The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [135]
“Ye dinna want to look upon them,” he said. “If ye do, they can call ye to them. Cast their glamour upon you. And then ye’re lost.”
“Do they kill people?”
Fraser shook his head.
“They take people,” he corrected. “Lure them. Take them back into the rocks, down to their ain world. Sometimes”—he cleared his throat—“sometimes, the stolen ones come back. But they come back two hundred years later. And all—all they knew and loved—are dead.”
“How terrible,” John said quietly. He could hear Fraser’s breathing, heavy, like a man struggling against tears, and wondered why this aspect of the tale should move him so.
Fraser cleared his throat again, explosively.
“Aye, well,” he said, voice steady once more. “So I spent the rest o’ the night in the burn and nearly froze to death. If it hadna been near dawn when I went in, I shouldna have come out again. I could barely move when I did, and had to wait for the sun to rise high enough to warm me, before I could make my way back to where I’d left my deer.”
“Was it still there?” Grey asked with interest. “As you’d left it?”
“Most of it was. Something—someone,” he corrected himself, “had gralloched it neat as a tailor’s seam and taken away the head and the entrails and one of the haunches.”
“The huntsman’s share,” Grey murmured under his breath, but Fraser heard him.
“Aye.”
“And were there tracks around it? Other than your own, I mean.”
“There were not,” Fraser said, the words clipped and precise. And he would know, Grey thought. Anyone who could hunt a deer like that could certainly discern the traces. Despite Grey’s attempt at logic, a brief shiver went over him, visualizing the headless carcass, clean and butchered, the blood-soaked ground left trackless in the mist of dawn, save for the deep-gouged prints of the fleeing deer and the man who had felled it.
“Did you—take the rest?”
Fraser raised one shoulder and let it fall.
“I couldna leave it,” he said simply. “I had a family to feed.”
They walked on then in silence, each alone with his thoughts.
THE MOON HAD BEGUN to sink before they reached Glastuig, and exertion had calmed Grey’s rush of spirits somewhat. These revived abruptly, though, when they found the gate shut but not locked and, passing through, saw a glimmer of light on the distant lawn. It was coming from one of the windows on the right.
“Do you know which room that is?” he murmured to Jamie, nodding toward the lighted window.
“Aye, it’s the library,” Fraser replied, equally low-voiced. “What do ye want to do?”
Grey took a deep breath, considering. Then touched Jamie’s elbow, inclining his head toward the house.
“We’ll go in. Come with me.”
They approached the house cautiously, skirting the lawn and keeping to the shrubberies, but there was no sign of any servants or watchmen being on the premises. At one point, Fraser lifted his head and sniffed the air, taking two or three deep breaths before gesturing toward an outbuilding and whispering, “The stable is that way. The horses are gone.”
Jamie’s cautious researches had indicated as much; word in the village was that all the servants had left, unwilling to remain in a house where murder had been done. The livestock would have been taken away to the village, too, Grey supposed.
Could this nocturnal visitor be the executor? Grey could think of no reason why a legitimate executor of the estate would need to make a surreptitious visit—but then, perhaps the man had come in daylight, as was proper, but then lingered at his work? He glanced up at the moon; it was past midnight. Surely that argued more dedication to duty than he was accustomed to find among lawyers. Perhaps the man was just staying in the house and, finding himself wakeful, had come down in search of a book, Grey thought with a mental shrug. Occam’s razor worked more often than not.
They were within pistol shot of the house now. Grey glanced to and fro, and then, feeling self-consciously dramatic, stepped out onto the lawn. It was lit like a stage, and his shadow puddled dark at his feet,