A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [143]
“Aye? And if no one finds her, they’ll think she’s still with us, won’t they?”
“But if Fraser catches up to us, and she’s not, who shall he blame . . .”
They stopped, four or five of them surrounding me. I scrambled to my feet, my hand closing by reflex around the nearest thing approaching a weapon—an unfortunately small rock.
“How far are we from the whisky?” Hodge demanded. He had taken off his hat, and his eyes gleamed, ratlike in the shadow.
“I don’t know,” I said, keeping a firm grip on my nerves—and the rock. My lip was still tender, puffed from the blow he had dealt me, and I had to form the words carefully. “I don’t know where we are.”
This was true, though I could have made a reasonable guess. We had traveled for a few hours, mostly upward, and the trees nearby were fir and balsam; I could smell their resin, sharp and clean. We were on the upper slopes, and probably near a small pass that crossed the shoulder of the mountain.
“Kill her,” urged one of the others. “She’s no good to us, and if Fraser finds her with us—”
“Shut your face!” Hodge rounded on the speaker with such violence that the man, much larger, stepped back involuntarily. That threat disposed of, Hodge ignored him and seized me by the arm.
“Don’t play coy with me, woman. You’ll tell me what I want to know.” He didn’t bother with the “or else”—something cold passed across the top of my breast, and the hot sting of the cut followed a second later, as blood began to bloom from it.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I said, more from surprise than pain. I jerked my arm out of his grasp. “I told you, I don’t even know where we are, you idiot! How do you expect me to tell you where anything else is?”
He blinked, startled, and brought the knife up by reflex, wary, as though he thought I might attack him. Realizing that I wasn’t about to, he scowled at me.
“I’ll tell you what I do know,” I said, and was distantly pleased to hear that my voice was sharp and steady. “The whisky cache is about half a mile from the malting shed, roughly northwest. It’s in a cave, well-hidden. I could take you there—if we began from the spring where you took me—but that’s all I can tell you in the way of direction.”
This was true, too. I could find it easily enough—but to give directions? “Go through a gap in the brush a little way, until you see the cluster of oak where Brianna shot a possum, bear left to a squarish rock with a bunch of adder’s-tongue growing over it. . . .” The fact that the need for my services as a guide was probably all that kept them from killing me on the spot was, of course, a secondary consideration.
It was a very shallow cut; I wasn’t bleeding badly at all. My face and hands were ice-cold, though, and small flashing lights came and went at the edges of my vision. Nothing was keeping me upright save a vague conviction that if it came to that, I preferred to die on my feet.
“I tell you, Hodge, you don’t want nothing to do with that one—nothing.” A larger man had joined the small group round me. He leaned over Hodge’s shoulder, looking at me, and nodded. They were all black in the shadow, but this man had a voice tinged with the lilt of Africa—an ex-slave, or perhaps a slave-trader. “That woman—I hear about her. She is a conjure woman. I know them. They are like serpents, conjure wives. You don’t touch that one, hear me? She will curse you!”
I managed to give a rather nasty-sounding laugh in answer to this, and the man closest to me took a half-step back. I was vaguely surprised; where had that come from?
But I was breathing better now, and the flashing lights were gone.
The tall man stretched his neck, seeing the dark line of blood on my shift.
“You draw her blood? Damn you, Hodge, you done it now.” There was a distinct note of alarm in his voice, and he drew back a little, making some sort of sign toward me with one hand.
Without the slightest notion as to what moved me to do it, I dropped the rock, ran the fingers of my right hand across the cut, and in one swift motion,