23
CRAIGH NA DUN
The early morning air was cold and misty, and I was glad of the cloak. It had been twenty years since I’d worn one, but with the sorts of things people wore nowadays, the Inverness tailor who’d made it for me had not found an order for a woolen cloak with a hood at all odd.
I kept my eyes on the path. The crest of the hill had been invisible, wreathed in mist, when the car had left me on the road below.
“Here?” the driver had said, peering dubiously out of his window at the deserted countryside. “Sure, mum?”
“Yes,” I’d said, half-choked with terror. “This is the place.”
“Aye?” He looked dubious, in spite of the large note I put in his hand. “D’ye want me to wait, mum? Or to come later, to fetch ye back?”
I was sorely tempted to say yes. After all, what if I lost my nerve? At the moment, my grip on that slippery substance seemed remarkably feeble.
“No,” I said, swallowing. “No, that won’t be necessary.” If I couldn’t do it, I would just have to walk back to Inverness, that was all. Or perhaps Roger and Brianna would come; I thought that would be worse, to be ignominiously retrieved. Or would it be a relief?
The granite pebbles rolled beneath my feet and a clod of dirt fell in a small rushing shower, dislodged by my passage. I couldn’t possibly really be doing this, I thought. The weight of the money in my reinforced pocket swung against my thigh, the heavy certainty of gold and silver a reminder of reality. I was doing it.
I couldn’t. Thoughts of Bree as I had seen her late last night, peacefully asleep in her bed, assaulted me. The tendrils of remembered horror reached out from the hilltop above, as I began to sense the nearness of the stones. Screaming, chaos, the feeling of being torn in pieces. I couldn’t.
I couldn’t, but I kept on climbing, palms sweating, my feet moving as though no longer under my control.
It was full dawn by the time I reached the top of the hill. The mist lay below, and the stones stood clear and dark against a crystal sky. The sight of them left me wet-palmed with apprehension, but I walked forward, and passed into the circle.
They were standing on the grass in front of the cleft stone, facing each other. Brianna heard my footsteps and whirled around to face me.
I stared at her, speechless with astonishment. She was wearing a Jessica Gutenburg dress, very much like the one I had on, except that hers was a vivid lime green, with plastic jewels stitched across the bosom.
“That’s a perfectly horrible color for you,” I said.
“It’s the only one they had in a size sixteen,” she answered calmly.
“What in the name of goodness are you doing here?” I demanded, recovering some remnant of coherence.
“We came to see you off,” she said, and a hint of a smile flickered on her lips. I looked at Roger, who shrugged slightly and gave me a lopsided smile of his own.
“Oh. Yes. Well,” I said. The stone stood behind Brianna, twice the height of a man. I could look through the foot-wide crack, and see the faint morning sun shining on the grass outside the circle.
“You’re going,” she said firmly, “or I am.”
“You! Are you out of your mind?”
“No.” She glanced at the cleft stone and swallowed. It might have been the lime-green dress that made her face look chalk-white. “I can do it—go through, I mean. I know I can. When Geilie Duncan went through the stones, I heard them. Roger did too.” She glanced at him as though for reassurance, then fixed her gaze firmly on me.
“I don’t know whether I could find Jamie Fraser or not; maybe only you can. But if you won’t try, then I will.”
My mouth opened, but I couldn’t find anything to say.
“Don’t you see, Mama? He has to know—has to know he did it, he did what he meant to for us.” Her lips quivered, and she pressed them together for a minute.
“We owe it to him, Mama,” she said softly. “Somebody has to find him, and tell him.” Her hand touched my face, briefly. “Tell him I was born.”
“Oh, Bree,” I said, my voice so choked I could barely speak. “Oh, Bree!”
She was holding my hands tight between her own, squeezing hard.
“He gave you to me,” she said, so low I could hardly hear her. “Now I have to give you back to him, Mama.”
The eyes that were so like Jamie’s looked down at me, blurred by tears.
“If you find him,” she whispered, “when you find my father—give him this.” She bent and kissed me, fiercely, gently, then straightened and turned me toward the stone.
“Go, Mama,” she said, breathless. “I love you. Go!”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Roger move toward her. I took one step, and then another. I heard a sound, a faint roaring. I took the last step, and the world disappeared.