“Could ye save him if he was?” One hand was idly combing through the damp reddish-blond bush of his pubic hair, in case I’d missed his point, which I hadn’t.

“Probably not, unless he was choking on the posset.”

“Well, he’ll ha’ finished the posset long before ye reach the point of no return here …”

He’d told me long ago that fighting gave one—a male one, I assumed—a terrible cockstand, assuming you weren’t too badly wounded. I supposed this desire for friction should be reassuring.

I sat down beside him and took a thoughtful grasp of the point in question. It was also cold, blanched, and shrunken, but seemed to be thawing rapidly in my hand.

“It would help me think,” he suggested.

“I don’t believe men think at all in such circumstances,” I said, but began to apply a very tentative sort of friction. His body hair had dried and begun to rise in its usual exuberant fuzz.

“Of course we think,” he said, closing his eyes again. An expectant look was beginning to bloom on his face; I’d definitely got his circulation restarted.

“About what, exactly …?” I lay down beside him and nuzzled his shoulder, not letting go. A large, cold hand rose up the back of my thigh, pushed under petticoat and shift, and grasped my bottom, with intent. I gasped, but didn’t—quite—shriek.

“That,” he said, with satisfaction. “Would ye maybe like to be on top, Sassenach? Or maybe bent over a pillow—for the view?”

I WASN’T SURE whether the adrenaline of battle just didn’t diffuse immediately, the recent nearness of death inducing a strong need to reproduce— or whether the desire for sex merely expressed a need to reassure oneself that one was still alive and in reasonable working order. Regardless, I had to admit that it had a settling effect.

I shook and patted myself back into some sort of order, looked at my reflection in the glass, then shook my head, and wound my hair up into a makeshift bun, precariously fastened by a couple of quills stolen from Jamie’s desk as I passed the study. I could hear voices in the kitchen, and one of them was Ian’s, which lifted my heart.

He and Tòtis were sitting at the table, eating bread and honey, conversing with Fanny and Agnes in a mélange of languages: I recognized English, Gaelic, and what I assumed to be Mohawk, plus a few words of French and a certain amount of sign language regarding food.

“So there you are!” I said, not quite accusingly.

“Here we are,” Ian agreed, amiably. “I hear ye’ve a visitor, Auntie.”

“We’ve had more than one,” I replied, and sat down, suddenly aware that it had been many hours since I’d eaten anything. “Did the girls tell you?”

“They’ve told me about the black soldiers,” he said, smiling at the girls. “And the man whose leg ye’ve sawed off? But I daresay ye ken a bit more about what’s happened, Auntie?”