A Breath of Snow and Ashes (109 page)

“The fish put up a good fight, did they?” he asked, nodding at the string. The corners of his mouth began to twitch.

“Yes,” she said, and dropped them on the ground in front of him. “But not nearly as good a fight as the beavers.”

“Beavers,” he said. He rubbed a knuckle meditatively down the bridge of his long, bony nose. “Aye, I heard them slapping. Ye’ve been fighting beavers?”

“I’ve been rescuing your wretched
dog
from beavers,” she said, and sneezed. She sank to her knees in front of the new-made fire and closed her eyes in momentary bliss at the touch of heat on her shivering body.

“Oh, Rollo’s back, then? Rollo! Where are ye, hound?” The big dog slunk reluctantly out of the shrubbery, tail barely twitching in response to his master’s call.

“What’s this I hear about beavers, then,
a madadh
?” Ian said sternly. In response, Rollo shook himself, though no more than a fine mist of water droplets rose from his coat. He sighed, dropped to his belly, and put his nose morosely on his paws.

“Maybe he was only after fish, but the beavers didn’t see it that way. They ran from him on shore, but once he was in the water—” Brianna shook her head, and wrung out the soggy tail of her hunting shirt. “I tell you what, Ian—
you
clean those damn fish.”

He was already doing so, gutting one with a single neat slice up the belly and a scoop of the thumb. He tossed the entrails toward Rollo, who merely let out another sigh, and seemed to flatten against the dead leaves, ignoring the treat.

“He’s no hurt, is he?” Ian asked, frowning at his dog.

She glared at him.

“No, he isn’t. I expect he’s embarrassed. You could ask whether
I’m
hurt. Do you have any idea what kind of
teeth
beavers have?”

The light was nearly gone, but she could see his lean shoulders shaking.

“Aye,” he said, sounding rather strangled. “I have. They, um, didna bite ye, did they? I mean—I should think it would be noticeable, if ye’d been gnawed.” A small wheeze of amusement escaped him, and he tried to cover it with a cough.

“No,” she said, rather coldly. The fire was going well, but not nearly well enough. The evening breeze had come up, and was reaching through the soaked fabric of shirt and breeches to fondle her backside with ice-cold fingers.

“It wasn’t so much the teeth as the tails,” she said, shuffling round on her knees to present her back to the fire. She rubbed a hand gingerly over her right arm, where one of the muscular paddles had struck flat on her forearm, leaving a reddened bruise that stretched from wrist to elbow. For a few moments, she’d thought the bone was broken.

“It was like being hit with a baseball bat—er . . . with a club, I mean,” she amended. The beavers hadn’t attacked her directly, of course, but being in the water with a panicked wolf-dog and half a dozen sixty-pound rodents in a state of extreme agitation had been rather like walking through an automated car wash on foot—a maelstrom of blinding spray and thrashing objects. A chill struck her and she wrapped both arms around herself, shivering.

“Here, coz.” Ian stood up and skinned the buckskin shirt off over his head. “Put this on.”

She was much too cold and battered to refuse the offer. Retiring modestly behind a bush, she stripped off the wet things and emerged a moment later, clad in Ian’s buckskin, one of the blankets wrapped around her waist sarong-style.

“You don’t eat enough, Ian,” she said, sitting down by the fire again, and eyeing him critically. “All your ribs show.”

They did. He’d always been lean to the point of thinness, but in his younger years, his teenage scrawniness had seemed quite normal, merely the result of his bones outstripping the growth of the rest of him.

Now he had reached his full growth and had had a year or two to let his muscles catch up. They had—she could see every sinew in his arms and shoulders—but the knobs of his spine bulged against the tanned skin of his back, and she could see the shadows of his ribs like rippled sand underwater.

He raised a shoulder, but made no reply, intent on skewering the cleaned fish on peeled willow twigs for broiling.

“And you don’t sleep very well, either.” She narrowed her eyes at him across the fire. Even in this light, the shadows and hollows in his face were obvious, despite the distraction of the Mohawk tattoos that looped across his cheekbones. The shadows had been obvious to everyone for months; her mother had wanted to say something to Ian, but Jamie had told her to let the lad be; he would speak when he was ready.

“Oh, well enough,” he murmured, not looking up.

Whether he was ready now or not, she couldn’t say. But he’d brought her here. If he wasn’t ready, he could bloody well get that way fast.

She had—of course—wondered all day about the mysterious goal of their journey, and why
she
was his necessary companion. For a matter of hunting, Ian would have taken one of the men; good as she was with a gun, several of the men on the Ridge were better, including her father. And any one of them would be better suited than she to something like digging out a bear’s den or packing home meat or hides.

They were in the Cherokee lands at the moment; she knew Ian visited the Indians frequently, and was on good terms with several villages. But if it had been a matter of some formal arrangement to be made, surely he would have asked Jamie to accompany him, or Peter Bewlie, with his Cherokee wife to interpret.

“Ian,” she said, with the tone in her voice that could bring almost any man up short. “Look at me.”

His head jerked up, and he blinked at her.

“Ian,” she said, a little more gently, “is this to do with your wife?”

He stayed frozen for a moment, eyes dark and unfathomable. Rollo, in the shadows behind him, suddenly raised his head and let out a small whine of inquiry. That seemed to rouse Ian; he blinked and looked down.

“Aye,” he said, sounding quite matter-of-fact. “It is.”

He adjusted the angle of the stick he had driven into the earth by the fire; the pale flesh of the fish curled and sizzled, browning on the green wood.

She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t speak—just broke off the edge of a piece of half-cooked fish and held it out to the dog, clicking his tongue in invitation. Rollo rose and sniffed Ian’s ear in concern, but then deigned to take the fish, and lay down again, licking the hot tidbit delicately before scooping it up with his tongue, gathering enough spirit then to engulf the discarded heads and fish guts as well.

Ian pursed his lips a little, and she could see the thoughts flickering half-formed across his face, before he made up his mind to speak.

“I did once think of marrying you, ye ken.”

He gave her a quick, direct glance, and she felt an odd little jolt of realization. He’d thought about it, all right. And while she had no doubt that his offer then had been made from the purest of motives . . . he was a young man. She hadn’t until this moment realized that he would of course have contemplated every detail of what that offer entailed.

His eyes held hers in wry acknowledgment of the fact that he had indeed imagined the physical details of sharing her bed—and had not found the prospect in any way objectionable. She resisted the impulse to blush and look away; that would discredit them both.

She was suddenly—and for the first time—aware of him
as
a man, rather than as an endearing young cousin. And aware of the heat of his body that had lingered in the soft buckskin when she pulled it on.

“It wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world,” she said, striving to match his matter-of-fact tone. He laughed, and the stippled lines of his tattoos lost their grimness.

“No,” he said. “Maybe not the best—that would be Roger Mac, aye? But I’m glad to hear I wouldna have been the worst, either. Better than Ronnie Sinclair, d’ye think? Or worse than Forbes the lawyer?”

“Ha, bloody ha.” She refused to be discomposed by his teasing. “You would have been at least third on the list.”

“Third?” That got his attention. “What? Who was second?” He actually seemed miffed at the notion that someone might precede him, and she laughed.

“Lord John Grey.”

“Oh? Oh, well. Aye, I suppose he’d do,” Ian admitted grudgingly. “Though of course, he—” He stopped abruptly, and darted a cautious look in her direction.

She felt an answering stab of caution. Did Ian know about John Grey’s private tastes? She thought he must, from the odd expression on his face—but if not, it was no place of hers to be revealing Lord John’s secrets.

“Have you met him?” she asked curiously. Ian had gone with her parents to rescue Roger from the Iroquois, before Lord John had appeared at her aunt’s plantation, where she had met the nobleman herself.

“Oh, aye.” He was still looking wary, though he had relaxed a little. “Some years ago. Him and his . . . son. Stepson, I mean. They came to the Ridge, traveling through to Virginia, and stopped a bit. I gave him the measle.” He grinned, quite suddenly. “Or at least he
had
the measle. Auntie Claire nursed him through it. Ye’ve met the man yourself, though?”

“Yes, at River Run. Ian, the fish is on fire.”

It was, and he snatched the stick from the flames with a small Gaelic exclamation, waving scorched fingers to cool them. Extinguished in the grass, the fish proved to be quite edible, if a little crispy round the edges, and a tolerably good supper, with the addition of bread and beer.

“Did ye meet Lord John’s son, then, at River Run?” he asked, resuming their conversation. “Willie, his name is. A nice wee lad. He fell into the privy,” he added thoughtfully.

“Fell in the privy?” she said, laughing. “He sounds like an idiot. Or was he just quite small?”

“No, a decent size for his age. And sensible enough, for an Englishman. See, it wasna quite his fault, ken. We were looking at a snake, and it came up the branch toward us, and . . . well, it was an accident,” he concluded, handing Rollo another piece of fish. “Ye’ve not seen the lad yourself, though?”

“No, and I think you are deliberately changing the subject.”

“Aye, I am. D’ye want a bit more beer?”

She raised an eyebrow at him—he needn’t think he was going to escape that easily—but nodded, accepting the jug.

They were quiet for a bit, drinking beer and watching the last of the light fade into darkness as the stars came out. The scent of the pine trees strengthened, their sap warmed from the day, and in the distance she heard the occasional gunshot warning slap of a beaver’s tail on the pond—evidently the beavers had posted sentries, in case she or Rollo should sneak back after dark, she thought wryly.

Ian had wrapped his own blanket round his shoulders against the growing chill, and was lying flat in the grass, staring upward into the vault of heaven overhead.

She didn’t make any pretense of not watching him, and was quite sure he was aware of it. His face was quiet for the moment, minus its usual animation—but not guarded. He was thinking, and she was content to let him take his time; it was autumn now and night would be long enough for many things.

She wished she had thought to ask her mother more about the girl Ian called Emily—the Mohawk name was something multisyllabic and unpronounceable. Small, her mother had said. Pretty, in a neat, small-boned sort of way, and very clever.

Was she dead, Emily the small and clever? She thought not. She’d been in this time long enough to have seen many men deal with the death of wives. They showed loss and grief—but they didn’t do what Ian had been doing.

Could he be taking her to
meet
Emily? That was a staggering thought, but one she rejected almost immediately. It would be a month’s journey, at least, to reach the Mohawks’ territory—probably more. But then . . .

“I wondered, ken?” he said suddenly, still looking up at the sky. “D’ye feel sometimes . . . wrong?” He glanced at her helplessly, not sure whether he’d said what he meant—but she understood him perfectly.

“Yes, all the time.” She felt a sense of instant, unexpected relief at the admission. He saw the slump of her shoulders, and smiled a little, crookedly.

“Well . . . maybe not
all
the time,” she amended. “When I’m out in the woods, alone, it’s fine. Or with Roger, by ourselves. Though even then . . .” She saw Ian’s eyebrow lift, and hurried to explain. “Not that. Not being with him. It’s just that we . . . we talk about what was.”

He gave her a look in which sympathy was mingled with interest. Plainly, he would like to know about “what was,” but put that aside for the moment.

“The woods, aye?” he said. “I see that. When I’m awake, at least. Sleeping, though . . .” He turned his face back toward the empty sky and the brightening stars.

“Are you afraid—when the dark comes on?” She’d felt that now and then; a moment of deep fear at twilight—a sense of abandonment and elemental loneliness as night rose from the earth. A feeling that sometimes remained, even when she had gone inside the cabin, the bolted door secure behind her.

“No,” he said, frowning a little at her. “You are?”

“Just a little,” she said, waving it away. “Not all the time. Not now. But what is it about sleeping in the woods?”

He sat up, and rocked back a little, big hands linked around one knee, thinking.

“Aye, well . . .” he said slowly. “Sometimes I think of the auld tales— from Scotland, aye? And ones I’ve heard now and then, living wi’ the Kahnyen’kehaka. About . . . things that may come upon a man while he sleeps. To lure away his soul.”

“Things?” Despite the beauty of the stars and the peace of the evening, she felt something small and cold slide down her back. “
What
things?”

He took a deep breath and blew it out, brows puckered.

“Ye call them
sidhe
in the Gaelic. The Cherokee call them the Nunnahee. And the Mohawk have names for them, too—more than one. But when I heard Eats Turtles tell of them, I kent at once what they were. It’s the same—the Old Folk.”

“Fairies?” she said, and her incredulity must have been clear in her voice, for he glanced up sharply at her, a glint of irritation in his eyes.