A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [621]
Did they want congratulations? she wondered fuzzily. But then she remembered what Roger had told her, describing her father leading her mother through the scene of butchery, making her look, so that she would know her tormentors were dead.
“Okay,” she said, swaying a little. “All right, I mean. I—I see. He’s dead.”
“Well . . . no. Actually, he isn’t.” Roger’s voice held an odd note of strain, and he coughed, with a look that shot daggers at her father.
“D’ye want him dead, lass?” Her father touched her shoulder, gently. “It is your right.”
“Do I—” She looked wildly from one to the other of the grave, shadowed faces, then at Bonnet, realizing for the first time that blood was running down his face. Dead men, as her mother had often explained, don’t bleed.
They had found Bonnet, Jamie said, run him to earth like a fox, and set about him. It had been an ugly fight, close-to, with knives, as their pistols were useless in the wet. Knowing that he fought for his life, Bonnet had struck viciously—there was a red-stained gash in the shoulder of Jamie’s coat, a scratch high on Roger’s throat, where a knife blade had passed within a fraction of slashing his jugular. But Bonnet had fought to escape, and not to kill—retreating into a space between trees where only one could come at him, he had grappled with Jamie, thrown him off, then bolted.
Roger had given chase, and boiling with adrenaline, had thrown himself at Bonnet bodily, knocking the pirate headfirst into the tree he now lay against.
“So there he lies,” Jamie said, giving Bonnet a bleak eye. “I had hoped he’d broken his neck, but no such thing, alas.”
“But he is unconscious,” Roger said, and swallowed.
She understood, and in her present mood, this particular male quirk of honor seemed reasonable. To kill a man in fair fight—or even an unfair fight—was one thing; to cut his throat while he lay unconscious at your feet was another.
But she hadn’t understood at all. Her father wiped his dirk on his breeches and handed it to her, hilt first.
“What . . . me?” She was too shocked even to feel astonishment. The knife was heavy in her hand.
“If ye wish it,” her father said, with grave courtesy. “If not, Roger Mac or I will do it. But it is your choice, a nighean.”
Now she understood Roger’s look—they had been arguing about it, before he had come to fetch her. And she understood exactly why her father offered her the choice. Whether it was vengeance or forgiveness, she held the man’s life in her hand. She took a deep breath, the awareness that it would not be vengeance coming over her with something like relief.
“Brianna,” Roger said softly, touching her arm. “Say the word if ye’ll have him dead; I’ll do it.”
She nodded, and took a deep breath. She could hear the savage longing in his voice—he did. She could hear the choked sound of his voice in memory, too, when he had told her of killing Boble—when he woke from dreams of it, drenched in sweat.
She glanced at her father’s face, nearly drowned in shadow. Her mother had said only a little of the violent dreams that haunted him since Culloden—but that little was enough. She could hardly ask her father to do this—to spare Roger what he suffered himself.
Jamie raised his head, feeling her eyes on him, and met her gaze, straight on. Jamie Fraser had never turned from a fight he saw as his—but this was not his fight, and he knew it. She had a sudden flash of awareness; it wasn’t Roger’s fight, either, though he would take the weight of it from her shoulders, and gladly.
“If you—if we—if we don’t kill him here and now—” Her chest was tight, and she stopped for breath. “What will we do with him?”
“Take him to Wilmington,” her father said matter-of-factly. “The Committee