The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [133]
Those bloody frogs were shrieking their passion, raw-throated and triumphant. Hundreds of them. The racket was deafening.
Distracted by the vision of amphibians in their thousands locked in slime-wrapped sexual congress amid the dark waters, he caught his foot in a root and fell heavily.
Fraser, close beside, felt him go and grabbed him, catching him round the middle and jerking him upright again.
“Are ye all right?” he asked, low-voiced, his breath warm on Grey’s cheek.
“Croakle dum-ho,” he said, breathless and dazed. Fraser’s hands were still tight on his arms, steadying him.
“What?”
“Great Lord Frog to Lady Mouse. It’s a song. I’ll sing it to you later.”
Fraser made a sound in his throat that might have been either derision or amusement—maybe both—and let go Grey’s arms. He swayed, almost staggering, and put out a hand to steady himself. He touched Fraser’s chest, warm and solid through his clothes, swallowed hard, and took his hand away.
“This seems the sort of night on which one might meet the Wild Hunt itself,” Grey said, starting to walk again. His skin prickled and jumped, and he would not in fact have been surprised in the slightest to see the Queen of Faerie come riding out of the wood, fair and spectral as the sailing moon, terrible in her hunting, her pack of attendants all young men, lithe and sharp-toothed, hungry as wolves. “What are they hunting, do you suppose?”
“Men,” Fraser said without hesitation. “Souls. I was thinking the same myself. Though ye see them more on a storm-tossed night.”
“Have you actually seen them?” He believed for an instant that it was quite possible, and put the question in all seriousness. Rather to Grey’s surprise, Fraser took it the same way.
“No,” he said, but in a tone verging on doubt. “At least—that is—”
“Tell me.”
They walked in silence for a few moments, but he could feel Fraser gathering his thoughts and kept silent himself, waiting, feeling the shifting rhythms of the bigger man’s body as he moved, soft-footed, on the uneven ground.
“Years back,” Fraser said at last. “It was after Culloden. I lived on my own land then, but hidden. In a wee cavern in the rocks. I’d come out at night, though, to hunt. And sometimes I’d have need to go far afield, if the hunting was poor, and often it was.”
They had emerged momentarily into a spot where the trees fell away, and the light of the moon shone bright enough for Grey to see Fraser tilt his head back, as though considering the orb.
“It wasna a night like this, really,” he said. “Nay moon at all, and the wind going through your bones and moaning like a thousand lost souls in your ears. But it—it was wild, ye might say. Wild in the way this is,” he added, dropping his voice a little and gesturing briefly at the dark countryside surrounding them. “A night when ye might expect to meet wi’ things, should ye venture out.”
He spoke quite matter-of-factly, as though it were entirely commonplace to meet with “things.” On a night like this, Grey could believe that completely and wondered suddenly how many nights the other had spent roaming alone beneath blazing stars or a clouded vault, with no touch on his skin save the wind’s rough caress.
“I’d run down a deer and killed it,” Fraser said, also as though this was commonplace. “And I’d sat down by the carcass to catch my breath before the gralloching—that’s the cutting out o’ the bowels, ken. I’d slit the throat, of course, to bleed the meat, but I hadna yet said the prayer for it—I wondered later if it was maybe that that called them.”
Grey wondered whether “that” referred to the hot scent of the pumping blood or the lack of a sanctifying word, but didn’t want to risk stopping the story by asking.
“Them?” he said after a moment, encouraging.
Fraser’s shoulders moved in a shrug. “Perhaps,” he said. “Only all of a sudden, I felt afraid. Nay—worse than afraid. A terrible fear came upon me, and then I heard it. Then I heard it,” he repeated,