The brindly dog made a great deal of fuss as he tried to show her the thing in his mouth while at the same time not wanting to give it up.
“I don’t think this was meant to be your Christmas gift,” Merida told him, once she wrested it free. His treasure was all that remained of a decorative wooden spoon; among the leaves carved intricately on the handle, she spied the name Merida. Or rather: Merid. The a had been eaten. “Unless your name’s Merida, too.”
The dog began to bark, the high, resentful yelps of a teen hound that felt he had been wronged.
She sighed. It wasn’t that she wanted another carved spoon (somewhere along the way, her parents had gotten it into their minds she was collecting them, which she wasn’t, and they’d given her so many she had to line them up on the mantel, which made it look even more like she was collecting them, which only generated more, a never-ending cycle of spoons), but she would have rather had the choice of deciding whether or not she wanted it.
Ordinarily, this would be the part of Christmas Day when she began to plot her revenge on the triplets, something to be enacted after the holiday’s frantic hubbub. Unlike the days of family festivities leading up to it, Christmas Day was a public affair. Before the sun rose, cooking and cleaning and decorating began, filling the castle with activity. Once the sun set, the castle opened itself to villagers, crofters, tacksmen, and wanderers to eat until they couldn’t eat any more and dance until they couldn’t stand. The DunBroch royal family told stories and made merry and generally made certain everyone had a good time as they pretended for at least one night that they, too, lived in the castle. It was ever so much work, and that was without Leezie’s Christmas wedding on top of it.
And today, Merida had a family to save. She didn’t have time for revenge.
“Out, wolves, out!” She shoved the dogs into the circular stairwell and slammed the door. “Michty me.”
She also didn’t have anything to wear.
A quick examination revealed that her dress was still wet. Leezie hadn’t bothered to stoke the fires in the early morning as she was supposed to (she didn’t bother with many of her assigned duties), so the remaining sullen embers had only made the back of the dress lukewarm. Moreover, it was filthy. The chase through the woods had needled the off-white fabric with dried thorns and barbs. Merida didn’t have another one. Like her mother and Leezie, Merida wore the same garment day in and day out; formal attire simply meant putting a fancier layer over it. She had to wash it.
But of course her kettle was missing, and there was no firewood in the rack. Supplying all this was Leezie’s job, but Leezie hadn’t done it.
Merida just stood there for several long minutes. The process of acquiring the kettle and remembering wherever her little bit of soap had gone since her last bath and getting the fire going hot and picking all the twigs from her hair so her mother could twist it into wedding-appropriate knots that would fit beneath a wimple seemed like an impossible amount of effort. It wasn’t as if she could ask for help, not without explaining how the dress had come to be in its current state, which was impossible under the terms of the bargain. How ridiculous! And she’d thought it such a simple part of the bargain last night.
Quite suddenly, Merida was furious. At Leezie for never doing her tasks properly. At her mother for letting Leezie always get away with it, when she never let Merida get away with sloppiness. At the devilish triplets for using up too much of Elinor’s disciplinary energy. At her father Fergus for not taking up the slack of shouting at the triplets so that her mother had more time to shout at Leezie. And finally, at the fire, for failing to do the only thing expected of it. Burn! Burn! How hard could it be? Merida’s cheeks were doing it just fine.
“Ma’am, do you need me to stock your hearth?”
Merida jumped.
The voice had come from behind her, inside her room.
Spinning, she discovered an elegant little girl in a servant’s simple dress, her arms piled with firewood and cleaning supplies.
“How’d you get in here?” Merida asked.
“Came in with the dogs, ma’am.”
This girl had been in her room this entire time? It felt like a magic trick. Not magic like the Cailleach’s knock on the door last night, but a little unsettling nonetheless. Merida asked, “Who are you?”
“Ila, ma’am.” The girl managed a catlike, sinuous curtsy even with her arms full. “I was supposed to take Leezie’s place.”
Take.
Leezie’s.
Place.
Merida felt an actual burst of physical pain at this phrase—a squeeze, right in her stomach, like her insides were being gripped. She felt betrayed by her own mind. It had tried to convince her she was upset about her filthy dress or the unready fire or even the dueling gods, when really the thing stopped her in her tracks was the knowledge that today was Leezie’s wedding day. Leezie! Getting married! Leezie! To the Cabbage! It had been four years since Elinor had invited Leezie to be the castle’s housekeeper. Four years since Leezie had completely failed at anything like housekeeping and had completely succeeded in weaseling her way into the Clan DunBroch’s hearts instead. Now, she was like a sister to Merida. An aggravating, vague, silly sister, but a sister nonetheless, her best friend. She was only moving as far as the blackhouse village, barely a mile away, but when the rest of your family lived in a castle, it wasn’t physical distance that mattered.
“Ma’am?” Ila said politely. “Is something wrong?”
Merida was uncomfortably aware she had been staring off into space, her face twisted with distress. She tried to organize it into something a bit more royal and drew her blanket robe close around her. “I’m fine. Fine! Fine. My mother hired you? Wait, is that soap you’ve got there?”
“Aye, and some wee tweezers, ma’am. I saw your dress and thought you might need them for the thorns. Anything else, ma’am?”
Merida, entirely unused to having a housekeeper who actually kept house, had no idea what was reasonable to ask. “Could I get some water for washing? Are you big enough to carry a bucket up these stairs?”
“I’m stronger than I look,” Ila said. She transferred the contents of her arms to the hearth in one neat movement, as if she’d been doing this sort of work her entire young life. Possibly she had. Leezie had only begun once her mother died, but most of the villagers knew their future trades from birth. “Older, too.”
Merida said, “And more clever, I suppose.”
“Yes, ma’am.” There was no hint of a smile to indicate if Ila thought this was a joke. She really was a lot like a cat. Sly. Private. Not conniving, like Harris, just thinking secret thoughts in the way cats do.
“Of course you are,” Merida said, watching Ila expertly birth a fire from embers. Amazing how cheering a good little pile of firewood was. Really, Leezie’s wedding was a good thing. Last night, the Cailleach’s offering of one year had felt generous. Excessive. But now, in the bright, stark light of morning, it seemed obvious that the gift of a year meant the gods were expecting much more sweeping changes than Merida had originally been picturing. Change like Leezie’s wedding. Leezie was such an integral part of the household that it was possible her marriage would provoke shifts in the other family members, too. It might do most of Merida’s work for her.
Yes, she was starting to feel much better. “Ila—Ila, is it? So you’re helping with the feast and the wedding today, right?”
“I am, ma’am, but—”
“You don’t have to call me ma’am. I just need to know how much time I have to clean my dress,” Merida said. “I wonder if I could boil it. Does that sound reasonable? I thought I heard Leezie say something about boiling bedsheets, but sometimes her ideas are not very good.”