The result was another, louder hmph! and his da laughed again, out loud this time.

“He turned round and pissed on Enoch Grant and then jumped down his throat and gave him laldy wi’ the hilt of his dirk.”

“Mm,” said Murtagh, clearly relishing the memory.

The hapless Grant had escaped worse injury, though, because just then the officers started shouting and the enemy—visible on the field at Sheriffmuir these last two hours—began to move.

“And a few minutes later, we popped out o’ the bracken like a swarm o’ brobhadan and the archers fired their arrows and those of us wi’ swords and targes ran down upon the Sassunaich,” Da said to Jamie.

“Aye, much good havin’ the high ground did us,” Murtagh said, glowering slightly. “I near as breakfast got an arrow in the back from our own men. It went through the sleeve o’ my shirt!”

“Well, ye did piss on Enoch Grant,” Da said reasonably. “What would ye expect him to do?”

Jamie smiled to himself, hearing the two of them talking, clear as day, and feeling in his bones the memory of the comfort of sleep coming for him, wrapped in the warmth of the firelit room at Lallybroch.

He was warm now, sweating from the climb, and he wasn’t sleepy. It was a small mountain, not even half the height of a Scottish beinn, but the sides were steep and thickly forested. He was following a cattle track across the face of the mountain—the local people grazed their stock sometimes on the top of the mountain, because there was a good meadow—but oak and maple saplings and a scurf of low bushes were creeping over it, and the track had vanished altogether by the time he made it to the summit through a screen of pines.

He stood at the edge of a long meadow, growing in a sort of saddle-shaped depression. It was late in the afternoon by now, and several deer were grazing at the far end, close to the shelter of the trees. One or two lifted their heads and looked at him, but he was still, and they went back to their business among the growing shadows.

There were rocky outcroppings near the edges of the plateau. Not large ones, but for a single rifleman, a decent vantage point—if you could make it that far and not be picked off struggling up the mountainside.

Aye, he could see well enough what Patrick Ferguson would think. With plenty of ammunition and a well-armed band of militia, it would be a simple matter to hunker down near the edges and fire downhill at the attackers.