There was a knock at the door.
It was polite. Without urgency. Pardon me, the knock said, is there anyone there—?
She wiped the tears from her face. Leezie always said she enjoyed a good cry, but Merida felt as if her face had been kneaded and left to rise. Puffy and clumsy—when she rose, her sleeve caught a bag of oatmeal and knocked over a jar of cloves. Elinor and Leezie must have been putting them into oranges for centerpieces—Leezie never could be bothered to put the lid on anything tightly. The odor surrounded her. Christmas, it shouted, Christmas. Christmas and the end of everything, maybe.
The door.
She went to it, and before she put her hand on the door pull, she thought about that snowy night almost a year ago and she had half a thought that she would open it and there would be no one on the other side.
But tonight, when she opened the door, there was someone standing on the other side of it. A familiar figure: That mane of hair. The broad-shouldered cloak. The hands in their gloves with oxblood stitching held carefully in each other.
“You,” she said.
But her mind thought, Finally.
This was what she had been waiting for. This was who she had been waiting for.
The very first flakes of snow of the year swirled behind him. She could hear the wind howling something fierce, nearly as strong as it had been on Eilean Glan.
It was the beginning of the end.
“Will you show me what has changed?” Feradach asked.
“YOU don’t need me to show you,” Merida told Feradach. “You can just feel it, can’t you? You could probably tell me more than even I know just from standing in the courtyard.”
Feradach replied, “The Cailleach says you’re meant to show me, so I think you should show me.”
“I think you just want to come in out of the cold.”
“May I?” he asked.
Merida let him in. He stood in the kitchen, looking quite ordinary and mortal as he had when he had talked with Aileen two seasons before. His eyes flitted over all the things he saw there and she wondered if he remembered it well enough to see how even the kitchen had changed. She wondered if it mattered, anyway. External change wasn’t what interested him.
“Do you want some bread? Do you eat?” she asked him. She felt shy around him now for some reason. He had been dying when she saw him before.
“I eat,” he said. He looked around. “It’s warmer than before.”
“Glass in all the windows,” Merida said. “Doing it right this time, my father said, welcome to the modern world. All the candles are beeswax now, too—no more smoky cow-smelling tallow candles, and oil lamps in the Great Hall and common room. The future is brighter!” she joked.
“It has changed,” Feradach agreed. “Show me more.”
“There are many people here,” Merida warned. “You’ll have to be quick on your feet as they see your changing face.”
“I always am.”
Yes, she supposed he was used to it. “Do you want to hang your cloak there?”
“I have always wanted to know what it looked like,” he said, and then he removed it and looked at it as if seeing it for the first time.
And he was, Merida realized with an odd feeling in her stomach. He did not know what he looked like, he said, until someone told him enough to remind him whose face he wore. His appearance was in the eye of the beholder. Merida had made that cloak that now hung with the others behind the kitchen door, in a way.
Magic, magic.
But the cloak was not enough to tell him whose face he had, because she saw him furtively touch his fingers once more to his jawline before he turned from the cloaks, trying to identify it. She could see from his expression that he was unsuccessful.
“Come see what you’d like to ruin,” she told him.
“I don’t want—” he began, before he realized she was merely ribbing him. He caught a bread roll as she tossed it, and then let her lead him into DunBroch for a third time.
This was nothing like the first time, when she’d pulled him fearfully from Aileen in the kitchen, unsure of how the game was going to play out. Now, in many ways, he was her closest confidant. Certainly he was the only one who knew what she was living through. It was an odd push-pull. Familiarity; caution. Shared secrets; opposite goals.
Who knew of his existence? She did.
Who knew of hers? He did.
She gave him a proper tour.
In each room, she tried to describe how it used to look, and what had been improved with her father’s renovation, but she found she frequently got sidetracked. When trying to think of good ways to describe how the room had been in the past, she often remembered stories that had happened in it, instead, and only realized partway through she hadn’t said anything about change.
“That summer, Dad told the triplets he’d give them a lump of sugar for every rat tail they nailed to this board under their name,” Merida said, in one of the hallways. “Seems positively violent to tell it to you now, but you have to understand, that summer of rats, they were everywhere, they were under the blankets with you in bed, they were taking supper with you, you’d reach down to pet a dog and you’d be petting a pile of rats instead.” Hamish hadn’t killed a single one, she was sure, but nonetheless he’d had just as many rat tails nailed up for every inspection, and Merida had once seen Hubert and Harris carefully splitting up their spoils in order to section off some for Hamish’s board. “Who knew what they squeezed out of Hamish for such a favor, but I thought it was kind of them anyway.” Merida shook her head. “I haven’t told you what this room used to be like.”
“The stories are fine,” Feradach said. “I can see the change. I can feel it.”
So she continued to tell him a story in each room. In the common room she told him how Mum had first found Leezie sleeping in her comfortable chair, right next to the fire, one of Mum’s pressed flower books in her hands, back when they had first hired Leezie on as a housekeeper’s assistant. She told him how Harris had once climbed out the window of the tower to the music room and hung on a rope there, trapped, for several hours, too proud to call for help. In the tapestry room, she told him how she and her mother had fought viciously over her right to her own hand in marriage, and of the mended tapestry that still hung there on the wall as a vow they’d never let themselves be separated by anger like that again. In the Great Hall, she showed him where all the tattered animal heads used to hang on the wall, horribly maimed, as she had, as a child, brought her bow and arrow in there and secretly shot at them for hours every night when she was first learning archery. She told him stories of Fergus and stories of Hubert and stories of Hamish and stories of all of them together, and he listened to all of them as the night outside grew deeper and the wind began to howl louder.
And then a remarkable thing happened.
They didn’t realize it was remarkable until after, though.
At first, Elinor simply said, on her way up to the attic with the two orphan girls trailing behind her, “Merida, who’s this fellow here so late?” She squinted at his expression and Merida could see her suspicion wash away with whatever she saw.
Merida thought fast and went with a version of the truth. “This is a fellow we met on the road to Ardbarrach. He gave us directions; he was passing through DunBroch and wanted to see how we’d fared.”
The girls with Elinor had been looking at Feradach, too, as much as they could while remaining polite. Merida hoped that whatever they saw him as, it wasn’t a woman or blind beggar, at least, so that the story held.
“Well, make sure he gets some warm ale in him,” Elinor said. “It’s quite a night out there. Those are splendid gloves, sir.”