A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [419]
“What’s this I hear about beavers, then, a madadh?” Ian said sternly. In response, Rollo shook himself, though no more than a fine mist of water droplets rose from his coat. He sighed, dropped to his belly, and put his nose morosely on his paws.
“Maybe he was only after fish, but the beavers didn’t see it that way. They ran from him on shore, but once he was in the water—” Brianna shook her head, and wrung out the soggy tail of her hunting shirt. “I tell you what, Ian—you clean those damn fish.”
He was already doing so, gutting one with a single neat slice up the belly and a scoop of the thumb. He tossed the entrails toward Rollo, who merely let out another sigh, and seemed to flatten against the dead leaves, ignoring the treat.
“He’s no hurt, is he?” Ian asked, frowning at his dog.
She glared at him.
“No, he isn’t. I expect he’s embarrassed. You could ask whether I’m hurt. Do you have any idea what kind of teeth beavers have?”
The light was nearly gone, but she could see his lean shoulders shaking.
“Aye,” he said, sounding rather strangled. “I have. They, um, didna bite ye, did they? I mean—I should think it would be noticeable, if ye’d been gnawed.” A small wheeze of amusement escaped him, and he tried to cover it with a cough.
“No,” she said, rather coldly. The fire was going well, but not nearly well enough. The evening breeze had come up, and was reaching through the soaked fabric of shirt and breeches to fondle her backside with ice-cold fingers.
“It wasn’t so much the teeth as the tails,” she said, shuffling round on her knees to present her back to the fire. She rubbed a hand gingerly over her right arm, where one of the muscular paddles had struck flat on her forearm, leaving a reddened bruise that stretched from wrist to elbow. For a few moments, she’d thought the bone was broken.
“It was like being hit with a baseball bat—er . . . with a club, I mean,” she amended. The beavers hadn’t attacked her directly, of course, but being in the water with a panicked wolf-dog and half a dozen sixty-pound rodents in a state of extreme agitation had been rather like walking through an automated car wash on foot—a maelstrom of blinding spray and thrashing objects. A chill struck her and she wrapped both arms around herself, shivering.
“Here, coz.” Ian stood up and skinned the buckskin shirt off over his head. “Put this on.”
She was much too cold and battered to refuse the offer. Retiring modestly behind a bush, she stripped off the wet things and emerged a moment later, clad in Ian’s buckskin, one of the blankets wrapped around her waist sarong-style.
“You don’t eat enough, Ian,” she said, sitting down by the fire again, and eyeing him critically. “All your ribs show.”
They did. He’d always been lean to the point of thinness, but in his younger years, his teenage scrawniness had seemed quite normal, merely the result of his bones outstripping the growth of the rest of him.
Now he had reached his full growth and had had a year or two to let his muscles catch up. They had—she could see every sinew in his arms and shoulders—but the knobs of his spine bulged against the tanned skin of his back, and she could see the shadows of his ribs like rippled sand underwater.
He raised a shoulder, but made no reply, intent on skewering the cleaned fish on peeled willow twigs for broiling.
“And you don’t sleep very well, either.” She narrowed her eyes at him across the fire. Even in this light, the shadows and hollows in his face were obvious, despite the distraction of the Mohawk tattoos that looped across his cheekbones. The shadows had been obvious to everyone for months; her mother had wanted to say something to Ian, but Jamie had told her to let the lad be; he would speak when he was ready.
“Oh, well enough,” he murmured, not looking up.
Whether he was ready now or not, she couldn’t say. But he’d brought her here. If he wasn’t ready, he could bloody well get that way fast.
She had—of course—wondered all day about the mysterious goal of their journey, and why she