A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [249]
“I forgive ye, Hiram,” she said. “Ye’ve been a good lad.”
My vision had gone dark, but I could still hear and sense things dimly. Something grasped me, pulled me away, and a moment later I came to myself, leaning against Jamie in a corner, his arms supporting me.
“Are ye all right, Sassenach?” he was saying urgently, shaking me a little and patting my cheek.
The black-clad bean-treim had come as far as the door. I could see them outside, standing like twin pillars of darkness, falling snow beginning to whirl round them as the cold wind came inside, small hard dry flakes skittering and bouncing in its wake across the floor. The women’s voices rose and fell, blending with the wind. By the table, Hiram Crombie was trying to fix his mother-in-law’s garnet brooch to her shroud, though his hands shook and his narrow face was wet with tears.
“Yes,” I said faintly, then “yes” a little stronger. “Everything is all right now.”
PART SIX
On the Mountain
40
BIRD-SPRING
March 1774
IT WAS SPRING, and the long months of desolation melted into running water, with streamlets pouring from every hill and miniature waterfalls leaping from stone to stone to stone.
The air was filled with the racket of birds, a cacophony of melody that replaced the lonely calling of geese passing by far overhead.
Birds go one by one in the winter, a single raven hunched brooding in a barren tree, an owl fluffed against the cold in the high, dark shadows of a barn. Or they go in flocks, a massed thunder of wings to bear them up and away, wheeling through the sky like handsful of pepper grains thrown aloft, calling their way in Vs of mournful courage toward the promise of a distant and problematic survival.
In winter, the raptors draw apart unto themselves; the songbirds flee away, all the color of the feathered world reduced to the brutal simplification of predator and prey, gray shadows passing overhead, with no more than a small bright drop of blood fallen back to earth here and there to mark the passing of life, leaving a drift of scattered feathers, borne on the wind.
But as spring blooms, the birds grow drunk with love and the bushes riot with their songs. Far, far into the night, darkness mutes but does not silence them, and small melodious conversations break out at all hours, invisible and strangely intimate in the dead of night, as though one overheard the lovemaking of strangers in the room next door.
I moved closer to Jamie, hearing the clear, sweet song of a thrush in the great red spruce that stood behind the house. It was still cold at night, but not with the bitter chill of winter; rather with the sweet fresh cold of thawing earth and springing leaves, a cold that sent the blood tingling and made warm bodies seek one another, nesting.
A rumbling snore echoed across the landing—another harbinger of spring. Major MacDonald, who had arrived mud-caked and wind-bitten the night before, bringing unwelcome news of the outside world.
Jamie stirred briefly at the sound, groaned, farted briefly, and lay still. He’d stayed up late, entertaining the Major—if entertainment was the word for it.
I could hear Lizzie and Mrs. Bug in the kitchen below, talking as they banged pots and slammed doors in hopes of rousing us. Breakfast smells began to rise up the stairs, enticing, the bitter smell of roasting chicory spicing the thick warmth of buttered porridge.
The sound of Jamie’s breathing had changed, and I knew he was awake, though he still lay with his eyes closed. I didn’t know whether this denoted an urge to continue the physical pleasure of sleep—or a marked disinclination to get up and deal with Major MacDonald.
He resolved this doubt at once by rolling over, enveloping me in his arms, and moving his lower body against mine in a manner that made it obvious that, while physical pleasure was what was on his mind, he was quite through sleeping.
He hadn’t reached the point of coherent speech yet, though, and nuzzled my