Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [289]
Fiona paused, looking down at her folded hands.
“It’s women; only women. The men havena got a part in it, and we do not tell them. Not ever.”
He laid a hand over hers.
“You’re right to tell me, Fiona,” he said, very softly. “Tell me the rest, please. I’ve got to know.”
She drew a deep, quivering breath and pulled her hand out from under his. She looked directly at him. “D’ye know where she’s gone? Brianna?”
“I think so. She’s gone where Gillian went, hasn’t she?”
Fiona didn’t reply, but went on looking at him. The unreality of the situation swept over him all of a sudden. He couldn’t be sitting here, in the comfortable, shabby kitchen he’d known since boyhood, sipping tea from a mug with the Queen’s face painted on the side, discussing sacred stones and time-flight with Fiona. Not Fiona, for God’s sake, whose interests were confined to Ernie and the domestic economy of her kitchen!
Or so he’d thought. He picked up the mug, drained it, and set it down with a soft thump.
“I have to go after her, Fiona—if I can. Can I?”
She shook her head, clearly afraid.
“I canna say. It’s only women I know about; maybe it’s only women who can.”
Roger’s hand clenched round the saltshaker. That’s what he was afraid of—or one of the things he was afraid of.
“Only one way to find out, isn’t there?” he said, outwardly casual. In the back of his mind, unbidden, a tall cleft stone rose up black, stark as a threat against a soft dawn sky.
“I have her wee book,” Fiona blurted.
“What—whose? Gillian’s? She wrote something?”
“Aye, she did. There’s a place—” She darted a look at him, and licked her lips. “We keep our things there, ready beforehand. She’d put the book there, and—and—I took it, after.” After Gillian’s husband had been found murdered in the circle, Roger thought she meant.
“I kent the polis should maybe have it,” Fiona went on, “but it—well, I didna like to give it to them, and yet I was thinkin’ what if it’s to do with the killing? And I couldna keep it back if it was to be important, and yet—” She looked up at Roger in a plea for understanding. “It was her own book, ye see, her writing. And if she’d left it in that place …”
“It was secret.” Roger nodded.
Fiona nodded, and drew a deep breath.
“So I read it.”
“And that’s how you know where she’s gone,” Roger said softly.
Fiona let out a shuddering sigh and gave him a wan smile.
“Well, the book’s no going to help the polis, that’s for sure.”
“Could it help me?”
“I hope so,” she said simply, and turning to the sideboard, pulled open a drawer and withdrew a small book, bound in green cloth.
32
GRIMOIRE
This is the grimoire of the witch, Geillis. It is a witch’s name, and I take it for my own; what I was born does not matter, only what I will make of myself, only what I will become.
And what is that? I cannot yet say, for only in the making will I find what I have made. Mine is the path of power.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, yes—and how? Why, in the assumption that power can be absolute, for it never can. For we are mortal, you and I. Watch the flesh shrink and wither on your bones, feel the lines of your skull, pushing through the skin, your teeth behind soft lips a grin of grim acknowledgment.
And yet within the bounds of flesh, many things are possible. Whether such things are possible beyond those bounds—that is the realm of others, not mine. And that is the difference between them and me, those others who have gone before to explore the Black Realm, those who seek power in magic and the summoning of demons.
I go in the body, not the soul. And by denying my soul, I give no power to any force but those I control. I do not seek favor from devil or god; I deny them. For if there is no soul, no death to contemplate, then neither god