“So, that decision was easy enough,” Roger said, with a grimace indicating that “easy” was a relative term. “We’d have to make the voyage from Scotland to America, regardless. It was partly a matter of whether the passage through the stones might be better from the stone circle near Inverness, or the one on Ocracoke.”

“People died on Ocracoke, coming through,” Bree said quietly, putting her hand on Roger’s. “Wendigo Donner told you so, didn’t he, Mama?”

“He did.” My own throat felt tight, as much from the memories Donner’s name conjured up as from other associations with the word “Ocracoke,” none of them good. Bree was very pale, and I thought she had her own memories of the place; she had been held prisoner there by Stephen Bonnet.

“And even those that didn’t die had—er—anomalies,” Roger said, and looked at me. “Otter-Tooth—Robert Springer. He meant for his entire group to go back to … when? The middle of the sixteenth century, earlier? A long way, anyway. He made it farther back than any of the rest, but still not as far as he meant to go. The point, though, is that the travel wasn’t the same for the members of the group.”

“We thought that might be because they went through one at a time, walking a pattern and chanting,” Bree put in. “We”—she gestured briefly at the sleeping children—“all came together, holding on to one another. That might have made a difference.”

“And we did come through Ocracoke together before,” Roger added. “If we did it once, we could maybe do it again.”

“So it came down to a question of ships, no?” Jamie had been sitting, intent, fingers tapping lightly against his thigh, but now straightened up. “Would there be a great difference, did ye think? Between a ship built in 1739 and one built in 1775 or so?”

“Yes,” Brianna said, with some emphasis. “Ships got bigger and faster—but weather is weather, and if you run into an iceberg or a hurricane”—she nodded at me—“it doesn’t matter that much whether you’re in a rowboat or the Titanic.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Jamie agreed, and I laughed. I’d told him—briefly—about the Titanic.

“From your point of view, a floating plank on the trout pond would be just as bad as the Queen Mary—that’s a really big ship.”

“Aye, well, I expect the food would be better on the latter,” he said, unperturbed by my teasing. “And as long as I had your wee stabbers in my face, I could choose on that basis. So, did ye ken the weather changed a great deal in forty years?” he asked, returning the conversation to Bree, who shook her head.

“Not the storms and wind-type weather—I mean, it might have, but we’d have no way of knowing that. What we did know, though, was the political weather.”