The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [679]
A stipple of brilliant pinpoints glinted on the table—a shower of the sharp needles had been thrust upward through the inch-thick wood. I heard Ian exclaim sharply, and bend to pull a tiny shaft from the flesh of his calf. Jemmy began to cry. Outside, Rollo the dog was barking furiously.
The opal had exploded.
IT WAS STILL broad daylight; the candleflame was nearly invisible, no more than a waver of heat in the late afternoon light from the window. Jamie blew out the taper he had used to light it, and sat down behind his desk.
“Ye didna sense anything odd about yon stone when ye gave it to the lad, Sassenach?”
“No.” I still felt shaken by the explosion, the echoes of that eerie noise still chiming in my inner ear. “It felt warm—but everything in the room is warm. And it certainly wasn’t making that noise.”
“Noise?” He looked at me queerly. “When it went bang, d’ye mean?”
Now it was my turn to look askance.
“No—before that. Didn’t you hear it?” He shook his head, a small frown between his brows, and I glanced round at the others. Bree and Roger nodded—both of them looked pale and ill—but Ian shook his head, looking interested, but puzzled.
“I didna hear a thing,” he said. “What did it sound like?”
Brianna opened her mouth to answer, but Jamie raised a hand to stop her.
“A moment, a nighean. Jem, a ruradh—did ye hear a noise before the bang?”
Jemmy had settled down from his fright, but was still crouching in his mother’s lap, thumb in his mouth. He looked at his grandfather out of wide blue eyes that had already begun to show a definite slant, and slowly nodded, not removing the thumb.
“And the stone Grannie gave ye—it was hot?”
Jemmy cast a glare of intense accusation in my direction and nodded again. I felt a small surge of guilt—followed by a much larger one, when I thought of what might have happened, had Bree not snatched him up at once.
We had picked most of the splinters out of the woodwork; they lay on the desk in a small heap of brittle fire. One had sliced a tiny flap of skin from my knuckle; I put it in my mouth, tasting silver blood.
“My God, those things are sharp as broken glass.”
“They are broken glass.” Brianna clutched Jem a little closer.
“Glass? You mean it wasn’t a real opal?” Roger raised his brows, leaning forward to pick up one of the needlelike shards.
“Sure it is—but opals are glass. Really hard volcanic glass. Gemstones are gemstones because they have a crystalline structure that makes them pretty; opals just have a really brittle structure, compared to most.” The color was beginning to come back into Brianna’s face, though she kept her arms wrapped tightly round her son.
“I knew you could break one if you hit with a hammer or something, but I never heard of one doing that.” She nodded at the pile of glimmering fragments.
Jamie picked a large shard out of the pile with finger and thumb and held it out to me.
“Put it in your hand, Sassenach. Does it feel warm to you?”
I accepted the jagged piece of stone gingerly. It was thin, nearly weightless, and translucent, sparkling with vivid blues and oranges.
“Yes,” I said, tilting my palm cautiously to and fro. “Not remarkably hot—just about skin temperature.”
“It felt cool to me,” Jamie said. “Give it to Ian.”
I transferred the bit of opal to Ian, who put it in the palm of his hand and stroked it cautiously with a fingertip, as though it were some small animal that might bite him if annoyed.
“It feels cool,” he reported. “Like a bit of glass, like Cousin Brianna says.”
A bit more experimentation established that the stone felt warm—though not strikingly so—to Brianna, Roger, and me—but not to Jamie or Ian. By this time, the wax had melted in the top of the big clock candle, allowing Jamie to extract the gemstones hidden there. He fished them out, rubbed the last of the hot wax off on his handkerchief,