The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [574]
“She is an Old One,” he said. “They will kill her, if they know.” Then his eyes had closed again, and he had not spoken again until the others had found them at daylight.
Viewed now in the clear light of an autumn morning, safely removed from the whining wind and dancing flames of that lost night on the mountain, Roger was reasonably sure that Fraser had only been wandering in the mists of his fever, concern for his wife muddled by phantoms that sprang from the poison in his blood. Still, Roger couldn’t help but take notice.
“She is an Old One.” Fraser had been speaking in English, which was too bad. Had it been Gaelic, his meaning would have been clearer. Had he said “She is ban-sidhe,” Roger would have known whether Jamie truly thought his wife was one of the faery-folk, or only a thoroughly human wisewoman.
Surely he couldn’t . . . but he might. Even in Roger’s own time, the belief in “the others” ran strongly, if less widely admitted, in the blood of the Highlands. Now? Fraser believed quite openly in ghosts—to say nothing of saints and angels. To Roger’s cynical Presbyterian mind, there wasn’t a great deal of difference between lighting candles to St. Genevieve and putting out a pan of milk for the faeries.
On the other hand, he was uneasily aware that he would himself never have disturbed milk meant for the Others, nor touched a charm hung over cow-byre or door lintel—and not only from respect for the person who had placed it there.
The work had warmed him thoroughly; his shirt was beginning to stick to his shoulders, and sweat trickled down his neck. He paused for a moment, to drink from his water gourd and tie a rag round his brow as a sweatband.
Fraser might just have a point, he thought. While the notion of himself or Brianna—even of Claire—as being sìdheanach was laughable on the face of it . . . there was more than one face to it, wasn’t there? They were different; not everyone could travel through the stones, let alone did.
And there were others. Geillis Duncan. The unknown traveler she had mentioned to Claire. The gentleman whose severed head Claire had found in the wilderness, silver fillings intact. The thought of that one made the hairs prickle on his forearms, sweat or no.
Jamie had buried the head, with due respect and a brief prayer, on a hill near the house—the first inhabitant of the small, sun-filled clearing intended as the future cemetery of Fraser’s Ridge. At Claire’s insistence, he had marked the small grave with a rough chunk of granite, unlabeled—for what was there to say?—but marbled with veins of green serpentine.
Was Fraser right? Ye should all go back, if the bairn can pass.
And if they didn’t go back . . . then someday they might all lie there in the sunny clearing together: himself, Brianna, Jemmy, each under a chunk of granite. The only difference was that each would bear a name. What on earth would they carve for dates? he wondered suddenly, and wiped sweat from his jaw. Jemmy’s would be no problem, but for the rest of them . . .
There was the rub, of course—or one of them. If the bairn can pass. If Claire’s theory was right, and the ability to pass through the stones was a genetic trait, like eye color or blood-type—then fifty/fifty, if Jemmy were Bonnet’s child; three chances out of four, or perhaps certainty, if he were Roger’s.
He hacked savagely at a clump of grass, not bothering to grasp it, and grain heads flew like shrapnel. Then he remembered the small pink figure underneath his pillow, and breathed deep. And if it worked, if there were to be another child, one that was his for sure, by blood? Odds three out of four—or perhaps another stone, one day, in the family graveyard.
The bag was almost full, and there was no more hay worth the cutting here. Fetching the hatchet, he slung the bag across his shoulder and made his way downhill, to the edge of the highest cornfield.