursed her lips and said, “Exaggeration.”
But the stories kept coming in, and getting longer and more elaborate, until eventually nearly the whole of the retinue was gathered around the fire, telling Merida tales of her mother before she’d become a mother, and finally Elinor was laughing sweetly and pitching in details they forgot.
“They called us War and Peace,” she said, breaking a cake into polite-sized mouthfuls. “When your father and I were engaged to be wed, no one believed it! Him spending his youth stirring up fights and me spending mine putting them down!”
“You were my age doing all that?” Merida asked in disbelief.
“Aye,” Elinor said. “Sometimes it feels like an entirely different me. Like I’ve lived two lives entirely. Ah, it was a time.”
Merida couldn’t believe that her mother had been riding around Scotland at her age. Merida had ridden all over, yes, but no one was going to sing songs and recite ballads about her just because she’d read some books at a convent and raised some cows and tagged along with mapmakers.
She was uncomfortably reminded of that phrase that kept haunting her, in Feradach’s voice: a storm that moved no roofs. Her mother had moved roofs.
And all this time, Merida had been judging Elinor for inaction.
She closed her eyes and thought about the ruined town and the odor of carnage. She thought about how the Dásachtach had salted the wells to keep them from being used in the future, and how he had ruined the good trees nearby to keep them from being used to rebuild new life. How completely opposite that was to the searing, purposeful destruction of Kinlochy, or the brutal, incisive destruction of Cennedig’s hands.