A Breath of Snow and Ashes (33 page)

“To be more exact, he wants you to take him there. And make introduction for him. He wouldna expect ye to interpret the preaching, he says.”

“Holy God.” He took a moment to contemplate this prospect, then shook his head decidedly. “No.”

“Of course not.” Roger pulled the cork from a bottle of beer, and offered it to him. “I just thought I should tell ye, so ye can decide best what to say to him when he asks.”

“Verra thoughtful of ye,” Jamie said, and taking the bottle, drank deeply.

He lowered it, took breath—and froze. He saw Roger Mac’s head turn sharply and knew he had caught it, too, borne on the chilly breeze.

Roger Mac turned back to him, black brows furrowed.

“Do ye smell something burning?” he said.

ROGER HEARD THEM first: a raucous caucus of cries and cackles, shrill as witches. Then a clappering of wings as they came in sight, and the birds flew up, mostly crows, but here and there a huge black raven.

“Oh, God,” he said softly.

Two bodies hung from a tree beside the house. What was left of them. He could tell that it was a man and a woman, but only by their clothes. A piece of paper was pinned to the man’s leg, so crumpled and stained that he saw it only because one edge lifted in the breeze.

Jamie ripped it off, unfolded it enough to read, and threw it on the ground.
Death to Regulators,
it read; he saw the scrawl for an instant, before the wind blew it away.

“Where are the bairns?” Jamie asked, turning sharply to him. “These folk have children. Where are they?”

The ashes were cold, already scattering in the wind, but the smell of burning filled him, clogged his breathing, seared his throat so that words rasped like gravel, meaningless as the scrape of pebbles underfoot. Roger tried to speak, cleared his throat, and spat.

“Hiding, maybe,” he rasped, and flung out an arm toward the wood.

“Aye, maybe.” Jamie stood abruptly, called into the wood, and, not waiting for an answer, set off into the trees, calling again.

Roger followed, sheering off as they reached the forest’s edge, going upslope behind the house, both of them shouting words of reassurance that were swallowed up at once by the forest’s silence.

Roger stumbled through the trees, sweating, panting, heedless of the pain in his throat as he shouted, barely stopping long enough to hear if anyone answered. Several times he saw movement from the corner of his eye and swung toward it, only to see nothing but the ripple of wind through a patch of drying sedges, or a dangling creeper, swaying as though someone had passed that way.

He half-imagined he was seeing Jem, playing at hide-and-seek, and the vision of a darting foot, sun gleaming off a small head, lent him strength to shout again, and yet again. At last, though, he was forced to admit that children would not have run so far, and he circled back toward the cabin, still calling intermittently, in hoarse, strangled croaks.

He came back into the dooryard to find Jamie stooping for a rock, which he threw with great force at a pair of ravens that had settled in the hanging tree, edging bright-eyed back toward its burden. The ravens squawked and flapped away—but only so far as the next tree, where they sat watching.

The day was cold, but both of them were soaked with sweat, hair straggling wet on their necks. Jamie wiped his face with his sleeve, still breathing hard.

“H-how many . . . children?” Roger’s own breath was short, his throat so raw that the words were barely a whisper.

“Three, at least.” Jamie coughed, hawked, and spat. “The eldest is twelve, maybe.” He stood for a moment, looking at the bodies. Then he crossed himself and drew his dirk to cut them down.

They had nothing to dig with; the best that could be managed was a wide scrape in the leaf mold of the forest, and a thin cairn of rocks, as much to spite the ravens as for the sake of decency.

“Were they Regulators?” Roger asked, pausing in the midst of it to wipe his face on his sleeve.

“Aye, but . . .” Jamie’s voice trailed away. “It’s naught to do wi’ that business.” He shook his head and turned away to gather more rocks.

Roger thought it
was
a rock at first, half-hidden in the leaves that had drifted against the scorched cabin wall. He touched it, and it moved, bringing him to his feet with a cry that would have done credit to any of the corbies.

Jamie reached him in seconds, in time to help dig the little girl out of the leaves and cinders.

“Hush,
a muirninn,
hush,” Jamie said urgently, though in fact the child was not crying. She was maybe eight, her clothes and hair burned away and her skin so blackened and cracked that she might have been made of stone indeed, save for her eyes.

“Oh, God, oh, God.” Roger kept saying it, under his breath, long after it became clear that if it was a prayer, it was long past answering.

He was cradling her against his chest, and her eyes opened halfway, regarding him with nothing like relief or curiosity—only a calm fatality.

Jamie had poured water from his canteen onto a handkerchief; he fed the tip of it between her lips to wet them, and Roger saw her throat move in reflex as she sucked.

“Ye’ll be all right,” Roger whispered to her. “It’s all right,
a leannan.
”

“Who has done this,
a nighean
?” Jamie asked, just as gently. Roger saw that she understood; the question stirred the surface of her eyes like wind on a pond—but then passed over, leaving them calm again. She did not speak, no matter what questions they asked, only looked at them with incurious eyes, and went on sucking dreamily at the wet cloth.

“Are ye baptized,
a leannan
?” Jamie asked her at last, and Roger felt a deep jolt at the question. In the shock of finding her, he had not truly taken in her condition.

“Elle ne peut pas vivre,”
Jamie said softly, his eyes meeting Roger’s. She cannot live.

His first instinct was a visceral denial. Of course she could live, she must. But huge patches of her skin were gone, the raw flesh crusted but still oozing. He could see the white edge of a knee bone, and literally see her heart beating, a reddish, translucent bulge that pulsed at the notch of her rib cage. She was light as a corn-dolly, and he became painfully aware that she seemed to float in his arms, like a slick of oil on water.

“Does it hurt, sweetheart?” he asked her.

“Mama?” she whispered. Then she closed her eyes and would say no more, only muttering “Mama?” now and then.

He had thought at first they would take her back to the Ridge, to Claire. But it was more than a day’s ride; she wouldn’t make it. Not possibly.

He swallowed, realization closing on his throat like a noose. He looked at Jamie, seeing the same sick acknowledgment in his eyes. Jamie swallowed, too.

“Do ye . . . know her name?” Roger could scarcely breathe, and forced the words. Jamie shook his head, then gathered himself, hunching his shoulders.

She had stopped sucking, but still murmured “Mama?” now and then. Jamie took the handkerchief from her lips and squeezed a few drops from it onto her blackened forehead, whispering the words of baptism.

Then they looked at each other, acknowledging necessity. Jamie was pale, sweat beading on his upper lip among the bristles of red beard. He took a deep breath, steeling himself, and lifted his hands, offering.

“No,” Roger said softly. “I’ll do it.” She was his; he could no more surrender her to another than he could have torn off an arm. He reached for the handkerchief, and Jamie put it into his hand, soot-stained, still damp.

He’d never thought of such a thing, and couldn’t think now. He didn’t need to; without hesitation, he cradled her close and put the handkerchief over her nose and mouth, then clamped his hand tight over the cloth, feeling the small bump of her nose caught snug between his thumb and index finger.

Wind stirred in the leaves above, and a rain of gold fell on them, whispering on his skin, brushing cool past his face. She would be cold, he thought, and wished to cover her, but had no hand to spare.

His other arm was round her, hand resting on her chest; he could feel the tiny heart beneath his fingers. It jumped, beat rapidly, skipped, beat twice more . . . and stopped. It quivered for a moment; he could feel it trying to find enough strength to beat one last time, and suffered the momentary illusion that it would not only do so, but would force its way through the fragile wall of her chest and into his hand in its urge to live.

But the moment passed, as did the illusion, and a great stillness came. Near at hand, a raven called.

THEY HAD ALMOST finished the burying, when the sound of hooves and jingling harness announced visitors—a lot of visitors.

Roger, ready to decamp into the woods, glanced at his father-in-law, but Jamie shook his head, answering his unasked question.

“Nay, they’d no come back. What for?” His bleak gaze took in the smoking ruin of the homestead, the trampled dooryard, and the low mounds of the graves. The little girl still lay nearby, covered with Roger’s cloak. He hadn’t been able to bear putting her into the ground just yet; the knowledge of her alive was still too recent.

Jamie straightened, stretching his back. Roger saw him glance to see that his rifle was to hand, leaning against a tree trunk. Then he settled himself, leaning on the scorched board he had been using as a shovel, waiting.

The first of the riders came out of the woods, his horse snorting and tossing its head at the smell of burning. The rider pulled it skillfully round and urged it closer, leaning forward to see who they were.

“So it’s you, is it, Fraser?” Richard Brown’s lined face looked grimly jovial. He glanced at the charred and steaming timbers, then round at his comrades. “Didn’t think you made your money just by selling whisky.”

The men—Roger counted six of them—shifted in their saddles, snorting with amusement.

“Have a bit o’ respect for the dead, Brown.” Jamie nodded at the graves, and Brown’s face hardened. He glanced sharply at Jamie, then at Roger.

“Just the two of you, is it? What are you doing here?”

“Digging graves,” Roger said. His palms were blistered; he rubbed a hand slowly on the side of his breeches. “What are
you
doing here?”

Brown straightened abruptly in his saddle, but it was his brother Lionel who answered.

“Coming down from Owenawisgu,” he said, jerking his head at the horses. Looking, Roger saw that there were four packhorses, laden with skins, and that several of the other horses carried bulging saddlebags. “Smelled the fire and come to see.” He glanced down at the graves. “Tige O’Brian, was it?”

Jamie nodded.

“Ye kent them?”

Richard Brown shrugged.

“Aye. It’s on the way to Owenawisgu. I’ve stopped a time or two; taken supper with them.” Belatedly, he removed his hat, plastering down wisps of hair over his balding crown with the flat of his hand. “God rest ’em.”

“Who’s burnt ’em out, if it wasn’t you?” one of the younger men in the party called. The man, a Brown by his narrow shoulders and lantern jaw, grinned inappropriately, evidently thinking this a jest.

The singed bit of paper had flown with the wind; it fluttered against a rock near Roger’s foot. He picked it up and with a step forward, slapped it against Lionel Brown’s saddle.

“Know anything about that, do you?” he asked. “It was pinned to O’Brian’s body.” He sounded angry, knew it, and didn’t care. His throat ached and his voice came out as a strangled rasp.

Lionel Brown glanced at the paper, brows raised, then handed it to his brother.

“No. Write it yourself, did you?”

“What?” He stared up at the man, blinking against the wind.

“Indians,” Lionel Brown said, nodding at the house. “Indians done this.”

“Oh, aye?” Roger could hear the undercurrents in Jamie’s voice—skepticism, wariness, and anger. “Which Indians? The ones from whom ye bought the hides? Told ye about it, did they?”

“Don’t be a fool, Nelly.” Richard Brown kept his voice pitched low, but his brother flinched a little, hearing it. Brown edged his horse nearer. Jamie stood his ground, though Roger saw his hands tighten on the board.