A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [407]
“You,” he said, pointing a long accusatory finger at me, “are going nowhere. You are not allowed to kill yourself, do I make myself clear?”
“Oh, so that’s where Bree gets it,” I murmured, trying to stop my head from swimming. I closed my eyes again.
“I seem to recall,” I said, “a certain abbey in France. And a very stubborn young man in ill health. And his friend Murtagh, who took his clothes in order to prevent his getting up and wandering off before he was fit.”
Silence. I opened one eye. He was standing stock still, the fading light from the window striking sparks in his hair.
“Whereupon,” I said conversationally, “if memory serves, you promptly climbed out a window and decamped. Naked. In the middle of winter.”
The stiff fingers of his right hand tapped twice against his leg.
“I was four-and-twenty,” he said at last, sounding gruff. “I wasna meant to have any sense.”
“I wouldn’t argue with that for an instant,” I assured him. I opened the other eye and fixed him with both. “But you do know why I did it. I had to.”
He drew a very deep breath, sighed, and set down my clothes. He came and sat down on the bed beside me, making the wooden frame creak and groan beneath his weight.
He picked up my hand, and held it as though it were something precious and fragile. It was, too—or at least it looked fragile, a delicate construct of transparent skin and the shadow of the bones within it. He ran his thumb gently down the back of my hand, tracing the bones from phalange to ulna, and I felt an odd, small tingle of distant memory; the vision of my own bones, glowing blue through the skin, and Master Raymond’s hands, cupping my inflamed and empty womb, saying to me through the mists of fever, “Call him. Call the red man.”
“Jamie,” I said very softly. Sunlight flashed on the metal of my silver wedding ring. He took hold of it between thumb and forefinger, and slid the little metal circlet gently up and down my finger, so loose that it didn’t even catch on the bony knuckle.
“Be careful,” I said. “I don’t want to lose it.”
“Ye won’t.” He folded my fingers closed, his own hand closing large and warm around mine.
He sat silent for a time, and we watched the bar of sun creep slowly across the counterpane. Adso had moved with it, to stay in its warmth, and the light tipped his fur with a soft silver glow, the fine hairs that edged his ears tiny and distinct.
“It’s a great comfort,” he said at last, “to see the sun come up and go down. When I dwelt in the cave, when I was in prison, it gave me hope, to see the light come and go, and know that the world went about its business.”
He was looking out the window, toward the blue distance where the sky darkened toward infinity. His throat moved a little as he swallowed.
“It gives me the same feeling, Sassenach,” he said, “to hear ye rustling about in your surgery, rattling things and swearin’ to yourself.” He turned his head, then, to look at me, and his eyes held the depths of the coming night.
“If ye were no longer there—or somewhere—” he said very softly, “then the sun would no longer come up or go down.” He lifted my hand and kissed it, very gently. He laid it, closed around my ring, upon my chest, rose, and left.
I SLEPT LIGHTLY NOW, no longer flung into the agitated world of fever dreams, nor sucked down into the deep well of oblivion as my body sought the healing of sleep. I didn’t know what had wakened me, but I was awake, quite suddenly, alert and fresh-eyed, with no interval of drowsiness.
The shutters were closed, but the moon was full; soft light striped the bed. I ran a hand over the sheet beside me, lifted my hand far above my head. My arm was a slender pale stem, bloodless and fragile as a toadstool’s stalk; my fingers flexed gently and spread, a web, a net to catch the dark.
I could hear Jamie breathing, in his accustomed spot on the floor beside the bed.
I brought my arm down, stroked my body lightly with both hands,