“Come on, pal,” she said to Jem, gently nudging him with the toe of her boot. “It’s time for bed.” He made a sleepy, interrogative noise and half-lifted his head, then collapsed again, soundly asleep.
“Dinna fash, I’ll get him.” Roger waved Jamie away and, stooping, rolled Jem into his arms and stood up with a grunt. “D’ye mean to go down, too?” he asked. “I can come back and take care of the fire, as soon as I’ve put Jem down.”
Jamie shook his head and put an arm around me.
“Nay, dinna trouble yourself. We’ll maybe sit awhile and see the fire out.”
They moved off slowly down the hill, shambling like cattle, to the accompaniment of clanking noises from Brianna’s bag. The Higgins cabin, where they’d spend the night, showed as a tiny glimmer in the dark; Amy must have lit a lamp and pulled back the hide that covered the window.
Jamie was still holding the chisel in his hand; eyes fixed on his daughter’s disappearing back, he raised it and kissed it, as he’d once kissed the haft of his dirk before me, and I knew this, too, was a sacred promise.
He put the chisel away in his sporran and took me in his arms, my back to him, so we could both watch them out of sight. He rested his chin on top of my head.
“What are ye thinking, Sassenach?” he said softly. “I saw your eyes; there are clouds in them.”
I settled against him, feeling his warmth a bulwark at my back.
“The children,” I said, hesitant. “They—I mean, it’s wonderful that they’re here. To think we’d never see them again, and suddenly …” I swallowed, overcome by the dizzying joy of finding myself—finding us—once again and so unexpectedly part of that remarkable thing, a family. “To be able to see Jem and Mandy grow up … to have Bree and Roger again …”
“Aye,” he said, a smile in his voice. “But?”
It took a moment, both to gather my thoughts and to put them into words.
“Roger said that something bad had happened, in their own time. And you know it must have been something truly terrible.”
“Aye,” he said, his voice hardening a little. “Brianna said the same. But ken, a nighean, they’ve lived in this time before. They do know, I mean—what it’s like, what it will be like.”
The ongoing war, he meant, and I squeezed his hands, clasped about my middle.
“I don’t think they do,” I said softly, looking down across the broad cove. They had vanished into the darkness. “Nobody knows who hasn’t been there.” To war.
“Aye,” he said, and held me, silent, his hand resting on my side, over the scar of the wound made by a musket ball at Monmouth.
“Aye,” he said again after a long moment. “I ken what ye’re saying, Sassenach. I thought my heart would burst when I saw Brianna and kent it was really her, and the bairns … but for all the joy of it … see, I missed them cruelly, but I could take comfort in thinking they were safe. Now—”
He stopped and I felt his heart beating against me, slow and steady. He took a deep breath, and the fire popped suddenly, a pocket of pitch exploding in sparks that disappeared into the night. A small reminder of the war that was rising, slowly, all around us.
“I look at them,” he said, “and my heart is suddenly filled with …”
“Terror,” I whispered, holding tight to him. “Sheer terror.”
“Aye,” he said. “That.”
WE STOOD FOR a bit, watching the darkness below, letting joy return. The window of the Higgins cabin still glowed softly on the far side of the clearing below.
“Nine people in that cabin,” I said. I took a deep breath of the cool, spruce-scented night, envisioning the fug and humid warmth of nine sleeping bodies, occupying every horizontal inch of the place, with a cauldron and kettle steaming on the hearth.
The second window bloomed into brightness.
“Four of them ours,” Jamie said, and laughed softly.
“I hope the place doesn’t burn down.” Someone had put fresh wood on the fire, and sparks were beginning to dance above the chimney.
“It willna burn down.” He turned me round to face him. “I want ye, a nighean,” he said softly. “Will ye lie wi’ me? It may be the last time we have any privacy for some while.”
I opened my mouth to say, “Of course!” and instead yawned hugely.
I clapped a hand to my mouth, removing it to say, “Oh, dear. I really didn’t mean that.”