Jamie was still holding the chisel in his hand; eyes fixed on his daughter’s disappearing back, he raised it and kissed it, as he’d once kissed the haft of his dirk before me, and I knew this, too, was a sacred promise.

He put the chisel away in his sporran and took me in his arms, my back to him, so we could both watch them out of sight. He rested his chin on top of my head.

“What are ye thinking, Sassenach?” he said softly. “I saw your eyes; there are clouds in them.”

I settled against him, feeling his warmth a bulwark at my back.

“The children,” I said, hesitant. “They—I mean, it’s wonderful that they’re here. To think we’d never see them again, and suddenly …” I swallowed, overcome by the dizzying joy of finding myself—finding us—once again and so unexpectedly part of that remarkable thing, a family. “To be able to see Jem and Mandy grow up … to have Bree and Roger again …”

“Aye,” he said, a smile in his voice. “But?”

It took a moment, both to gather my thoughts and to put them into words.

“Roger said that something bad had happened, in their own time. And you know it must have been something truly terrible.”

“Aye,” he said, his voice hardening a little. “Brianna said the same. But ken, a nighean, they’ve lived in this time before. They do know, I mean—what it’s like, what it will be like.”

The ongoing war, he meant, and I squeezed his hands, clasped about my middle.

“I don’t think they do,” I said softly, looking down across the broad cove. They had vanished into the darkness. “Nobody knows who hasn’t been there.” To war.

“Aye,” he said, and held me, silent, his hand resting on my side, over the scar of the wound made by a musket ball at Monmouth.

“Aye,” he said again after a long moment. “I ken what ye’re saying, Sassenach. I thought my heart would burst when I saw Brianna and kent it was really her, and the bairns … but for all the joy of it … see, I missed them cruelly, but I could take comfort in thinking they were safe. Now—”

He stopped and I felt his heart beating against me, slow and steady. He took a deep breath, and the fire popped suddenly, a pocket of pitch exploding in sparks that disappeared into the night. A small reminder of the war that was rising, slowly, all around us.

“I look at them,” he said, “and my heart is suddenly filled with …”

“Terror,” I whispered, holding tight to him. “Sheer terror.”

“Aye,” he said. “That.”

WE STOOD FOR a bit, watching the darkness below, letting joy return. The window of the Higgins cabin still glowed softly on the far side of the clearing below.