A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [423]
“Then . . . things happened. I wasna in Scotland any longer, and home was . . . gone.” His voice was soft, but she could hear the echo of loss in it.
“I would wake, with no idea where I might be—or who.”
He was hunched over now, big hands hanging loose between his thighs as he gazed into the fire.
“But when I lay wi’ Emily—from the first time. I knew. Kent who I was again.” He looked up at her then, eyes dark and shadowed by loss. “My soul didna wander while I slept—when I slept wi’ her.”
“And now it does?” she asked quietly, after a moment.
He nodded, wordless. The wind whispered in the trees above. She tried to ignore it, obscurely afraid that if she listened closely, she might hear words.
“Ian,” she said, and touched his arm, very lightly. “Is Emily dead?”
He sat quite still for a minute, then took a deep, shuddering breath, and shook his head.
“I dinna think so.” He sounded very doubtful, though, and she could see the trouble in his face.
“Ian,” she said very softly. “Come here.”
He didn’t move, but when she scooted close and put her arms around him, he didn’t resist. She pulled him down with her, insisting that he lie beside her, his head pillowed in the curve between shoulder and breast, her arm around him.
Mother instinct, she thought, wryly amused. Whatever’s wrong, the first thing you do is pick them up and cuddle them. And if they’re too big to lift . . . and if his warm weight and the sound of his breathing in her ear kept the voices in the wind at bay, so much the better.
She had a fragmentary memory, a brief vivid image of her mother standing behind her father in the kitchen of their house in Boston. He lay back in a straight chair, his head against her mother’s stomach, eyes closed in pain or exhaustion, as she rubbed his temples. What had it been? A headache? But her mother’s face had been gentle, the lines of her own day’s stress smoothed away by what she was doing.
“I feel a fool,” Ian said, sounding shy—but didn’t pull away.
“No, you don’t.”
He took a deep breath, squirmed a little, and settled cautiously into the grass, his body barely touching hers.
“Aye, well. I suppose not, then,” he murmured. He relaxed by wary degrees, his head growing heavier on her shoulder, the muscles of his back yielding slowly, their tension subsiding under her hand. Very tentatively, as though expecting her to slap him away, he lifted one arm and laid it over her.
It seemed the wind had died. The firelight shone on his face, the dark dotted lines of his tattoos standing out against the young skin. His hair smelled of woodsmoke and dust, soft against her cheek.
“Tell me,” she said.
He sighed, deeply.
“Not yet,” he said. “When we get there, aye?”
He would not say more, and they lay together, quiet in the grass, and safe.
Brianna felt sleep come, the waves of it gentle, lifting her toward peace, and did not resist. The last thing she recalled was Ian’s face, cheek heavy on her shoulder, his eyes still open, watching the fire.
WALKING ELK WAS telling a story. It was one of his best stories, but Ian wasn’t paying proper attention. He sat across the fire from Walking Elk, but it was the flames he was watching, not his friend’s face.
Very odd, he thought. He’d been watching fires all his life, and never seen the woman in them, until these winter months. Of course, peat fires had no great flame to speak of, though they had a good heat and a lovely smell . . . oh. Aye, so she was there, after all, the woman. He nodded slightly, smiling. Walking Elk took this as an expression of approval at his performance and became even more dramatic in his gestures, scowling horrendously and lurching to and fro with bared teeth, growling in illustration of the glutton he had carefully tracked to its lair.
The noise distracted Ian from the fire, drawing his attention to the story again. Just in time, for