Текст книги "Written in My Own Heart's Blood"
Автор книги: Diana Gabaldon
Соавторы: Diana Gabaldon
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 74 страниц)
“Deo … gratias!” he managed to gasp. It was what Grandda said when he talked about a fight or killing something, and this wasn’t quite that sort of thing, but it seemed like a good thing to say anyway.
Now he could feel all of himself again, but he sat up and grabbed his neck, just to be sure his head was still on. His skin was jumping in the weirdest way. Like a horse’s does when a horsefly bites it, but all over. He swallowed and tasted sugared silver and he gasped again, because now he knew what had hit him. Sort of.
This wasn’t quite like it had been when they’d all walked into the rocks on Ocracoke. One minute he’d been in his father’s arms, and the next minute it was as if he’d been scattered everywhere in little wiggly pieces like the spilled quicksilver in Grannie’s surgery. Then he was back together again, and Da was still holding him tight enough to squeeze his breath out, and he could hear Da sobbing and that scared him, and he had a funny taste in his mouth and little pieces of him were still wiggling around trying to get away but they were trapped inside his skin …
Yeah. That was what was making his skin jump now, and he breathed easier, knowing what it was. That was okay, then; he was okay; it would stop.
It was stopping already, the twitchy feeling going away. He still felt kind of shaky, but he stood up. Careful, because he didn’t know where it was.
Wait—he did know. He knew exactly.
“That’s weird,” he said, out loud without really noticing, because he wasn’t scared by the dark anymore; it wasn’t important.
He couldn’t see it, not with his eyes, not exactly. He squinted, trying to think how he was seeing it, but there wasn’t a word for what he was doing. Kind of like hearing or smelling or touching, but not really any of those.
But he knew where it was. It was right there, a kind of … shiver … in the air, and when he stared at it, he had a feeling in the back of his mind like pretty sparkly things, like sun on the sea and the way a candle flame looked when it shone through a ruby, but he knew he wasn’t really seeing anything like that.
It went all the way across the tunnel, and up to the high roof, too, he could tell. But it wasn’t thick at all; it was thin as air.
He guessed that was why it hadn’t swallowed him like the thing in the rocks on Ocracoke had. At least … he thought it hadn’t and, for an instant, worried that maybe he’d gone sometime else. But he didn’t think so. The tunnel felt just the same, and so did he, now that his skin had stopped jumping. When they’d done it, on Ocracoke, he’d known right away it was different.
He stood there for a minute, just looking and thinking, and then shook his head and turned around, feeling with his foot for the track. He wasn’t going back through that, no matter what. He’d just have to hope the door wasn’t locked.
The laird’s study,
Lallybroch estate
BRIANNA’S HAND closed on the letter opener, but even as she calculated the distance involved, the obstacle of the desk between Rob Cameron and herself, and the flimsiness of the wooden blade, she was reluctantly concluding that she couldn’t kill the bastard. Not yet.
“Where’s my son?”
“He’s okay.”
She stood up suddenly, and he jerked a little in reflex. His face flushed and he hardened his expression.
“He’d bloody well better be okay,” she snapped. “I said, where is he?”
“Oh, no, hen,” he said, rocking back on his heels, affecting nonchalance. “That’s no how we’re playing it. Not tonight.”
God, why didn’t Roger keep a hammer or a chisel or something useful in his desk drawer? Did he expect her to staple this jerk? She braced herself, both hands flat on the desk, to keep from leaping over it and going for his throat.
“I’m not playing,” she said through her teeth. “And neither are you. Where’s Jemmy?”
He leveled a long finger at her.
“You’re no longer the boss lady, Ms. MacKenzie. I call the shots now.”
“Oh, you think so, do you?” she asked, as mildly as she could. Her thoughts were slipping past like grains of sand in an hourglass, a slithering cascade of what if, how, shall I, no, yes …
“I do, aye.” His color, already high, rose higher, and he licked his lips. “Ye’re gonna find out what it’s like to be on the bottom, hen.”
Cameron’s eyes were very bright, and his hair was clipped so short that she could see beads of sweat glittering above his ears. Was he high on something? She thought not. He was wearing track pants, and his fingers flicked unconsciously across the front, where a substantial bulge was beginning to show. Her lips tightened at the sight.
Not on your life, buddy.
She widened her gaze as much as possible, to take him in without letting his eyes move from hers. She didn’t think he was armed, though the pockets of his jacket had stuff in them. He really thought he could make her have sex with him, without a set of manacles and a sledgehammer?
He twirled his finger, pointing to the floor in front of him.
“Come round here, hen,” he said softly. “And take your jeans down. Might do ye good to learn what it’s like to take it up the arse regularly. Ye’ve done it to me for months—fair’s fair, isn’t it?”
Very slowly, she came around the desk but stopped well short of him, keeping out of reach. She fumbled cold-fingered at the button of her fly, unwilling to look down, unwilling to take her eyes off him. Her heart was beating so hard in her ears that she could barely hear his heavy breathing.
The tip of his tongue showed briefly, involuntarily, as she pushed the jeans down over her hips, and he swallowed.
“The knickers, too,” he said, half breathless. “Take them off.”
“You don’t rape people very often, do you?” she said rudely, stepping out of the puddled jeans. “What’s your rush?” She bent and picked the heavy denim pants up, shook out the legs, and turned as though to lay them on the desk. Then whipped back, clutching the jeans at the ankle, and lashed them as hard as she could at his head.
The heavy cloth with its zipper and brass fly button struck him full in the face, and he staggered back with a grunt of surprise, clutching at the jeans. She let go of them instantly, leapt onto the desk, and launched herself at him, shoulder-first.
They fell together with a crash that shook the hardwood floor, but she landed on top, kneed him hard in the belly, and then grabbed him by both ears and thumped his head on the floor as hard as she could. He let out a cry of pain, reached for her wrists, and she promptly let go of his ears, leaned backward, and grabbed for his crotch.
Had she been able to get a decent grip on his balls through the soft fabric, she would have crushed them. As it was, she managed a glancing squeeze but one hard enough to make him yelp and convulse, nearly dislodging her from her perch.
She couldn’t win a fistfight. Couldn’t let him hit her. She scrambled to her feet, looking wildly round the office for something heavy to hit him with, seized the wooden letter box, and smashed it over his head as he started to rise. He didn’t fall down but bobbed his head, dazed amongst the cascade of letters, and she kicked him in the jaw as hard as she could, her own teeth clenched. It was a sliding, sweaty impact, but she’d hurt him.
She’d hurt herself, too, had kicked him with her heel, as much as she could, but she felt a burst of pain in the middle of her foot; she’d torn or broken something, but it didn’t matter.
Cameron shook his head violently, trying to clear it. He was on his hands and knees now, crawling toward her, reaching for her leg, and she backed up against the desk. With a banshee shriek, she kneed him in the face, squirmed out of his grasp, and ran for the hall, limping heavily.
There were weapons on the walls of the foyer, a few targes and broadswords kept for ornament, but all hung high, to be out of the children’s reach. There was a better one easily to hand, though. She reached behind the coat rack and grabbed Jem’s cricket bat.
You can’t kill him, she kept thinking, dimly surprised at the fact that her mind was still working. Don’t kill him. Not yet. Not ’til he says where Jemmy is.
“Fucking … bitch!” He was nearly on her, panting, half blinded by blood running down his forehead, half sobbing through the blood pouring from his nose. “Fuck you, split you open, fuck you up the—”
“Caisteal DOOON!” she bellowed, and, stepping out from behind the coat rack, swung the bat in a scything arc that caught him in the ribs. He made a gurgling noise and folded, arms across his middle. She took a deep breath, swung the bat as high as she could, and brought it down with all her strength on the crown of his head.
The shock of it vibrated up her arms to her shoulders and she dropped the bat with a clunk and stood there gasping, trembling and drenched with sweat.
“Mummy?” said a tiny, quavering voice from the foot of the stair. “Why is you not got pants on, Mummy?”

THANK GOD FOR instinct was her first coherent thought. She’d crossed the length of the foyer, snatched Mandy up in her arms, and was patting her comfortingly before any sort of conscious decision to move had been made.
“Pants?” she said, eyeing the limp form of Rob Cameron. He hadn’t twitched since he’d fallen, but she didn’t think she’d killed him. She’d have to take more-certain steps to neutralize him, and fast. “Oh, pants. I was just getting ready for bed when this naughty man showed up.”
“Oh.” Mandy leaned out of her arms, peering at Cameron. “Iss Mr. Rob! Iss a burglar? Iss a bad man?”
“Yes, both,” Brianna said, deliberately casual. Mandy’s speech showed the sibilance it had when she got excited or upset, but the little girl seemed to be recovering pretty fast from the shock of seeing her mother crown a burglar in the front hall while wearing only a T-shirt and underpants. The thought made her want to stomp on Cameron’s balls, but she choked it back. No time for that.
Mandy clung to her neck, but Brianna set her firmly on the stairs.
“Mummy wants you to stay here, a ghraidh. I have to put Mr. Rob someplace safe, where he can’t do anything bad.”
“No!” Mandy cried, seeing her mother head toward the crumpled Cameron, but Brianna waved in what she hoped was a reassuring manner, picked up the cricket bat as insurance, and nudged her prisoner in the ribs with a cautious toe. He wobbled but didn’t stir. Just in case, she moved round behind him and prodded him rudely between the buttocks with the cricket bat, which made Mandy giggle. He didn’t move, and she drew a deep breath for the first time in what seemed like hours.
Going back to the stairs, she gave Mandy the bat to hold and smiled at her. She pushed a strand of sweaty hair behind her ear.
“Okay. We’re going to put Mr. Rob in the priest’s hole. You go and open the door for Mummy, all right?”
“I hit him?” Mandy asked hopefully, clutching the bat.
“No, I don’t think you need to do that, darling. Just open the door.”
Her work tote was hanging from the coat rack, the big roll of duct tape easily to hand. She trussed Cameron’s ankles and wrists, a dozen turns each, then bent and, clutching him by the ankles, dragged him toward the swinging baize door at the far end of the hall, which separated the kitchen from the rest of the house.
He began to stir as they negotiated the big table in the kitchen, and she dropped his feet.
“Mandy,” she said, keeping her voice as calm as possible. “I need to have a grown-up talk with Mr. Rob. Give me the bat. Then you go right on out to the mudroom and wait for me there, okay?”
“Mummy …” Mandy was shrinking back against the sink cabinet, eyes huge and fixed on the moaning Cameron.
“Go, Mandy. Right now. Mummy will be there before you can count to a hundred. Start counting now. One … two … three …” She moved between Cameron and Mandy, motioning firmly with her free hand.
Reluctantly, Mandy moved, murmuring, “Four … five … six … seven …” and disappeared through the back kitchen door. The kitchen was warm from the Aga, and despite her lack of clothes, Bree was still streaming with sweat. She could smell herself, feral and acrid, and found that it made her feel stronger. She wasn’t sure she’d ever truly understood the term “bloodthirsty” before, but she did now.
“Where’s my son?” she said to Cameron, keeping a wary distance in case he tried to roll at her. “Answer me, you piece of crap, or I’ll beat the shit out of you and then call the police.”
“Yeah?” He rolled slowly onto his side, groaning. “And tell them what, exactly? That I took your boy? What proof of that d’ye have?” His words were slurred; his lip was puffed out on one side, where she’d kicked him.
“Fine,” she snapped. “I’ll just beat the shit out of you.”
“What, beat a helpless man? Fine example for your wee lassie.” He rolled onto his back with a muffled grunt.
“As for the police, I can tell them you broke into my house and assaulted me.” She pointed one foot at him, so he could see the livid scratches on her leg. “You’ll have my skin cells under your fingernails. And while I’d rather not have Mandy go through it all again, she’d certainly tell them what you were saying in the hallway.” She would, too, Bree thought. Mandy was a very faithful tape recorder, especially where bad language was concerned.
“Nng.” Cameron had closed his eyes, grimacing against the light over the sink, but now opened them again. He was less dazed; she could see the light of calculation back in his eyes. Like most men, she thought, he was probably smarter when he wasn’t sexually aroused—and she’d taken care of that.
“Aye. And I tell them it was just a wee sex game that got out of hand, and you say it wasn’t, and they say, ‘Aye, fine, missus, and where’s your husband, then?’” The undamaged side of his mouth twisted up. “You’re not that swift tonight, hen. But, then, ye’re not usually.”
His mention of Roger made the blood surge in her ears. She didn’t reply but grabbed him by the feet and pulled him roughly through the kitchen and into the back passageway. The grating that covered the priest’s hole was hidden by a bench and several boxes of milk bottles, bits of farm equipment awaiting repair, and other items that didn’t go anywhere else. She dropped Rob’s feet, shoved the bench and boxes aside, and pulled up the grating. There was a ladder leading down into the shadowy space; she pulled this up and slid it behind the bench. That little amenity wouldn’t be needed.
“Hey!” Rob’s eyes widened. Either he hadn’t known there really was a priest’s hole in the house or he hadn’t thought she’d do it. Without a word, she seized him under the arms, dragged him to the hole, and shoved him in. Feetfirst, because if he broke his neck, he couldn’t tell her where Jem was.
He fell with a shriek, which was cut short by a heavy thump. Before she could worry that he’d managed to land on his head after all, she heard him moaning and a rustle as he started to stir. A muttering of very bad language further reassured her that he was in good enough shape to answer questions. She fetched the big flashlight from the kitchen drawer and shone it down into the hole. Cameron’s face, congested and streaked with blood, glared up at her. He curled up and with some difficulty managed to wriggle into a sitting position.
“You’ve broken my leg, you fucking bitch!”
“Good,” she said coldly, though she doubted it. “Once I get Jem back, I’ll take you to a doctor.”
He breathed heavily through his nose, making a nasty snuffling noise, and swiped at his face with his bound hands, smearing the blood across one cheek.
“You want him back? You get me out of here, and fast!”
She’d been considering—and discarding—different plans of action, shuffling through them like a mental pack of cards, ever since she’d duct-taped him. And letting him out wasn’t one she’d considered. She had thought of fetching the .22 rifle the family used to hunt rats and winging him in a few nonessential places—but there was some risk of either disabling him too badly to be of help or killing him accidentally by hitting something vital if he squirmed.
“Think fast,” he shouted up at her. “Your wee lass will hit a hundred and be back any second!”
Despite the situation, Brianna smiled. Mandy had very recently been introduced to the idea that numbers were infinite and had been enchanted by the concept. She wouldn’t stop counting until she ran out of breath or someone stopped her. Still, she wasn’t going to engage in pointless conversation with her prisoner.
“Okay,” she said, and reached for the grate. “We’ll see how talkative you are after twenty-four hours without food or water, shall we?”
“You bloody bitch!” He tried to surge to his feet but fell over onto his side, writhing impotently. “You—you just think about this, aye? If I’m without food and water, so’s your wee lad!”
She froze, the metal edge of the grate digging into her fingers.
“Rob, you’re not bright,” she said. She was amazed that her voice sounded conversational; waves of horror and relief and renewed horror were rippling across her shoulders, and something primitive in the back of her mind was screaming.
A sullen silence from below, as he tried to work out what he’d just given away.
“Now I know you didn’t send Jem back through the stones,” she clarified for him. She carefully didn’t shriek, But you sent Roger back to look for him! And he’ll never find him. You … you … “He’s still here, in this time.”
Another silence.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Okay, you know that. But you don’t know where he is. And you’re not going to, until you turn me loose. I meant it, hen—he’ll be thirsty by now. And hungry. It’ll be a lot worse for him by morning.”
Her hand tightened on the grate. “You had better be lying,” she said evenly. “For your sake.” She shoved the grate back into place and stepped on it, clicking it down into its frame. The priest’s hole was literally a hole: a space about six feet by eight, and twelve feet deep. Even if Rob Cameron hadn’t been bound hand and foot, he couldn’t jump high enough to get hold of the grate, let alone reach the latch that held it down.
Ignoring the furious shouts from below, Brianna went to retrieve her daughter and her jeans.

THE MUDROOM WAS empty, and for an instant she panicked—but then she saw the tiny bare foot sticking out from under the bench, long toes relaxed as a frog’s, and her heart rate dropped. A little.
Mandy was curled up under Roger’s old mac, thumb half in her mouth, sound asleep. The impulse was to carry her to her bed, let her sleep ’til daylight. Brianna laid a soft hand on her daughter’s black curly hair—black as Roger’s—and her heart squeezed like a lemon. There was another child to consider.
“Wake up, sweetheart,” she said, gently shaking the little girl. “Wake up, honey. We need to go and look for Jem.”
It took no little cajoling and the administration of a glass of Coca-Cola—a rare treat, and absolutely unheard of so late at night, how exciting!—to get Mandy into a state of alertness, but once there she was all eagerness to go and hunt for her brother.
“Mandy,” Bree said as casually as she could, buttoning her daughter’s pink quilted coat, “can you feel Jem? Right now?”
“Uh-huh,” Mandy replied offhandedly, and Brianna’s heart leapt. Two nights before, the child had waked screaming from a sound sleep, weeping hysterically and insisting that Jem was gone. She had been inconsolable, wailing that her brother had been eaten by “big wocks!”—an assertion that had terrified her parents, who knew the horrors of those particular rocks all too well.
But then, a few minutes later, Mandy had suddenly calmed. Jem was there, she said. He was there in her head. And she had gone back to sleep as though nothing had happened.
In the consternation that had followed this episode—the discovery that Jem had been taken by Rob Cameron, one of Brianna’s fellow employees at the hydroelectric plant, and presumably taken through the stones into the past—there had been no time to recall Mandy’s remark about Jem being back in her head, let alone to make further inquiries. But now Brianna’s mind was moving at the speed of light, bounding from one horrifying realization to the next, making connections that might have taken hours to make in cooler blood.
Horrifying Realization Number 1: Jem hadn’t gone into the past, after all. While by itself this was undeniably a good thing, it made Horrifying Realization Number 2 that much worse: Roger and William Buccleigh had undoubtedly gone through the stones, searching for Jemmy. She hoped they were in fact in the past and not dead—traveling through whatever sort of thing the stones were was a bloody dangerous proposition—but, if so, that brought her back to Horrifying Realization Number 1: Jem wasn’t in the past. And if he wasn’t there, Roger wasn’t going to find him. And since Roger would never give up looking …
She pushed Horrifying Realization Number 3 aside with great force, and Mandy blinked, startled.
“Why you making faces, Mummy?”
“Practicing for Halloween.” She rose, smiling as best she could, and reached for her own duffel coat.
Mandy’s brow creased in thought.
“When’s Halloween?”
Cold rippled over Brianna, and not just from the draft through the crack under the back door. Did they make it? They thought the portal was most active on the sun feasts and fire feasts—and Samhain was an important fire feast—but they couldn’t wait the extra day, for fear that Jem would be taken too far from Craigh na Dun after passing through the stones.
“Tomorrow,” she said. Her fingers slipped and fumbled on the fastenings, shaky with adrenaline.
“Goody, goody, goody!” Mandy said, hopping to and fro like a cricket. “Can I wear my mask to look for Jemmy?”

NOTHING’S SO HARD BUT SEARCH WILL FIND IT OUT
HE’D FELT THE DIAMONDS explode. For some time, that was the only thought in his mind. Felt it. One instant, briefer than a heartbeat, and a pulse of light and heat in his hand and then the throb of something going through him, surrounding him, and then …
Not “then,” he thought muzzily. Wasn’t any then. Wasn’t any now. Now there is, though …
He opened his eyes to find that there was a now. He was lying on stones and heather and there was a cow breathing—no, not a cow. He made to rise and managed to turn his head half an inch. It was a man, sitting huddled on the ground. Taking huge, irregular, gasping sobs of breath. Who … ?
“Oh,” he said aloud, or almost. “ ’S you.” The words came out in a mangle that hurt his throat, and he coughed. That hurt, too. “You … okay?” he asked hoarsely.
“No.” It came out in a grunt, filled with pain, and alarm got Roger up onto hands and knees, head spinning. He did a bit of gasping himself but crawled as fast as he could toward Buck.
William Buccleigh was curled over, arms crossed, gripping his left upper arm with his right hand. His face was pale and slicked with sweat, lips pressed so tight together that a ring of white showed round his mouth.
“Hurt?” Roger lifted a hand, not sure where or whether to prod. He couldn’t see any blood.
“My … chest,” Buck wheezed. “Arm.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Roger said, the last remnants of muzziness stripped away by a blast of adrenaline. “Are you having a bloody heart attack?”
“What …” Buck grimaced, then something seemed to ease a little. He gulped air. “How would I know?”
“It’s—never mind. Lie down, will you?” Roger looked wildly round, though even as he did, he realized the sheer pointlessness of doing so. The area near Craigh na Dun was wild and unpopulated in his own time, let alone this one. And even should someone appear out of the stones and heather, the chances of whoever it was being a doctor were remote.
He took Buck by the shoulders and eased him gently down, then bent and put his ear to the man’s chest, feeling like an idiot.
“D’ye hear anything?” Buck asked anxiously.
“Not with you talking, no. Shut up.” He thought he could make out a heartbeat of some sort but had no idea whether there was anything wrong with it. He stayed bent a moment longer, if only to compose himself.
Always act as if you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. He’d been given that bit of advice by a number of people, from performers he’d shared a stage with to academic advisers … and, much more recently, by both of his in-laws.
He put a hand on Buck’s chest and looked into the man’s face. He was still sweating and plainly scared, but there was a little more color in his cheeks. His lips weren’t blue; that seemed a good sign.
“Just keep breathing,” he advised his ancestor. “Slow, aye?”
He tried to follow that bit of advice himself; his own heart was hammering and sweat was running down his back, in spite of a cold wind that whined past his ears.
“We did it, aye?” Buck’s chest was moving more slowly under his hand. He turned his head to look round. “It’s … different. Isn’t it?”
“Yes.” In spite of the current situation and the overwhelming worry for Jem, Roger felt a surge of jubilation and relief. It was different: from here, he could see the road below—now no more than an overgrown drovers’ trace rather than a gray asphalt ribbon. The trees and bushes, they were different, too—there were pines, the big Caledonian pines that looked like giant stalks of broccoli. They had made it.
He grinned at Buck. “We made it. Don’t die on me now, you bugger.”
“Do my best.” Buck was gruff but maybe starting to look better. “What happens if ye die out of your time? D’ye just disappear, like ye never were?”
“Maybe ye explode into bits. I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out. Not while I’m standing next to you, at least.” Roger got his feet under him and fought down a wave of dizziness. His own heart was still beating hard enough that he felt it in the back of his head. He breathed as deep as he could and stood up.
“I’ll … get ye some water. Stay there, aye?”

ROGER HAD BROUGHT a small empty canteen, though he’d worried about what might happen to the metal in transit. Evidently whatever it was that vaporized gemstones wasn’t bothered about tin, though; the canteen was intact, and so was the small knife and the silver pocket flask of brandy.
Buck was sitting up by the time Roger came back from the nearest burn with water, and after mopping his face with the water and drinking half the brandy, he declared himself recovered.
Roger wasn’t all that sure; the look of the man was a little off-color still—but he was much too anxious about Jem to suggest waiting any longer. They’d talked about it a bit on the drive to Craigh na Dun, agreeing on a basic strategy, at least to start.
If Cameron and Jem had made it through without mishap—and Roger’s heart misgave him at that thought, recalling Geillis Duncan’s careful collection of news reports involving people found near stone circles, most of them dead—they had to be on foot. And while Jem was a sturdy little boy and capable of walking a good distance, he doubted they could make much more than ten miles in a day over rough country.
The only road was the drovers’ track that led near the base of the hill. So one of them would take the direction that would intersect with one of General Wade’s good roads that led to Inverness; the other would follow the track west toward the pass that led to Lallybroch and, beyond it, Cranesmuir.
“I think Inverness is the most likely,” Roger repeated, probably for the sixth time. “It’s the gold he wants, and he knows that’s in America. He can’t be meaning to walk from the Highlands to Edinburgh to find a ship, not with winter breathing down his neck.”
“He won’t find a ship anywhere in the winter,” Buck objected. “No captain would cross the Atlantic in November!”
“D’ye think he knows that?” Roger asked. “He’s an amateur archaeologist, not a historian. And most folk in the twentieth century have trouble thinking anything was ever different in the past, save the funny clothes and no indoor plumbing. The notion that the weather could stop them going anywhere they’d a mind to—he may well think ships run all the time, on a regular timetable.”
“Mmphm. Well, maybe he means to hole up in Inverness with the lad, maybe find work, and wait ’til the spring. D’ye want to take Inverness, then?” Buck lifted his chin in the direction of the invisible town.
“No.” Roger shook his head and began patting his pockets, checking his supplies. “Jem knows this place.” He nodded toward the stones above them. “I brought him here, more than once, to make sure he never came upon it unawares. That means he knows—approximately, at least—how to get home—to Lallybroch, I mean—from here. If he got away from Cameron—and, God, I hope he did!—he’d run for home.”
He didn’t trouble saying that even if Jem wasn’t there, Brianna’s relatives were, her cousins and her aunt. He’d not met them, but they knew from Jamie’s letters who he was; if Jem wasn’t there—and, Lord, how he hoped he was—they’d help him search. As to how much he might try to tell them … that could wait.
“Right, then.” Buck buttoned his coat and settled the knitted comforter round his neck against the wind. “Three days, maybe, to Inverness and time to search the town, two or three back. I’ll meet ye here in six days’ time. If ye’re not here, I follow on to Lallybroch.”
Roger nodded. “And if I’ve not found them but I’ve heard some word of them, I’ll leave a message at Lallybroch. If …” He hesitated, but it had to be said. “If ye find your wife, and things fall out—”
Buck’s lips tightened.
“They’ve already fallen,” he said. “But, aye. If. I’ll still come back.”
“Aye, right.” Roger hunched his shoulders, anxious to go, and awkward with it. Buck was already turning away but suddenly about-faced and gripped Roger’s hand, hard.
“We’ll find him,” Buck said, and looked into Roger’s eyes, with those bright-moss eyes that were the same as his. “Good luck.” He gave Roger’s hand one sharp, hard shake and then was off, arms outstretched for balance as he picked his way down through the rocks and gorse. He didn’t look back.

WARMER, COLDER
“CAN YOU TELL when Jem’s at school?”
“Yes. He goes on da bus.” Mandy bounced a little on her booster seat, leaning to peer out the window. She was wearing the Halloween mask Bree had helped her make, this being a mouse princess: a mouse face drawn with crayons on a paper plate, with holes pierced for eyes and at either side for pink yarn ties, pink pipe cleaners glued on for whiskers, and a precarious small crown made with cardboard, more glue, and most of a bottle of gold glitter.
