My lips felt numb, and not only from the cider.

“How long?” I said, appalled. “How many?” Children, young men, young women, wrenched from their homes and sold cold-bloodedly into slavery. No one to follow. Even if they were somehow to escape eventually, there would be no place—no one—to return to.

Jamie sighed. He looked unutterably tired.

“Brown doesna ken,” Ian said quietly. “He says … He says he’d nothing to do with it.”

“Like bloody hell he hadn’t,” I said, a flash of fury momentarily eclipsing horror. “He was with Hodgepile when they came here. He knew they meant to take the whisky. And he must have been with them before, when they—did other things.”

Jamie nodded.

“He claims he tried to stop them from taking you.”

“He did,” I said shortly. “And then he tried to make them kill me, to stop me telling you he’d been there. And then he bloody meant to drown me himself! I don’t suppose he told you that.”

“No, he didn’t.” Ian exchanged a brief look with Jamie, and I saw some unspoken agreement pass between them. It occurred to me that I might possibly just have sealed Lionel Brown’s fate. If so, I was not sure I felt guilty about it.

“What—what do you mean to do with him?” I asked.

“I think perhaps I will hang him,” Jamie replied, after a moment’s pause. “But I’ve more questions I want answered. And I must think about how best to manage the matter. Dinna bother about it, Sassenach; ye’ll not see him again.”

With that, he stood and stretched, muscles cracking, then shifted his shoulders, settling himself with a sigh. He gave me a hand and helped me to my feet.

“Go up to bed, Sassenach, and I’ll be up directly. I must just have a wee word with Ian first.”



HOT BUTTERED TOAST, cider, and conversation had made me feel momentarily better. I found myself so tired, though, that I could barely drag myself up the stairs, and was obliged to sit on the bed, swaying blearily, in hopes of getting up the strength to take off my clothes. It was a few moments before I noticed that Jamie was hovering in the doorway.

“Erm … ?” I said vaguely.

“I didna ken, did ye want me to stay with ye tonight?” he asked diffidently. “If ye’d rest better alone, I could take Joseph’s bed. Or if ye’d like, I could sleep beside ye, on the floor.”

“Oh,” I said blankly, trying to weigh these alternatives. “No. Stay. Sleep with me, I mean.” From the bottom of a well of fatigue, I summoned something like a smile. “You can warm the bed, at least.”

A most peculiar expression flitted across his face at that, and I blinked, not sure I’d seen it. I had, though; his face was caught between embarrassment and dismayed amusement—with somewhere behind all that the sort of look he might have worn if going to the stake: heroically resigned.

“What on earth have you been doing?” I asked, sufficiently surprised as to be shaken out of my torpor.

Embarrassment was getting the upper hand; the tips of his ears were going red, and a flush was visible in his cheeks, even by the dim light of the taper I’d set on the table.

“I wasna going to tell ye,” he muttered, avoiding my gaze. “I swore wee Ian and Roger Mac to silence.”

“Oh, they’ve been silent as the grave,” I assured him. Though this statement did perhaps explain the occasional odd look on Roger’s face, of late. “What’s been going on?”

He sighed, scraping the edge of his boot across the floor.

“Aye, well. It’s Tsisqua, d’ye see? He meant it as hospitality, the first time, but then when Ian told him … well, it wasna the best thing to have said, under the circumstances, only … And then the next time we came, and there they were again, only a different pair, and when I tried to make them leave, they said Bird said to say that it was honor to my vow, for what good was a vow that cost nothing to keep? And I will be damned if I ken does he mean that, or is he only thinking that either I’ll crack and he’ll have the upper hand of me for good, or that I’ll get him the guns he wants to put an end to it one way or the other—or is he only having a joke at my expense? Even Ian says he canna tell which it is, and if he—”

“Jamie,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

He stole a quick glance at me, then looked away again.

“Ah … naked women,” he blurted, and went red as a piece of new flannel.

I stared at him for a moment. My ears still buzzed slightly, but there wasn’t anything wrong with my hearing. I pointed a finger at him—carefully, because all my fingers were swollen and bruised.

“You,” I said, in measured tones, “come here right now. Sit down right there”—I pointed at the bed beside me—“and tell me in words of one syllable exactly what you’ve been doing.”

He did, with the result that five minutes later I was lying flat on the bed, wheezing with laughter, moaning with the pain to my cracked ribs, and with helpless tears running down my temples and into my ears.

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” I gasped. “I can’t stand it, I really can’t. Help me sit up.” I extended a hand, yelped with pain as his fingers closed on my lacerated wrist, but got upright at last, bent over with a pillow clutched to my middle, and clutched it tighter each time a gust of recurrent laughter struck me.

“I’m glad ye think it’s sae funny, Sassenach,” Jamie said very dryly. He’d recovered himself to some extent, though his face was still flushed. “Ye’re sure ye’re no hysterical?”

“No, not at all.” I sniffed, dabbing at my eyes with a damp linen hankie, then snorted with uncontainable mirth. “Oh! Ow, God, that hurts.”

Sighing, he poured a cup of water from the flask on the bedside table, and held it for me to drink. It was cool, but flat and rather stale; I thought perhaps it had been standing since before …

“All right,” I said, waving the cup away and dabbing moisture very carefully from my lips. “I’m fine.” I breathed shallowly, feeling my heart begin to slow down. “Well. So. At least now I know why you’ve been coming back from the Cherokee villages in such a state of—of—” I felt an unhinged giggle rising, and bent over, moaning as I stifled it. “Oh, Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. And here I thought it was thoughts of me, driving you mad with lust.”

He snorted then himself, though mildly. He put down the cup, rose, and turned back the coverlet. Then he looked at me, and his eyes were clear, unguarded.

“Claire,” he said, quite gently, “it was you. It’s always been you, and it always will be. Get into bed, and put the candle out. As soon as I’ve fastened the shutters, smoored the hearth, and barred the door, I’ll come and keep ye warm.”



“KILL ME.” Randall’s eyes were fever-bright. “Kill me,” he said. “My heart’s desire.”

He jerked awake, hearing the words echo in his head, seeing the eyes, seeing the rain-matted hair, Randall’s face, wet as that of a drowned man.

He rubbed a hand hard over his own face, surprised to feel his skin dry, his beard no more than a shadow. The sense of wet, the itching scurf of a month’s whiskers, was still so strong that he got up, moving quietly by instinct, and went to the window, where moonlight shone through the cracks in the shutter. He poured a little water into the basin, moved the bowl into a shaft of light, and looked in, to rid himself of that lingering sense of being someone else, somewhere else.

The face in the water was no more than a featureless oval, but smooth-shaven, and the hair lay loose on his shoulders, not bound up for battle. And yet it seemed the face of a stranger.

Unsettled, he left the water in the bowl, and after a moment, padded softly back to the bed.

She was asleep. He had not even thought of her when he woke, but now the sight of her steadied him. That face he knew, even battered and swollen as it was.

He set his hand on the bedstead, comforted by the solid wood. Sometimes when he woke, the dream stayed with him, and he felt the real world ghostly, faint around him. Sometimes he feared he was a ghost.