IAN MADE HIS way out of the British camp, looking neither to right nor to left. The night was throbbing slowly round him. It was like being trapped inside a huge heart, he thought, feeling the thick walls squeeze him breathless, then draw away to leave him floating and weightless.
Lord John had offered to have an army surgeon tend his wound, but he couldn’t bear to stay. He needed to go, to find Rachel, find Uncle Jamie. Had refused the offer of a horse, as well, unsure that he could stay on it. He’d do better walking, he’d told his lordship.
And he was walking all right, though obliged to admit that he didn’t feel just that well in himself. His arms were still trembling from the shock of the killing blow. It had come up from his bowels and was still echoing through his bones, couldn’t seem to find a way out of his body. Well, it would settle soon enough—this wasn’t the first time, though he hadn’t killed anyone in a long while, and a longer while since he’d done it with that much violence.
He tried to think who the last one had been, but couldn’t. He could hear and see and feel things, but while his senses worked, they weren’t joined up aright with the things he sensed. Troops were still marching past him into the camp. The battle must have ceased now with the darkness; the soldiers were coming home. He could hear the din they made, marching, their tin cups and canteens jangling against their cartridge boxes—but he heard it clanging long after they’d passed, and he couldn’t always tell the light of distant campfires from the glow of fireflies near his feet.
The Scottish overseer. At Saratoga. The man’s face was suddenly there in his memory, and just as suddenly his body remembered the feel of the blow. The violent punch of his knife, hard up under the man’s back ribs, straight into the kidney. The huge, strange flexing he’d felt in his own body as the man’s life surged up and then rushed out.
He wondered for a dazed moment whether butchers felt it—that echo—when they slaughtered a beast. You did, sometimes, when you cut a deer’s throat, but usually not if it was just wringing a chicken’s neck or crushing a weasel’s skull.
“Or maybe ye just get used to it,” he said.
“Maybe ye’d best try not to get used to it. Canna be good for your soul, a bhalaich, bein’ used to that sort of thing.”
“No,” he agreed. “But ye mean when it’s with your hands, aye? It’s no the same wi’ a gun or an arrow, now, is it?”
“Och, no. I did wonder sometimes, does it make a difference to the man ye kill, as well as yourself?”
Ian’s feet blundered into a knee-high growth of thick weed and he realized that he’d stumbled off the road. It was just past the dark of the moon, and the stars still faint overhead.
“Different,” he murmured, steering back into the roadway. “How d’ye mean, different? He’d be dead, either way.”
“Aye, that’s so. I’m thinkin’ it’s maybe worse to feel it’s personal, though. Bein’ shot in battle’s more like bein’ struck by lightning, ken? But ye canna help it bein’ personal when ye do a man to death wi’ your hands.”
“Mmphm.” Ian walked a bit farther in silence, the thoughts in his head circling like leeches swimming in a glass, going this way and that.
“Aye, well,” he said at last—and realized suddenly that he’d spoken aloud for the first time. “It was personal.”
The trembling in his bones had eased with the walking. The huge throbbing of the night had shrunk and come to rest in the arrow wound, the ache of it pulsing to the beat of his own heart.
It made him think of Rachel’s white dove, though, flying serene above the hurt, and his mind steadied. He could see Rachel’s face now, and he could hear crickets chirping. The cannon fire in his ears had stopped and the night grew slowly peaceful. And if his da had more to say on the subject of killing, he chose to keep his silence as they walked toward home together.
JOHN GREY EASED his battered feet into the pan, teeth gritted against the expected sensation, but to his surprise found that it caused him little pain, in spite of the torn skin and ruptured blisters.
“What—that’s not hot water, is it?” he asked, leaning forward to look.
“Sweet oil,” his brother said, his worn face relaxing a little. “And it had better be warm, not hot, or my orderly will be crucified at dawn.”
“I’m sure the man trembles in his boots. Thank you, by the way,” he added, gingerly dabbling. He was sitting on Hal’s cot, his brother perched on the campaign chest, pouring something out of a canteen into one of the scarred pewter cups that had accompanied him for decades.
“You’re welcome,” Hal said, handing him the cup. “What the devil happened to your eye? And is your arm broken? I’ve called for a surgeon, but it may be some time.” He waved a hand, encompassing the camp, the recent battle, and the stream of the returning wounded and sun-stricken.
“I don’t need one. At first I thought my arm was broken, but I’m fairly sure it’s just badly bruised. As for the eye . . . Jamie Fraser.”
“Really?” Hal looked surprised and bent forward to peer at Grey’s eye, now unwrapped from the bandages and—so far as Grey himself could tell—much improved. The constant watering had stopped, the swelling had gone down quite a bit, and he could, with caution, move it. From the look on Hal’s face, though, the redness and bruising had perhaps not quite disappeared.
“Well, first Jamie, and then his wife.” He touched the eye lightly. “He punched me, and then she did something excruciating to fix it and put honey in it.”
“Having been subject to the lady’s notions of medical treatment, I am not even faintly surprised to hear that.” Hal lifted his cup in brief salute; Grey did the same and they drank. It was cider, and a dim recollection of applejack and Colonel Watson Smith floated through Grey’s mind. Both seemed remote, as though they’d happened years ago rather than days.
“Mrs. Fraser doctored you?” Grey grinned at his brother. “What did she do to you?”
“Well . . . saved my life, to be perfectly frank.” It was hard to tell in the lantern light, but Grey thought his brother was blushing slightly.
“Oh. In that case, I’m doubly obliged to her.” He raised the cup again ceremoniously, then drained it. The cider went down gratefully after a hot day with no food. “How the hell did you fall into her clutches?” he asked curiously, extending the cup for more.
“I was looking for you,” Hal said pointedly. “If you’d been where you were supposed to be . . .”
“You think I’m supposed to be sitting somewhere waiting for you to turn up without warning and involve me in—do you know you nearly got me hanged? Besides, I was busy being kidnapped by James Fraser at the time.”
Hal raised one eyebrow and poured more cider. “Yes, you did say he’d punched you. What for?”
Grey rubbed two fingers between his brows. He hadn’t really noticed the headache before, only because he’d had it all day. Hal was definitely making it worse, though.
“I couldn’t begin to explain it, Hal,” he said tiredly. “Can you find me a bed? I think I’m going to die, and if by some unfortunate chance I don’t, I’ll have to speak to Willie tomorrow about . . . well, never mind.” He drank the last of the cider and set down the cup, preparing reluctantly to lift his feet from the soothing oil.
“I know about William,” Hal said.
Grey stopped abruptly, looking dubiously at his brother, who shrugged.
“I saw Fraser,” he said simply. “In Philadelphia. And when I said something to William this afternoon, he confirmed it.”
“Did he?” Grey murmured. He was surprised but somewhat heartened by that. If Willie had calmed down sufficiently as to talk to Hal about the matter, Grey’s own conversation with his son might be a trifle less fraught than he’d feared.
“How long have you known?” Hal asked curiously.
“For certain? Since Willie was two or three.” He suddenly gave an enormous yawn, then sat blinking stupidly. “Oh—meant to ask. How did the battle go?”
Hal looked at him with something between affront and amusement. “You were bloody in it, weren’t you?”
“My part of it didn’t go that well. But my perspective was somewhat limited by circumstance. That, and having only one working eye,” he added, gently prodding the bad one. A good night’s sleep . . . Longing for bed made him sway, narrowly catching himself before simply falling into Hal’s cot.
“Hard to tell.” Hal fished a crumpled towel out of a basket of laundry lurking disreputably in a corner and, kneeling down, lifted Grey’s feet out of the oil and blotted them gently. “Hell of a mess. Terrible ground, chopped up by creeks, either farmland or half covered in trees . . . Sir Henry got away with the baggage train and refugees all safe. But as for Washington . . .” He shrugged. “So far as I can tell from what I saw and heard, his troops acquitted themselves well. Remarkably well,” he added thoughtfully. He rose to his feet. “Lie down, John. I’ll find a bed somewhere else.”
Grey was much too tired to argue. He simply fell over and rolled onto his back, not bothering to undress. The bad eye felt gritty, and he wondered dimly whether to ask Hal to find some honey but decided that could wait ’til morning.
Hal took the lantern from its hook and turned toward the tent flap, but paused for an instant, turning back.
“Do you think Mrs. Fraser—by the way, tomorrow I want to know how on earth she came to marry you—do you think she knows about William and James Fraser?”
“Anyone with eyes who’d seen the two of them would know,” Grey murmured, eyes half closed. “She never mentioned it, though.”
Hal grunted. “Apparently everyone knew—save William. Little wonder he’s . . .”
“That’s one word for it.”
“I hadn’t found one yet.”
“Does it matter?” Grey’s eyes closed all the way. Through the drifting mists of sleep, he heard Hal’s quiet voice, by the tent flap.
“I’ve had word of Ben. They say he’s dead.”