“Shouldn’t we … take her away?” A rough, uncertain voice somewhere far above me. “I mean … he’s …”
“Leave her.” Young Ian. He sat down beside me; I heard the scuff of dirt beneath his moccasins and the sigh of stretching buckskin on his thighs.
I drew a quick, sobbing breath, deep as I could, pulling air for both of us, and Young Ian rested a hand on my shoulder, tentative, not sure what he should do, but he was there.
There. A solid shape with no form, glowing with a fractured light; Ian was hurt, but not badly, I could feel his strength pulse and fade, pulse and fade …
I felt the pulse of it through my flesh. For an instant, I was disoriented, couldn’t find the limits of my own body. I felt Jamie’s slow surrender in my belly and veins, Ian’s strong pulse in my heart and arteries.
Where am I?
I concluded, dimly, that it didn’t matter.
Help me, I said silently, and yielded my own boundaries.
148
Not … yet …
WE STAYED THERE, THE four of us, through the rest of that day, the night beyond, and most of the next day. When I finally resumed contact with the world, I was curled beside Jamie, a sheet of canvas flapping in a gentle wind above us.
“Here, Auntie.” Young Ian’s hands slid under my arms, and he lifted me gently into a sitting position.
“What …？” I croaked, and he put a canteen to my mouth. I drank. It was cider and I had never tasted anything better. Then I remembered.
“Jamie?” I looked blearily round for him, but couldn’t make my eyes focus.
“He’s alive, Claire.” It was Roger, squatting next to me, smiling. Bloodshot and black-stubbled, but smiling. “I don’t know how you did it, but he is alive. We were afraid to move you—the two of you, I mean, because you wouldn’t let go of him.”
I looked around. We were still behind the rocky outcrop, shielded from the battlefield, but I could hear—and smell—the cleaning-up. Grunts and talk and the shoof of shovels and soft thud of dirt cast aside. Burying the dead.
But not us.
I put a hand on Jamie. He looked dead. I certainly felt dead. But apparently we weren’t.
Jamie’s chest moved under my hand. He was breathing, and slight as the movement was, I felt it as though the gentle wind moved through me.
“Do you think it’s safe to move him, Auntie?” Young Ian asked. “Roger Mac’s found a farmhouse, not too far away, where ye can stay for a bit, until ye’re both strong enough to travel.”
I wetted my cracked lips and leaned over Jamie.
“Can you hear me?” I said.
His face twitched briefly, fell into stillness, and then—after an agonizingly long moment—his eyes opened. Only a dark-blue, red-rimmed slit, but open.
“Aye,” he whispered.
“The battle’s over. You’re not dead.”
He regarded me for a long moment, his mouth slightly open.
“Not … yet,” he said, in what I thought was a rather grudging tone.
“We’re going home,” I said.
He breathed for a minute, then said, “Good,” and closed his eyes again.
149
Angry, Irascible, Difficult Sons of Bitches
Fraser’s Ridge
October 22, 1780
“I’M NO DYING IN my sleep,” Jamie said stubbornly. “I mean—should the Lord choose to take me in my bed, I’ll go, of course. But if I’m going to die by your hand, I want to be awake.”
My hands were shaking; I folded them under my apron, both to hide the trembling and to control the urge to throttle him.
“You have to be asleep,” I said, as reasonably as I could manage, which wasn’t all that reasonably. “Your leg has to be completely immobile, and I can’t manage that if you’re awake. I don’t care how strong you think you are, you can’t keep still enough, and even tying you to the table—which I fully intend to do”—I glared at him—“wouldn’t be enough to completely immobilize you.
“So.” My hands had stilled, thank God, and I brought them out from under the apron, picked up the ether mask, and pointed a finger at him. “Either you lie flat right now and take it, or I get Roger and Ian to tie you down and then you take it. But you’re getting it, like it or not.”
He immediately sat up and swung his feet off the table, apparently intending to make a break for it, cracked kneecap or no.
“No, mate.” Roger grabbed him by an arm and a shoulder, and Ian, slithering behind the table like a water moccasin, grabbed Jamie’s other arm with one hand and forearmed him across the throat.