The woman crosses the room, and it is only when she is directly in front of us that I am certain about who she is. She is dressed in a pelisse fashionable among women half her age, and the feather in her hat is an extraordinary shade of blue. Outside, a young man is waiting at her coach. Passersby will suspect that he is her son, but anyone who has ever been acquainted with her will know better.
My grandsire,′ Jamie observed evenly, ’has by all reports got a character that would enable him to hide conveniently behind a spiral staircase.
A man’s life had to have more purpose than only to feed himself each day.
My God, he thought, I’m going to die before I’ve been born.
For a moment, I saw him as he had looked the morning I married him. Duine uasal was what he looked, a man of worth. But the bold face above the lace was the same, older now, but wiser with it – yet the tilt of his shining head and the set of the wide, firm mouth, the slanted clear cat-eyes that looked into my own, were just the same. Here was a man who had always known his worth.
I was dead, my Sassenach – and yet all that time, I loved you.
Egg-sucking son of a porcupine!
A mark on one arm like the one I bore. Here, in this time, the mark of sorcery, the mark of a magus. The small, homely scar of a smallpox vaccination.
Sassenach,” he said against my shoulder, a moment later. “Mm?” “Who in God’s name is John Wayne?” “You are,” I said. “Go to sleep. I really needed that laugh to break the tears.
She supposed that it it perhaps not fair to quarrel with someone on the basis of what you thought they were thinking.
Twenty-four years ago today, I married ye, Sassenach,” he said softly. “I hope ye willna have cause yet to regret it.
Your face is my heart, Sassenach,” he said softly, “and love of you is my soul. But you’re right; ye canna be my conscience.
I dinna mean to interruupt ye, Sassenach” he whispered in my air. “But would ye like a bit of help we that?
He wasn’t a whole person any longer, but only half of something not yet made.
After all, I thought, what were days and weeks in the presence of eternity?
Is thee afraid of me, Rachel?” he whispered. “I am,” she whispered back, and closed her hand on his wounded shoulder, lightly but hard enough for him to feel the hurt of it. “And I am afraid for thee, as well. But there are things I fear much more than death – and to be without thee is what I fear most.
My first coherent thought was, “It’s raining. This must be Scotland.
No, the fault lies with the artists,” Claire went on. “The writers, the singers, the tellers of tales. It’s them that take the past and re-create it to their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king.
You are mine,” it had said. “Mine! And I will not let you go.
There’s no place on earth with more of the old superstitions and magic mixed into its daily life than the Scottish Highlands.