Well, Jamie did.

“And may your vow redeem me.” He had whispered that to me, the night before. It was just about the last thing I recalled him saying, in fact. Well, all right; but I would greatly prefer that he didn’t feel in need of redemption to start with. And as for Ian and Fergus …

Fergus had fought in the Battle of Prestonpans, at the age of ten. I still remembered the face of the small French orphan, soot-smeared and dazed with shock and exhaustion, looking down at me from his perch atop a captured cannon. “I killed an English soldier, madame,” he’d said to me. “He fell down and I stuck him with my knife.”

And Ian, a fifteen-year-old, weeping in remorse because he thought he had accidentally killed an intruder to Jamie’s Edinburgh print shop. God knew what he had done, since; he wasn’t talking. I had a sudden vision of Fergus’s hook, dark with blood, and Ian, silhouetted in the dark. “And I,” he’d said, echoing Jamie. “It is myself who kills for her.”

It was 1773. And on the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five … the shot heard round the world was already being loaded. The room was warm, but I shuddered convulsively. What in the name of God did I think I could shield them from? Any of them.

A sudden roar from the roof above startled me out of my thoughts.

I walked out into the dooryard and looked up, shading my eyes against the morning sun. Jamie was sitting astride the rooftree, rocking to and fro over one hand, which he held curled into his belly.

“What’s going on up there?” I called.

“I’ve got a splinter,” came the terse answer, obviously spoken through clenched teeth.

I wanted to laugh, if only as small escape from tension, but didn’t.

“Well, come down, then. I’ll pull it out.”

“I’m no finished!”

“I don’t care!” I said, suddenly impatient with him. “Come down this minute. I want to talk to you.”

A bag of nails hit the grass with a sudden clank, followed instantly by the hammer.

First things first, then.



TECHNICALLY, I SUPPOSED, it was a splinter. It was a two-inch sliver of cedarwood, and he’d driven it completely under the nail of his middle finger, nearly to the first joint.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!”

“Aye,” he agreed, looking a little pale. “Ye might say that.”

The protruding stub was too short to grip with my fingers. I hauled him into the surgery and jerked the sliver out with forceps, before one could say Jack Robinson. Jamie was saying a good deal more than Jack Robinson—mostly in French, which is an excellent language for swearing.

“You’re going to lose that nail,” I observed, submerging the offended digit in a small bowl of alcohol and water. Blood bloomed from it like ink from a squid.

“To hell wi’ the nail,” he said, gritting his teeth. “Cut the whole bloody finger off and ha’ done with it! Merde d’chevre!”

“The Chinese used to—well, no, I suppose they still do, come to think of it—shove splinters of bamboo under people’s fingernails to make them talk.”

“Christ! Tu me casses les couilles!”

“Obviously a very effective technique,” I said, lifting his hand out of the bowl and wrapping the finger tightly in a strip of linen. “Were you trying it out, before using it on Lionel Brown?” I tried to speak lightly, keeping my eyes on his hand. I felt his own gaze fix on me, and he snorted.

“What in the name of saints and archangels was wee Ian telling ye, Sassenach?”

“That you meant to question the man—and get answers.”

“I do, and I shall,” he said shortly. “So?”

“Fergus and Ian seemed to think that—you might be moved to use any means necessary,” I said with some delicacy. “They’re more than willing to help.”

“I imagine they are.” The first agony had abated somewhat. He breathed more deeply, and color was beginning to come back into his face. “Fergus has a right. It was his wife attacked.”

“Ian seemed …” I hesitated, searching for the right word. Ian had seemed so calm as to be terrifying. “You didn’t call Roger to help with the—the questioning?”

“No. Not yet.” One corner of his mouth tucked in. “Roger Mac’s a good fighter, but no the sort to scare a man, save he’s truly roused. He’s no deceit in him at all.”

“Whereas you, Ian, and Fergus …”

“Oh, aye,” he said dryly. “Wily as snakes, the lot of us. Ye’ve only to look at Roger Mac to see how safe their time must be, him and the lass. A bit of a comfort, that,” he added, the tuck growing deeper. “To ken things will get better, I mean.”

I could see that he was trying to change the subject, which was not a good sign. I made a small snorting noise, but it hurt my nose.

“And you’re not truly roused, is that what you’re telling me?”

He made a much more successful snorting noise, but didn’t reply. He tilted his head to one side, watching as I laid out a square of gauze and began to rub dried leaves of comfrey into it. I didn’t know how to say what was troubling me, but he plainly saw that something was.

“Will you kill him?” I asked baldly, keeping my eyes on the jar of honey. It was made of brown glass, and the light glowed through it as though it were a huge ball of clear amber.

Jamie sat still, watching me. I could feel his speculative gaze, though I didn’t look up.

“I think so,” he said.

My hands had started to tremble, and I pressed them on the surface of the table to still them.

“Not today,” he added. “If I kill him, I shall do it properly.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what constituted a proper killing, in his opinion, but he told me anyway.

“If he dies at my hand, it will be in the open, before witnesses who ken the truth of the matter, and him standing upright. I willna have it said that I killed a helpless man, whatever his crime.”

“Oh.” I swallowed, feeling mildly ill, and took a pinch of powdered bloodroot to add to the salve I was making. It had a faint, astringent smell, which seemed to help. “But—you might let him live?”

“Perhaps. I suppose I might ransom him to his brother—depending.”

“Do you know, you sound quite like your uncle Colum. He would have thought it through like that.”

“Do I?” The corner of his mouth turned up slightly. “Shall I take that as compliment, Sassenach?”

“I suppose you might as well.”

“Aye, well,” he said thoughtfully. The stiff fingers tapped on the tabletop, and he winced slightly as the movement jarred the injured one. “Colum had a castle. And armed clansmen at his beck. I should have some difficulty in defending this house against a raid, perhaps.”

“That’s what you mean by ‘depending’?” I felt quite uneasy at this; the thought of armed raiders attacking the house had not occurred to me—and I saw that Jamie’s forethought in storing Mr. Brown off our premises had perhaps not been entirely for the purpose of sparing my sensibilities.

“One of the things.”

I mixed a bit of honey with my powdered herbs, then scooped a small dollop of purified bear grease into the mortar.

“I suppose,” I said, eyes on my mixing, “that there’s no point in turning Lionel Brown over to the—the authorities?”

“Which authorities did ye have in mind, Sassenach?” he asked dryly.

A good question. This part of the backcountry had not yet formed nor joined a county, though a movement was afoot to that purpose. Were Jamie to deliver Mr. Brown to the sheriff of the nearest county for trial … well, no, perhaps not a good idea. Brownsville lay just within the borders of the nearest county, and the current sheriff was in fact named Brown.

I bit my lip, considering. In times of stress, I tended still to respond as what I was—a civilized Englishwoman, accustomed to rely on the sureties of government and law. Well, all right, Jamie had a point; the twentieth century had its own dangers, but some things had improved. This was nearly 1774, though, and the colonial government was already showing cracks and fault lines, signs of the collapse to come.