“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.” What if—all right, I was insane, but too late for that to make a difference.

“What if he—if I, we—what if Master Raymond is—was—somehow related to me?”

Jamie said nothing, but I felt his hand move, under my hair. His middle finger folded down and the outer ones stood up straight, making the sign of the horns, against evil.

“And what if he’s not?” he said dryly. He rolled me off him and turned toward me so we were face-to-face. The darkness was slowly fading and I could see his face, drawn with tiredness, touched with sorrow and tenderness, but still determined.

“Even if everything ye’ve made yourself think was somehow true—and it’s not, Sassenach; ye ken it’s not—but if it were somehow true, it wouldna make any difference. The woman in Frances’s locket is dead now, and so is our Faith.”

His words touched the raw place in my heart, and I nodded, tears welling.

“I know,” I whispered.

“I know, too,” he whispered, and held me while I wept.

25

Voulez-vous Coucher Avec Moi

THE WEATHER WAS STILL fine in the daytime, but the smoke shed stood in the shade of a rocky cliff. No fire had been lit in here for over a month, and the air smelled of bitter ash and the tang of old blood.

“How much do you think this thing weighs?” Brianna put both hands on the shoulder of the enormous black-and-white hog lying on the crude table by the back wall and leaned her own weight experimentally against it. The shoulder moved slightly—rigor had long since passed—but the hog itself didn’t budge an inch.

“At a guess, it originally weighed somewhat more than your father. Maybe four hundred pounds on the hoof?” Jamie had bled and gralloched the hog when he killed it; that had probably lightened his load by a hundred pounds or so, but it was still a lot of meat. A pleasant thought for the winter’s food, but a daunting prospect at the moment.

I unrolled the pocketed cloth in which I kept my larger surgical tools; this was no job for an ordinary kitchen knife.

“What do you think about the intestines?” I asked. “Usable, do you think?”

She wrinkled her nose, considering. Jamie hadn’t been able to carry much beyond the carcass itself—and in fact had dragged that—but had thoughtfully salvaged twenty or thirty pounds of intestine. He’d roughly stripped the contents, but two days in a canvas pack hadn’t improved the condition of the uncleaned entrails, not savory to start with. I’d looked at them dubiously, but put them to soak overnight in a tub of salt water, on the off chance that the tissue hadn’t broken down too far to prevent their use as sausage casing.

“I don’t know, Mama,” Bree said reluctantly. “I think they’re pretty far gone. But we might save some of it.”