A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [426]
Other young women had come in with her, bringing more beer. They nudged their way in among the young men, murmuring, poking, and laughing. He’d been wrong, Ian thought, watching them. The firelight shone on their faces, glanced from their teeth, caught the moist shine of eyes and the soft dark flesh inside their mouths as they laughed. The fire gleamed on their faces more than it had ever shone from the crystal and silver of Rose Hall.
“So, husband,” Emily said, lowering her eyelids demurely. “Tell us about this woman with green eyes.”
He took a thoughtful swallow of beer, then another.
“Oh,” he said. “She was a witch, and a very wicked woman—but she did make good beer.”
Emily’s eyes flew open wide, and everyone laughed. He looked into her eyes and saw it, clearly; the image of the fire behind him, tiny and perfect—welcoming him in.
“But not as good as yours,” he said. He lifted the bucket in salute, and drank deep.
70
EMILY
BRIANNA WOKE IN THE MORNING stiff and sore, but with one clear thought in mind. Okay. I know who I am. She had no clear idea where she was, but that didn’t matter. She lay still for a moment, feeling oddly peaceful, despite the urge to get up and pee.
How long had it been, she wondered, since she had wakened alone and peaceful, with no company but her own thoughts? Really, not since she had stepped through the stones, she thought, in search of her family. And found them.
“In spades,” she murmured, stretching gingerly. She groaned, staggered to her feet, and shuffled into the brush to pee and change back into her own clothes before returning to the blackened fire ring.
She unplaited her draggled hair, and began groggily combing her fingers through it. There was no sign of Ian or the dog nearby, but she wasn’t concerned. The wood around her was filled with the racket of birds, but not alarm calls, just the daily business of flutter and feeding, a cheerful chatter that didn’t alter when she rose. The birds had been watching her for hours; they weren’t concerned, either.
She never woke easily, but the simple pleasure of not being dragged from sleep by the insistent demands of those who did made the morning air seem particularly sweet, in spite of the bitter tang of ashes from the dead fire.
Mostly awake, she wiped a handful of dew-wet poplar leaves over her face by way of a morning toilette, then squatted by the fire ring and began the chore of fire-starting. They had no coffee to boil, but Ian would be hunting. With luck, there’d be something to cook; they’d eaten everything in the knapsack, save a heel of bread.
“Heck with this,” she muttered, whacking flint and steel together for the dozenth time, and seeing the spatter of sparks wink out without catching. If Ian had only told her they were camping, she would have brought her fire-striker, or some matches—though on second thought, she was not sure that would be safe. The things could easily burst into flame in her pocket.
“How did the Greeks do it?” she said aloud, scowling at the tiny mat of charred cloth on which she was attempting to catch a spark. “They must have had a way.”
“The Greeks had what?”
Ian and Rollo were back, having captured, respectively, half a dozen yams and a blue-gray waterbird of some kind—a small heron? Rollo refused to allow her to look at it, and took his prey off to devour under a bush, its long, limp yellow legs dragging on the ground.
“The Greeks had what?” Ian repeated, turning out a pocket full of chestnuts, red-brown skins gleaming from the remnants of their prickly hulls.
“Had stuff called phosphorus. You ever heard of it?”
Ian looked blank, and shook his head.
“No. What is it?”
“Stuff,” she said, finding no better word to hand. “Lord John sent me some, so I could make matches.”
“Matches between whom?” Ian inquired, regarding her warily.
She stared at him for a moment, her morning-sodden mind making slow sense of the conversation.
“Oh,” she said,