“You’d best take care of yours, then,” I observed, handing him a wooden cup of hot, mint-scented water. I’d got a fire started, under a sort of junior lean-to made of canvas—our canvas, not the canvas from the wagon—and a handy bush, but a fitful wind kept springing up, shaking the canvas and blowing wet off the trees, then passing on, only to return again in a few minutes.

“Do you want a drop of whisky in that?”

He considered for a moment, but then shook his head.

“Nay, keep it. We may need it more, later.”

I sat down beside him and sipped my own cup, slowly, warming both my hands and my insides. We hadn’t any food to cook, and precious little to eat: corn dodgers and a bag of apples Roger had coaxed from a farmstead we’d passed. Jamie had made the rounds of his men, making sure they’d got a few scraps of whatever food was available and had places to sleep. Now he leaned back against the trunk of a large pine beside me, took off his hat, and shook the water off it.

“Will I tell ye something, Sassenach?” Jamie said, after a long silence. He leaned back to look up at the crescent moon, briefly visible through the shredding clouds, and set his hand on my knee. It was his right hand, and I could see the thin line of the scar where I had removed his ring finger, white against the cold-mottled darkness of his skin, the four remaining fingers cramped with grasping reins all day.

“You shall,” I said, taking the hand and beginning to massage it. He didn’t seem worried or upset, so it probably wasn’t bad news.

“I was sitting on the porch, just afore we left, and I had wee Davy in my arms, him sucking on my thumb, and Mandy came up the steps covered in mud, to show me a bone she’d found by the lake and ask who’d owned it. I took it, looked at it, and told her it was from the backbone of a beaver, and she looked at me and asked did I hear animals.”

I started to straighten and stretch his fingers, and he settled his back more firmly against the tree and made a small sound of mingled pain and pleasure in the back of his throat.

“Hear them … how?” It had rained on and off all day but had stopped in the evening, and while I was damp all the way to my underthings, I’d established enough equilibrium of body temperature not to be shivering, and it was tranquil here, away from the large campfires.

“Ken she and Jem can tell where each other are, without seeing each other?”