“Leezie,” Merida said. “Wasn’t he very upset?”
Leezie was dressed in some sort of gauzy flowing dress that she had put together herself. It seemed likely it had been either a curtain or a horse sheet before she’d co-opted it. She also wore an outlandish headdress, a brimming bay leaf crown studded with dried flowers and berries. She’d nearly managed to get her hair up by herself—braids followed rules, and Leezie wasn’t big on rules—and just a few dusty locks escaped in an attractively messy fashion. She always looked as if she needed help, which always somehow ended up making people help her, even though she never asked for or even seemed to realize she needed it. All of this was what it meant to be Leezie. Like a fancy table, she was more decorative than useful.
That’s just Leezie.
“Who?” Leezie asked. “Oh, John?”
“Yes, John!” repeated Merida. “The Cabbage! Husband to be! Master Leezie in Training! Who else? Wasn’t he upset?”
“The Cabbage is fine,” Merida’s father Fergus boomed pleasantly. “I gave him two heifers for his trouble and he was well satisfied.”
“Two heifers,” echoed Merida. “As in, two cows.”
“One would have been rude,” her father said.
Merida’s father was spread enormously in his equally enormous chair, his big wooden leg on one side, his big flesh-and-bone leg on the other. He had been crowned already with a voluminous green Christmas wreath pebbled with red holly berries. He was a big person. Big beard, big body, big personality, big stories. To meet Fergus of DunBroch was to meet the hugeness of him. You don’t get to be a king by staying small, he liked to say. In his hand was a mug of one of the best Yule traditions, whipkull, a drink made with lots of eggs, sugar, rum, and cream, and in his beard were the crumbs of one of the biscuits. Like Merida, he thought of his appearance only after Elinor pestered him.
“I think two was perfectly fair, especially in the middle of winter,” Elinor said. The queen was perched in the chair closest to the fireplace, a place won for her by Fergus, who won everything his queen desired. Unlike her redheaded children and redheaded husband, Elinor’s smooth hair was a heathered gray brown. She was quite the opposite of Fergus, all slender and precise, not a single bit louder or more unpleasant than she needed to be. Quite the opposite of Merida, too, come to think of it. She was regal perfection; hard for Merida to imagine what she could possibly need to change.
“How many cows do you think I’m worth?” Merida asked, voice tense.
Elinor dipped a toast soldier in her egg with regal splendor. “I pray we never have to find out.”
“They’d probably give us cows to keep her.” This was a whisper from one of the triplets, though Merida couldn’t tell which. Their voices remained mostly identical even though their appearances had begun to diverge. Their personalities, too. Aileen had just complained to Merida that they were impossible to tell apart, but to Merida, they seemed distinct now more than ever.
Hubert had a big heart, and big feelings, and a big voice, like Fergus. Since Merida had left for three seasons of wandering, he’d grown nearly a hand taller and also plaited his fiercely red hair like a Norseman. He’d told her when she returned that he planned to also grow a Norseman’s huge beard, and then plait that as well. When Merida looked too disbelieving, he assured her he’d already picked out the two blue beads he intended to use to finish the plaits.
Hamish, on the other hand, had stayed small. His fingers were delicate things, spiderlike, and colorless as a dead man’s, and in the winter, if he put them against Merida’s neck when she wasn’t looking, she was forced to scream from the cold of them. His red hair, finer than Hubert’s and Hamish’s, was fluffed up high like a downy seed head. He was a very feathery sort of person altogether, and Merida had an abnormal number of nightmares about him getting broken in some way, an attribute they seemed to share.
Harris looked neither big nor small; he looked old. Mature. This was because he always sat very straight and because he wore his long red hair slicked back from his forehead, which made his head look smaller. Between that and his pointy features and slender shoulders, his proportions looked less like a sweet little boy ready for a hug than a conniving thirty-year-old lord come to take your dinner right out of your mouth for lack of tithing. He was also a know-it-all, which was never an attractive trait, particularly when one did know it all, as Harris often did. Once upon a time, he and Merida had had long, thoughtful conversations, but yesterday, when she returned, he had only seemed scornful of her attempts to start one with him.
Really, Merida thought, all the triplets had in common was the red hair and the mischief.
“It was a fair transaction,” Harris murmured now, in a very Harris-y way, silently moving a piece on the board. It was a winning move, though neither of his brothers had noticed it yet. “Any bad feeling would have simply been ego.”
This entire conversation had Merida feeling a little bad for the Cabbage. Lump or not, this all felt a little below the belt. “What about love?”
“Yes!” Leezie agreed, her voice dreamy. “What about love?”
“You can’t just say what I said,” Merida said.
“You don’t have to be mad,” Leezie replied, nearly dragging her sleeve through some gravy. Hubert hurriedly lifted it at the last minute (the urge to help her was so strong it extended even to the triplets, which was strong indeed). “I was agreeing with you. Why not wait for love?”
“You didn’t love the Cabbage?” all the triplets roared in unison, even Harris.
With a vague smile, Leezie squished one of her wedding buns into a flower shape. “I think I might have been bored, and that’s why I thought of getting married.”
“I’m sure the right young man will come along and sweep you off your feet. It simply wasn’t the right time,” Elinor said, and something about her words made Merida realize that the queen had known all along Leezie wouldn’t go through with the wedding.
What a load of tosh! Merida thought. Years ago, Merida had said she didn’t want to get married at that moment, and it had caused an enormous fight, the biggest fight, in fact, that she and her mother had ever had, the one that ended up with twenty-four hours of bad feeling, magical curses, and eventually a reconciliation. Merida wasn’t sorry it had happened, as it had improved their previously tense relationship immensely, but to see Leezie reaping the benefits of the chaos without having to live through it seemed very unfair.
“Those two heifers will definitely sweep the Cabbage off his feet,” snickered one of the triplets. The other two triplets snickered along with him.
“Boys,” Fergus said, but in that voice that meant he wished he could snicker, too.
From somewhere deeper in the castle, the dogs began to bark.
“What are they carrying on for?” Elinor mused.
This reminded Merida. She asked, “Who’s that new dog, by the way? The one who ate my Christmas present?”
“Harris!” admonished Elinor. “I’ve told you time and again that dog needs discipline! Your father traded a ewe for that spoon!”
Merida would’ve preferred a ewe with MERIDA shorn into it to yet another carved spoon, but she tried to look appropriately crushed.
“I’ve tried to teach him,” Harris said, a bit of a whinge to his voice. “Brionn’s untrainable.”
“Brionn is from good stock!” Fergus said. “Comgeall said he was pick of the litter out of Sneachda, and there’s no more faithful hound than her.” To Merida, he said, “Comgeall remembered how Harris liked his hounds when he visited here three years ago, can you imagine that? What a memory he has, mind like a trap! Sent Brionn this summer. What a lad.”
Harris gave Merida a persecuted look that meant he disagreed with some part of this story; it was just a hint of their old secret sibling conversations.