Outlander - Diana Gabaldon [33]
After a time, we reached a crossroads, where we stopped a moment while the bald man and the leader conferred in low tones. Jamie dropped the reins over the horse’s neck and let it wander to the verge to crop grass, while he began twisting and turning behind me.
“Careful!” I said. “Don’t twist like that, or your dressing will come off! What are you trying to do?”
“Get my plaid loose to cover you,” he replied. “You’re shivering. But I canna do it one-handed. Can ye reach the clasp of my brooch for me?”
With a good deal of tugging and awkward shifting, we got the plaid loosened. With a surprisingly dexterous swirl, he twirled the cloth out and let it settle, shawllike, around his shoulders. He then put the ends over my shoulders and tucked them neatly under the saddle edge, so that we were both warmly wrapped.
“There!” he said. “We dinna want ye to freeze before we get there.”
“Thank you,” I said, grateful for the shelter. “But where are we going?”
I couldn’t see his face, behind and above me, but he paused a moment before answering.
At last he laughed shortly. “Tell ye the truth, lassie, I don’t know. Reckon we’ll both find out when we get there, eh?”
* * *
Something seemed faintly familiar about the section of countryside through which we were passing. Surely I knew that large rock formation ahead, the one shaped like a rooster’s tail?
“Cocknammon Rock!” I exclaimed.
“Aye, reckon,” said my escort, unexcited by this revelation.
“Didn’t the English use it for ambushes?” I asked, trying to remember the dreary details of local history Frank had spent hours regaling me with over the last week. “If there is an English patrol in the neighborhood…” I hesitated. If there was an English patrol in the neighborhood, perhaps I was wrong to draw attention to it. And yet, in case of an ambush, I would be quite indistinguishable from my companion, shrouded as we were in one plaid. And I thought again of Captain Jonathan Randall, and shuddered involuntarily. Everything I had seen since I had stepped through the cleft stone pointed toward the completely irrational conclusion that the man I had met in the wood was in fact Frank’s six-times-great-grandfather. I fought stubbornly against this conclusion, but was unable to formulate another that met the facts.
I had at first imagined that I was merely dreaming more vividly than usual, but Randall’s kiss, rudely familiar and immediately physical, had dispelled that impression. Neither did I imagine that I had dreamed being knocked on the head by Murtagh; the soreness on my scalp was being matched by a chafing of my inner thighs against the saddle, which seemed most undreamlike. And the blood; yes, I was familiar enough with blood to have dreamed of it before. But never had I dreamed the scent of blood; that warm, coppery tang that I could still smell on the man behind me.
“Tck.” He clucked to our horse and urged it up alongside the leader’s, engaging the burly shadow in quiet Gaelic conversation. The horses slowed to a walk.
At a signal from the leader, Jamie, Murtagh, and the small bald man dropped back, while the other two spurred up and galloped toward the rock, a quartermile ahead to the right. A half-moon had come up, and the light was bright enough to pick out the leaves of the mallow plants growing on the roadside, but the shadows in the clefts of the rock could hide anything.
Just as the galloping shapes passed the rock, a flash of musket fire sparked from a hollow. There was a bloodcurdling shriek from directly behind me, and the horse leaped forward as though jabbed with a sharp stick. We were suddenly racing toward the rock across the heather, Murtagh and the other man alongside, hair-raising screams and bellows splitting the night air.
I hung onto