Outlander - Diana Gabaldon [233]
Bloody place is haunted, I thought, listening to the leafy conversation overhead as I threaded my way through the slender trunks. I wouldn’t be surprised to meet a ghost behind the next tree.
I was surprised, though. Actually, I was scared out of my wits when the shadowy figure slid out and grabbed me. I let out a piercing shriek and struck at it.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, “what are you doing here?” I crumpled for a moment against Jamie’s chest, relieved to see him, in spite of the fright he had given me.
He took me by the arm and turned to lead me out of the wood.
“Came for you,” he said, low voiced. “I was coming to meet you because night was comin’ on; I met Geillis Duncan near St. John’s brook and she told me where you were.”
“But the baby—” I began, turning back toward the hill.
“The child’s dead,” he said briefly, tugging me back. “I went up there first, to see.”
I followed him then without demur, distressed over the child’s death, but relieved that I would not, after all, have to face the climb to the fairies’ crest or the long journey back alone. Oppressed by the dark and the whispering trees, I didn’t speak until we had crossed the brook again. Still damp from the previous immersion, I didn’t bother removing my stockings, but sloshed across regardless. Jamie, still dry, stayed that way by leaping from the bank to a central boulder that stood above the current, then vaulted to my bank like a broad-jumper.
“Have ye any idea how dangerous it is to be out alone at night like that, Sassenach?” he inquired. He didn’t seem angry, just curious.
“No…I mean yes. I’m sorry if I worried you. But I couldn’t leave a child out there, I just couldn’t.”
“Aye, I know.” He hugged me briefly. “You’ve a kind heart, Sassenach. But you’ve no idea what you’re dealing with, here.”
“Fairies, hm?” I was tired, and disturbed over the incident, but covered it with flippancy. “I’m not afraid of superstitions.” A thought struck me. “Do you believe in fairies, and changelings, and all that?”
He hesitated for a moment before answering.
“No. No, I dinna believe in such things, though damned if I’d care to sleep all night on a fairies’ hill, for a’ that. But I’m an educated man, Sassenach. I had a German tutor at Dougal’s house, a good one, who taught me Latin and Greek and such, and later when I went to France at eighteen—well, I studied history and philosophy and I saw that there was a good deal more to the world than the glens and the moors, and the waterhorses in the lochs. But these people…” He waved an arm, taking in the darkness behind us.
“They’ve ne’er been more than a day’s walk from the place they were born, except for a great thing like a clan Gathering, and that might happen twice in a lifetime. They live among the glens and the lochs, and they hear no more of the world than what Father Bain tells them in kirk of a Sunday. That and the old stories.”
He held aside an alder branch and I stooped under it. We were on the deer trail Geilie and I had followed earlier, and I was heartened by this fresh evidence that he could find his way, even in the dark. Away from the fairies’ hill, he spoke in his normal voice, only pausing occasionally to brush away some tangling growth from his path.
“Those tales are naught but entertainment in Gwyllyn’s hands, when ye sit in the Hall drinking Rhenish wine.” He preceded me down the path, and his voice floated back to me, soft and emphatic in the cool night air.
“Out here, though, and even in the village—nay, that’s something else. Folk live by them. I suppose there’s some truth behind some of them.”
I thought of the amber eyes of the waterhorse, and wondered which others were true.
“And others…well,” his voice grew softer, and I had to strain to hear him. “For the parents of that child, maybe it will