A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [298]
“I don’t know,” Germain admitted. “But they have fur. What’s a silkie, Grandpère?”
Jamie closed his eyes against the sinking sun, and rubbed a hand over his face, shaking his head a little. Brianna thought he was smiling, but couldn’t tell for sure.
“Ah, well,” he said, sitting up straighter, opening his eyes, and throwing back his wet hair. “A silkie is a creature who is a man upon the land, but becomes a seal within the sea. And a seal,” he added, cutting off Jemmy, who had been opening his mouth to ask, “is a great sleek beastie that barks like a dog, is as big as an ox, and beautiful as the black of night. They live in the sea, but come out onto the rocks near the shore sometimes.”
“Have you seen them, Grandpère?” Germain asked, eager.
“Oh, many a time,” Jamie assured him. “There are a great many seals who live on the coasts of Scotland.”
“Scotland,” Jemmy echoed. His eyes were round.
“Ma mère says Scotland is a good place,” Germain remarked. “She cries sometimes, when she talks of it. I am not so sure I would like it, though.”
“Why not?” Brianna asked.
“It’s full of giants and water horses and . . . things,” Germain replied, frowning. “I don’t want to meet any of those. And parritch, Maman says, but we have parritch here.”
“So we have. And I expect it’s time we were going home to eat some.” Jamie got to his feet and stretched, groaning in the pleasure of it. The late-afternoon sun washed rock and water with a golden light, gleaming on the boys’ cheeks and the bright hairs on her father’s arms.
Jemmy stretched and groaned, too, in worshipful imitation, and Jamie laughed.
“Come on, wee fishie. D’ye want a ride home?” He bent so that Jemmy could scramble onto his back, then straightened up, settling the little boy’s weight, and put out a hand to take Germain’s.
Jamie saw her attention turn momentarily back toward the blackened smudge at the edge of the rock.
“Leave it, lass,” he said quietly. “It’s a charm of some kind. Ye dinna want to touch it.”
Then he stepped off the rock and made for the trail, Jemmy on his back and Germain clutched firmly by the back of the neck, both boys giggling as they made their way through the slippery mud of the path.
Brianna retrieved her spade and Jamie’s shirt from the creekbank, and caught the boys up on the trail to the Big House. A breeze had begun to breathe through the trees, chilly in the damp cloth of her shift, but the heat of walking was enough to keep her from being cold.
Germain was singing softly to himself, still hand-in-hand with his grandfather, his small blond head tilting back and forth like a metronome.
Jemmy sighed in exhausted bliss, legs wrapped round Jamie’s middle, arms about his neck, and leaned his sun-reddened cheek against the scarred back. Then he thought of something, for he raised his head and kissed his grandfather with a loud smacking noise, between the shoulder blades.
Her father jerked, nearly dropping Jem, and made a high-pitched noise that made her laugh.
“Is that make it better?” Jem inquired seriously, pulling himself up and trying to look over Jamie’s shoulder into his face.
“Oh. Aye, lad,” his grandfather assured him, face twitching. “Much better.”
The gnats and midges were out in force now. She beat a cloud of them away from her face, and slapped a mosquito that lit on Germain’s neck.
“Ak!” he said, hunching his shoulders, but then resumed singing “Alouette,” undisturbed.
Jemmy’s shirt was thin, worn linen, cut down from one of Roger’s old ones. The cloth had dried to the shape of his body, square-rumped and solid, the breadth of his small, tender shoulders echoing the wide set of the older, firmer ones he clung to. She glanced from the redheads to Germain, walking reed-thin and graceful through shadows and light, still singing, and thought how desperately beautiful men were.
“Who were the bad people, Grandda?” Jemmy asked drowsily, head nodding with the rhythm of Jamie’s steps.
“Sassunaich,” Jamie