A Breath of Snow and Ashes (45 page)

He took deep breaths, slowing to the rhythm of Jem’s breathing, calming himself. It seemed important not to weep, even though there was no one to see or care.

Jamie had looked at him, as they moved from Brown’s pallet, the question clear in his eyes.

“Ye dinna think I mind only for myself, I hope?” he had said, low-voiced. His eyes had turned toward the gap in the brush where Claire had gone, half-squinting as though he could not bear to look, but couldn’t keep his eyes away.

“For her,” he said, so low that Roger scarcely heard. “Would she rather . . . have the doubt, d’ye think? If it came to that.”

Roger took a deep breath of his son’s hair, and hoped to God he’d said the right thing, there among the trees.

“I don’t know,” he’d said. “But for you—if there’s room for doubt—I say, take it.”

If Jamie were disposed to follow that advice, Bree should be home soon.

“I’M FINE,” I said firmly. “Perfectly fine.”

Bree narrowed her eyes at me.

“Sure you are,” she said. “You look like you’ve been run over by a locomotive.
Two
locomotives.”

“Yes,” I said, and touched my split lip gingerly. “Well. Yes. Other than that, though . . .”

“Are you hungry? Sit down, Mama, I’ll make you some tea, then maybe a little supper.”

I wasn’t hungry, didn’t want tea, and particularly didn’t want to sit down—not after a long day on horseback. Brianna was already taking down the teapot from its shelf above the sideboard, though, and I couldn’t find the proper words to stop her. All of a sudden, I seemed to have no words at all. I turned toward Jamie, helpless.

He somehow divined my feeling, though he couldn’t have read much of anything on my face, given its current state. He stepped forward, though, and took the teapot from her, murmuring something too low for me to catch. She frowned at him, glanced at me, then back, still frowning. Then her face changed a little, and she came toward me, looking searchingly into my face.

“A bath?” she asked quietly. “Shampoo?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, and my shoulders sagged in grateful relief. “Please.”

I did sit down then, after all, and let her sponge my hands and feet, and wash my hair in a basin of warm water drawn from the cauldron in the hearth. She did it quietly, humming under her breath, and I began to relax under the soothing scrub of her long, strong fingers.

I’d slept—from sheer exhaustion—part of the way, leaning on Jamie’s chest. There’s no way of achieving real rest on horseback, though, and I found myself now close to nodding off, noticing only in a dreamy, detached sort of way that the water in the basin had turned a grubby, cloudy red, full of grit and leaf fragments.

I’d changed to a clean shift; the feel of the worn linen on my skin was sheer luxury, cool and smooth.

Bree was humming softly, under her breath. What was it . . . “Mr. Tambourine Man,” I thought. One of those sweetly silly songs of the sixt—

1968.

I gasped, and Bree’s hands gripped my head, steadying me.

“Mama? Are you all right? Did I touch something—”

“No! No, I’m fine,” I said, looking down into the swirls of dirt and blood. I took a deep breath, heart pounding. “Perfectly fine. Just—began to doze off, that’s all.”

She snorted, but took her hands away and went to fetch a pitcher of water for rinsing, leaving me gripping the edge of the table and trying not to shudder.

You don’t act afraid of men. You oughta act more afraid.
That particularly ironic echo came to me clearly, along with the outline of the young man’s head, leonine hair seen silhouetted by the firelight. I couldn’t recall his face clearly—but surely I would have noticed that hair?

Jamie had taken my arm, afterward, and led me out from under my sheltering tree, into the clearing. The fire had been scattered during the fight; there were blackened rocks and patches of singed and flattened grass here and there—among the bodies. He had led me slowly from one to another. At the last, he had paused, and said quietly, “Ye see that they are dead?”

I did, and knew why he had shown me—so I need not fear their return, or their vengeance. But I had not thought to count them. Or to look closely at their faces. Even had I been sure how many there were . . . another shiver struck me, and Bree wrapped a warm towel around my shoulders, murmuring words I didn’t hear for the questions clamoring in my head.

Was Donner among the dead? Or had he heeded me, when I’d told him that if he were wise, he’d run? He hadn’t struck me as a wise young man.

He
had
struck me as a coward, though.

Warm water sluiced around my ears, drowning out the sound of Jamie’s and Brianna’s voices overhead; I caught only a word or two, but when I sat back up, with water dripping down my neck, clutching a towel to my hair, Bree was reluctantly moving toward her cloak, hung on the peg by the door.

“Are you
sure
you’re all right, Mama?” The worried frown was back between her brows, but this time I could muster a few words of reassurance.

“Thank you, darling; that was wonderful,” I said, with complete sincerity. “All I want just now is sleep,” I added with somewhat less.

I was still terribly tired, but now completely wakeful. What I did want was . . . well, I didn’t know quite what I
did
want, but a general absence of solicitous company was on the list. Besides, I’d caught a glimpse of Roger earlier, bloodstained, white, and swaying with weariness; I wasn’t the only victim of the recent unpleasantness.

“Go home, lass,” Jamie said softly. He swung the cloak from its peg and over her shoulders, patting her gently. “Feed your man. Take him to bed, and say a prayer for him. I’ll mind your mother, aye?”

Bree’s gaze swung between us, blue and troubled, but I put on what I hoped was a reassuring expression—it hurt to do it, rather—and after a moment’s hesitation, she hugged me tight, kissed my forehead very gently, and left.

Jamie shut the door and stood with his back against it, hands behind him. I was used to the impassive facade he normally used to shield his thoughts when troubled or angry; he wasn’t using it, and the expression on his face troubled
me
no end.

“You mustn’t worry about me,” I said, as reassuringly as I could. “I’m not traumatized, or anything of that sort.”

“I mustn’t?” he asked guardedly. “Well . . . perhaps I wouldna, if I kent what ye meant by it.”

“Oh.” I blotted my damp face gingerly, and patted at my neck with the towel. “Well. It means . . . very much injured—or dreadfully shocked. It’s Greek, I think—the root word, I mean, ‘trauma.’”

“Oh, aye? And you’re not . . . shocked. Ye say.”

His eyes narrowed, as he examined me with the sort of critical attention usually employed when contemplating the purchase of expensive bloodstock.

“I’m fine,” I said, backing away a little. “Just—I’m all right. Only a bit . . . shaken.”

He took a step toward me, and I backed up abruptly, aware belatedly that I was clutching the towel to my bosom as though it were a shield. I forced myself to lower it, and felt blood prickle unpleasantly in patches over face and neck.

He stood very still, regarding me with that same narrow look. Then his gaze dropped to the floor between us. He stood as though deep in thought, and then his big hands flexed. Once, twice. Very slowly. And I heard—heard clearly—the sound of Arvin Hodgepile’s vertebrae parting one from another.

Jamie’s head jerked up, startled, and I realized that I was standing on the other side of the chair from him, the towel wadded and pressed against my mouth. My elbows moved like rusty hinges, stiff and slow, but I got the towel down. My lips were nearly as stiff, but I spoke, too.

“I am a little shaken, yes,” I said very clearly. “I’ll be all right. Don’t worry. I don’t want you to worry.”

The troubled scrutiny in his eyes wavered suddenly, like the glass of a window struck by a stone, in the split second before it shatters, and he shut his eyes. He swallowed once, and opened them again.

“Claire,” he said very softly, and the smashed and splintered fragments showed clear, sharp and jagged in his eyes. “I have
been
raped. And ye say I must not worry for ye?”

“Oh, God damn it!” I flung the towel on the floor, and immediately wished I had it back again. I felt naked, standing in my shift, and hated the crawling of my skin with a sudden passion that made me slap my thigh to kill it.

“Damn, damn, damn it! I
don’t
want you to have to think of that again. I don’t!” And yet I had known from the first that this would happen.

I took hold of the chairback with both hands and held tight, and tried to force my own gaze into his, wanting so badly to throw myself upon those glittering shards, to shield him from them.

“Look,” I said, steadying my voice. “I don’t want—I don’t want to make you recall things better left forgotten.”

The corner of his mouth actually twitched at that.

“God,” he said, in something like wonder. “Ye think I’d forgot any of it?”

“Maybe not,” I said, surrendering. I looked at him through swimming eyes. “But—oh, Jamie, I so wanted you to forget!”

He put out a hand, very delicately, and touched the tip of his index finger to the tip of mine, where I clutched the chair.

“Dinna mind it,” he said softly, and withdrew the finger. “It’s no matter now. Will ye rest a bit, Sassenach? Or eat, maybe?”

“No. I don’t want . . . no.” In fact, I couldn’t decide
what
I wanted to do. I didn’t want to do anything at all. Other than unzip my skin, climb out, and run—and that didn’t seem feasible. I took a few deep breaths, hoping to settle myself and go back to that nice sense of utter exhaustion.

Should I ask him about Donner? But what was there to ask?
“Did you happen to kill a man with long, tangled hair?”
They’d all looked like that, to some extent. Donner had been—or possibly still was—an Indian, but no one would have noticed that in the dark, in the heat of fighting.

“How—how is Roger?” I asked, for lack of anything better to say. “And Ian? Fergus?”

He looked a little startled, as though he had forgotten their existence.

“Them? The lads are well enough. No one took any hurt in the fight. We had luck.”

He hesitated, then took a careful step toward me, watching my face. I didn’t scream or bolt, and he took another, coming close enough that I could feel the warmth of his body. Not startled this time, and chilly in my damp shift, I relaxed a little, swaying toward him, and saw the tension in his own shoulders let go slightly, seeing it.

He touched my face, very gently. The blood throbbed just below the surface, tender, and I had to brace myself not to flinch away from his touch. He saw it, and drew back his hand a little, so that it hovered just above my skin—I could feel the heat of his palm.

“Will it heal?” he asked, fingertips moving over the split in my left brow, then down the minefield of my cheek to the scrape on my jaw where Harley Boble’s boot had just missed making a solid connection that would have broken my neck.

“Of course it will. You know that; you’ve seen worse on battlefields.” I would have smiled in reassurance, but didn’t want to open the deep split in my lip again, and so made a sort of pouting goldfish mouth, which took him by surprise and made
him
smile.

“Aye, I know.” He ducked his head a little, shy. “It’s only . . .” His hand still hovered near my face, an expression of troubled anxiety on his own. “Oh, God,
mo nighean donn,
” he said softly. “Oh, Christ, your lovely face.”

“Can you not bear to look at it?” I asked, turning my own eyes away and feeling a sharp little pang at the thought, but trying to convince myself that it didn’t matter. It
would
heal, after all.

His fingers touched my chin, gently but firmly, and drew it up, so that I faced him again. His mouth tightened a little as his gaze moved slowly over my battered face, taking inventory. His eyes were soft and dark in the candlelight, the corners tight with pain.

“No,” he said quietly, “I cannot bear it. The sight of ye tears my heart. And it fills me with such rage I think I must kill someone or burst. But by the God who made ye, Sassenach, I’ll not lie with ye and be unable to look ye in the face.”

“Lie with me?” I said blankly. “What . . . you mean
now
?”

His hand dropped from my chin, but he looked steadily at me, not blinking.

“Well . . . aye. I do.”

Had my jaw not been so swollen, my mouth would have dropped open in pure astonishment.

“Ah . . . why?”

“Why?” he repeated. He dropped his gaze then, and made the odd shrugging motion that he made when embarrassed or discomposed. “I—well—it seems . . . necessary.”

I had a thoroughly unsuitable urge to laugh.

“Necessary? Do you think it’s like being thrown by a horse? I ought to get straight back on?”

His head jerked up and he shot me an angry glance.

“No,” he said, between clenched teeth. He swallowed hard and visibly, obviously reining in strong feelings. “Are ye—are ye badly damaged, then?”