An Unexpected Destiny (Completed)

Uproar

There is an uproar around the campfire that night when I pallidly tell the company what the man had said to me.  MacLeod struggles to calm down Robin, who is close to panicking, while also attempting to solve how after just a few days of traveling, we already had fortune hunters on our tail.  Jude organizes the chaos by ordering all of us to mentally travel down memory lane and recall exactly what we said and did in the town-- who we met, talked to, and how they responded.  Then, he makes us say the lane of memory aloud.  It is very clever, but I am so weary after telling him every detail I could scrounge up, I nearly lay down on a bed of pine needles and fall asleep.  Of course, I can't do this.  I have to rescue Merida.  Get her back home.  Get us home.

Ferdinand is last.  While Robin and MacLeod efficiently relate everything, Isen is quite useless: he can't remember half of anything he said or did.  While Robin runs his hands continuously through his already mussed hair and MacLeod tilts his head back with his eyes raised to the heaven as if asking why he had such a son, Ferdinand, who has yet to say one word since departing the village, gets paler.  I feel blood drain from my face.  Paranoia threatens to embrace me and I glance nervously about the thin woods we are stationed just outside of.  Ferdinand knows something-- and it's not at all good.

When Jude finally gets to Ferdinand, the man doesn't say anything for a long moment.  Until, "Isen, what did you say to those two women dressed in men's clothes accompanied by the men in black and bearing curved swords?"

"I told you; I remember nothing,"  The boy insists.  He fidgets, whether from irritation or uncertainty, I do not know.

"Try," MacLeod orders.  I almost wish he hadn't.

"Well..." Isen begins, tapping a dirty fingernail to his lips.  "I complimented the women on their bows-- as they were exquisitely carved-- then began to ask them where they were from and where they might be traveling to and--"

"Did you happen to mention Princess Merida and Lady Agnes?"  MacLeod asks slowly, tautly.  The camp goes quiet, the raised voices and lighted tempers extinguished.  Isen has gone deathly white.

He gulps.  If I were him, I'd give anything to dig a hole and bury myself in it.  "I--I may have?"  Though it sounds like a question, there is no denying the hesitant truth behind it.

I slide down the log and plop onto the ground numbly as Robin shouts a curse that scalds even my highschool-experienced ears.  MacLeod scolds his son and calls him a dunce.  Jude sits beside Ferdinand and asks him excatly what Isen told the women and men.  A pair of fingers snap in front of my face.  I jerk out of my stunned stupor to find Robin crouching in front of me.  His face bear no traces of anger, only very faint lines on the cutting edges of fatigue.  If our situation wasn't so serious, I'd crack a joke about how all that pent up anger must be exhausting.  But I don't.  His dark eyes flit to Jude and back to me.  I nod solemnly before removing myself from the cold ground and sitting on the other side of Jude.  Robin sits next to Ferdinand.  We tune out the shouts of MacLeod and mortified apologies of Isen.

"I didn't actually believe Isen had told them; I thought I was just so concerned with saying something myself I believed it was my imagination," says Ferdinand.  He looks guilty, as if this was all his fault.  "But when I saw the women's reactions and heard their low murmurings to the men, who appeared even more sinister afterwards then when I first saw them, I knew I hadn't."

"What were the women's reactions?" asks Jude.  Robin's eyes meet mine.  I raise my brows a centimeter.  His eyes become darker before they return to Ferdinand.  Was he curious as to how women reacted to certain things?  He had admitted he wasn't used to women being around.  I wondered in the back of my mind if he would compare my reactions to the women Ferdinand spoke of and any other women we met.  He hadn't even glanced at the giggling girls at the well in town.