The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [561]
His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, under my hand, and my own heart jerked and shuddered, as though I had been pulled back at the last moment from an unexpected precipice.
He blinked at me. His eyes were heavy, still clouded with fever.
“It didna take much effort, Sassenach,” he said, his voice soft and husky from sleep. “Not dying was harder.”
He made no pretense of not understanding me. In the light of day, I saw clearly what exhaustion and the aftereffects of shock had stopped me seeing the night before. His insistence on his own bed. The open shutters, so he could hear the voices of his family below, his tenants outside. And me beside him. He had, very carefully, and without saying a word to me, decided how and where he wanted to die.
“You thought you were dying when we brought you up here, didn’t you?” I asked. My voice sounded more bewildered than accusing.
It took him a moment to answer, though he didn’t look hesitant. It was more as though he was looking for the proper words.
“Well, I didna ken for sure, no,” he said slowly. “Though I did feel verra ill.” His eyes closed, slowly, as though he were too tired to keep them open. “I still do,” he added, in a detached sort of voice. “Ye needna worry, though—I’ve made my choice.”
“What on earth do you mean by that?”
I groped beneath the covers, and found his wrist. He was warm; hot again, in fact, and with a pulse that was too fast, too shallow. Still, it was so different from the deathly chill I had felt in him the night before that my first reaction was relief.
He took a couple of deep breaths, then turned his head and opened his eyes to look at me.
“I mean I could have died last night.”
He could, certainly—and yet that wasn’t what he meant. He made it sound like a conscious—
“What do you mean you’ve made your choice? You’ve decided not to die, after all?” I tried to speak lightly, but it wasn’t working very well. I remembered all too well that odd sense of timeless stillness that had surrounded us.
“It was verra strange,” he said. “And yet it wasna strange at all.” He sounded faintly surprised.
“I think,” I said carefully, keeping a thumb on his pulse, “you’d better tell me just what happened.”
He actually smiled at that, though the smile was more in his eyes than his lips. Those were dry, and painfully cracked in the corners. I touched his lips with a finger, wanting to go and fetch some soothing ointment for him, some water, some tea—but I put aside the impulse, steeling myself to stay and hear.
“I dinna really know, Sassenach—or rather, I do, but I canna think quite how to say it.” He still looked tired, but his eyes stayed open. They lingered on my face, a vivid blue in the morning light, with an expression almost of curiosity, as though he hadn’t seen me before.
“You are so beautiful,” he said, softly. “So verra beautiful, mo chridhe.”
My hands were covered with fading blue blotches and overlooked smears of buffalo blood, I could feel my hair clinging in unwashed tangles to my neck, and I could smell everything from the stale-urine odor of dye to the reek of fear-sweat on my body. And yet whatever he saw lit his face as though he were looking at the full moon on a summer night, pure and lovely.
His eyes stayed fixed on my face as he talked, absorbed, moving slightly as they seemed to trace my features.
“I felt verra badly indeed when Arch and Roger Mac brought me up,” he said. “Terribly sick, and my leg and my head both throbbing with each heartbeat, so much that I began to dread the next. And so I would listen to the spaces between. Ye wouldna think it,” he said, sounded vaguely surprised, “but there is a great deal of time between the beats of a heart.”
He had, he said, begun to hope, in those spaces, that the next beat would not come. And slowly, he realized that his heart was indeed slowing—and that the pain was growing remote, something separate from himself.
His skin had grown colder, the fever fading from both body and mind, leaving