Now it was her turn to be surprised.

“Ye’ve forgotten?” She frowned at him. “Aye, well … it’s true ye were off your heid wi’ fever for a good ten days when they brought ye home. Ian and I took it in turn to sit with ye—as much to stop the doctor takin’ your leg off as anything else. Ye can thank Ian ye’ve still got that one,” she added, nodding sharply at his left leg. “He sent the doctor away; said he kent well ye’d rather be dead.” Her eyes filled abruptly with tears, and she turned away.

He caught her by the shoulder and felt her bones, fine and light as a kestrel’s under the cloth of her shawl.

“Jenny,” he said softly. “Ian didna want to be dead. Believe me. I did, aye … but not him.”

“No, he did at first,” she said, and swallowed. “But ye wouldna let him, he said—and he wouldna let you, either.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand, roughly. He took hold of it and kissed it, her fingers cold in his hand.

“Ye dinna think ye had anything to do with it?” he asked, rising to his feet and smiling down at her. “For either of us?”

“Hmph,” she said, but she looked modestly pleased.

The goats had moved away a little, brown backs smooth amid the tussocked grass. One of them had a bell; he could hear the small clank! of it as she moved. The yaffles had moved off as well—he caught the flash of scarlet as one flew low across the field and disappeared into the black mouth of the trail.

He let a moment go by, two, and then shifted his weight and made a small menacing noise in the back of his throat.

“Aye, aye,” Jenny said, rolling her eyes at him. “Of course I’ll tell ye. I had to fettle my mind, first, ken?” She rearranged her skirts and settled herself more firmly. “Aye, then—this is the way of it. As ye told it to me, at least.

“Ye said”—her brows drew together with the effort of careful remembrance—“that ye’d fought your way across the field in a fury and when ye stopped because ye had to breathe, you—you were … dismayed … to find ye weren’t dead yet.”

“Aye,” he said softly, and with a deep sense of fear, felt the day well up in him. Cold, it had been bitter cold in the wind and rain, but he’d been ablaze with the fighting; he hadn’t felt it ’til he stopped. “What then? That’s what I dinna ken …”

She drew a deep, audible breath.

“Ye were behind the government lines. There were cannon behind ye—pointing the other way, aye? Toward … our men.”

“Aye. I could see—I could … see them. Lying dead and dying, in windrows.”