Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)

“Shit,” he muttered, and scrambled to his feet.

The grenadiers were hard at work nearby; he heard their officers’ shouts, the bang and pop of their explosions as they worked their way stolidly through the French like the small mobile batteries they were.

A grenade struck the ground a few feet away, and he felt a sharp pain in his thigh; a metal fragment had sliced through his breeches, drawing blood.

“Christ,” he said, belatedly aware that being in the vicinity of a company of grenadiers was not a good idea. He shook his head to clear it and made his way away from them.

He heard a familiar sound that made him recoil for an instant from the force of memory—wild Highland screams, filled with rage and berserk glee. The Highlanders were hard at work with their broadswords—he saw two of them appear from the smoke, bare legs churning beneath their kilts, pursuing a pack of fleeing Frenchman, and felt laughter bubble up through his heaving chest.

He didn’t see the man in the smoke. His foot struck something heavy and he fell, sprawling across the body. The man screamed, and Grey scrambled hastily off him.

“Sorry. Are you—Christ, Malcolm!”

He was on his knees, bending low to avoid the smoke. Stubbs was gasping, grasping desperately at Grey’s coat.

“Jesus.” Malcolm’s right leg was gone below the knee, flesh shredded and the white bone splintered, butcher-stained with spurting blood. Or…no. It wasn’t gone. It—the foot, at least—was lying a little way beyond, still clad in shoe and tattered stocking.

Grey turned his head and threw up.

Bile stinging the back of his nose, he choked and spat, turned back, and grappled with his belt, wrenching it free.

“Don’t—” Stubbs gasped, putting out a hand as Grey began wrapping the belt round his thigh. His face was whiter than the bone of his leg. “Don’t. Better—better if I die.”

“The devil you will,” Grey replied briefly.

His hands were shaking, slippery with blood. It took three tries to get the end of the belt through the buckle, but it went at last, and he jerked it tight, eliciting a yell from Stubbs.

“Here,” said an unfamiliar voice by his ear. “Let’s get him off. I’ll—shit!” He looked up, startled, to see a tall British officer lunge upward, blocking the musket butt that would have brained Grey. Without thinking, he drew his dagger and stabbed the Frenchman in the leg. The man screamed, his leg buckling, and the strange officer pushed him over, kicked him in the face, and stamped on his throat, crushing it.

“I’ll help,” the man said calmly, bending to take hold of Malcolm’s arm, pulling him up. “Take the other side; we’ll get him to the back.” They got Malcolm up, his arms round their shoulders, and dragged him, paying no heed to the Frenchman thrashing and gurgling on the ground behind them.

Malcolm lived, long enough to make it to the rear of the lines, where the army surgeons were already at work. By the time Grey and the other officer had turned him over to the surgeons, the battle was over.

Grey turned to see the French scattered and demoralized, fleeing toward the fortress. British troops were flooding across the trampled field, cheering, overrunning the abandoned French cannon.

The entire battle had lasted less than a quarter of an hour.

He found himself sitting on the ground, his mind quite blank, with no notion how long he had been there, though he supposed it couldn’t have been much time at all.

He noticed an officer standing near him and thought vaguely that the man seemed familiar. Who…Oh, yes. Wolfe’s adjutant. He’d never learned the man’s name.

He stood up slowly, stiff as a nine-day pudding.

The adjutant was simply standing there. His eyes were turned in the direction of the fortress and the fleeing French, but Grey could tell that he wasn’t really seeing either. Grey glanced over his shoulder, toward the hillock where Wolfe had stood earlier, but the general was nowhere in sight.

“General Wolfe?” he said.

“The general…” the adjutant said, and swallowed thickly. “He was struck.”

Of course he was, silly ass, Grey thought uncharitably. Standing up there like a bloody target, what could he expect? But then he saw the tears standing in the adjutant’s eyes and understood.

“Dead, then?” he asked, stupidly, and the adjutant—why had he never thought to ask the man’s name?—nodded, rubbing a smoke-stained sleeve across a smoke-stained countenance.

“He…In the wrist first. Then in the body. He fell and crawled—then he fell again. I turned him over…told him the battle was won, the French were scattered.”

“He understood?”

The adjutant nodded and took a deep breath that rattled in his throat. “He said—” He stopped and coughed, then went on more firmly. “He said that in knowing he had conquered, he was content to die.”

“Did he?” Grey said blankly. He’d seen men die, often, and imagined it much more likely that if James Wolfe had managed anything beyond an inarticulate groan, his final word had likely been either “shit,” or “oh, God,” depending upon the general’s religious leanings, of which Grey had no notion.

“Yes, good,” he said meaninglessly, and turned toward the fortress. Ant trails of men were streaming toward it, and in the midst of one such stream he saw Montcalm’s colors, fluttering in the wind. Below the colors, small in the distance, a man in general’s uniform rode his horse, hatless, hunched and swaying in the saddle, his officers bunched close on either side, anxious lest he fall.

The British lines were reorganizing, though it was clear no further fighting would be required. Not today. Nearby, he saw the tall officer who had saved his life and helped him to drag Malcolm Stubbs to safety, limping back toward his troops.

“The major over there,” he said, nudging the adjutant and nodding. “Do you know his name?”

The adjutant blinked, then firmed his shoulders.

“Yes, of course. That’s Major Siverly.”

“Oh. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?”



ADMIRAL HOLMES, third in command after Wolfe, accepted the surrender of Quebec five days later, Wolfe and his second, Brigadier Monckton, having perished in battle. Montcalm was dead, too; had died the morning following the battle. There was no way out for the French save surrender; winter was coming on, and the fortress and its city would starve long before its besiegers.

Two weeks after the battle, John Grey returned to Gareon and found that smallpox had swept through the village like an autumn wind. The mother of Malcolm Stubbs’s son was dead; her mother offered to sell him the child. He asked her politely to wait.