“I’ve had time,” Merida replied. “I’ve had lots of time. I can feel how I want to stay the same, though. All my ideas are the same ideas I’ve already had. I’m a storm moving no roofs.”
He recognized his own words at once. “That was very cruel of me to say.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Merida said. “Or at least, it wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t changing. I still haven’t. I don’t really know how, still.”
Feradach’s gloved hands were in loose fists now.
“Which means I need your help,” Merida said.
She gestured to his glove.
Feradach jerked his hand back.
“I’m not afraid,” Merida said. She had seen all the ways his destruction could manifest, when he was the one choosing it. Sometimes it was the terrible fire, like at Kinlochy, but sometimes it was the flood, or the broken hand of a harper. She knew it was going to hurt, but she knew it would be fair. She knew in the end, she’d be like the scholar, like the harper. She would be a better version of herself. “Please.”
“It won’t be easy,” he said.
“I trust you.” I love you.
Feradach sighed, and then he looked at the palms of those gloves with the oxblood stitching.
“How do you decide?” Merida asked. “What it is that will happen?”
Feradach carefully tugged off one glove. Then the other. They were just ordinary, human-looking hands beneath, as always, but of course they weren’t ordinary human hands at all. They weren’t even really his. Just borrowed, for a bit. “It’s instinct, I suppose. From watching humans for a long time. You think about what they think they want, and you take it away from them, so they have room to realize what they truly need instead. You cut out all the bits that are standing in the way of growth. The dead ends. The land that might have been good once, but now won’t support another crop.”
“Do you know what it will do to me?” Merida asked.
He nodded.
“You will heal,” he said, and then he put his hand on her cheek. There was no feeling of dread, just the feeling of Feradach’s hand on her.
“You will always be impossible,” he added, and he put his other hand on her other cheek. There was still no sense of doom; of what might be to come.
“You will still be Merida of DunBroch,” he said, and he kissed her.
Neither the mortal nor the god had ever been in love before. It is not every day or every week or every month or every year that one person meets another who is their perfect foil, and it is not even every century that the pairing is a mortal and a god. It’s more than simply love when it is a pair like this: it is balance, perfect balance, the push-pull of opposite forces that require each other.
It is a sort of love that never grows old.
Magic, magic, magic.
Merida could feel the dread beginning to rise up in her.
Feradach pulled back just enough to whisper in her ear: “It is this: you will never see me again.”
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, she was alone. There were not so much as a single footprint in the frost beside the pools.
Feradach’s hands had done their destructive work. Her heart was broken.
She would never be the same.
THIS is a story about two gods and a girl.
The first god, the Cailleach, went about her business the way she had always done. Coaxing buds from trees, kits from foxes, crops from rocky ground. It is not that the Cailleach is incapable of change. It is just that she is very old, and will continue to get older, and so the scale of her change happens so slowly that it would be very difficult to capture in the space of a story like this. It is a bit like how you cannot tell the Earth is curved unless you’re in space. It’s just too big. She’s just too old. Merida’s story changed her a little, but so very little that we mortals can’t see it.
The second god, Feradach, went about his business as well. The balance still had to be held. Destruction still had to be wrought. But his time with DunBroch had changed him. He was slower to incite ruin, and when he did, it was often less complete than before. He left humans room to make mistakes and to learn from them, and his destruction often threw people together in new ways, so that they could learn from each other without having to lose everything along the way.
The girl, however, did not go about her business as usual.
She had been a storm that didn’t move roofs, but she’d spent a year watching storms that did. Instead of striking off on her own, as she’d always done, she decided to learn to listen.
In spring, she went to Eilean Glan, and she listened to the old queen teach girls to heal.
In summer, she went to Ardbarrach, and as the bells rang, she listened to the value of order.
In fall, she returned home long enough for her mother to prepare for the journey, and then, as they rode around a new and fragile Scotland, she listened to her mother talk about peace.
In winter, she returned to DunBroch to think about all she had learned over the long, dark season.
“There’s something I’d like to show you,” Leezie told Merida.
The two girls—the two sisters—the two young women, really—took a chilly walk out to the standing stone known as Feradach’s stone. It was dark and frostbitten and standing off by itself from the holy well nearby. The two sisters knelt until both were at eye level with an ancient handprint.
Leezie gestured for Merida to fit her hand into the print. She did.
“Stone,” Leezie whispered, and her eyes glinted with the Sight, “show her what you’ve seen.”
Merida thought for a moment that it would not work, and then, just like that, she was whisked to a long-ago time, in a DunBroch long before it was called DunBroch. There was a hunt afoot. This hunt did not yet have the name it would come to have later: the Hunt for the Unnamed.
There were two hunters pursuing the quarry that raced between the trees. Strange quarry it was, quarry without a body, just feelings, barely more than air, just gleeful odd beings that existed in all times over and over. These breathy entities could see everything, could watch everything, but that was about all they did. They did not harm the world, and the world did not harm them. They loved the world.
You can still feel them in the right places.
One of the hunters was a man, and although he was still pursuing aggressively, he would come away from the hunt empty-handed, as men always did. The quarry was too unlike him for him to even understand what he was chasing, and that’s no way to catch anything.
The other hunter was the Cailleach, who was ancient even then. She was old and tired of doing unpleasant things; she longed to put the ugly work behind her and focus only on growth, and so she had a plan. She was tricky even then, and she used a trick to make one of the small pools of water she controlled become a perfect reflection of the sky. One of the strange carefree air beings got caught in it as it fled, and before it could make sense of the trap, the Cailleach scooped it out. The quarry was not entirely like her, but it was enough like her that she could hold it firmly.
Walking to the craggy standing stone near the pool, she pressed the being against the stone so that it was trapped between stone and skin.
“You will no longer be air,” she said. “You will be a god.”
The stone hummed with the power of it, with the transfer of the dread and the ruin. The airy creature cried out as it was given form for the first time. The Cailleach’s hand sank right into the stone.
This was the first of the Feradachs.
“No,” he said bitterly, understanding at once what his duty was to be. “There must be a way out.”
The Cailleach smiled.
“Of course,” she said. “But it will have to be a trick.”
Merida sat back from the stone, her mind returning to the present day beside Leezie. Time moved sluggishly around her.
“Leezie,” she said, her voice barely audible.
“I’ll help you think of one,” Leezie said.
The two sisters walked back to the castle, and joined the revelry there.
Later, as the snow began to fall on the shortest night of the year, as Merida went to the kitchen to get some fresh bread, as she stood there, looking in the fire and remembering, she heard a knock.