The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [544]
“So ye think it is all meant? We’re doomed or saved from the moment of birth, and not a thing can change it? And you a minister’s son!” Fraser gave a dry sort of chuckle.
“Yes,” Roger said, feeling at once awkward and unaccountably angry. “I mean no, I don’t think that. It’s only . . . well, if something’s already happened one way, how can it happen another way?”
“It’s only you that thinks it’s happened,” Fraser pointed out.
“I don’t think it, I know!”
“Mmphm. Aye, because ye’ve come from the other side of it; it’s behind you. So perhaps you couldna change something—but I could, because it’s still ahead of me?”
Roger rubbed a hand hard over his face.
“That makes—” he began, and then stopped. How could he say it made no sense? Sometimes he thought nothing in the world made sense anymore.
“Maybe,” he said wearily. “God knows; I don’t.”
“Aye. Well, I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.”
Roger glanced sharply at him, hearing a strange note in his voice.
“What d’ye mean by that?”
“Ye think ye ken that I died three years from now,” Fraser said calmly. “If I die tonight, then you’re wrong, aye? What ye think happened won’t have happened—so the past can be changed, aye?”
“You’re not going to die!” Roger snapped. He glowered at Fraser, daring him to contradict.
“I’m pleased to hear it,” Fraser said. “But I think I’ll take a bit o’ the whisky now. Draw the cork for me, aye? My fingers willna grasp it.”
Roger’s own hands were far from steady. Perhaps it was only the heat of Fraser’s fever that made his own skin feel cold as he held the flask for his father-in-law to drink. He doubted that whisky was recommended for snakebite, but it didn’t seem likely to make much difference now.
“Lie down,” he said gruffly, when Jamie had finished. “I’ll fetch a bit more wood.”
He was unable to keep still; there was plenty of wood to hand, yet still he prowled the darkness, keeping just within sight of the blazing fire.
He had had a lot of nights like this; alone under a sweep of sky so vast that it made him dizzy to look up, chilled to the bone, moving to keep warm. The nights when he had wrestled with choice, too restless to lie in a comforting burrow of leaves, too tormented to sleep.
The choice had been clear then, but far from easy to make: Brianna on the one hand, and all that came with her; love and danger, doubt and fear. And on the other, surety. The knowledge of who and what he was—a certainty he had forsaken, for the sake of the woman who was his . . . and the child who might be.
He had chosen. Dammit, he had chosen! Nothing had forced him, he had made the choice himself. And if it meant remaking himself from the ground up, then he’d bloody well chosen that, too! And he’d chosen to kiss Morag, too. His mouth twisted at the thought; he’d had even less notion of the consequences of that small act.
Some small echo stirred in his mind, a soft voice far back in the shadows of his memory.
“. . . what I was born does not matter, only what I will make of myself, only what I will become.”
Who’d written that? he wondered. Montaigne? Locke? One of the bloody Enlightenment lads, them and their notions of destiny and the individual? He’d like to see what they had to say about time traveling! Then he remembered where he’d read it, and the marrow of his spine went cold.
“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.”
“Right!” he said aloud, defiant. “Right, and you couldn’t change things either, could you, Grandma?”
A sound came from the forest behind him, and the hair rose on the back of his neck before he recognized it; it wasn’t laughter, as he’d thought at first—only a panther’s distant cry.
She had, though, he thought suddenly. True, she’d not managed to make a king of Charles Stuart