Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)

NEARLY TWILIGHT, and the rats were still dead. The comte heard the bells of Notre Dame calling sept and glanced at his pocket watch. The bells were two minutes before their time, and he frowned. He didn’t like sloppiness. He stood up and stretched himself, groaning as his spine cracked like the ragged volley of a firing squad. No doubt about it, he was aging, and the thought sent a chill through him.

If. If he could find the way forward, then perhaps…but you never knew, that was the devil of it. For a little while, he’d thought—hoped—that traveling back in time stopped the process of aging. That initially seemed logical, like rewinding a clock. But, then again, it wasn’t logical, because he’d always gone back farther than his own lifetime. Only once he’d tried to go back just a few years, to his early twenties. That was a mistake, and he still shivered at the memory.

He went to the tall gabled window that looked out over the Seine.

That particular view of the river had changed barely at all in the last two hundred years; he’d seen it at several different times. He hadn’t always owned this house, but it had stood in this street since 1620, and he always managed to get in briefly, if only to reestablish his own sense of reality after a passage.

Only the trees changed in his view of the river, and sometimes a strange-looking boat would be there. But the rest was always the same and no doubt always would be: the old fishermen, catching their supper off the landing in stubborn silence, each guarding his space with outthrust elbows, the younger ones, barefoot and slump-shouldered with exhaustion, laying out their nets to dry, naked little boys diving off the quay. It gave him a soothing sense of eternity, watching the river. Perhaps it didn’t matter so much if he must one day die?

“The devil it doesn’t,” he murmured to himself, and glanced up at the sky. Venus shone bright. He should go.

Pausing conscientiously to place his fingers on each rat’s body and ensure that no spark of life remained, he passed down the line, then swept them all into a burlap bag. If he was going to the Court of Miracles, at least he wouldn’t arrive empty-handed.



JOAN WAS STILL reluctant to go below, but the light was fading, the wind getting up regardless, and a particularly spiteful gust that blew her petticoats right up round her waist and grabbed her arse with a chilly hand made her yelp in a very undignified way. She smoothed her skirts hastily and made for the hatchway, followed by Michael Murray.

Seeing him cough and chafe his hands at the bottom of the ladder made her sorry; here she’d kept him freezing on deck, too polite to go below and leave her to her own devices, and her too selfish to see he was cold, the poor man. She made a hasty knot in her handkerchief, to remind her to say an extra decade of the rosary for penance, when she got to it.

He saw her to a bench and said a few words to the woman sitting next to her, in French. Obviously he was introducing her, she understood that much—but when the woman nodded and said something in reply, she could only sit there openmouthed. She didn’t understand a word. Not a word!

Michael evidently grasped the situation, for he said something to the woman’s husband, which drew her attention away from Joan, and engaged them in a conversation that let Joan sink quietly back against the wooden wall of the ship, sweating with embarrassment.

Well, she’d get into the way of it, she reassured herself. Bound to. She settled herself with determination to listen, picking out the odd word here and there in the conversation. It was easier to understand Michael; he spoke slower and didn’t swallow the back half of each word.

She was trying to puzzle out the probable spelling of a word that sounded like “pwufgweemiarniere” but surely couldn’t be, when her eye caught a slight movement from the bench opposite, and the gurgling vowels caught in her throat.

A man sat there, maybe close to her own age, which was twenty-five. He was good-looking, if a bit thin in the face, decently dressed—and he was going to die.

There was a gray shroud over him, the same as if he were wrapped in mist, so his face showed through it. She’d seen that same thing—the grayness lying on someone’s face like fog—seen it twice before and knew it at once for death’s shadow. Once it had been on an elderly man, and that might have been only what anybody could see, because Angus MacWheen was ill, but then again, and only a few weeks after, she’d seen it on the second of Vhairi Fraser’s little boys, and him a rosy-faced wee bairn with dear chubby legs.

She hadn’t wanted to believe it. Either that she saw it or what it meant. But four days later, the wean was crushed in the lane by an ox that was maddened by a hornet’s sting. She’d vomited when they told her, and couldn’t eat for days after, for sheer grief and terror. Because could she have stopped it if she’d said? And what—dear Lord, what—if it happened again?

Now it had, and her wame twisted. She leapt to her feet and blundered toward the companionway, cutting short some slowly worded speech from the Frenchman.

Not again, not again! she thought in agony. Why show me such things? What can I do?

She pawed frantically at the ladder, climbing as fast as she could, gasping for air, needing to be away from the dying man. How long might it be, dear Lord, until she reached the convent, and safety?



THE MOON WAS rising over the ?le de la Cité, glowing through the haze of cloud. He glanced at it, estimating the time; no point in arriving at Madame Fabienne’s house before the girls had taken their hair out of curling papers and rolled on their red stockings. There were other places to go first, though: the obscure drinking places where the professionals of the court fortified themselves for the night ahead. One of those was where he had first heard the rumors—he’d see how far they had spread and would judge the safety of asking openly about Ma?tre Raymond.

That was one advantage to hiding in the past, rather than going to Hungary or Sweden—life at this court tended to be short, and there were not so many who knew either his face or his history, though there would still be stories. Paris held on to its histoires. He found the iron gate—rustier than it had been; it left red stains on his palm—and pushed it open with a creak that would alert whatever now lived at the end of the alley.

He had to see the frog. Not meet him, perhaps—he made a brief sign against evil—but see him. Above all else, he needed to know: had the man—if he was a man—aged?

“Certainly he’s a man,” he muttered to himself, impatient. “What else could he be, for heaven’s sake?”

He could be something like you, was the answering thought, and a shiver ran up his spine. Fear? He wondered. Anticipation of an intriguing philosophical mystery? Or possibly…hope?