The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [515]
The horses must be dead; I knew that. Why weren’t we? I breathed in the stink of burning flesh, and a tiny shudder arose, somewhere deep inside me. Were we alive now, only because we were doomed to die in four years? When it came our turn, would we lie in the burnt ruins of our house, shells of charred and reeking flesh?
Burnt to bones, whispered the voice of my memory. Tears ran down my face with the rain, but they were distant tears—for the horses, for my mother—not for myself. Not yet.
There were blue veins beneath the surface of my skin, more prominent than before. On the backs of my hands, they traced a roadmap . . . in the tender flesh behind my knee, they showed in webs and traceries; along my shin, one large vein swelled snakelike, distended. I pressed a finger on it; it was soft and disappeared, but came back the instant I removed the finger.
The inner workings of my body were becoming slowly more visible, the taut skin thinning, leaving me vulnerable, with everything outside, exposed to the elements, that once was safely sheltered in the snug casing of the body. Bone and blood push through . . . there was an oozing graze on the top of my foot.
Jamie was back, drenched to the skin and breathless from the climb. Both his shoes were gone, I saw.
“Judas is dead,” he said, sitting down beside me. He took my cold hand in his own cold hand and pressed it hard.
“Poor thing,” I said, and the tears ran faster, warm streams mingling with cold rain. “He knew, didn’t he? He always hated thunder and lightning, always.”
Jamie put an arm round my shoulders and pressed my head against his chest, making little soothing noises.
“And Gideon?” I asked at last, raising my head and making an effort to wipe my nose on a fold of sodden cloak. Jamie shook his head, with a small, incredulous smile.
“He’s alive,” he said. “He’s burnt down the side of his right shoulder and foreleg and his mane’s singed off entirely.” He picked up a fold of his own tattered cloak and tried to wipe my face, with no better results than I had had myself. “I expect it will do wonders for his temper,” he said, trying to make a joke of it.
“I suppose so.” I was too worn out and shaken to laugh, but I managed a small smile, and it felt good. “Can you lead him down, do you think? I—I have some ointment. It’s good for burns.”
“Aye, I think so.” He gave me a hand and helped me stand up. I turned to brush down my crumpled skirts, and as I did so, caught sight of something.
“Look,” I said, my voice no more than a whisper. “Jamie—look.”
Ten feet away, up the slope from us, stood a big balsam fir, its top sheared cleanly away and half its remaining branches charred and smoking. Wedged between one branch and the stump of the trunk was a huge, rounded mass. It was half black, the tissues turned to carbon—but the hair on the other half lay in sodden white spikes, the cream-white color of trilliums.
Jamie stood looking up at the corpse of the bear, his mouth half open. Slowly he closed it, and shook his head. He turned to me, then, and looked past me, toward the distant mountains, where the retreating lightning flashed silently.
“They do say,” he said softly, “that a great storm portends the death of a king.”
He touched my face, very gently.
“Wait here, Sassenach, while I fetch the horse. We’ll go home.”
85
HEARTHFIRE
Fraser’s Ridge
October, 1771
THE SEASON CHANGED, from one hour to the next. She had gone to sleep in the cool balm of an Indian summer evening, and wakened in the middle of the night to the sharp bite of autumn, her feet freezing under the single quilt. Still drowsy, she couldn’t fall sleep again, not without more covers.
She dragged slit-eyed out of bed, padded over the icy floor to check Jemmy. He was warm enough, sunk deep into his tiny featherbed, the quilt drawn up around his small pink ears. She laid a gentle hand on his back, waiting for the reassurance of the rise and fall of his breath. Once, twice, once more.
She rummaged