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Chapter Text

I, Lord John William Grey, confess to being a sodomite. 

As I read the words on the torn paper, my heart sank like a stone. It was John's handwriting, and the half-moon signet pressed into the wax was his as well. What could have possessed him? The quill is mightier than the sword, it is said. This definitely made it deadlier. 

I pushed back the letter across the desk to Judge Altman. "This is outrageous. I refuse to believe that Lord John would have written this in his own free will. You must believe me, your Honor. He was coerced into writing this absurd confession. There is no other way. Besides, Captain Richardson was a known traitor to the British army. He obviously sought to discredit Lord John only to escape the gallows himself. I have proof." 

As I slid another letter on the desk, the judge stared at me with his small, dark eyes under his powdered wig. With a sigh clearly expressing his annoyance, he put his glasses on and opened it. 

"Captain Richardson sent this letter to Lord John's family with the clear intent to blackmail the Duke of Pardloe, his lordship's brother. Certainly, this is enough to dismiss the case and free Lord John." 

A trickle of sweat was running down my spine while the judge skimmed the document. It was worth a try, but I didn't hold much hope. John was a British officer and North Carolina was under the Congress’ control. 

Altman set the letter down, and pursed his lips. "I fail to see how this can help his lordship. Captain Richardson might have been as you describe, but since he died in the sinking of his ship in our harbor, he is not the one standing trial. Lord John Grey is. As this letter does not explicitly say that he is falsely accused of being a pederast, I'm afraid it doesn't have much weight against his own words. Words that sound like the sincere regrets of a man who wishes to repent his sins to the earthly justice in the hope of saving his soul from eternal damnation." 

"If you knew him like I–" 

The judge jerked his hand to stop me from speaking my thoughts. 

"Mrs. Fraser. Save any further arguments you may have as a moral witness of his lordship's character for the trial if you wish. In the meantime, you will be able to see him like everybody else: at the pillory for two hours every day until the thirteenth of October."

"His trial's in a month? But he'll never survive! You are condemning him to death before he even has a chance to defend himself! You are forcing me to reveal–"

"Enough!" The judge's face turned red as he stood up, and laid both hands flat on his desk. "I only agreed to receive you out of respect for your husband, but let me remind you that Lord John Grey is a British officer captured in our good city of–" Two sharp knocks on the door cut the judge off mid-diatribe. "What now?!"

The door opened and the junior clerk rushed in toward the judge. Casting a sly glance at me, he whispered urgently in his ear. The furor drained at once from the judge's face. "Please, stay here, Mrs. Fraser," he said severely before leaving his office. 

"What is this about?" I asked. I could feel my heart racing. Something had gone wrong. A sentiment that the clerk confirmed as he offered me a drink.

"I'm afraid the weather's turning dreadful outside," the clerk said, reaching for the bottle of brandy on the console between the two windows, which were rattling with each gust of wind.  

"I don't care about the weather. What I care about is to see Lord John, and I'm done taking no for an answer."

The clerk let out a weak strangled cry as I jerked the glass of brandy out of his hand, sending it crashing against the judge’s desk, wetting the documents. Taking advantage of the moment of panic that this caused, I darted out of the office, down the flight of stairs, and out into the street. 

The weather had indeed turned terrible, but my whole body was burning, and I welcomed the fresh sting of the north-eastern wind and the lashing rain on my face to help keep my nerves cool enough to think. 

Since we'd learned of an American frigate taking the Palas off the Carolina coast, and the subsequent transfer of the prisoners to the Wilmington jail, we'd known that to rescue John, we would have to convince the judge that he was a spy working for our side. It was a risky maneuver, both for Jamie and John. William, of course, had been the most difficult to convince. For him, accusing his stepfather of treason was no better than stabbing him in the heart. However, given that the majority of John's family had already switched sides, we deemed it the best strategy to free him, short of taking the jail ourselves. Discovering the existence of this written confession had thrown a curveball in our plan.

In the five minutes it took me to reach the prison, the rain soaked through my clothes. The inclement weather prompted the quick opening of the door, but convincing the guards to open the one leading to the cells proved a more challenging endeavour.

I was threatening the two men with being drafted into Jamie's regiment–which he wasn't commanding anymore, a detail of insignificant matter at the moment–hoping that William was not so far inside that he wouldn’t hear me. 

As a stepson, he'd been allowed to visit John in jail. By now, he would have told him of our plan to get him out, and, I hoped, convinced him to go along with it. Nothing was less certain. John’s stubbornness rivaled Jamie’s when honor came in the way of logic and good sense. I knew a part of him would rather die hanged for sodomy than live as a traitor. But after thirty years of living with the most stubborn Scotsman on Earth, I also knew how to break through those thick skulls and make them see reason. 

“Will you open the goddamn door?!” I shouted. 

The door creaked open at last.

"William, I am so glad you're here," I said as he immediately stepped toward me and gently pulled me into a rare embrace. 

"Mother Claire," he said, breathing shakily. "I'm afraid we are too late."

My heart skipped a beat at those words. I tried to push him away, to look at him in the eye, to see if he were serious or merely advancing one of our crazier plans forward––the one to fake John's death with ether, knowing at once that it wasn’t the case for the simple reason that I hadn't given William a vial of ether. Therefore, John was ever seriously injured, or…

"Let go of me," I muttered, pushing harder to break free, which I did for a few seconds before William caught my arm again. 

"I know you want to see him, but it is not a sight one can unsee... what they did to him is..." 

"What did they do to him?" I asked, my voice weakening with each word to end only in a whisper. William’s face was pale but his eyes were red, like he was holding back tears. 

"He was hit by a rock in the head this morning at the pillory. Someone in the crowd, they said. Although, no one saw who. Papa collapsed upon reaching his cell. He never woke up." 

A sudden shiver ran down my spine, like a cold, viscous eel was wrapping itself around my heart. I closed my eyes for a moment, forcing a deep breath in and out of my lungs. Then, I squeezed the eel and threw it into a pit of fire. From what William had said, John wasn’t dead; he was in a coma. 

"I am an army surgeon, William. I've already seen many things that I can't unsee. It never stopped me before. It won't now either. I came here to see your father, and damn you, I will see him."

Releasing his hold on me, William turned toward the guard and dropped a few coins in his hand. The man grunted but looked askance as he granted me passage. 

The inside of the jail was as chilly and damp as I remembered it. 

Bleak daylight filtered from a single high and narrow, barred window in each cell on either side of a long corridor. Prisoners stared at me as I walked down between the guard and William. There were some lewd remarks, some threats to do some despicable things to my person, that William silenced with a venomous stare. An object clanked and bounced on the dirty floor, merely a foot behind us. At once, a nauseating smell of piss and excrements filled the corridor. 

At the moment, in North Carolina, it was hard to know which was worse; being a captured British officer––even a former one––or an accused pederast. John was both and, for that reason, he had been placed in a cell alone at the very end of the corridor. That thought brought little relief. If having his own cell kept John safe from the other inmates, it offered no protection against the guards––who were not that hard to bribe to begin with. 

As I walked down the dim corridor I could not help but think that John had been forced to walk the same path for his daily public shaming. Two distinctive silhouettes were standing in front of his cell. The conferring voices were the judge's and, much to my alarm, Dr. Johnson's. The man had a notorious habit of being constantly drunk after noon–and the way he was leaning heavily on the wall confirmed that today was no exception–so the fact that they hadn't waited until tomorrow morning for him to be sober showed the seriousness of the situation. 

"Who in hell let you in?" As the judge moved forward to block my path, William quickly stepped in front of me. 

"I did," he said, a growl in his voice.

The judge froze at once as he met the young earl of Ellesmere's gaze. A Fraser's gaze, really. I'd seen Jamie driving the fear of God into men with it. And his growl would make a tiger flee with its tail between its legs. 

The judge was no tiger. "This is no place for a woman," he said, stepping back enough to allow me a first look into the cell. 

It was more of a dungeon, dug a few feet into the ground with a small barred window near the twelve foot ceiling to provide air and light. A weak glow from an oil lamp hanging on a hook inside to the right side of the heavy door illuminated the room. 

As I stepped in, a cough escaped me as the sharp scent of human misery hit my nose. 

"Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ," I whispered.

Chapter Text

Shock. Fear. Anger. 

As I stood in front of the cell, the reality of John’s plight hit me like a gutpunch. Dazed, I leaned against the doorframe, remembering Valley Forge and the shock as I discovered him standing at attention in the middle of Jamie’s soldiers, barely recognizable under his rebel get-up, dirty, short-haired, a black patch covering his left eye. The fear that Jamie would notice him as well. But it was the anger I remembered the most. 

Against John for telling Jamie that we had consummated our arranged and short-lived marriage during a drunken blaze of emotional agony, and then for getting himself caught in such a predicament that he had to pass himself off as a patriot to avoid capture, and miserably failing at it. 

Against Jamie for the brute force with which he'd punched John. An eighth of inch to the right, and the blow would have killed his friend there and then, a poor reward for saving me from being arrested and hanged for espionage while we all thought he’d died at sea. 

But the true anger was for myself, for being powerless to protect John as he lay in Jamie’s tent, awaiting the inevitable moment when Jamie would have to hand him over to Washington for questioning, potentially leading to his execution. No matter their disagreements, Jamie would never have been able to forgive himself.

It wasn't anger that I was feeling now. It wasn't even outrage. I was past that. 

To see John lying eyes closed on a filthy bed sack so thin he might as well be lying on the floor, blood dripping from a gash on his forehead, running down his bruised and swollen face, soaking an unkempt beard that reached down his chest… his shirt, breeches, and socks, all soiled and muddy and torn and reeking… it broke my heart. Why? 

You bloody well know why, the cold voice of logic cut in. There was only one reason John would have signed his confession. 

"Blast you and your damn romantic hero complex," I cursed through my teeth. 

Outrage coming back with a vengeance, I stepped forward and leaned over his face. 

It was hard to detect, but it was there, a cold, slow, and shallow breath against my cheek. His skin was cold as well, and moist to the touch. Not from sweat though, but from the remnants of a bucket of icy water thrown at him, probably to stir him up. A mental image of John’s condition formed in my head. The gash on his head was large but superficial. I doubted he’d suffered a traumatic brain injury as a result of it, but he was hypothermic, bradycardic, and unresponsive to stimuli. Such a deep coma––and the abruptness of his collapse––could be the consequence of a stroke. I needed to get him out now. 

I turned a dark, angry gaze back to the trio of men.

"You killed him, bloody bastard! He was innocent, and you killed him!" Standing up, I raised my arm above my head, grazing my fingers against the low ceiling. I would have slapped the Judge hadn't William caught my hand before it reached its target. 

"Mother Claire, please ... get a hold on yourself, if only for papa."

"Oh, your father wouldn't have minded, believe me!"

As the rage in my voice froze William, Dr. Johnson stumbled inside the cell and leaned over John’s chest to validate, or more probably invalidate, my assertion. I collapsed in his arms, emitting a pained groan–it was the only way I could think of to distract Johnson’s attention–when a gust of air snuffed out the candle. 

As darkness swallowed the cell, I thanked God, the sky, and all the saints for whoever’s timely divine aid it was, while the judge, muttering a curse, quickly retrieved another lantern from the corridor. 

A weaker glow cast deep shadows into the cell. Johnson was still at John’s bedside, holding his wrist, but his eyes were on me, his brow furrowed. Please, I mouthed, knowing Johnson’s profound humanity and hatred for violence.

"Is he dead or not?" the judge asked in a tone filled with annoyance. 

"May God have mercy on this poor sinner’s soul," Dr. Johnson replied, crossing himself before covering John's body with a filthy blanket. Then he turned to me and William, and humbly casting down his eyes, he extended his sincerest sympathies for our loss.

William’s body stiffened. So did mine, but not for the same reason. William was fighting a terrible pain to keep himself upright out of a sense of dignity; I, on the other hand, felt like a bull in the stalls, ready to rush through the door. With proper care, stroke victims could sometimes recover, and if I weren’t ready to give up yet on John, I was dreadfully aware that every single minute counted. I had to get him warm, first thing. The blanket covering him was no way near enough. 

"If you would follow me to my office," the judge said, offering us the escape on a silver platter, "I will sign the death certificate so you can make arrangements for his lordship’s burial while the guards bring his body to the morgue." 

His eyes burning with a combination of fury and anguish, William directed a vindictive glare at the Judge. "Your men dishonored my father when he was alive. They humiliated him. Beat him. I will not give anyone the opportunity to desecrate his body," he said before easily lifting John in his arms, silent tears running down his cheeks. 

Most of the prisoners stayed silent as we walked the corridor in a procession behind William. Some crossed themselves, and whispered a prayer. A few others looked down at their feet, maybe out of shame, pity, or sadness, I couldn’t tell. John wasn’t one of them, but he was a prisoner. Nothing was thrown at us this time. 

The rain had stopped, and a small crowd had gathered outside the jail. Which didn’t surprise me at all. I often wondered if it was our astounding capacity to spread gossip faster than light that had given an evolutionary advantage to Homo sapiens over our cousin the Neanderthal. 

"Arh, so that's true, then. That British sodomite's dead? What a shame he'll nah swing. Here's a good warning lost to those like him still breathing, if you ask me," a man said while William lay John in the back of the Doctor's wagon and covered his body with the blanket. "They'll get what's coming for 'em soon enough,'' a woman said. "Still, I'd like hav' saw him hang for all the hurt their lot caused," another man replied, prompting more disappointed and angry remarks from the crowd. 

Some of the rabble were demanding to burn John's body to send him faster to Hell. Aware of the agitation brewing, Dr. Johnson climbed on the driver’s seat, helped by a guard to avoid falling back into a puddle of mud, and set us in movement.

“Where should I drive you, Mrs. Fraser?” he asked, his voice more steady than his legs, while William followed the judge back to his office. 

“The stables near the Red Falcon, if you please,” I replied, digging my nails into the wooden seat to keep myself still. 

Chapter Text

The crowd didn’t follow us. The resuming rain and the guards scattered them. As we stopped behind the Red Falcon Inn ten minutes later, nobody was waiting for us but Jamie and Ian, who’d seen us turning around the corner from inside the lobby. 

After paying Johnson his fee, and expressing my gratitude for his unexpected help, we began our journey back to Fraser's Ridge. It was a three-day trip for a skilled rider with a good horse. Under our circumstances, it was likely to take us triple that time, maybe more if the roads were washed out by the last few days of rain.

As we reached the city’s outskirts, Jamie poked his head inside the wagon, water dripping from his soaked hair. "William’s riding behind us. How's John doing?”

As a surgeon, I've too often been in the unpleasant position of having to deliver unfavorable diagnostics; this one felt devastatingly different. John was wedged in the cramped space between our luggage and camping equipment. I had covered him with every blanket we had, wetted his dehydrated lips, and cleaned the gash on his head and the blood from his face. Unfortunately, he’d given no response to any of these stimuli and his pupils were almost fully dilated. 

"He's still breathing," I said, my voice shaking with emotion as I met Jamie's eyes. 

“How long?” he whispered.

Tears burst in mine. "Ten minutes, one hour, one day... I can't say."

Jamie's jaw clenched as he swallowed hard. "Ian kens a safe place to set camp for the night. T'is no' too far, he said."

My throat felt too tight to answer, so I gave him a small nod, and resumed wetting John's lips, hoping that he would somehow perceive my presence and find solace in it. 

We reached Ian’s campsite half an hour later, about two hundred yards off the main road, hidden from it by a thick curtain of birches growing near a riverbank. 

The rain had thankfully stopped but everything was damp. Using our reserve of wood we’d kept inside the covered wagon, Jamie managed to get a small fire to burn. We carefully carried John next to it, making him as comfortable as he could be on a thick bed sack. He was still with us. 

While Ian and Jamie gathered more wood, I set myself to the task of preparing our dinner, even though I knew nobody would have much of an appetite tonight, myself included. But the day had been long, and stomachs would need to be filled no matter the somber mood. As the carrots and potatoes started to boil, I glanced at William. The young man was sitting next to John. Holding his hand, he was confessing mischiefs he’d done in his young life. Mischiefs that essentially involved pilfering food from the kitchen with his cousin, Henry, for the most minor one. And for the most serious, eluding the watch after getting into trouble at a tavern with Henry again, by plunging into the Thames, subsequently spending the night at a brothel, and fabricating an excuse for their tardiness for duty the next morning. 

William chuckled quietly while reminiscing about those moments, hoping that somehow John could hear him and join in the laughter or admonish him. "Why did he write this letter?" he asked as I brought him a bowl of stew. "How could Richardson convince him to do this? Short of being tortured, I cannot see him yielding to such an abhorrent blackmail. Was he, Mother Claire?"

Seeing tears stream down William’s face caused my eyes to water as I hesitated to give him a clinical answer. The sheer amount of bruising on John's torso showed he'd been beaten repeatedly by the guards during his short stay in Wilmington's jail. Short being an all too relative term under those conditions. I hadn’t seen older injuries, however, which made me think that Richardson had treated John well, physically at least. He had lost weight though, by lack of physical activity and sufficient food. 

"There are other ways than torture to convince a man to do things he wouldn't do otherwise," Jamie said with a sharp edge to his voice. 

A cold shiver ran down my spine as Jamie muttered a curse in Gaelic, the shadow of Black Jack Randall and Wentworth burning dark in his gaze.

William's eyes squinted. "You've known torture, haven't you?"

"Aye. I personally ken that evil..." Jamie whispered. Then, much to my surprise, he let out a deep, relaxing breath, took out his pocket flask and handed it to William, saying, "Did John ever tell ye how we met?"

"He was the governor of a jail in Scotland where you were a prisoner after the Rising. Are you saying that papa had you tortured there? Because if you are, I swear–"

"Nah. That’s no what I meant, lad,” Jamie interrupted. “Although he had me flogged at some point. He had no choice, mind ye. I'd brought the punishment on my head––or back––by my actions alone. And if I’m honest about it, I think that it was torture for him to inflict such cruel punishment on my person, because cruel, your stepfather never was. But Ardsmuir wasna where we first got acquainted, him and me, and Claire for what mattered.”

“What do you mean? He knew you both before you were imprisoned? I thought… Oh, he did say that he’d spent some time in Scotland in his youth, after his father’s death. Was it then?”

“A few years after that, but aye, it was when he was young. On a night not so different as this one. Maybe a wee bit cooler. What d'ye think, Sassenach?" 

"I don’t know. Honestly, it's not the temperature that I remember the most of that night," I said, a bit troubled to be thrown thirty-five years back in time by a simple question and the memories that flooded my mind. It was very possible that Brianna had been conceived that night. 

"It was four months before Culloden," Jamie said, grabbing the hand that I was unconsciously pressing to my belly. "John was a few years younger than ye are now." 

Four months, it was about that indeed. 

"He said that he was sixteen, but he was scrawny for his age, still had a bairn's face. However, what he lacked in weight and size, he certainly made up for in bravery."

"And foolishness," I added, shaking my head. “Recklessness.”

"Maybe ye want to tell the whole story yerself, Sassenach?"

"Oh, no, please. Keep going."

Jamie smirked. "His brother's regiment was encamped a few miles from us, but the forest there was dense and steep in places. He said that he was out hunting for food that afternoon when he thought he saw smoke in the distance. That piqued his curiosity and he’d waited for the cover of the night to come back to investigate."

"Alone?" William cast a baffled glance at John. "And he tells me I'm reckless."

"Well, it takes one to know one.”

Jamie cast an annoyed glance at me for interrupting again.

"He was as silent as a cat. I'll give him that. The wee bugger passed right between my men, snuck his way a hundred yards into our camp, until he saw me, alone, taking a pish!" Jamie made one of his Scottish noises for disdain, but there was admiration in his eyes. "My face was on all the broadsheets as I was wanted dead or alive, but he was smart enough to ken the odds of taking me alive were naught."

William's eyes went wide. "He tried to kill you?" 

"Felt like a rabid badger had jumped on my back." Jamie leaned toward the young man to show the faint scar John's knife had left next to his right jugular vein. 

"Man, an eighth of an inch to the left, and you were done." William's grin transformed into a grimace. "And incidentally, so was I, I guess." 

"Weird to think, isn't it?" I said, smiling faintly. In truth, it was a chilling thought. So much of our lives depended on that near miss. Jamie's life for starters. Brianna's. Frank's too. If I had gone back to the twentieth century childless and having witnessed Jamie's murder… knowing that my life in Scotland was gone forever. Maybe Frank and I could have made it work. John’s, for sure. No matter his age, Jamie’s men would have certainly killed him out of pain and vengeance. Would Geneva Dunsanny still be alive? And her sister as well since she wouldn’t have sailed to Jamaica to join John in his posting of Governor, and therefore wouldn’t have caught the bloody flux. The possibilities––and questions––were endless, but none of them mattered to us now.

"What happened, then?" William asked, more interested in the past than in possible futures. "I mean, you both survived the assault, obviously. Did he slip back into the night like a cat?" 

Jamie scoffed. "If ye think that's possible, lad, ye're as foolish as him. He broke his left arm freeing himself from my grasp. The pain was enough to knock him senseless for a few seconds, and by the time he stood up again, he was surrounded by a dozen verra pissed Highlanders." 

"So you took him prisoner, then. Uncle Hal must have burnt the forest down to find him."

"We were preparing for battle and had no means or desire to drag a prisoner with us. That said, I couldn't let the wee bugger go free either. He knew the location of our camp. And I needed the location of his."

William's gaze darkened as he started to comprehend why Jamie was telling this story now. "What did you do to him? You said it yourself. He was only a child."

"Aye. But it was war. If he'd been a spy, I had every right to hang him, no matter his age." Jamie grabbed his dirk that he'd put next to him while we ate our dinner, and as he had thirty-five years ago, he put the tip in the flames. 

"He was a brave laddie. My men were holding him tight on his feet, but he barely flinched when I got this less than an inch to his eye, swearing that he wouldna talk. If ye look behind his left ear, ye might see the scar it left."

"So you tortured him..." William's mouth distorted in a grimace of horror. 

"I didna go further than that. For once, Claire would have killed me first if I did."

"I certainly would have at least knocked you on the head with the first pot or stone I could put my hand on."

"And for two, I wasna ready to inflict on him the kind of pain that had been once inflicted to my flesh… I might be a lot of things, but I’m no that cruel either. That evil, it eats yer heart and yer soul and everyone ye love with it."

William remembered to breathe upon hearing Jamie’s words. Then, he also remembered that he was still holding the flask and took a long gulp of whiskey. 

Jamie could speak no more. He nodded at me, silently asking me to say the rest if I wished to. But did I? The emotions were high on my side too. And it was an embarrassing memory. But William was looking at me, silently begging for me to find the strength to reveal the rest of the story.

"Fortunately, John had misunderstood my situation. He thought I was a captured English lady at the mercy of a savage band of Scotchmen. All Jamie had to do to convince him to talk was to threaten my dignity in front of him. In the end, between his honor and mine, he chose to save mine." 

William closed his eyes and exhaled. 

"Then, Jamie sent his men to check that he'd told the truth, and they left him tied to a tree one mile down his camp where, I imagine, English soldiers found him the next morning."

"So, that's where it comes from," William said with a faint smile on his face.

"What?" I asked.

"When uncle Hal took me with his regiment to get some experience of a soldier's life, before I left, papa told me not to be reckless in seeking glory, less I wanted to end up tied to a tree or worse." 

"Well, it's sound advice," I said, as William looked troubled.

"He must have been so scared. A whole night tied to a tree? Injured, cold, hungry, wondering if he was going to be eaten by wolves. I certainly would have pissed my pants in his place, knowing that the next day would even be much worse... When uncle Hal learnt about what he'd done... I've seen soldiers flogged for less."

"But he wasn't one yet, and wolves were already quite extinct in Scotland at the time," I said, realizing nonetheless that I’d never actually given a thought of what had happened to John after our encounter. He was safe from being eaten by a beast, but men were no beast.

"Arh, nobody woulda dare touch a hair on this wee bugger’s silky head, I ken that now. The Duke’s always been verra protective of his little brother,” Jamie said, putting my sudden doubt to rest. 

William, on the other hand, was far from feeling relieved by the answer. "How could he ever forgive you? Let alone becoming your friend after all this?"

"Well, that change of heart didna happen overnight. Before my men took him, John recognized that I'd forced a debt of honor on him, and that once that debt would be paid, he'd killed me. Give ye, takes some courage to issue threats like these from a position of weakness. John might be many things, but a coward, he never was. I admired that." 

While Jamie unraveled the past to William, I settled with John's head on my lap again, his hand in mine. It wasn’t as cold anymore. He was holding on, for now. Some patients waking up from a deep coma said that they could hear people talking around them while they lay unconscious. Maybe John was lingering on Earth to listen to Jamie’s voice, telling their adventures one last time. 

A cold draft of air brushed my soul at the thought. "Do not go gentle into that good night," I whispered, squeezing his fingers as Dylan Thomas’s poem came back to me. Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

“The Duke then spared Jamie’s life at Culloden,” I said, nodding toward Jamie to prompt him to keep talking. As much as John, maybe, I needed to hear the sound of his voice.

“I escaped the British army for some time after it,” Jamie continued, “surviving in the familiar wilderness of my own land, like a beast, living in a cave, without Claire to bring light to my days… Just before Culloden, I’d sent her home, to Boston, so our child would be safe from the repercussions of my actions, even years after the end of the Rising… The army was still looking for me, harrassing my brother-in-law’s family. So I..." Jamie paused, fixing his eyes on the darkness in front of him. "I surrendered and was sent to Ardsmuir, where I was rejoined wi’ my fellow clansmen, including my godfather, Murtagh Fitzghiborn, who was severely sick. A couple years later, John was sent to replace the prison governor. A colonel Quarry, ye might ken him.”

“Harry Quarry? He was one of papa’s best friends. He died two years ago from a heart attack.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sincerely.”

“When they learnt of his passing, Papa and Uncle Hal spent a whole night drinking and laughing their asses off as they read some vulgar poetry… I was quite shocked, but papa said that Quarry would have wanted them to honor his life in such peculiar fashion.”

Jamie snorted, his mouth twitching in a repressed smile. “From what I ken of the man, he’d have been drinking with them if that had been possible. I wouldna even put past him to leave written instructions for yer stepfather or yer uncle to do what they did to honor his life,” he said, looking down at John. Sadness came back in his gaze. 

We all fell into a deep silence, none of us voicing what had to be a common thought. How would John like us to remember him? 

“Back in Ardsmuir,” Jamie resumed after a moment in a more solemn atmosphere. “John needed my cooperation to get the prisoners to do the work, while I needed his compassion to ensure our survival. And out of those shared needs, an odd friendship formed, as far as a warden and a prisoner can be friends. At least, there was some respect earned on both sides. When the prison closed to become a garrison, John arranged for me to do the rest of my sentence at Helwater instead of being sent to the Tower, to clear the debt for himself, he said. The rest ye ken already. Enough of it, anyway."

William's mouth was open. He closed it when he noticed, but the shock of the revelation lingered on his tired face. "So you're saying that I owe my life both to your carelessness and his recklessness, is that so?"

"And their compassion too,” I added.

William swallowed hard and nodded. “Before we came to the colonies, with my regiment, he told me of his wish to be cremated, in case he died abroad, and for his ashes to be brought back to England and buried next to his father’s tomb.”

“And we will respect his pragmatic wishes,” Jamie said as I felt John's fingers twitching.

“But maybe not today…” I said, delicately lowering John’s head onto a small pillow.

"Sassenach?" Jamie inquired as I leaned over his chest to listen to his heart with a mixture of relief and growing astonishment for the ensuing minutes. A strong heartbeat, a faint rasping sound emanating from his lungs, and as his eyes fluttered open, a gurgling noise. "Help me roll him on his left side, quick!"

Chapter Text

We’d barely put John in a lateral position when bile shot out of his mouth. His stomach was quite empty to begin with, and the spasms eased fast, but the exertion left him shaking and panting.  

“It’s all right, John. Try to breathe deep and slow for me, will you?” I said, rubbing my hand along his spine to comfort him and to keep him from rolling on his back just yet. Standing over him, Jamie, William, and Ian joined me in a chorus of encouragement that echoed in the night. 

Cries of joy followed when John's eyes fluttered open, heavy and unfocused. 

"What is he saying?" William asked as I washed John’s face with a wet cloth. 

I leaned my ear close to his mouth to listen. “Don't let them, I think."

"Don't let them do what, papa?"

"Promise… you won’t… let ‘em…" John whispered as intense shivers seized him. Perplexed, I lay him in a supine position and tucked him under a blanket. 

"Why is he shaking so much?" Ian asked. "It's nah that cold, Auntie."

“I’m not certain…” I replied while John, eyes half closed, kept on mumbling. 

"He's nah speaking to us, Sassenach. But at least, he's speaking. Canna be bad, can it?"

"No, it's not bad at all," I said as I put the back of my hand on John’s forehead. He was running a slight fever. It was nothing alarming considering that we were thinking about his funeral just a moment ago. 

Jesus H. Rosevelt Christ… Maybe for the first time in my life, I was truly and utterly baffled. I thought again about Nayawenne’s prophecy, wondering if I had somehow convinced John’s soul to stay on Earth, but dismissed it almost in the same breath. I’d seen enough patients waking up after surgery to know that John was struggling with the mental and physical aftereffects of anesthesia waning in his system. The singular issue was that no substance in this century could induce a state of apparent coma like this. Unless someone from the future had administered a strong anesthesia agent to John. But who? Aside from the guards, William, the Judge, and... 

Dr. Johnson. It must have been–could only have been–him. The man had helped us save John, after all. And I knew for a certain fact that if I were trapped in the eighteenth century without the man I loved, I’d be drinking through my days as well. It was the most likely explanation. 

Wendigo Donner and his fellows, now Johnson... Exactly how many travelers were currently living the birth of the United States trying to change the past in the hope of a better future? 

That question had the potential to keep me awake at night, but for now, it wasn’t anywhere close to the top of my priorities. John was my main concern. His pulse was strong and fast, but his breathing was uneasy to the point of being painful. He likely had bruised or broken ribs. “Help me prop him up,” I said, lifting him in a sitting position with so much ease that it scared me. But at least, his breathing improved. 

"Well, the good news is, I think he's out of danger,” I said once we’d installed him as comfortably as possible, with bags and pillows supporting him. “William? Will you give me a cup of water, please?” 

Startled by the freshness against his dehydrated lips, John opened his eyes again, and gazed at me, blinking in an obvious effort to make my face come into focus. 

"It's me, Claire," I said while he sipped the water, hoping he'd recognize my voice. 

“Shit…” 

I chuckled. Not exactly the word I was expecting, but then, patients waking up from surgery couldn’t be held responsible for whatever came out of their mouth either. And John was indeed running a fever on top of it. That alone could explain his confusion.

"Ye're safe, ye wee bugger," Jamie said with an affectionate snort as he squeezed John’s left shoulder. 

John swiftly turned his head toward Jamie then closed his eyes tight, clenching his left arm against his chest with a wince of pain. 

“Let me see your arm,” I said, my concern rising again. A broken bone shouldn’t cause a fever but John was malnourished, and that made him more vulnerable to infection. 

But as I gently grabbed his wrist, John pulled it closer to himself and kicked the blankets away.

“Don’t…” he said, rolling on his side again but lacking any strength to avoid falling. Jamie caught him and pushed him back up against the bags.

“Let Mother Claire see what’s wrong with your arm, papa,” William said as Jamie held John’s shoulders to keep him steady. “I've always heard him say that his arm could guess the weather with a stunning precision since it was broken during a battle. I just didn't know that the battle was with you.” 

John lifted his eyes toward William. "Tom…" 

"Your old valet? What about him?"

"Pi…char’... oh, God no..." John suddenly squeezed his eyes shut, his breathing becoming more erratic.

Jamie let out a gasp of mixed surprise and pain as John twisted in his arms and elbowed him into the crotch in an attempt to free himself from his grasp. Curses in Gaelic reverberated in the night, along with promises to break bones if John didn’t become more reasonable. Threats that had little chances of success since nobody had ever calmed down by being told to calm down.

“Sassenach!” Jamie called. He was holding John tight against him, circling his body with his strong arms, but stretching his neck out of the way as John tried to headbutt him. 

How long could John hold this struggle in his state? I wondered as Ian took a hit to his nose. 

“Try not to put pressure over his ribcage,” I warned as William crashed back next to the fire, kicked in the shoulder. Ian threw all his weight on John’s legs as they struggled to keep him on the ground. 

“Bloody hell…” I muttered, reaching for the bottle of ether in my medical bag. I was wary of sedating John again, especially since I didn’t know what Johnson had administered to him. But John didn’t give any sign that he would snap out of his panic attack any time soon. Not soon enough for his own sake or ours, in any case.

As John fell limp in Jamie’s arms, we collectively exhaled a sigh of relief.

“Rabid badger, you said?” William muttered, favoring his shoulder, looking distraught for a second before rage fired back in his eyes. “If I get my hands on that Tom Pilchard, whoever that might be, I swear I’ll–"

"Break yer hand, that’s what ye’ll do," Jamie interrupted, lying John down carefully before getting up. "Tom Pilchard is the name of a cannon, not a man."

"A cannon?" William asked incredulously.

"Aye, a canon. It exploded near him during a battle in Germany, a long time ago. Almost killed him, from what I was told by Quarry and wee Tom Byrd while we...” Jamie’s voice trailed off as he limped toward the fire and crouched stiffly to put a few more sticks in it. 

“While you what?” William asked. 

“Arh… that’s another long story. But like for what happened in Germany, I doubt it has anything to do with Richardson and his current situation. Next time he awakes, ye might want to give him a moment for him to realize where he is before touching his arm again, Sassenach.”

I nodded, raking my hand in my hair and exhaling deeply, still feeling a bit shocked by John’s violent reaction. How could I have missed it? I’d seen the scars on his chest and arm, although I remembered being quite indifferent about them at the time. John was a soldier and, as such, had fought in numerous wars. War killed and maimed. War left scars, visible and invisible. John had just woken up in the middle of one, and I couldn’t help but feel angry at myself for making it worse. 

Pushing those useless feelings of culpability aside, I kneeled next to John again and, after checking that he was unresponsive, proceeded with my examination. 

“His arm is not broken,” I said as I joined the three men around the fire a little later. “I cannot rule out a hairline fracture, but there’s no swelling or inflammation.” 

“Why did he react like he did, then?” William asked.

“I don’t know for certain, but surviving a cannon explosion sounds like a dreadful experience.” I turned toward Jamie. “You were the one who knew him back then. Did he seem to you unusually temperamental or displayed any odd behaviours?”

Jamie’s shoulders tensed as he considered my question. His mouth opened, and he seemed about to say something. Then, his shoulders sagged and he shook his head. “Bloody bugger…” he whispered before letting out a snort. “Odd, you ask? Aye, ye might say so, I guess. As for losing his temper… aye, he did that too, at one occasion at Helwater, but he wouldna want me to share any details of it, and to be honest wi’ ye, I dinna want either.”

"So, he was your friend,” William said, “Even if you were a..."

"Jacobite. Aye. And he was my friend, even if he was a redcoat."

William exhaled deeply and gazed at the flames rising high above the logs. "In that case, the reason I haven't heard you claim even once that he is not what he confessed to be in that letter, if only to defend his honor, as his friend... I guess it's because…” William raised his eyes to look at Jamie’s. “It's true, isn't it?"

Bloody effing hell… Jamie and I had expected the question for some time now, but we hadn't agreed on what to reply yet. Turned out, we didn't have to.

"What importance does it have to ye that lord John's a two spirit man?" Ian asked as he came back to sit by the fire with us. 

William’s brows shot up. So did mine. 

"A what?" Jamie asked.

"T'is nah somethin’ shameful to have two spirits for the Indians. Quite the contrary. T'is a great gift from the Creator to have both a male and a female spirit in one's soul. As a matter of fact, I think ye're one of them, Auntie Claire, 'cause ye do a man's work, ye being a surgeon, and ye curse like a man too, if you pardon me saying so. T’is nah yer fault, though. And it wouldna be healthy to keep yer male spirit from expressing himself. But for love, t'is yer female spirit that talks, like for his Lordship. That's why ye ended up marrying each other, even for a brief time. ‘Cause all yer four spirits were looking in the same direction."

Jamie coughed up to cover his embarrassment as I was quite unable to dart a look toward him. 

"Ye're all right, Uncle? I swear I'm no insulting Auntie. T'is a true honor to be like her and for a one spirit man to love her whole speaks for the bravery and strength of yer own soul.” 

"Is that how Indians see homosexuality? Having two spirits? Like twins?" I quickly asked to keep Ian from digging himself further into that hole as Jamie’s face was glowing dangerously red with no assist from the embers in the fire. 

Ian shook his head. "Twins look alike, think alike, love alike, like the Beardsleys. Two spirit people have both male and female eyes to see the world, so they can understand it better than most of us. We're the crippled, ye see, having only one set." 

"Like the yin and the yang," I said, admiring the clarity of the Native Indian's vision of the complexity of the human nature. 

"I dinna ken what is ying or yan, but what I ken, though, t'is barbaric to hang two-spirits people for their gift. And ye were speaking of torture earlier? T'is torture to them to deny them to be able to be whole. Some can go totally mad, ye ken, sick, even die." 

"So it's true," said William sadly.

"Well, doesna matter how many spirits inhabit your stepfather's body," Jamie said, "He's a good man, a good friend, and I ken he was a good father to ye."

“Uncle Hal must have known too. They're so close to each other that I was certain when I was young that they could read each other's mind. But how did Richardson know?" 

Jamie's brow furrowed deeply and a long, growling curse in Gaelic escaped his lips. "John wasna the target of all this conspiracy. The Duke was. And like ye said, it's no secret that those two are close. Anyone going after the Duke would ken the best way is through John. Does the name Twelvetree mean something to ye?” 

William shook his head. 

"Anyone in London ken there's bad blood between the two families, although most of it happened before ye were born."

"How bad?" William asked.

Jamie snorted. "As bad as duels can get." 

As if war wasn’t violent enough, duels, now. Why should I even be surprised? Knowing John’s notion of honor and bravery, I had, in fact, no difficulty imagining him involved in such dreadful events. 

"The Twelvetrees brothers were three. I was told that the duke killed the first one in a duel over a personal matter. I was there when John killed the second over a muddy business of treason, murder, and espionage. But the thing that matters to us right now, is that the man accused John of being a sodomite.” 

"He knew?" William asked, distressed.

"T'was an easy insult to throw and most probably, nobody took it seriously since the accusations of treason against his person were far more damaging."

"But assuming that man knew. He could have said so to his second, for starters. Do you happen to remember the man's name?"

Jamie's eyes squeezed as he searched his memory. "I ken a Dr. Hunter was there but he wasna Twelvetree's second..."

"Denny?" Ian asked, surprised.

Jamie quickly shook his head. "Nah. Another Hunter, older. I dinna ken if they are related, but John was scared out of his wits that the man would cut him in pieces to study anatomy if he died. Made me swear I'd bring his body safe back home if such a case arose. Twelvetree’s second, he was military. A Captain... Honey."

"Never heard the name," William said. "Do you know anything else about him? Which regiment he was part of?"

Jamie slightly shook his head. "What I recalled is that after the duel, the Twelvetrees name was disgraced. I dinna ken there's anyone in London who has more reasons to hate the Grey brothers than the last standing brother. Would make sense he’s the man behind Richardson, is what I say." 

"And how Richardson knew Papa's weakness."

"It's nah weakness, lad," Ian said with an irritated tone. "It's just who he is. Like ye being a bastard is no weakness from yours. Merely a fact ye've got to live with."

The day had been grueling enough for such words, and by the redness of his face, William didn’t have much self-control left in his Fraser’s blood. I put my hand on his arm. "What Ian wants to say, It's that John couldn't choose his preference in the matter no more than you could choose the color of your eyes."

“Nobody dies from having blue eyes,” William muttered, fists clenched.

"You need to go back to London to warn your uncle. He needs to ken that his brother’s alive and safe, and also that the last Twelvetree is more likely the one behind all this.”

William nodded. “Tomorrow, as we reach the fork for Salem, I'll go North for Norfolk–”

“No,” I said, my heart making a leap in my chest. “I… heard there was a blockade. No ships are going in or out from any port in the region.”

“Well, then, I’ll go South to Charleston. There are still ships bound to––" William paused as I stared at the darkness with alarm.

“What is it?” Jamie asked, standing up slowly.

“I just saw… something move under the branches over there.”

Without making a sound, Jamie, Ian, and William rose to their feet and spread out in the darkness surrounding our camp, while I retrieved a knife from my medical bag and moved nearer to John. 

Perceiving my presence at his side, John opened his eyes. I gently squeezed his right shoulder to get his attention and placed a finger to my lips. To my relief, he was oriented enough this time to understand my directive. He remained calm as he looked at me and at the trees above him, then he closed his eyes and fell asleep again. 

Jamie came back a few minutes later. “Whatever ye saw, Sassenach, left,” he said, his limping more pronounced. 

William walked out the bushes near the river. "We didn't see anything either.”

"Could have just been a deer, Auntie," Ian said, trying and failing to reassure me. 

An animal would have made a racket and my shadow had been silent. Listening to my own thoughts, I suddenly realized that maybe I was more exhausted than I thought.

"Or it was my imagination. Sorry about this," I replied, putting the knife in my pocket, just in case it wasn’t my imagination. 

Jamie's hands close on my shoulders. I leaned my head against his chest, welcoming the strength of his arms around me and the warmth of his body against my face. I stood there, breathing the intoxicating smell of earthy leaves and burning wood that permeated his clothes. “How’s your knee?” I asked as he suddenly put some of his weight on me to lower himself to the ground with a groan.

“Didna feel it all day… but t’was a long day, Sassenach.” 

“Let me put a bit of ointment. It’ll help.” Not waiting for his authorization, I grabbed his leg and gently stretched it before him, rolled down his stocking and his breeches up just enough to expose the kneecap. While I massaged his leg, his gaze turned toward John. “It makes me sick to my stomach to see him like this, Sassenach…” 

John was awake again, although awake was a bit of a generous term. William had put a bowl of stew on his lap and the spoon in his hand that, after some encouragement, John slowly and shakily brought to his mouth, much like an automaton. 

"He's exhausted. I doubt he had much to eat for the last month. At least." 

"I ken what starvation does to a man's body. Worse has been done to him.”

“I think he’s been heavily sedated,” I whispered to Jamie. “The deep coma he was in when we found him and his symptoms when he woke up are characteristic of someone being given a strong dose of an anesthesia drug.”

Jamie’s brow furrowed even deeper as I revealed my suspicions about Dr. Johnson. 

“He wasna tortured, then?” Jamie said, relief showing on his face for a brief second before he read my doubts, that according to the Geneva convention, denying sufficient food and beating a prisoner of war–which in some way, John was–in itself was torture. “Sassenach?”

“Except for what was done to him in Wilmington? I don’t know.” It was the truth. One year was a hell of a long time to spend alone, locked in a cabin on board the Palas. “Even if Richardson treated him better than the prison guards, solitary confinement is a form of torture. Besides, I still don’t believe John willingly wrote his confession.”

“Neither do I…” Jamie whispered, his gaze lingering on his son plaiting John’s hair, trying to give him back a sense of dignity, even if John didn’t seem to be aware of his surroundings at the moment. 

Holding the bowl on his lap, he was staring at the fire, eyes wide open and brows drawn. 

There was no coming to terms with the fact that life was inherently violent, regardless of the era or location, and I had not yet encountered a person who had been entirely untouched by evil, however minor. And in John’s dark, expressionless gaze, I could see the hovering shadows of the demons that haunted our own lives. 

There was nothing I could do to heal those invisible wounds, but at the very least, I needed to know what they were in order to not to make them worse for John, like I’d inadvertently done with his arm. Despite all the moments we’d shared along the years, I realized that I knew very little of his life. We hadn’t been married long enough to know each other's most intimate memories and deepest wounds. 

Maybe Isobel Dunsanny, if she were still alive, would have been able to help him better than me. After all, he’d married her after his return from Germany from what I’d understand. Which, after second thoughts, would definitely qualify as odd for John.

Christ… No wonder he couldn’t feel anything when she died. His mind was acting to protect him from more than her death… and he’d come to Jamie for help instead. To reconnect with himself. Only to face my hostility...

Looking at the blankets I’d piled on top of John to keep him warm, I now wondered how many layers of trauma he’d piled in his life. I was beginning to have enough of an idea to realize that I would need to be careful in the next few days, maybe even weeks while he recovered physically from this ordeal. And despite our desire to know what had happened to him, that started by restraining ourselves to seek those answers directly. 

It was a singular thing, love. Over the years, my love for Frank had gradually waned, sometimes transforming into a darkness that bordered on indifference at best, and despise at worst, eventually settling in a complex mix of deep and bittersweet affection. My emotions towards John were growing in the opposite way. Moving from feelings of disgust and jealousy to indifference, then gratitude, friendship, and now, I had to admit to myself, something even closer, a sense of brotherly love, albeit one that had been incestuous in a moment of turmoil. I didn’t know if I could help him go through what was happening in his life. But as far as family love went, I would be here for him.

 "I can't leave him. Not like that," William said as I kneeled next to John to help him eat a bit more. "If I go now, it won't be for six days, like the time when he caught the measles. It might be six months before I can travel back to the colonies. Perhaps even longer with this goddamn war." 

As William put away the brush in his bag, and took out one of his shirts, sniffing at it to check its cleanliness, it struck me how young he still was. No matter how complicated their relationship had become in the last couple of years, it was painfully obvious how much he still needed John. 

"This land has brought nothing but death and suffering to my family. I wish we'd never come here. Mama Isobel would still be alive, and papa would be safe in London with her. They didn't deserve this," he said while we put John into clean clothes. 

"No, they didna," Jamie replied, his voice breaking as we gently lay John and tucked him under the blankets. 

William grabbed the soiled and torn clothes and tossed them into the fire. As he stood there, head bent and shoulders shaking, Jamie limped to his side.

"I'll keep yer stepfather safe. I give ye my word, mo mhac," he said, putting his hand on his son’s neck and pulling him into an embrace. 

Chapter Text

Waking up at daybreak, I set out with Ian to collect medicinal herbs in the prairie on the opposite bank of the river while Jamie and William slowly packed up. We were all quite anxious to get on the road. We had at least twelve days of travel ahead of us, as Jamie would need to ride at a slower pace due to John's injuries. 

Before leaving the Ridge, I had packed sufficient provisions for a week, with the intention of restocking in Wilmington. Unfortunately, we’d departed the city in a bit of a hurry and I now needed to find whatever medicinal plants I could on the way. Which thankfully today wasn’t too hard an endeavour.

Carrying a woven basket containing my harvest of coneflowers to boost John's immune system and help with the inflammation around his broken ribs, bloodroot for the flare of rheumatism in his left arm and fever, I was carefully climbing up the bank after crossing the shallow stream when Ian gently pulled me to a stop. 

I lifted my eyes from the ground. "What is it?" I whispered, seeing nothing but trunks, branches, and leaves. 

"I dinna ken, Auntie. For a moment, I thought I saw something move in front of us."

A shudder ran down my spine. "A deer?" 

"Arh, nothing. Dinna fash," Ian said as we resumed walking back to the camp. "I think my mind is playing tricks with me, is what I think. I dinna sleep well last night. Had vivid dreams."

"About what?" I asked, not quite reassured.

"My spirit animal. It was sick. I miss Rolo, t'is all. I wished he was here with me."

"I'm so sorry, Ian," I said, clasping his hand in mine.

Ian smiled sadly as he gave me a quick nod of gratitude before coming to another halt. "Oh, looks like his Lordship's feeling better this morning." 

Better was an euphemism. John was on his feet and staring angrily at Jamie. 

"I'm no sorry for saving yer life, ye wee ingrate bugger, but one more word and I'll be more than happy to send you to your maker."

"Be my guest," John replied in a bitter tone, opening his arms wide in a welcoming gesture. Although one arm quickly sought support on the nearby tree. "That's three words... more than enough for... your bloody, pig-headed Scottish temper."

I shoved my basket into Ian's hands. "Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ! Can't I turn my back on you for a minute without finding you both at each other's throats?" 

I stepped between the two men and gave them each a long stare, more so with Jamie, who forced his fists to relax before stepping away to calm his nerves near the river. 

"And you bloody sit down," I told John, who was standing up by sheer willpower. 

William stepped forward as John realized that he had, indeed, exhausted his adrenaline reserves.

"Leave me alone, please," he whispered, leaning heavily against the tree and scraping his back down along the trunk as he sat, gasping for breath. 

I put my hand on William's arm. "Let's give both your fathers a moment," I said, nodding toward the wagon. "We need to pack up the camp, anyway."

As we walked behind the wagon, I gave William an interrogative glance, but he brushed me off and redirected his gaze towards Ian. 

"Would you know where Denny is right now, by any chance?" the young man asked.

"Last time I saw him, t'was at Philadelphia."

"Find him for me, please. Richardson made a threat against my cousin's life."

"Dottie?" I inquired, beginning to grasp the cause of John's agitation.

William nodded gravely. "The threat likely perished with its author, but Denny should be informed nonetheless. Besides, Papa thinks there's a chance that Richardson wasn't acting alone." Visibly upset, the young man quickly gathered his belongings and mounted on his mare. "Please, will you take care of them? If that is in the realm of possibilities."

"You have my word, William," I said, sorry to see him go so soon. 

"And you have my gratitude. Tell Papa that I don't care about how many spirits there are in his mind. I just want him safe." 

And without another word, the young man rode away. 

While I prepared the medicinal concoction, Jamie and Ian packed up our canvas tent. John had fallen asleep against the tree. The position couldn’t be comfortable and we were all glancing nervously at John, expecting to see him slide to the ground any second. However, more concerned about the impact of waking him up in this state of exhaustion, I gently put two bags to cushion a potential fall and decided to let him sleep. 

"John just woke up in the middle of a goddamn existential crisis with a concussion, broken ribs, a painful rheumatoid flare, and God knows what else. You have to be the one thinking straight for him," I said to Jamie as we returned to the wagon with our hands full.

"Don't ye think I ken that, Sassenach?"

"So why did you pick up a fight with him?" 

Jamie dropped the box of blankets a bit more heavily than was necessary. Then, he shook his head, sighing. "That fight was all his doing. And I ken him. He'll no stop until I pick up whatever’s raging in his head. I figured as well do it sooner than later, for his own sake."

This was the sort of logic that, sadly, I understood, especially when dealing with obstinate individuals such as John and Jamie. In medicine, as in life, addressing unavoidable problems promptly was the most successful method. Healing will follow, or so one hopes. 

"In the meantime, best no to let a pistol or a knife within his reach."

As Jamie walked back to pack up our last few items, I rested against the open tailgate of the wagon, taking a moment to absorb the chilling warning. 

We'd been so concerned with John's reaction to our plan, that is, to portray him as a traitor framed by his own side to have him cleared of all the accusations against him and let go, that it had never crossed my mind that he would choose not to fight, and that, instead he would... 

Bloody hell. Jamie was right. 

I did know John, at least well enough to know that he'd have decided a long time ago what he would do in this very situation. Given the choice between his life and protecting his family from the shame of a public trial, his decision would be obvious. There would be no trial. But where did that leave him now? His reputation, his name, his honor all destroyed. Had he given a thought about what he'd do in this situation? 

Jamie's approaching footsteps yanked me out of my dreadful thoughts. "One last moody package and we're good to go, Sassenach."

"What did John say to trouble both you and William that much?"

"He put a pistol in William’s hand and gave him the same two choices he'd given the Duke after Culloden. To kill him right there or accept who he was and speak no more of it, for both their sakes."

"Oh," I said, blowing out a breath of relief. John wasn't suicidal. "After Culloden? Hal protected him his whole life." 

"Like any older brother would." Jamie grunted. 

The memory of the duke asking me to explain, dumbstruck that he was, how the hell John had come to marry me a year ago resurfaced in my mind. "Poor man..."

"Who?" Jamie asked. 

"Hal. Surrounded by so many headstrong people around him, trying to keep his ship afloat despite all the self-inflicted storms that threatened to tear his family apart. His bloody, controlling temper makes better sense now. Almost makes him look like a victim of his own family, don't you think?"

"The Duke's no victim, Sassenach." Jamie said with a smirk. "But he's a brave, honorable man doing what he can to keep his family safe, I'll give him that. Must be the Scottish blood from his mother's side, if ye ask me." Jamie winced as he stretched his back. "Why don't you help me keep my word, and help me put his Grace's brother safely in our wagon so we can get on our way?"

As Ian and Jamie carried him, John stirred awake but he did not offer any resistance, remaining completely silent during the process. This state of muteness persisted for the majority of the following days, due a combination of extreme fatigue, migraines, and pervasive pain that the laudanum could only touch. 

Jamie was maneuvering to the best of his abilities to avoid jolting us too roughly, but the summer rains had damaged the road. In a few areas, it was washed out completely, forcing us to unload the whole wagon and drag the horses into knee deep streams. Our voyage, which should have taken eight days to complete, stretched well beyond two weeks. 

It was during our fourteenth night in the peaceful wilderness of a creek between two high hills, as I was getting ready for sleep, I caught sight of John gazing into the flickering flames, his cheeks glistening with moisture. 

I quickly look over at Jamie. He was sound asleep. 

This didn’t surprise me. He had been up before dawn to go hunting and it had been a hard day. We'd crossed three more streams as we’d gone deeper into the wilderness toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. If John was more alert now, his sense of balance was still uncertain thanks to the concussion, and Jamie had been forced to rescue him from the first current. After that, despite his bad knee, he insisted on carrying John across the next two rivers, brooking no arguments. 

I wasn’t surprised either that John, on the other hand, forced to inactivity, couldn’t sleep. 

Feeling the chill of the night, I grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around my shoulders, then sat down next to John. 

"I have some ether to help you sleep if you want."

Keeping his eyes on the fire, John shook his head slightly. We stayed watching the flames for a long moment in silence. I was putting three more logs before going to join Jamie for the night when John finally spoke. 

"You said you were gone for twenty years, but that's where you truly were. In the future?" 

The unexpectedness of John’s question froze me. It was a simple one to answer, but it had triggered a cascade of questions like a summer storm suddenly swelling the waters of a quiet stream into a raging torrent. What had made John change his mind and believe me all of a sudden?

"Yes, that is where I was," I replied, forcing a faint smile on my lips despite the tightening in my throat.

"But you must have known about all this chaos. Why come back to this? After all, we were long dead to you."

"No, you weren't. Time is a relative concept for those few people like me who can travel through the stones. But as for why I came back… my husband in the future, Frank, had died. And I wouldn't say that I felt terribly alone, because in fact, I'd felt that way since Jamie convinced me to leave him, just before Culloden, knowing that there was a terrible chance that he would die on the battlefield. He wanted me and Brianna safe. I’d forced myself to go on with my life, make something out of the sacrifice he'd made, for us. But after Frank's passing, Roger discovered that Jamie had survived Culloden..."

"So you came back to be with him."

“Yes, I did…What made you change your mind about this?”

John groaned as he eased himself down on a supine position, then propped himself back up to a sitting position. I grabbed a large bag and slid a pillow behind his back for support. “Is it better?”

John nodded. "Your daughter told me once that she would never forget the man who raised her there… in the future."

"They were very close, she and Frank. His death devastated her," I replied, concerned that he’d ignored my question.

"But life goes on."

"Yes, it does, indeed. And it is a comforting thought, don't you think?"

"Perhaps it is. But does it matter?" 

"What do you mean?" I asked, growing slightly concerned by his tone as much as his words. 

"I could have died so many times in my life, from the very first day I was born. The doctors didn't give me a week, being born almost a month too soon. Too small… too frail… not ready, they said. My mother wouldn’t have it. She kept me against her for a month, refusing to let anyone take care of me but her. And I survived… Fifty-one years certainly beat the odds, don't you think?"

"Your mother’s maternal instinct saved you. Will you trust mine when I say that you still have many years in front of you?"

"Only the future truly knows, it seems…" John took a deep inhale and sighed heavily. "I thought I'd made my peace... my whole life, I thought..."

"Your peace about what?"

"You asked me once about Perseverance. You knew him as Percy Beauchamp but his real name was Perseverance Wainwright. He was the stepson of my mother's third husband. You asked me that day, what had he done to me?"

"I remember," I said, wondering where John was going with this line of thought, but too relieved that he was speaking to interrupt him. "I also asked you if he cared for you."

"He did, in his own capacity. But it wasn't what he'd done to me, but rather what I'd done to him that mattered."

"Which was?" 

"I did for him what you just did for me. Give him his life back. The difference is, I didn't ask you to."

I straightened, grasping to understand. "Do you mean that you helped him escape..."

John nodded. "I arranged for a dead body to be placed in his cell instead of him, to spare his life and our family the shame of a trial..." John’s voice trailed as he slowly shook his head. "But I didn't want this. Neither did Hector. He made me swear…” John paused to swallow. “...  that if such a situation would happen to him, I’d bring him a pistol. I joked back at him… that it was unlikely that I’d be in a position to offer him such a dreadful service since I would myself be in a cell as well… But it didn’t matter anyway. In the end, it was the war that killed him. The choice Jamie gave me that night in the woods… head or heart… after I’d betrayed the regiment... Judge Altman was kind enough to grant me a similar one. And the cold, hard truth was… that I'd rather have died an English officer captured by the enemy, on the pillory, than as a sodomite hanged on the gallows.” 

John groaned and lay down on the bed sack. He pulled on the blanket with his one working hand to cover himself as I struggled to internalize what he'd just revealed. I saw myself again in the judge’s office, outraged that he was condemning John to death before his trial would even begin. 

My throat was so tight that I could barely draw a breath. I stayed next to John, unable to move. Richardson had used John to get to his brother. Then, he’d used his niece, Dottie, to get him to sign a confession that had brought his worst nightmare to life. It should have been enough to get the trial dismissed. But I could understand that John, uncertain about Richardson’s death or his accomplices’ whereabouts, wouldn’t do anything to put his niece in danger. Sadly, I also understood what that kind of sacrifice did to one’s soul. 

"Are we still hung in your time?" 

"No, it is not a crime anymore," I said, seeing no reason to distress John further with the complexity of the decriminalization of homosexuality across Great Britain, the United States, and the whole fucking world for what mattered, silencing the bleak truth that gay men were still beaten and killed, or died at their own hands. 

“Good,” John replied, closing his eyes. 

I returned to Jamie’s side, dazed. Solid arms wrapped around me. But when I closed my eyes, what I saw was Jamie’s face when he’d traded his body for my freedom to Black Jack Randall, Wilmington jail and Wentsworth prison becoming one in the darkness.

Chapter Text

The days went by uneventfully, in a quiet routine. Just before sunrise, Jamie would go hunting and come back with food for the day. We'd ride until dusk, stopping briefly for lunch. Set up the camp near a stream, eat in silence, and start all over again in the morning.

After eighteen days on the road, if one could even call this a road, the tree-covered hills looked more and more familiar. They were steeper, and showed here and there bare patches of schist and gneiss of the Appalachian Highland Range. The leaves were still a vibrant green, but the freshness of the mornings hinted at the imminent arrival of autumn and its warming blend of yellow, orange, and red. More than ever, I was longing to return to the Ridge. 

I was eager to see the snow blanket everything, silencing the chaos of civilization, isolating us with our own thoughts, restricting our movements, and ultimately guiding us to acknowledge our powerlessness over nature. 

John was gradually improving. Despite the pain of his broken ribs, he could now breathe normally, and although his balance wasn't as steady as a gymnast on a beam, he could walk without tripping as often. He didn’t talk much and refused to engage in a verbal game of chess with Jamie, since he wasn’t able to focus enough to make the activity interesting. Which was likely true. Whether or not the activity needed to be interesting, though, was up for debate. Jamie, who thought silence was not healthy, was growing concerned for his friend. I didn’t share his alert yet. Headaches and general fatigue were the most probable causes of John’s withdrawal into himself. 

On the morning of our last day of travel, I awoke to the sound of water splashing as if a boulder had fallen into the river.

"Swim and ye'll be fine, ye wee bugger." Jamie's voice pierced through the thin fog rising through the trees bordering the bank. 

If John answered, it wasn't loud enough for his voice to reach me. Shivering in the fresh, chill air, I wrapped my shawl around my shoulders, and stirred our fire. 

Jamie had set the stovetop Italian coffee maker aside, waiting for me to wake up to infuse the coffee. Brianna had instructed her intrigued father on how to craft this life-saving, modern tool from pots.

I stayed there a few minutes, holding my hands close to the embers that were emitting a comforting warmth, savoring the peace of the moment while the bold smell of coffee penetrated my nostrils, adding the touch of domesticity to make the serenity of the moment complete. 

 It was a beautiful morning.

The leaves shimmered with dew. Birds chirped in the branches. A hawk soared high through the sky, its piercing cry echoing far and wide. But despite the serenity the wilderness offered to us, it was the thought of sleeping in my own bed with a sturdy roof overhead tonight that brought me the most relief. 

I was pouring myself a cup when another, louder splash reminded me of my companions. 

With my mug in hand, I made my way towards the river, just a hundred feet from our camp. I carefully descended the steep, wooded bank, being extra cautious to avoid spilling any of the precious beverage that I’d managed, with great diligence, to stretch our reserves until today. But as my shawl got caught in a branch, my right foot slid on a blanket of dead leaves hiding a root. I came down hard, hitting the ground four feet below, on my hands and knees, still gripping my mug. Sadly, it had nothing left in it. 

"Sassenach!" Jamie cried as he rushed out of the water. "Are you all right?"

I looked up and gawked. "You're naked."

"I ken, and believe me I could take ye right here, right now. I dinna care if anyone's looking," Jamie whispered in my ear as he helped me get to my feet. To my surprise, Jamie playfully smacked my backside. I rolled my eyes at him, knowing full well what was going on in that Fraser's deprived anatomy.

"Oh, I believe you. And unlike you, I do care," I replied, pushing him away. "Besides, it's not anyone, it's John."

"Even more reason to do it, Sassenach. He just said that he hasna feelings for me anymore. I want to know if the bloody bugger is lying. Tell me, is he staring at my arse?"

I glanced over Jamie's shoulder. "No, he is looking away, embarrassed, as you should be. Poor man's been tortured enough already."

"Ye're quite the specialist speaking, Sassenach," Jamie muttered as John yelled, "I might be paralyzed, but I'm certainly not deaf!" 

"What do you mean?" I asked, pushing Jamie away so he would release his grasp on me.

"I mean ye've been torturing me for the last month." As if to mark his words, Jamie's body reacted to my presence with the usual stiffness.

"I warn you, behave yourself or–"

"Ye're no paralyzed, ye wee drama bugger!" Jamie cut me in my threat to shout at John instead. 

While Jamie went to dress, I headed toward the water and crouched to get my sprained wrist in the cool water. "How are you feeling this morning?"

"Mortified," John replied without humor and a slight tremor to his voice. It wasn't only from emotion. His lips were blue. 

"You've been in there long enough, John. Please, do me a favor and get out before you catch pneumonia, will you?"

Favoring my wrist, I climbed the steep bank, leaving John some privacy while Jamie, wearing his long shirt, stepped into the river to help him out. 

"Damn," I muttered, noticing the pot of coffee on the ground, the dark liquid spilled. It had been a lovely morning until now.  

"Did ye drink all the coffee already, Sassenach?" 

"There's probably a raccoon with a burnt tongue in the bushes somewhere," I said, looking around for plants suitable for a strong concoction. I'd seen some sweet ferns and goldenrod up the stream. Their anise taste would be nice. And there was ginseng just there. 

"And the bloody thief stole your mug, too, by the way. You're best to put it to boil first if we find it back if you don't want to catch rabies," I said, using my pocket knife to dig out some ginseng with their roots. The tea they’d make would help reduce stress and fatigue. I was still digging when Jamie asked me to come back to the camp.

"What?" I asked, stunned to see him with his pistol in hand. John was beside him loading a second. 

"What about not giving––" Jamie cut me off with a glance. Apparently the present circumstances overruled his edict against giving John weapons.

Holding on my pocket knife, I scanned the dense vegetation around our camp while Jamie and John wandered further. 

The bushes on my left suddenly stirred with agitation and Jamie walked out, holding a sheepish-looking Indian by the neck. "There's yer raccoon, Sassenach," he said. “Though I didna check if his tongue’s burnt or no.”

"Manoke?" John asked as he stepped out of the forest behind me.

"Englishman, can you tell the spirit protecting you that I'm friend?"

To my surprise, for the first time since we’d rescued him, the shadow of a smile brightened John’s eyes as he waved at Jamie to let the Indian go, his throat obviously too tight to speak.

"I do not speak about him only," the Indian said, looking up at the trees with fear as John reached him. And then, both men were in a tight embrace. 

"It is so good to see you, my friend."

"Same here, Englishman. Your arm? Again?"

"If that's the only thing I'm losing in this whole bloody nightmare, I can live with it."

"I've got herbs for you. It will help with the pain. And these will help you reconnect to your spirit animal, like I showed you. Remember? Trust its guidance."

"I saw an eagle fishing in the river this morning," John said as Manoke gave him another small pouch. "What's in this one?"

"Cedar, ash tree, and sweetgrass. To keep the evil spirits away. Always keep them on you, Englishman, promise me."

It was dubious John believed in animism, but he appeared moved by the request. In a hushed tone, he uttered something in the Indian language, then grasped the Indian man’s foreman. He pulled the man closer until their foreheads were gently touching, their mouth less than half an inch.

Feeling like an intruder, I squeezed Jamie's hand and with a small nod, asked him to step away a bit with me so we could grant the two men some well needed privacy.

"T'was ye outside of Wilmington two weeks ago. Ye've been following us. Why didn't ye show yerself sooner?" Jamie asked bluntly, not budging an inch.

Both men straightened at once, breaking their embrace. As the Indian glanced at Jamie with concern, I felt a pang of annoyance at Jamie for ruining this moment of peace for John. 

"That first night, I swear, there was a Wendigo in the woods with you, watching on you. I tried to chase it away, but he almost got me instead. My spirit must have saved me at the last second because I woke up the next morning still breathing, but you were gone. I was scared that it got the four of you, but I found your wagon tracks. So I followed you, keeping my distance ‘cause it was still there, standing ready if it decided to get to you. But it didn't, and now I think it wasn't a wendigo at all. It must have been a skinwalker instead." Manoke turned to me as he said that last word. "I think it's she."

"Me?" I asked, stunned.

Manoke nodded. "She's controlling a powerful spirit to protect you during the night so she can sleep."

"My wife's no witch," Jamie growled.

"It's all right. It's hardly the first time such words have been spoken toward me," I said. I recalled how I’d once tried to save a sick baby abandoned at the base of a tree on a frigid night. The parents had hoped the Scottish fairies would take it and return their own, healthy baby in its place. Which didn’t happen. The child died and they accused me of being responsible. "Besides,” I added, “Amerindians never burnt witches to my knowledge." 

"To my knowledge, Sassenach, no matter the culture, any people thinking someone wishes them or their family ill through physical or spiritual means, that person will be dealt with brutally. And although I enjoy saving your bonny ass, as ye've reminded me more than once lately, I'm no getting any younger."

"You won't have to save me from Manoke," I said. It had occurred to me that John’s lover might scalp me out of jealousy once he discovered our marriage. Even if John had reassured me that I would not meet such a tragic demise, I'd rather be granted the reverence Amerindians felt toward their shamans. 

"Since you claim you can see it, is the spirit still there?" I asked. It was my intent to test his honesty.

The Indian looked at the trees again for a long minute. "No. It left. This morning at dawn."

That was awfully precise. "Indeed," I replied, trying not to sound surprised. "Why don't you sit with us around the fire? We were just about to have breakfast."

"I thank you, but I have business to attend to with the Cherokees that I cannot delay any longer and your path is taking me too much North. I just wanted to make sure you were safe, Englishman."

John's face crumbled at the news. 

"His Lordship will be our guest at Fraser's Ridge for the time being," I quickly said, ignoring the sudden tension in Jamie's posture. "If your path ever takes you toward us, just know that you're welcome to stay at our home."

The Indian acknowledged my invitation with a polite bow before exchanging a long, silent look with John, and bowing his head once more. 

"You take care, Manoke."

"And you, Englishman."

John stayed on his feet, watching the forest for a few minutes after Manoke had disappeared from sight. 

"Doesn't he know yer name?" Jamie said with a snort.

"Don’t you know your wife's and yet still call her that offensive word?"

"Fair point. But it's nah offensive between us."

"To me it is,” John replied, his gaze suddenly burdened, as though a fleeting moment of brightness had entered his life, only to be replaced by darkness once again. 

"Why don't we sit down to eat a bit before we pack up?" I asked, deliberately breaking the moment. "We still have a long road ahead of us."

After a quick breakfast, Jamie and I started loading the wagon one last time, leaving John to his thoughts by the fire. He was sitting next to the fire with his knees pulled to his chest, the pouches of herbs in his hands. 

"Sasse––Claire," Jamie called with a low voice as I was organizing our belongings inside the wagon. I crept out and looked in the direction indicated. 

John was kneeling upright, inhaling the thick smoke rising from the fire, his eyes shut, gripping one of the pouches tightly. 

"What d'ye think it is that's burning? The protection against the evil spirits, or the connection to his animal one?"

"I don't know. But I wish Ian was there. He'd tell us what to expect." The last thing John needed was a bad trip.

“He’s losing his grip on reality, I tell ye,” Jamie said, resuming packing. “That, or I dinna ken him at all."

I was struggling to reconcile this vision as well. Not a particularly religious man, John was the poster child of rationalism. Definitely not someone inclined to mysticism, and even less animism. “Or he likely knows from a previous experience that the herbs will do him some good, physically or mentally. There's, in fact, nothing more logical than to seek relief from pain.” 

Which meant those herbs probably contained a mix of opiate and psychotropic agents.

I started mentally cross-referencing all the active molecules I knew with medicinal herbs, their dosage, side effects, synergic effects, contraindications with concussions, when I noticed that John was rocking back and forth like a high-rise building during an earthquake.

"Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, Jamie!" I muttered as I quickly climbed down. "Don't breathe the smoke!"

Thankfully, Jamie reached him faster than I and kept him from collapsing face first into the fire. He dragged John a few feet away, out of range from the smoke.

"Roll him on his left side!" I said as John started convulsing. He vomited up the tea he’d just had. "Bloody effing stupid... Englishman!" 

The seizure lasted two minutes, and thankfully, none followed. 

"Why would the Indian want to kill him?" Jamie asked as I picked up the empty pouch and sniffed at it. There was no foul odour, but it was a bit earthy.

"I don't think Manoke wanted to kill John. For all we know, this might be the intended effect, or the dosage was higher than his concussed brain could take." There was also the possibility that John had poured too much of the mix into the fire by mistake, overdosing himself. 

"How is he?" Jamie asked as I checked John's vitals and, as I’d expected, found them compatible with someone under LSD.

"Likely approaching a state of Nirvana," I replied, sitting back on my heels. 

"What do we do with him? Should we stay here until he wakes up?"

My shoulders sank at the idea of spending one more day in the wilderness when we were so close to the Ridge. "If he's going to sleep most of the day, he can do that while we ride. I'll just stay at the back with him to make sure he doesn't choke. No, let's go home."

Muttering his discontentment, Jamie lifted John in his arms, and carried him to the wagon. "If my back breaks, it'll be his fault."

"I'll give you a massage tonight," I said as I slid a cushion under John's head. 

"I'll make ye keep yer promise, Sassenach." With a playful smirk, Jamie smacked a kiss on my mouth before worming his way to the front of the wagon and into the driver's seat. 

We resumed our way, a bit faster than usual. The road was nothing but a trail in the forest, and it was hard enough, no rain having fallen in this region for the last month. 

John kept going in and out of his trance for the next two hours while the hallucinogenic substance he'd exposed himself to peaked in his system, bringing his heart rate and temperature up, and causing another seizure. A milder one, thankfully. I was cursing myself for not reacting sooner. I had gone through enough trauma in my life not to know about the extremes one could go to alleviate one’s pain. My own experience with ether should have given me enough warning to keep John from committing the same mistake, no matter who had given him the herbs. 

To my relief, John slowly but surely emerged during the afternoon. And he was awake and oriented by the time we finally reached the boundaries of Fraser’s Ridge.  

At last, Jamie announced we were less than a mile from the house. I was creeping my way to join him in the front when John pulled on my long skirt. 

"My spirit showed me the truth about my feelings,” he said, speaking for the first time since the morning. 

I smiled slightly at John’s mumbling, realizing that nothing about to come out of his mouth at this point should be taken seriously. 

"I need the bucket." 

Except this.

I promptly seized it and shoved it on John's lap, just in time. There was little more than bile since he had eaten nothing since breakfast.

Upon hearing the retching, Jamie stopped the wagon with a sigh of exasperation. "Couldn't he wait ten more minutes?" he asked as I kept John’s long hair off his face.

“Just give us a few minutes,” I asked Jamie before giving John water. 

"It said that I gave my heart to your husband to keep me safe, so I couldn’t give it to anyone else. I used him… to hide myself from my fears," John continued, unaware that Jamie was listening. "I'm a coward. And my cowardice landed me in jail. This is all my own bloody fault."

"You might be many things, John, but a coward, you're certainly not. Trust me," I said, exchanging a quick, perplexed gaze with Jamie.

"Oh, I am. Mind you, my cowardice kept me from feeling. So I guess it did half the job right, didn't it?" John swallowed hard as I gently squeezed his hands. 

He squeezed them back out of reflex. His left was still weaker than his right, but had a firmer grip now. As far as I could tell without the luxury of an MRI at my disposal, the seizure hadn't caused any brain damage, and whatever had been in the pouch, a disturbed stomach and a confused mind were the least severe consequences I could hope for. It even seemed to have helped to soothe the rheumatoid flare in his left arm. 

"Are you feeling anything now? Anger, maybe?"

As John shook his head, Jamie quickly poked his head completely under the canvas. "Sassenach, he's not making any sense. Don't encourage him to say things he'll regret later," he said, then he turned back to get the horse moving again.

I disagreed. John's reasoning might not seem rational, but it wasn't the first instance of him expressing a disconnection from his emotions. It happened to him in the aftermath of his first wife's death. Besides, there was no stopping John from untangling whatever twisted yarn he'd created during his day-long hallucination. Giving him some guidance to go through the process was essential. 

John suddenly straightened and took a deep breath. "You can recall your spirit, my dear. I've no use of it anymore," he said, patting my hand affectionately before crawling to the back of the wagon.  

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"To do something I should have done a long time ago." 

I reached for his leg to hold him back, only to collide with the soiled bucket and twist my sore wrist on it. Cursing, I watched John fall off the wagon.

I screamed, and Jamie pulled up to a quick stop. A barrage of curses echoed in both Gaelic and English as we rushed to John's aid. Jamie reached him first. "Easy, ye wee bug–" But as he pulled John to his feet, John's fist landed on his jaw with such force that Jamie staggered back a few feet, dazed by the blow. 

Spitting blood, Jamie raged at him. "If that's what I get for saving yer miserable arse, next time ye'll–"

"That's not for that and you know it, you bastard!" John crumpled to the ground, panting.

"What the bloody hell was that for, then?"

"For accusing me of preying on boys when you've got no fucking idea what it is to be preyed upon, you self-righteous son of a bitch!"

I pressed my hand over my mouth to silence a gasp. I looked at Jamie, scared to see him losing his temper. But he was as shocked as I was. All the blood had drained from his face as he stood speechless.

With a groan, John managed to stand up. "I'd rather walk to the house, if you don't mind," he said softly. All the rage he'd just shown a minute ago vanished, like some evil had just been exorcized. 

The house wasn't far, less than three hundred yards away, but I doubted that John could walk the distance. Nonetheless, I resisted the temptation of convincing him to climb back into the wagon, knowing that both Jamie and he needed to clear their heads, one from the influence of drugs, the other from Black Jack Randall's specter. Clearing my own mind would be as difficult.

I didn't want to talk about Randall. I shared Jamie's revulsion for the man. But John wasn't Randall. Still,  through Jamie, that darkness had hurt him, long after Randall had taken his last breath on Earth. Under that light–or lack thereof–Manoke's belief of evil spirits wasn't as superstitious as it seemed. But as vile Jamie’s words were, it wasn’t the only thing that disturbed me. Something else was gnawing at me, like a piece of the shattered puzzle of John's mind was falling into place. 

"Did you ever deny that John’s feelings could be genuine?”

“Aye, but I dinna ken him as–”Jamie grabbed my arm abruptly. 

“Da!”

I looked up and saw a silhouette running toward us in the distance.

"Brianna?" Jamie called.

"Da!" our daughter screamed again. My heart started to race. Jamie let go of the horse's reins and hurried toward her.

"What is it, mo nighean? What happened?!"

"Jem's missing!”

"Someone kidnapped him?" I asked, "Did you notice anyone wandering?"

"No! He… he just left! And this morning… Mandy sensed that he went through the stones. She said he’s gone and he doesn’t want us to come looking for him." With shaking hands, Brianna pulled a letter from her apron pocket. "She gave me this today, saying it's yours. Jem especially instructed her to give it to us today. Once it was too late to stop him!"

I was dumbstruck. For an eleven-year-old boy, Jeremiah was a precocious child but this was pushing it too far, even for him. The letter in front of me didn't make much more sense. I recognized the feel of the paper in my hand, and despite the declining daylight, the words were all too familiar: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" 

I looked up at Jamie and Brianna in complete dismay. "It is my handwriting but I don't remember ever writing this poem down."

"But you will, Mama. Look!"

My eyes fell on the date written at the top right corner. October, 27, 1782. "In two weeks from now?" As if this mystery wasn't enough, I'd sealed it with John's half-moon signet. Why would I be in possession of John's ring? 

"I don't know what's going on," Brianna said, wiping tears from her face. "I'm terrified this time we'll never find him again!"

"We will find him, mo nighean, I give ye my word." Jamie held our daughter tight against his shoulder. "Tomorrow morning, I'll go about all the places he likes to hide. Maybe he left something else in one of those spots."

"Roger already did that, Da."

"Aye, I’m sure he did. But can't a man and his grand-kid have some secret hideouts for themselves? Come on, now. It's getting darker and yer mother already has a sprained wrist. We don't want her to twist an ankle on top of it."

"Mama?"

"Oh, it's nothing, sweetheart. Just your father making a fuss," I replied. We started toward the house. 

"I'm serious, Sassenach. The horse has better eyes than yers, so please why don't ye make a fuss and climb in the wagon?"

"There's nothing wrong with my sight. You're the one who needs glasses to read," I said, knowing full well what Jamie was doing. Shifting her attention to me, Brianna gently took my hand. 

We were all squeezing in to sit on the driver's bench when a detonation suddenly echoed in the sky, scaring flocks of geese and smaller birds into the air.

"Wait. Where's John?" I asked, seeing his silhouette nowhere. 

Chapter Text

By the time Jamie brought the wagon to a stop in front of the house, my hands and feet tingled with thousands of white hot needles. 

We all jumped up from our seats and spread out across the front yard, searching for John in the growing darkness. What on earth had he done? And where had he found a bloody rifle? Judging from the deafening crack that had ripped through the sky, it wasn't a pistol he'd fired. 

My heart was still feeling the wrenching pang from the terrible news Brianna had just told us about Jeremiah, and now, the dreadful feeling that John had taken advantage of that moment to escape our vigilance and–"John?!" I called, struggling to keep the panic at bay as light flooded the front porch. 

Roger stepped out of the house, a rifle in one hand, a lantern in the other, Mandy on his heels. He turned around to push his daughter back into the house, but upon seeing me, she slipped past him. 

"Grannie!"

I caught my granddaughter in my arms as I scanned the grounds, holding her close to me. The daylight was fading fast into deep shades of purple and night blue in the cloudless sky. The stables and the barn were already merely dark shapes melting with the backdrop of the forest. The crisp wind was biting fiercely, carrying the pungent mix of powder and blood in its wake. It couldn’t be real, of course. It was an olfactory memory coming from a life spent as a nurse, and then as a surgeon on more battlefields than I dare to count, as if my mind, knowing what to expect, was preparing me so I wouldn’t be overcome and could render assistance to the best of my abilities. 

A cold sweat crawled down my back. I knew at once that whatever happened, it wasn't something I wanted my six-year-old granddaughter to see. "Let's go inside," I said, suddenly finding strength in my legs again. 

Fanny, alerted by the commotion, was standing at the bottom of the stairs, holding David in her arms, her sweet face fearful. "Come on, girls," I said, pushing them up the steps as Brianna closed the door fast behind me.

"What's going on with Lord John, Mama?" Bree asked, taking her son in her arms. 

A slight feeling of vertigo seized me. Where to begin? I didn't even have time to think about what to say that the back door swung open and Jamie's voice reverberated with an urgency that caused my body to erupt with goosebumps.

"Sassenach!" 

"We're about to find out," I said before hurrying down the corridor toward the surgery. 

A near miss was my answer. 

Near, because, for some miracle, John, eyes wide open and blood all over his face, was still standing up, although barely. Jamie and Roger half-carried, half-dragged him into the room and dropped him into a chair. "Bloody fucking hell, John. What have you done?" I asked, suddenly furious.

"Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ," Brianna whispered, bringing one hand to her mouth with shock. "Is he alive?"

"Aye," Jamie replied as I wet a cloth and wiped John's forehead, expecting to see a long gash all across his scalp. "T'isna his blood. Not all at least."

Jamie's first assertion was definitely correct. John was awake and capable of sitting unaided. Now, about the second... 

"I can help," Fanny said as I pulled bits of gray matter and tiny fragments of bone from John's hair, stirring no reaction from the interested party. This didn't surprise me at all. I’d expect anybody with someone else's brain splattered all over the head to ever be hysterical or catatonic. John fell into the second category. 

"Not this time, honey," Brianna replied, pushing back the girls out of the surgery. "Let's go upstairs and finish reading Robinsons' adventures instead." 

I waited a few more seconds for Brianna and the girls to be away before turning toward Jamie urgently. "There's someone lying out there with a smashed skull," I said, keeping my voice low despite the fear gripping my stomach as I imagined the kind of violent action needed to result in such a bloody mess. 

"Smashed?" Roger asked while I completed my exam. "Like with a stone? Who fired the shot, then?" 

"A good guess would be whoever all that blood belongs to," I replied, discarding the bloodied rag into a bucket and taking a clean one. None of the blood was John's, actually, but that fact wasn't bringing as much relief as I thought it would. "No, not with a stone. There would be blood on his hands." Visions of John felling an ax on Jo or Kezzie in a raging delirium brought bile to my throat. 

Jamie's brows furrowed. "He was alone when I found him. Could that person have wandered far?"

"Men are not chickens. We don’t have a part of our brain in the neck that can still control our legs when our skull's crushed," I said, somewhat at a loss as the memory of a chicken my aunt had beheaded – and that I’d refused to eat later at dinner – running around in the courtyard. Its legs hadn’t yet received the message that it was dead. "More likely is John's the one who wandered because one way or another, that blood didn't appear by magic on his head." 

Cursing, Jamie grabbed his rifle and headed for the door, only to be stopped by John's sudden and bewildering exclamation. 

"You won't find him! Whoever it was who attacked me... A spirit dragged their body into the forest.”

"You were attacked? By whom?" I asked, ignoring the second portion of his statement for now.

"Christ, he wasn't, Sassenach. Look at him. He's not making any sense! Goddamn it, he's no himself since we rescued him from that jail!"

Though Jamie's gaze was intense, it wasn't driven by anger, but by the fear that John's mental health had been irreversibly affected by the ordeal he’d suffered the past year. 

"Could it be a bear instead, what he saw?" Roger said. He grabbed his rifle. "I'll go with you."

"I'm no scared of bears or spirits, but if he's raving to the point of killing someone and not remembering it, I don't want Claire or Bree and the kids to be alone with him."

A somber feeling descended upon the room as the door shut close on Jamie. 

Could John, still under the influence of the drugs or their withdrawal, have believed that he was attacked, and killed someone? Then, unable to face the reality of such a horrendous act, consciously or not, fabricated a complete fantasy about a spirit being responsible to absolve himself of the crime? The possibility was both chilling and dreadful in its plausibility, although a bear attack was at least as likely. In both cases, someone had died very horribly. 

Roger moved to the window, all attention on whatever was happening outside. I returned to John’s side.

He was prostrate in the chair, eyes on the floor, rocking back and forth with his fingers clawed on his knees. It was a self-soothing mechanism and hopefully a signal that the crisis was waning. 

"John, look at me," I said softly.

Getting no reaction, I reached for his right hands. After a few seconds, his fingers gently wrapped around mine, but his gaze stayed fixed on the floor between us. With caution, I reached for his left as well. To my relief, he extended his fingers, then closed them around mine. I remained with him in silent support as he gradually slowed his breathing and stopped rocking. 

"Thank you for being here for me out there," he whispered.

"Out there?" I asked, reassured to hear his voice but uncertain of the meaning of his last words. "What happened out there?"

"You should know. It was your spirit that protected me."

Ah. Well. No need to jump to conclusions, though. John would probably need the night to clear the drug out of his system.

Since he was calm and cooperative, I proceeded with a basic neurologic exam to assess his motor function and checked for a concussion. He knew he was at Fraser's Ridge, and was suffering a slight fever and an overall sensation of fatigue. He also had a faint tingling in his arms and legs that were likely a sign of hypoglycemia, not unexpected as he had eaten very little since breakfast. Nothing especially concerning stood out. 

"Let's get you cleaned up, then we'll see about getting something in your stomach. What do you think?" 

"I think I feel queasy enough already, but if you have stiff drink in this house, and I’m sure you do, I certainly could use a glass or two," he replied, adding, “If you don’t mind.” 

That, at least, brought me a sense of relief. “No, I don’t, John,” I said with a faint smile. 

Out of reflex, Jamie had put some water to boil for me while I’d first examined John. I poured the hot water into the washbasin and soaked a clean rag in it. With Roger's help, we helped him out of his blood-stained clothes, cleaned his upper body, and tucked him under the blankets of the surgery's in-patient bed. To our relief, he was fast asleep.

Adrenaline was waning off my body and my legs felt stiffer than ever. But I still had to clean up the bloody mess before allowing myself to collapse in the rocking chair by the hearth. I returned to the examination table when David’s wails rang out. 

Roger lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. "Not again," he muttered. "He's been cutting tooth after tooth for three weeks in a row, now." 

"Go, I'll be fine." 

"I'll send Bree down with a clean nightshirt and a few clothes for his lordship."

As Roger walked out of the surgery, the outside door opened and Jamie came in alone. This could only mean one thing; that whatever the source of the blood was, it was dead and too heavy for Jamie to carry back on his own. So not Jo or Kezzie, thank God, but who? Or what?

Reading the question on my face, Jamie shook his head. “I found no one,” he said, limping toward the armchair by the fireplace where he stiffly collapsed with a groan. 

As he stretched his bad knee in front of him, I joined him and massaged his tense shoulders. Jamie was starting to relax when our grandson let out another piercing scream. "Got his grandpa's voice this one, I tell ye."

"Cried a lot, did you?"

"Nah, not a lot. But when I did, I made sure everybody all the way to London could hear me. That's what Jenny told me our Da used to say about me."

"Somehow, I have no trouble believing it," I said with a chuckle. We were interrupted from a snore from John. I put the back of my hand on his forehead and cursed. "His fever's a bit stronger."

"That's the most normal thing he did all day," Jamie remarked. "The snoring, I mean."

"He came back to his senses just before you entered," I said, indicating that we should move to the kitchen to avoid disturbing John, who was stirring a little. "What did you mean, there was no one?"

"I found bloody tracks, like he said, going toward the forest."

"A bear, then?" My legs were aching under the nervous exhaustion of the day, I sat at the table with a piece of leftover meat pie. Jamie grabbed a bottle of brandy before joining me.

"Bears don't leave footprints behind them, Sassenach."

"So it was a thief and his accomplice?" 

"Near the stables? That crossed my mind, aye. All the horses are there, save for Milly. She's the one Jem absconded with. My best guess is that John surprised them before they could steal anything. Ye sure he wasn't hurt?"

I gave him a quick nod. "Not physically, at least. Jem took Milly?"

"Aye. At least he had the good sense to take the best horse at his disposal. But that won't save his arse when I put my hand on him for putting his mother and father through such wrenching agony," Jamie said, rubbing the bruise left by John's punch on his chin. Which made me think about John’s words again. I was too tired to feel surprised, both that it had happened to him and that he’d never talked about it. Men bigger than him had been preyed upon–including the one sitting next to me– and John and I were never close enough to share that kind of trauma with each other. I didn’t want to think further about this and didn’t have to. Brianna entered, clothes folded over her arm.

"The girls are sleeping. And so is David," our daughter said, collapsing onto the chair between me and her father. With sufficient light, I could now clearly see the dark circles under her eyes. She was exhausted from countless sleepless nights, dealing both with a teething toddler and the overwhelming anxiety regarding Jem. 

"I'll search for him first light tomorrow, mo nighean donn."

"There's no need, Da. Mandy is certain that he went through the stones. And I could feel it too. In my chest and my soul,” she said, her voice breaking down as she struggled to keep herself from bursting into tears. “He even took his toy plane with him.”

I put my hand on hers and stood up to wrap my arms tightly around her. "I'm so sorry, Bree," I said, pulling her head against my shoulder. She held onto my arm tightly as she cried. 

I exchanged a pained glance with Jamie. I was at a total loss, and so was he. Muting a groan of pain, he stood up and limped toward the cupboard where he kept the whiskey. 

“Here, mo nighean donn,” he said, holding a glass. 

Bree shook her head. “No, I’m fine. It’s all right,” she said, wiping the tears off her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” Jamie replied. 

"Oh, don't be sorry for me,” she shot back. “Be sorry for your grandson. I swear when I put my hand on him, I'll lock him in his room for the rest of his life." 

Jamie snorted. “Poor lad. Ye sound like yer auntie Jenny. And yer grandmother as well since Jenny took that from her.”

That made Bree smile at least. 

"Now, tell me: what's happened to Lord John? Roger said he's as high as a peacenik at Woodstock." 

"That is a euphemism," I replied before giving her a summary of John's rescue and our subsequent trip back home.

"Johnson, you said? A thin man about my height, brown hair, brown eyes, an aquiline nose and thin mustache, intelligent eyes?"

"Maybe his hair was brown one day, but not anymore," I said, "Otherwise, it fits the description. How do you know him?"

"I think he's the one who trepanned Lord John at Aunt Jocasta's, all those years back. When I was pregnant." Bree blew a heavy sigh at the memory of the circumstances surrounding Jem’s birth. 

"That would explain a lot, actually," I said, giving her hand an affectionate squeeze. 

I'd been quite surprised at the time to see the clean hole that had been drilled into John's skull to relieve the pressure caused by a subdural hematoma, and remembered telling myself that John had been twice lucky to be operated on by a doctor who knew what he was doing. 

"Geillis Duncan, Wendigo and his fellows, and now Dr. Johnson," Bree said, shaking her head pensively, "And to think that we were concerned about little green aliens living amongst us, trying to destroy our societies from within. Like always, we are only doing this to ourselves." 

I took another look at the letter Jem had left behind. It was word for word the New Colossus poem displayed in every history book and displayed on the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. A poem written before I was born, and that I would put to paper in a month, for it to reach me a hundred years before its author would take up her pen to write it. To complete the mystery, it was sealed with John's signet. 

Jamie removed his spectacles and gave me back the letter. "It is yer handwriting, Sassenach. That I ken. What I don't, is how is it relevant to you?" 

"It's a symbol for America's purpose and its role of being a beacon of hope and compassion in our world. I learned it at school, and I remember us visiting Ellis Island with Frank.” Bree glanced at Jamie as she pronounced her father’s name, or rather stepfather’s. Jamie frowned slightly at the mention of the man who had raised his daughter. It struck me suddenly that Jamie had sired two children and both Bree and William had been raised by other men. Both children had also discovered the truth about Jamie in their late teenage years. Obviously, fate ignored the saying that lightning never strikes twice at the same place. 

Bree continued. “But Jem never went to school in America, and I doubt he even knew about the poem’s existence. Even less what it means." 

"But that letter is not from him. T'is from yer mother. Could there be a hidden message inside that only you two could decipher?"

"If there is, I've got no idea where to look," I answered. I took the letter again but found that my sight was too blurry to focus on the words. “Besides, if I had to write a letter, why would I send it to myself?”

“You think there’s a cypher?” Bree asked, examining the letter.

"Fortunately for ye, my non-intelligencer wife and daughter, I've got some experience in the matter. And I did teach my grandson a thing or two as well. Arh. Both of ye can go to bed and leave that matter with me for the night. Besides, I want to keep my eye on his lordship at the same time, just in case he sees spirits again." 

"Oh, I don't mind staying down here with Lord John," Brianna said. "You and mama didn't have a bed to sleep in for the last month, and watching you move around, I don’t think your knee and your back would appreciate sitting in a chair all night very much. Besides, watching over feverish bodies is right up my alley these days. At least with him I know it's not teething."

Despite the tension and fatigue, I couldn't help but chuckle at Brianna's quip. Somehow, Frank had transmitted this character trait to her. Jamie was about to protest, but I, quite selfishly maybe, for I wanted nothing more than to lie down in his arms, cut him off. "Your daughter is right."

That matter settled, I returned to John's side with Brianna. We sat by the fire, drinking one last cup of tea before I climbed up for the night. 

“Poor man,” Brianna said softly. “He looks like he’s aged ten years in one. Is he going to recover?”

"With patience, care, and support, yes, I hope so. John’s nothing but resilient.”

“I know, but… It’s just so horrible, his worst nightmare coming to life, really. Must be something in the air nowadays.”

My heart sank. I wanted so much to reassure Bree that Jem would come back, but we both knew the reality of traveling through the stones was that things were not so simple. 

“You know, back at Aunt Jocasta’s when I was pregnant with Jem, I saw him one night coming out of the slave quarters. The male quarters. He was disheveled, and his shirt was loose. That’s how I understood about him. And I was so desperate that the next morning, I blackmailed him. I wanted him to marry me in case you never found Roger, because he was gay. And I thought that because of it, he would never have me betray my love for Roger. So I threatened to expose him. I remember the shock and the horror on his face, that I could risk his life. I was so ashamed of myself and I wouldn’t have done it, as I told him later when I apologized. But I don’t think I truly understood the horror of my actions until now. And yet, he agreed to play along with our false engagement, although he did warn me that he wouldn’t proceed, certain that Da would kill him if he did, even to save my life and honor.”

We both chuckled sadly at that statement. It would have likely been close to the truth. 

“Have you any idea how hard his life is? Always walking on a razor thin edge, wondering if someone will discover his secret?” Bree added.

“I’m not sure it ever preoccupied him much. John’s a soldier, and soldiers learn to live with the constant possibility of being killed.”

“Maybe. But when you’re a soldier, and you die on the battlefield, it is considered an honorable death. It doesn’t scare Da, or William, or Ian. All of them think the same way. And what they all say terrifies them, is to die without honor. I don’t think it’s the same thing, mama.”

Bree’s words gave me pause. I remembered John’s confession, and the deal he’d made with the judge at Wilmington. To allow him to die as a British officer and not as a sodomite, and told Bree about it. 

“Well, thank god, news doesn't travel as fast here as in the twentieth century."

"And with Richardson dead, there’s hope that no damage has been done to his reputation,” I added, yawning on the last word.

“You go to bed. I’ll stay here and put the surgery back in order.”

“Thank you. You don't hesitate to wake me up if his fever worsens, all right? And if he wakes up in the middle of the night–and seems lucid enough–gently insist that he eat. Healing begins with a stomach full."

“I will, promise. Good night, mama. It’s good to have you back. I’ve missed you.”

After a heart-warming hug with Bree, I warily made my way up the stairs to my bedroom, at last. I put on my nightdress and was brushing my hair, sitting at my console, when Jamie finally joined me, carrying David in his arms.

"That wee laddie doesna want to let anybody sleep. D'ye mind we take him with us tonight, Sassenach?"

"Not at all." 

"Go give yer grannie a hug."

Cheeks red and warm, David cheerfully stretched his little arms toward me. After dealing with so much today, caring for a teething toddler brought a welcome sense of normalcy. At least, with that little guy, I knew it was just his teeth bothering him.

Chapter Text

It hadn’t rained that much.

A thin drizzle had fallen during the night. The light sound of rainfall along with the quiet breathing of his sleeping wife and grandson had helped put his mind to peace enough to allow him to sleep for a few hours. 

Bluebell trampled the ground beside him, her muzzle deep in the wet grass as she sniffed the traces of blood and flesh that had stained the ground the previous night. 

Jamie’s back cracked as he stood up stiffly and scanned the edge of the forest, the understory still dark.

"The tracks led in that direction," he said to Roger who'd joined him, rifle in hand, as requested.

The hound raised her head and barked, as if to acknowledge the statement. 

"What kind of thief would drag his accomplice's dead body and then come back to cover their tracks?" Roger asked.

"The kind who's encamped nearby and doesna want to be discovered." 

"His lordship is darn lucky to be alive, then, especially in the state he was yesterday."

"Ahr, that wee bugger always had swift reflexes," Jamie said, rubbing his jaw where John's fist had hit him. It was a sore reminder that John was not to be underestimated. A life spent on battlefields certainly honed one's survival instincts. 

Still, Jamie agreed that John had been lucky that the man had been alone when he'd stumbled on him. He could easily envision John disarming the thief in a brief fight and shooting him point blank, likely with his own rifle for, John hadn’t been armed at the time. Another scenario was the accomplice shooting his comrade by mistake instead of John. 

Either way, it was a relief that John was unharmed, but damn, it made him angry as well. He'd sworn to William that he would protect his stepfather, that John would be safe at the Ridge. How could have he explained that he’d let John be murdered instead?

Well, no point in dwelling on something that hadn't happened. Best deal with what mattered, which was to find if the thieves–or whoever they were–were still on his property or no.

"I don't understand," his son-in-law said, "Why would thieves run away, then come back to cover their tracks? That's something soldiers–scouts–would do. It can’t be Indians, can it? We’re in good terms with them, last I checked. Deserters, then?"

"Aye, all those thoughts crossed my mind as well during the night. Didna dismiss any of them yet. Come on, Rogermac, let's pay these men a visit," he said. He wished young Ian was there with them, and not only because his nephew was more adept at tracking. 

With Bluebell sniffing the ground before them, they moved toward the treeline. They followed the dog, listening carefully to the sounds of the forest all the while as Bluebell let them deeper toward the west boundary of Fraser’s Ridge. It was a place Jamie knew well, a trail section that rose steeply for a while before dropping down again on a small canyon with a lively river at the bottom. 

He’d come here once with William ten years ago, then with Jemmy many times to teach his grandson to fish and hunt. Both boys had been about the same age when they’d camped here with him, and yet, he remembered the one time with William the most. Maybe it was because John, who’d stopped by on his way to Virginia after his wife’s death, had caught the measles, and he’d come here with William to keep him from catching the disease as well. He’d attributed the boy’s uncooperative attitude to being a spoiled brat, a verra rich one that was used to have people do his bidding, until he’d realized that his son, after witnessing his stepmother’s death to the bloody flux on their way to Jamaica, was simply terrified of losing his only remaining parent. 

He’d felt for the lad. He kent what it was to suffer such grief. The rebellion he’d seen in William’s eyes was something he’d seen in the mirror. At the time resisting the urge to hug his son and tell him that everything would be all right had been the hardest fatherly instinct to control. For the first time, he’d sincerely prayed that John would live, for he also kent what it was to lose a father and didna want his son to ken what being an orphan did to one’s soul. Would he have told him the truth then? Arh… no need to torture oneself about this again. John had recovered, and it was the last time he’d seen William until a few years ago at Wilmington, in the full uniform of a lieutenant in his uncle’s regiment. 

Jem, on the other hand, had never been touched by life’s brutal cruelty and therefore the joyful moments he’d spent here with his grandson had been whole and untarnished by such harshness. This made the lad’s reckless decision to run away to Ocracoke and leave his whole family behind, without so much of a good-bye, as infuriating as it was scary. Not that Bree’s eldest wasna resourceful; he was, more than any kid he kent of his age, but the boy had never been alone. 

Bluebell’s growling broke his reverie. 

“What is it, a nighean?” he asked, turning to Roger. 

For his part, Bree’s husband looked very perplexed. He was putting his weight on one foot, then the other in a swaying movement that made the leaf-covered ground creak like a ship on high sea.

***

The freshness of the morning was biting his face, but John could barely feel it, nor the wetness of the grass beneath his backside.

How long had he been sitting there? He didn't know and upon reflection, didn't really care. Long before he’d got the confirmation that some people could bend time at their will through a circle of standing stones, time had ceased to have meaning for him. That was the downside of being held prisoner in a small room aboard a ship for almost a year, he was told. It could have been ten, he wouldn’t know.

He vaguely knew that some time in the past hour or two or three, the sun had risen above the lake. He remembered more clearly that he’d set out to come here to watch the spectacle only to lose interest on the way, and couldn’t remember what it had been like. Perhaps it had been one of those unremarkable sunrises. People didn't notice unremarkable things. After all, nobody had come out looking for him for one bloody year.

It wasn't a fair thought. William, Jamie and Claire had gone out of their way to save him from that stinking gaol. It just had taken them an incredible amount of time to determine where he was being held captive.

Manoke had found him too. 

He wished his friend had stayed with him. If he had, they’d be lying on the grass together. Perhaps he still wouldn't have noticed the colors of the sunrise, but he would have had a good reason to be distracted. 

God damn Jamie Fraser's eyes for scaring Manoke away! 

Why had he given the man so much power over his life? That was going beyond ordinary friendship. Well, their friendship had never been ordinary. There had been passion once, and before that, hatred and rage. From their first encounter, Jamie Fraser had stirred up the most violent reaction in his body and his soul, something wild, untamable, visceral, something alive with teeth, grazing his skin raw, eating him from the inside out, something agonizing, that made him want to murder, or vomit, or explode from his groin, like he had in the stables of Helwater long ago. How could someone have such power over him? 

Even now, John looked down at his thighs and was tempted to rip his flies open and bring himself some relief. God knew he needed some, and he was all alone. 

Cursing, John clenched his fists to control the shaking in his hands. Tears wet down his face. 

During those months of captivity when he’d had nothing to do but think, he’d come to the conclusion that his first experience of a disastrous loss of control over his life had been that fateful morning when he'd discovered his father's lifeless body in a pool of his own blood, murdered. Now he thought otherwise; the turning point had happened that night near Carryarick pass in the Scottish Highlands. 

He still could feel Jamie's throat heaving under the pressure of his knife before his world was swiftly, brutally, and painfully turned upside down. 

Fury, agony, shame, terror, those initial emotions that he'd associated with Jamie Fraser and his wife, were later turned into passion, jealousy, loyalty, reverence. One set of powerful emotions replaced another. It was a mind trick, like the one Richardson had used on him. 

Hate and love, pain and reward, always coming together, one extreme after the other again and again, until the reward had stopped coming unless he asked for it. Then begged for it. And then signed his death warrant for it. 

Like Jamie Fraser before him, Richardson had carefully removed any remaining sense of control John had over his life. He’d mastered him. Conquered him. Completely. Utterly. The only difference, and a substantial one, was that Jamie was his friend and would never ask for his death, especially in such a shameful, dishonoring way. But the truth was, Jamie wouldn’t even have to ask for it. Like Percy had said a long time ago, saving people was in his nature. 

John shivered, feeling the freshness of the breeze on his sweat-covered shirt.

A dog was barking in the distance. He looked up to see two familiar silhouettes making for the tree line on the west side of the house. It was Jamie and Brianna's husband, Roger, likely investigating what had happened the previous evening.

During his insomnia, he had not given much thought about why the thief he'd caught roaming near the stables would have been slain by his accomplice. Money and fear of betrayal were usually sufficient reasons for criminals to turn on each other. Of course, there was the most likely explanation that the other thief was a poor shot and had killed the other man while aiming for John. Either way, he wouldn't have lost any sleep over it if the brutality of the act had not reminded him of Lieutenant Lister's gruesome death, his head blown off by a French cannonball just minutes before the Tom Pilchard would explode and pierce his body with dozens of white hot shards of metal. 

Bothered by the recollection and his recent bad dream, John rose to his feet and shook off the tingling sensation in his legs. 

Given all that he’d been through, including his self-punishment–what in God’s name had taken him to mix the entire contents of Manoke's herbs for his arm into his tea, and pour the remaining herbs into the fire?–nightmares were hardly surprising.

"Ass," he muttered to himself, dismissing the vivid dreams as normal under abnormal circumstances.

Swim, ye wee bugger. Jamie had told him the other day. 

John stared at the lake. 

At least, here he was relatively free. 

In a way, Jamie was offering him the same half freedom he'd offered him after Ardsmuir. Although, if John were honest with himself, he had to acknowledge that he'd ended up with the better deal since he wouldn't be required to do labor or sleep in the stables. 

He wasn't a prisoner of war. Merely a prisoner of unfortunate circumstances. 

His life was on hiatus, until the sentence would come under the form of a letter, from William or Hal or both, to apprise him whether he still had a life to live, or if he was required to disappear, like Percy had done after Crefeld. 

John cursed through clenched teeth. First, hell would freeze over before he'd contemplate living the rest of his life in exile in France. Second, he'd thought he'd firmly decided that he did not want to think about Crefeld, nor Percy, nor Hal, nor–

William knew. 

Oh, God, his son knew. Oh, God. Oh, dear God. 

***

The soft freshness of the air reached my face. I lay on my side, captivated by the white raven on my windowsill, afraid to move lest it fly away. Its white feathers shone under the bright morning rays. Behind the peculiar bird, the green, tender leaves of the maple tree were rustling as birds chirped and flittered within. 

I was in the blissful state where one is aware of dreaming, feeling good and rested, warm and protected. It was a pleasant dream, quite unexpected, I must say, considering the brutal events of the previous day. 

I so much wished it were real, but the majestic maple had been my morning view from our old bedroom, in the big house. That one had burnt to the ground when Wendigo Donner and his fellows, in search of gemstones to travel back to the twentieth century, had come to the Ridge and accidentally set vapors of ether ablaze in their careless burglary. 

I rejected the intrusion of consciousness into my dream, shooing it away like an annoying fly buzzing around my head. It felt good to be in my old bedroom, and I hadn't experienced such a peaceful moment in years. I didn't want it to stop just now. I wanted to let the dream develop, see where the white raven would take me. Why not? Alice had followed a white rabbit, after all. My companion was pecking at the window gently, pushing it to open fully, then flew to the closest branch. 

Maybe it was  an invitation to get outside instead, I mused. 

Intrigued, I pushed the blanket aside and went to the window. Upon seeing me, it took flight again and landed on the fence around the old garden, its white feathers blending in with the strokes of yellow, pink, purple, and green from the wildflowers I'd let take over after Malva's tragic death. 

The sight always brought a pang to my heart, but not this time. 

After a snowy winter, the old wooden fence around it was disappearing under the generous nature, giving the small garden the busy and yet tranquil aura of an impressionist painting of a warm and sunny summer day in the countryside. 

I wrapped myself in my shawl and headed for the garden. The white raven was waiting for me on the hinge post of the gate which was half open. I could hear a child’s joyous giggles.

He was there, a toddler, sitting in a bare patch of grass between stands of purple coneflowers. As I approached, he turned his head toward me and I recognized Jem’s mischievous, smiling face from when he was a year old. The white raven was in his lap now, tickling him with its feathers. Was it a way my subconscious had found to tell me that my grandson was not in danger?

"Where are you?" I asked. 

Jem smiled. "Babbabba mammamma... " he replied, opening his arms wide above him and laughing as the white raven took off and flew high into the sky.

babbababamamamama

Blinded by the sunlight, I closed my eyes for a second, feeling the wind on my face, pressing, gentle and warm. Dadadaaamammaa the wind was saying.

I opened my eyes and David’s smiling face appeared, revealing a new incisor. 

"Mmmammma," he said, pressing his warm little hands on my face.

"Want your mama, don't you?"

David chewed his life and nodded, then crawled out of the bed. 

I got up and sat for a moment, processing my dream. Jem missing, and David sleeping with me. John's Indian friend who'd claimed an animal spirit had been stalking us since Wilmington. As usual, it was my brain sorting things out in a peculiar way. At least, it hadn't been a nightmare and didn't leave me with a feeling of unease. 

Ten minutes later, I entered the kitchen with David in my arms. Mandy and Fanny were alone at the breakfast table.

"Manny," David exclaimed, opening his arms toward his sister. 

"Have you seen your mommy this morning, sweetheart?" I asked, setting David in his wooden high-chair next to her.  

"She's still sleeping in the surgery. Daddy and grandpa went outside to track the bear. They told us to stay inside until they returned."

"They took Bluey with them," Fanny said. "I hope there's no bear. I don't want her to be hurt. Or anybody else."

"I'm sure they'll all be fine. It's just a precaution," I said to reassure the children. This wasn’t an easy task. There had been bear attacks on the Ridge before, not to mention a vengeful mob, a horde of despicable men, thieves. 

I shuddered slightly at the thought. 

While Mandy and Fanny took care of feeding David his gruel with honey, I focused on fixing  a breakfast tray for John, then headed into the surgery.

"Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ," I muttered. My patient was gone. So were Roger's clothes that Brianna had brought down last evening for John. 

I put the tray on the small table near the hearth and woke up Brianna, who was sleeping in the rocking chair.

"Mama? What time is it?" Bree asked as I opened the door and scanned the property. 

"Ten past eight," I said. Maybe John had gone with Jamie and Roger. Or maybe he was simply using the privy. 

“Coffee, thank goodness! Is everything all right?

“Yes,” I replied, hoping it was true as I closed the door. 

"Is that for Lord John?"

"If he'd been there, but since he's not, you can have it. I'll fix him something else when he returns," I said, stirring up the fire in the hearth.

"He wouldn't have eaten the toast anyway. He's allergic to peaches. Raspberries too. They make him itch."

"Raspberry allergy is quite common, but peach is rather unusual. How did you find out?"

"At Aunt Jocasta's. I brought him breakfast one morning when he was recovering from his concussion. But how could you not know? You were married to him for a couple of months. Surely you shared breakfast together?"

"I wasn't quite myself during that time to notice much about anything, I'm afraid. How did the night go?" I asked, swiftly changing the subject.

Brianna gave me a nurse’s report of John's night. His fever had dropped around one in the morning, but he'd had an agitated sleep, likely suffering nightmares, although John had refused to confirm that. "He ate a small piece of meat pie and I insisted that he drink some water instead of brandy, standing my ground like you told me to. Otherwise, aside from being exhausted, he was his usual self. The very definition of charm and resilience," she added with a tone that conveyed her skepticism. 

"At least he was lucid. Did he say anything about what happened to him yesterday evening?"

Brianna winced. "No, but about that," she said, looking toward the pharmacy corner of the surgery, "I put something under your microscope for you to examine."

Chapter Text

John swung his arms a few times to fight the pull of the depth. Floating in the water was more difficult than he remembered. It was nothing surprising. He lacked the abdominal muscles needed to keep himself afloat, and also the fat to keep warm, but the coolness of the lake didn't bother him that much. He could use it to focus his thoughts or to dissolve them into oblivion. He wasn’t yet sure which way he preferred to go.

But to dissolve into water or not wasn’t the question, it was what the war had done to his family. Dissolved it. Wrecked it. Sunk it. He gave another swing with his arms. 

His father had taught him how to swim in the pond at their country house, the same summer he'd put a sword in John's hand for the first time. The Duke believed in the importance of both mental and physical strength, and wanted his sons to be ready for any challenges life may bring.

Don't be caught, Hal said softly. How typical of his brother to break into his thoughts, ignoring his need for privacy even from afar. 

"Well, I am caught," he replied to his brother, although he didn't hear his voice, muted that it was by the water in his ears. "Now what?"

Hal did not respond to that. What was there to respond to? William hadn't known what to say either. 

Three weeks had gone by since he had thrust a gun into his son's grasp and presented him with the same option he had given Hal after Culloden, thirty-five years ago. Thirty-six, he corrected. Keeping track of time became essential now that he'd regained a sense of it. 

Have you? Claire Fraser asked. 

Get out of my head, damn you. John angrily flapped the water to get away from that intrusion to circle back to William, the most important person in his life, and the last one he'd ever wished to discover the abominable truth about him. 

Had there been a look of horror on his face? Or perhaps it was disgust? He couldn't remember. No matter how hard he tried, he had no recollection of the days he’d spent in jail or the days following his rescue. What he did remember was the one day he'd rather have erased from his memory entirely. Unfortunately, there was no escaping this one. No escaping Culloden. He’d left a major piece of himself on its battlefields and that emptiness remained. It was like a dark well, once filled with boiling magma that had exploded like a volcano in Hal’s face. The magma had cooled down now. It was a black rock inside him, solid enough that he could stand on it and see the vast field it left in him, burnt dark, like a cold battlefield.

Culloden.

The memory was as fresh as this morning. It wasn’t even three days after the cannons had stopped roaring and spitting fire. He saw the flash of surprise in his brother’s eyes when he'd told him who he was, who he really was. In an instant, the shock on Hal’s face had turned into pure anger, and John briefly believed that Hal would actually fire the pistol he’d put in his hand. More than believed, in truth. He’d hoped to be put out of his misery. Hector had just passed away, and he had no qualms about joining him. So he met his brother's gaze with unwavering determination and fearlessness. 

Hal had not fired. Neither had William, obviously, or John wouldn’t be freezing his arse off in a mountain lake. He knew that he had confronted his son the same way he’d done with Hal because Claire had told him so in a feeble attempt to reassure him that William didn’t hate him for what he was. He just didn’t remember how exactly that confrontation had unfolded. Was his mind so far gone?  

John began humming Lillibulero's song to suppress the rising panic. This was his way to avoid talking to himself and allowing captivity to push him towards madness. He'd sung. He'd sung in German, French, Latin, or English. Singing to not talk to himself. To not be alone with his thoughts, to not hear them, and to stop thinking altogether. Singing. 

You're sinking. And I mean it literally this time, ass, Hal said, grasping his arm and pulling him up. 

John's eyes flew wide open. He flailed his arms and kicked as he swam to the surface and gasped for air. He looked all around in panic, surprised to find himself so far away from the shore, and greatly disturbed by the sensation that someone had grasped him in reality. And yet he was alone. 

Swim, you wee bugger! Jamie's voice rang in his head. 

"Shut up," John growled, spitting water. "Both of you, shut up."

He'd drifted close to the middle of the lake and had to gather all the strength and will left in his body and his mind to reach the bank. Vultures were already circling high above his head, smelling the high potential of carrion in him. If he made it to the shore. His muscles were aching and turning to stone, making every move, every breath, excruciating. 

The panic increased. In response, a powerful instinct for self-preservation emerged. There was a patch of soft sand between the sedges, fifteen yards away. He wouldn't have seen it if a vulture had not hopped into the air from the spot. 

John snorted, finding the situation quite ironic. In a twisted version of the egg or the chicken, the vultures had already figured out where he would touch down and were patiently waiting for their meal to reach their obscene beak. But he was no deadmeat, and he had no fear of them. Cowardice was a common trait among vultures, even more so in the human sort. If he could pull off the feat, they would fly away as soon as he stood up. Because fucking Richardson was dead. 

He did’t know where that thought had come from, but it was enough to give him the energy to swim. John finally crawled onto the muddy beach. The dark birds didn't even look at him. He rolled on his back, and took a moment to catch his breath. He was shivering badly, but the sun was out and he could feel the gentle warmth of its rays on his skin. 

The dark shadow of a vulture flew low over him and flapped its wings so close to his face that he could smell the putrid scent of death emanating from it.

"God damn those bloody birds," he muttered as he staggered on all fours and opened his eyes to a most gruesome sight. 

"Oh, God," he muttered, clenching his teeth to contain an urge to vomit. 

Decomposing corpse first, vulture second. 

Groaning, John stood up and waved his arms to scare the feasting beasts away from the headless body. It wasn't exactly headless, though. The top and part of the left side of the face had been blown away, leaving a cavity wide open for the vultures to peck into, wiping it clean like it was a bowl of gruel. His stomach heaved again at the thought. He had never much cared for gruel in the first place, but now he was certain that he would never stand the sight of it again. 

"Oh, God," he whispered as he crawled into the high sedges to escape the sinister view. Dark moving spots invaded his vision, and he had to close his eyes and breath deeply to keep himself from fainting. 

That sudden weakness surprised him. The stench of death shouldn't upset him to that extent. He'd seen enough eviscerated bodies in his life of soldiering to not be disturbed by this. Soldiers with bayonets and swords through eyes and mouths. Scalped skulls and heads with hatchets buried at every possible angle. He remembered all too vividly Hector's half severed head. He’d seen so many gruesomely mutilated bodies in his life. 

So why was he shaking?

Because you're freezing cold, ass, Hal said. 

"Shut. Up." It was part of the problem, but to a minor degree. 

The man's face looked like someone had put a grenade inside his head instead of throwing one at him. Which was impossible. Not in this century. 

Or should he say, not in his century?

It was such a ridiculous notion that he laughed. 

And yet, something was undeniably very wrong. The evidence pointed to something that defied the laws of nature and fell into the realm of superstition inhabited by fairy tales, biblical creatures, spirits, and ghosts.

Oh, God. This was insane!

But if the man had been killed with a weapon that didn't exist in his century, he had to assume that his killer was not from this century either. 

With fear rising in his heart, John searched the open understory of the forest. Could Richardson be there? From what he'd heard–he'd been locked in his cabin when the American frigate had attacked the Palas–Richardson had been thrown overboard by a cannonball that had struck the poop deck during the first minutes of the fight. It was the reason they had brought the colors down so fast. But they had never found the Captain's body, had they? 

Oh, God. Oh, God. What if the man was still alive? And what if he was out for him again? He’d rather go back into the lake and drown himself than to let the man have his way with him again. 

The roaring winds of panic intensified in his head. It took him a moment to force that storm to calm down. Logic and reason were powerful weapons too.

Why would Richardson come all this way to kill a horse thief? If he'd meant to kidnap him again, he could have easily done so yesterday evening. God knew he'd been too shocked to offer even a semblance of resistance. 

No, it wasn't Richardson. 

With that conclusion, the clutch in his throat vanished. His attention turned to the corpse that was being picked apart by vultures. Scaring them off again would be pointless because the birds wouldn't suspend their natural behavior for very long. Besides, he no longer cared. 

He was cold, tired, hungry, and desperate to retrieve his clothes before being spotted in his birthday suit. He did not need to add that kind of shame to his emotional chaos. 

He looked up above the sedges waving gently in the breeze. The house was but a small dot on the backdrop of the forest. His clothes should be lying on a rock about a hundred feet away. With a stiff gait, he made his way back up the trail around the lake, humming Lillibulero. 

"So, what now?" Hal asked.

"Nothing," John muttered between clenched teeth. Hal never shut up, but he could stop answering.

Chapter Text

"What do you think?" Bree asked. "I found them when I washed the rags yesterday evening. Those are metal fragments, aren't they?"

To say that I was in disbelief would have been the biggest understatement of the century. Of any century. However, each time I peered through the eyepiece of my microscope, my incredulity reduced at a rate of knots.

Each fragment was a flawless decagon that not only fitted perfectly into ten others, but held together in place like magnets, their assembly creating the distinctive shape of a bullet, one that would undoubtedly explode upon impact, causing maximum damage to its victim. In further evidence of outrageous barbarity, it looked like the fragments could be recycled if collected on the victim with a simple magnet. 

In the future, man, out of concern for waste or, more probably, money, would create reusable instruments of death. 

Out of all the theories that had popped into my head since last evening, this one was straight out of a science fiction dystopia. 

"They definitely are, but of what alloy, I've no idea," I replied, rubbing my forehead to ease a growing headache. "Take a look." 

Bree's whole body tensed as she observed the partial cylinder I'd been able to reconstitute. "I've never seen anything like this. Where the hell could this come from?"

"The concept of explosive ammunition itself is quite old, actually," I said. "For one, the Soviets were known to use such ammunition during World War II. A rudimentary version of this, anyway."

Bree peered into the microscope again. "You think there's a Russian spy on the Ridge?"

"When you say it that way it sounds a bit too James Bond for my taste." 

"It's less crazy than a spirit, though." Bree glanced at the empty bed. "We all thought John had lost his mind, but if I met a soldier from the future, at dusk moreover, I'm not sure I wouldn't run away screaming about monsters."

"I certainly would," I said. Brianna was right and I started to feel guilty about how we'd treated the situation the past evening. John had witnessed a violent murder, and we'd accused him of being responsible, as victims are all too often.

I'd always been appalled by some of my male colleagues' treatment of rape victims. Their subtle–or sometimes not so subtle–way of putting the blame on the young women with their questions, or stares, snorts, or their head-shaking in obvious judgment of the victim's clothes or alcohol consumption, as if the victim had triggered the aggression. Their lack of empathy as they failed to grasp the harm they caused to the victim despite their oath disgusted me, and yet, yesterday evening, I'd done the same. 

My compassion had not extended to giving John the benefit of the doubt. Was fear for Jo or Kezzie a justification for such a failure? I could answer that question. I’d let my personal inner turmoil get the better of me. Jem’s disappearance and the inexplicable letter had both scared me to the point of losing a degree of professionalism. 

Even now, the feeling that something had been set in motion from far away in time paralysed me. In need to shake off the numbness in my legs, I stepped to the window in hopes of seeing Jamie, Roger, or John, but there was no one on this side of the house. 

"You can't blame Lord John for not wanting to stay inside," Bree said as she joined me. "It will take him some time to adjust back to normal life. Roger said he'd talk to him, in confession if needed, to put him at ease that no harm will come to him if he opens up about what he lived through during the last year. Do you think he is religious enough to consider this?"

"I'm fairly certain that John is agnostic, but it's worth a try," I replied. Just then,  Jamie and Roger stepped out of the forest. 

Five minutes later, we were all standing around the table, watching Roger unpack the contents of a large military backpack. The objects within were modern, but that wasn’t what captured our attention. 

Bree grabbed Jem's wooden model plane like it was a gold nugget in the middle of a river. "It's his!" she said as she examined it under every angle. "He's back!"

"I called him. He didn't answer," Roger said. He looked increasingly upset as he removed several small bags with clothes, food, and an emergency kit. "It doesn't make any sense. This bag's way too heavy for him." 

"Where did you find this?" I asked as I opened the medical kit. 

"In a dugout shelter not too far from the river," Jamie replied, mesmerized by the complexity of the shoulder straps and all the hooks and zipper pouches. "What the devil is this, Sassenach?" 

"Food," I said. "See the dent on the side?"

"Aye."

"Tear it open."

Jamie did as I instructed. "There's a powder inside with little chunks of–I'm not sure of what, actually."

I was more interested by the extensive content of the trauma and survival kit than by a military ration. The kit included everything needed to stabilize battlefield wounds including massive bleeding, fractures, and burns, even chest seals to prevent collapsed lungs.

"Let’s pour a bit of hot water in this." Bree went into the kitchen and returned with the rehydrated ration in a bowl. Jamie tentatively took a bite and grimaced. "If that's truly my grandson out there, he can consider his arse saved from the correction I'd planned for him. Eating this is certainly punishment enough.”

"Mama, look." Bree pointed out the series of letters and numbers on the foil packaging. 

I stared at the expiration date."Jesus! Eleven twenty-five? It can't be." 

Roger dipped his finger into the bowl. "Tastes like Beef Stroganoff to me, but that packaging certainly didn't exist in November Nineteen-twenty-five."

Bree pulled out a chair and sat down. "Jem traveled to the twenty-first century, possibly even further."

"Twenty-first?" Jamie repeated. "But aren't you all coming from the twentieth?" 

We did. And I had no explanation about how this was even possible. 

"The truth is, we don't really know how the stones truly work,” I said. “I was thinking about finding you in 1765 in Edinburg the last time I went through the stones. And the first time, I might have been thinking about Frank doing his genealogical research about his ancestor when I touched the stone."

"And it brought ye right to him." Jamie's gaze darkened, the specter of Black Jack Randall rising from the depths of our nightmares once more.  

"And I was thinking about you, Mama," Bree said as she reached for my hand. "To warn you and Da about the fire. I knew the time by the article in the newspaper. I was desperate to arrive before it was too late."

Roger looked thoughtful. He leaned back against the table and held on the edge with both hands, as if in need of touching something real. I certainly shared the feeling. "When we tried to go back to the twentieth century the first time with Jem,” Roger said. “We were thinking of going back home. And it didn't work. The stones returned us to you. We had to focus hard on going back to the twentieth century to make it happen."

"So the stones read yer mind, and bring ye where or when ye tell them to," Jamie said. "Like a ship. They need an azimuth to be steered in the right direction."

I nodded. "In which case, Jem must have known when he had to go."

Bree sighed. "That letter is not the only thing that he found. There must have been another, with instructions. Or something else."

"Or maybe someone," I added. A picture was slowly taking shape into my mind, although it was still too blurry to make heads or tails out of it.

"What kind of paradox would that be?" Roger asked. "If it's truly him out there, he's definitely a grown man."

"You mean Jem told his younger self to travel so far into the future to be able to protect us back in the past?" Bree asked. We were clearly on the same wavelength. 

“That would explain the backpack,” he replied. 

"But protect us from what? Or whom?" I wondered as the door creaked open and John came in, looking like a drenched stray cat. I couldn't resist glancing through the window to check. It wasn't raining. 

"The lake's a wee bit cold for a swim," Jamie snorted as I quickly wrapped a blanket around John’s shoulders and helped him settle into a chair in front of the hearth. As I rubbed his back, concerned by his absent look, Bree put a towel on his head to dry his hair. 

“Thank you, my dears, for your caring attention,” John said. “But I’d rather not be touched and probed just now, if you don’t mind.”

"Did ye fall in there?" Jamie asked as he put a glass of whiskey into John's hand. Bree caught my disapproving gaze and disappeared into the kitchen.

"No, I went in voluntarily. Don’t say it. It seemed like a good idea at the time," John added. There was an unmistakable raw edge to his voice. Bree returned with a breakfast tray. John offered no resistance as I swiftly replaced the glass of whiskey with a cup of tea. 

"I bet it did," Jamie snorted. 

While John recounted his macabre discovery to Jamie, Bree motioned for me to return to the table with her and Roger, who was examining the contents of a box. It was cool to the touch. 

"The box is refrigerated. How can that be?" Bree asked as I grabbed a pen-like device. 

"Batteries?" Roger said.

Bree frowned. "Most likely but I can't see where's the compartment. It must be built in." 

There was a click as she brushed her fingers on the side of the box, and a compartment slid open. But it wasn't batteries inside.

There were five vials, each about two inches long. Each was securely housed in its own protective compartment. A sixth was empty. The vials were marked. Adrenaline was the only one I recognized; the rest were unfamiliar to me. 

Understanding now what I had in my hands, I pushed a button on the top of the pen-like device. A small needle sprang out, a clear drop pearling at the tip. 

"It's a syringe," Roger said, stating the obvious. 

"Not exactly," I said as I unscrewed the middle portion and revealed an empty cartridge engaged in the device. "It's more of an injector. And it has been used." The name written on the side of the vial was ringing a bell. "Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. It's an anesthetic agent." And there had been enough in it to knock down an elephant, let alone a man.

Both Bree and I glanced at John. "It wasn't Doctor Johnson who saved John," she said, a light shining in her eyes. 

I couldn't help but laugh faintly as well. "Jem must have followed us to Wilmington and known what we were about to do."

“And he just happened to have better means?” Bree asked, incredulously.

“I guess there are a lot of questions my wee grandson needs to answer,” Jamie said with a smirk as he and John joined us at the table.

“I can't be furious with him anymore, can I?" Bree said. She heaved a deep sigh as her whole body relaxed at the news. The joy of knowing that Jem was outside somewhere was soon replaced by worry. "He must be famished if he's been eating military rations all this time. And why wouldn't he come when you called him?"

"Because he knows better than to take his eyes off the ball," Roger said. "That's what I always told him at school. To help him focus on his task and not let his mind wander between the centuries."

John looked like a curious child trying to stay awake to see the end of a movie. "You sit down," I told him, offering my chair when Jamie put the bowl under his nose.

“Want to try twentieth century food?”

John suddenly turned green and stumbled out the door. 

“I dinna think he likes yer food verra much, Sassenach.”

The sound of retching confirmed the intuition. 

Jamie winced. "Arh. Dinna fash. I’ll go check on that wee bugger. Anyways, we need to retrieve the man's body before one of the villagers stumbles upon it."

Or worse, one of the children, I thought with a shudder. Another person had been murdered on our property. The specter of Malva rose from the dead, and with her, those of Lionel and his men as well. The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees. 

"All right. Do what you have to do," I said. “And, Jamie? John needs a friend; not sarcasm. The future came to you through me. John didn’t have the same luck.”

Jamie frowned as he grasped my meaning. Then, he nodded. "Will you want to examine the body?"

"No," I said, waving my hand in dismissal before realizing that I had to. "Wait! Yes. Please. Bring it back here." I couldn't take the chance of the villagers finding metal fragments from another century while preparing the body for the funeral.

"I must warn you, my dear, that it is by far the most gruesome corpse I've had the misfortune to see."

I looked at John who was standing on the doorframe, still looking a bit green around the gills. Then, I looked at Jamie, who had once ordered John not to talk to me that way in front of him. Neither seemed to have taken notice of the slip. Maybe because the saying don’t shoot at an ambulance applied here. That or enough time had gone by that John's demonstration of affection toward me didn't bother Jamie anymore. I hoped for the latter.

"It's quite alright," I said, "Believe it or not, I have an idea of what the body looks like. And the longer it’s out there, the bigger the risk that someone not accustomed to such injuries will find it. Please, bring it back here so I can make it look more acceptable."

"Verra well, Sassenach. We shouldna be long. It's no that far."

"Wait!" Bree said as John, Roger, and Jamie started to leave. 

"What is it, honey?" I asked. Then I saw the flat device in Bree's hands. I could see the terror in her eyes as she lifted her head to look at me. "We have a bigger problem than the villagers."

Chapter Text

Jamie made his way back to Claire and Bree in the middle of the afternoon. It was lovely; sunny and warm with the invigorating scent of autumn in the air. The horizon was a painter's palette with vibrant golden, orange, and red. So beautiful, but without the usual calming effect such scenes usually had on him. It was not to be this time, perhaps it never ever would be again. 

He'd left Roger at the meeting house to supervise the preparations for the funeral of a man he felt accountable for, despite never having met him. The man's brother, Bradley Shaw, had confirmed that they'd arrived a month ago, and said his brother, Sean, had left the day before to go hunting. He assumed that his brother, who was unfamiliar with the area, had gotten lost on his way back home and met a tragic end at the claws of a bear or perhaps a mountain lion. Despite Claire’s efforts to disguise the missing chunk of skull with bandages, the body was terribly mutilated.

Bear or lion, it didn't matter to him what kind of beast they thought had killed their own. As long as nobody suspects a human being, he was more than happy to go along with their theories. That went for the assumptions as to why the victim was on his property in the first place as well. Accusing a man who'd been brutally killed of being a horse thief would serve no purpose, and almost certainly raise unwelcome suspicions amongst the tenants about the true nature of his murderer. The question that would be left without a satisfying answer in any case. Best to leave the dead to rest in peace and let the living grieve. 

The unrest that followed Malva's murder in their own garden was still a very much a raw memory for him and Claire. That violent darkness was burnt into their flesh, although it wasn't that dreadful memory that tied his guts into knots at the present. People, even the scared, stupid, and angry ones, he could deal with if he had to. Against the Apocalypse, he could do nothing but repent his sins on his knees and pray for the salvation of his soul and of the people he loved. 

Jamie clenched his thighs against his horse's sides to resist an urge to dismount and do just so. Instead, he looked up at the thin threads of clouds stretching high like a soft veil into the pale blue sky. They didn't look like mushrooms to him. 

Blessed are the ignorant, he thought, shuddering at the memory of what he’d learned that morning in the surgery. How he wished he’d never acquired that knowledge. Claire had called it radioactivity, a new poison that man had created in the future. Although it wasn't exactly a creation of man. Like the first humans had mastered the fire at the dawn of civilization, scientists in the future would master another element, the atom it was called. Something that existed in all living and inert things. Bree had called them the building blocks of Creation. The horse on which he rode, the grass, the rocks, even water was made of them. Those invisible things were in everything that existed. God's flour, Roger had further explained, one that could make thousands or even billions of different types of pastries, bread, and pies. And like some food could nourish you or make you sick if turned bad, or even be poison for humans and only meant for birds to eat, some atoms could give every living thing a deadly sickness. Radiation. And it was all over Jem's equipment. 

"Oh, God. Do we need to jump into the lake to wash?" Roger had asked, staring at his hands in alarm. Claire and Bree had pulled him and John away from the table like they were two kids about to touch a hot stove.

Claire had watched the device glow yellow a few more seconds before relaxing. "Washing our hands with soap will be enough. Our faces too, as we might have scratched ourselves," she'd said as she hovered the device above the letter. 

It too, was contaminated, but like the rest, not badly enough to make them sick. Still, the initial panic in Claire's, Bree's, and Roger's faces had remained vivid in his mind. Never had he seen the three of them so scared of anything. It was like the Devil Himself were sitting on the table instead of a bag.

As the house appeared at the end of the road, Jamie felt a pang in his heart. His horse's ears flattened in response to the tension growing in his body. He gently patted the horse's neck. The gesture soothed the stallion, but brought Jamie no comfort. He had an unnerving feeling that whatever future his grandson had visited, it was one of war, and that somehow, that war had reached his home, his land, and he had no idea where or what it was, much less why. How was he going to protect his family and all the people under his responsibility from a threat he couldn’t see or understand? For now, Jem was protecting them, but he was only one man. 

Jamie exhaled sharply, causing his horse to raise its head and flatten its ears again. Jamie patted him. but to no avail this time. The horse yanked its head to the left and snorted impatiently. Jamie was surprised. He was a young horse, but he'd never shown such nervousness with him. "It's all right, a bhalaich," he said calmly as he tightened his grip on the reins and kept his horse moving straight toward the stables. After a few more feet, the horse refused to move forward and started to kick the ground, threatening to rear back. Jamie dug his knee hard into its side to keep control of his mount, not seeing what could cause the horse such distress, for he was alone in front of the house. The front door opened and Claire called him. 

A few years ago, it would have unfolded in a more elegant manner. 

"Jamie!" Claire screamed as he dismounted a bit too fast and hit the ground with his butt with barely enough time to roll out of the reach of the stallion's hooves. 

A few years ago, he would also have sprung back to his feet by his own means. As it was, Claire reached him before that thought crossed his mind.

"I'm all right, Sassenach, I'm all right," he said, trying not to grunt as Claire pulled him up. Pain shot up his arse into the lower back, then all the way up between his shoulder blades and down his thighs. 

"What scared him?"

"Your voice, Sassenach."

She gave him a dubious stare. 

"I dinna ken what took him," he said, watching the horse running wild down the grassy field bordering the lake, kicking and rearing as if he was fighting a swarm of hornets.

"You get inside and lie down. I'll go get him," Claire said, still holding his arm.

"As tempting as it is, especially if it's wi' ye, Sassenach, I forbid ye to go anywhere near that beast." Jamie cursed through his teeth. Jo was at the village with Roger, and Kezzie was still away hunting, which didn't leave him with a lot of help. "Is his Lordship awake from his afternoon nap?"

"As a matter of fact, I was about to go and check on him when I saw you," she said, a deep concern in her eyes, but not for him. 

"What is it, Sassenach?"

Claire clasped his arm tightly around hers as they started to walk up the path. "Do you remember Hal's letter?" she asked after a moment. 

Unless she'd hidden a full correspondence with the Duke of Pardloe, which was unlikely, he was aware of only one. "The one where he asked ye how to poison rats? Or is there another one I'm not aware of?" he asked, trying not to sound too suspicious. Claire’s reproachful look told him he’d failed at that.

"He made another request as well."

Aye. To take care of his brother in case something happened to him. "We did as he asked even if we dinna ken anything happened to his Grace," he said. 

"I don't think that's what Hal - the Duke - meant when he wrote those words."

Jamie didn’t see her point. As far as he was concerned, it meant exactly that: to help John if he was caught. "Pardloe protected his brother his whole life. Wi' him gone, he wanted to make sure someone would continue protecting him. Although he didna feel comfortable to ask me directly and kent verra well that ye'd no say no to him and I’d no say no to ye." Manipulative son of a bitch, Jamie muttered as he looked up and frowned. Claire had shifted their path toward the stables without him noticing. "If ye want to have a moment in a haystack wi' me, Sassenach, maybe best to talk about that wee bugger later."

"John's been retrenched there all afternoon."

Jamie came to a halt, his smile vanishing along with his hope of sharing a private moment with his wife. "Retrenched, ye said?"

"Well, retrenched might not be the right word. Hidden is more appropriate, in the empty stall you use as a tack room. Not the most comfortable place to take a nap."

No, indeed. "What about the guest room?" While Claire was examining the body that morning, he’d noticed that John, exhausted from his exertions, had lain on the surgery cot. Jamie had asked Bree and Roger to install him upstairs instead, and John had followed them without a word.

"The bed wasn't even slightly untidy."

Christ. Of course it wasn’t. "It's nah the bed, Sassenach," he said. "It's the walls."

It dawned on him, then, why Claire was speaking of the Duke's letter now. He’d detected a tendency toward melancholy in John a long time ago. Clearly the Duke had been well aware of that weakness. 

"Jamie–" she paused, biting her lower lip as she searched for her next words carefully. "The Ridge is for him what the abbey was for you." Her voice trembled. Time hadn't softened the sharp edges of that painful memory, like shards of glass in his guts.

The Palas was for John what Wentsworth was for you, was what Claire truly meant to say. But he was glad that she'd taken those few extra seconds to find a way to give him this message without saying out loud the name of that filthy dark hole, a well of pure darkness where he'd been torn into a thousand, shredded pieces. In the abbey, she'd picked them up, against his will, one by one. She'd sewn them back together, using her own body as glue to make him whole again. It had been a violent process. He'd fought against it. But in the end, he'd surrendered to her love, her strength, and her flesh. 

At that last thought, Jamie let out a grunt, suddenly uncertain about his ability to help John. Maybe that wee Indian would have been better suited for the task, and now he felt bad for scaring the man away. As for violence, he didn't know if John could take any more, and certainly didn't wish to cause him further harm, although the bruise on his chin showed that John still had some fight in him. If it came to that, it shouldn't be too difficult for him to immobilize John. The wee bugger should know better than to try to free himself from a lock now. He wasn't sixteen anymore.Although he might be wrong about that. Over the years John had gained combat experience and a degree of wisdom, yes, but would it be enough to overcome his panic and anger? Discrimination goes out the window when pressed hard enough; those visceral emotions can overrule everything else. 

"I dinna ken if I'm the one he needs, Sassenach. I'm not for him what ye are for me."

"But you know what he's going through. All he needs is for someone to understand him." 

Claire pressed her hands gently on his chest and kissed him softly. 

As she returned to the house, Jamie stayed a moment in front of the stables. The door was half-closed. Through the small aperture, he could see the dust in the air glistening like gold powder. Even the time of day was the same as last time in Helwater. 

Jamie raised his eyes toward the sky, not to check on the clouds but to pray God to give him the strength to keep his temper under control. Of all the places, why did that wee bugger have to choose the stables? But this wasn't Helwater. And John was his friend. His most unlikely one, for sure, but a friend and a kinsman through William, and again by marriage, through Ian. He certainly deserved better than sarcasms.

He didn't spot John immediately. The filtering sun created deep shadows in the corners where the rays didn't reach. Jamie’s sight adjusted and there he was, sitting in the far left corner, facing the empty stall of his mare, the one Jem had taken to flee to the circle of stones at Ocrockee. Jamie grunted as he realized that he now had now horses on the loose. He'd deal with this later. Maysie's pen had a stool inside, and he contemplated grabbing it to sit in front of John. He looked at the cow who, undisturbed by his presence, kept munching on straw. After a moment of hesitation, he decided that the ground next to John would at least remove the duty to acknowledge each other's presence by making eye contact. 

"Arh!" Jamie yelped as his back cracked. "I'm afraid ye'll have to carry me back to the house."

His misery elicited a snort from John. "Which would assuredly cause my own back to snap like a twig and leave us both to crawl the rest of the way."

"Crawl? Speak for yerself. Last time that happened to me, I couldna even move a toe. It was yer fault by the way," he added sarcastically.

"How's that?"

"Must have torn a muscle in the swing I took at ye outside Philadelphia."

John snorted again. "Divine Justice exists, after all."

"Ahr. No good deeds go unpunished, most likely." 

They both laughed lightly at that, and Jamie felt that maybe Claire had been wrong, for there was no hostility in John's voice. She and Bree always worried too much. Sometimes with good reason, he couldn't blame them, but more often, they worried because it simply was in their caring nature.

"I appreciate you checking up on me, but I didn't come here to talk. Your present pain is most unnecessary, I assure you."

"Why ye've come here, then?"

To Jamie's surprise, John bent to his side, then dropped Frank's book on his lap, Frank's picture face up, not the title. 

"Ah. That's called a photograph."

John nodded. "Your daughter explained it in length. A rather ingenious invention, I admit."

"What d'ye think of it?"

"The book or its cover?"

"A rational man like ye wouldna judge a book by its cover, certainly."

John scratched the bridge of his nose and let out a deep sigh.

"Aye. Reading it gave me a headache the first time, too."

"When I was your prisoner at Valley Forge, your wife mentioned a British officer, John Andre, being caught and hanged for spying. Has he already been executed?"

"Last year. In October, if I recall correctly."

"Ah. Time flies." 

Jamie didn't know exactly what time did or was. For him, time was like an ever changing river on which he was floating. Sometimes he was on a solid boat, sometimes on a feeble raft. A few times he'd gone overboard and swallowed a mouthful. What was constant was that he had very little to no power to steer whatever embarcation he was on. Claire, on the other hand, had some power, not over the flow of the river, but over her presence in it. If a dangerous rapid appeared ahead, she could choose to do a portage, or jump into another much quieter river. Then, once the danger was over, she could come back to him. He agreed with John with time flying, though. The flow of the river seemed to go faster now that he was older.

"I thought rationality was the only thing that brought order to the world," John said, lifting his head from his knees and leaning it back against the wall. "The only reliable tool one could use to see the truth in all the chaos. But there's nothing rational in this."

"What's not rational?" Jamie asked, not certain what John meant.

"Time is not supposed to be an abstract concept. Not entirely anyway. It's supposed to be a pillar on which our comprehension of the world rests, something unmovable, more stable than a mountain. If it is not, then what other forces of the universe that we take for granted are something else altogether?"

"I dinna ken time is different than we think it to be, merely that some people can travel through it."

"Is it? If Richardson had succeeded in keeping the colonies under British rule, then this book would be of no consequence. It would be something from a future that no longer existed."

"History might change, then, but not time," Jamie replied. He'd had a few decades of reflection on the subject, and Claire's help as well. "Time is made of the aggregation of seconds in minutes, hours into days, then years, and so on. Those units doesna change and so time doesna change either."

"Doesn't it?" John whispered, his face suddenly blank. "I could swear it does."

Jamie silently cursed himself. He knew what John meant and it had nothing to do with time travel, as Bree called it, at least not that alone. Time spent in captivity was a different beast. It messed up one's mind to the point it ceased to have any meaning. One day blended into the next and so on until nothing outside one's torment seemed to even exist. At least in Ardsmuir, he'd had the company of his kinsmen to keep his mind safe from insanity. 

"Did ye ken him? John Andre?" Jamie asked, deciding to change the topic to keep John away from the edge of a cliff he knew all too well. Reality was the best remedy for that ailment. 

"Enough to know that he was a good man and a promising officer. As a matter of fact, he reminded me of–" John froze. His shoulders sagged with his breath. 

"William?"

"I was about to say myself. But that might sound presumptuous."

Jamie shifted on his side to look John in the eye. "Ye? A spy?"

"I didn't end up being Jamaica's governor for my love of politics, I can assure you," John replied, a sarcastic edge to his voice.

"That's how ye kent Claire was in danger. When ye both thought me at the bottom of the ocean."

John nodded silently. "Richardson was wearing too many coats not to represent a mortal danger."

"I shoulda thank ye sooner. I'm most grateful for what ye did to protect my wife and my family."

John gave a faint wave from his hand to dismiss the matter, either because it was the most normal service he could render or John didn't wish to take the risk for their conversation to turn into an unpleasant argument.

"Imagine you could go back to Rome," John said, moving away from the dangerous subject of his brief marriage to Claire. "What would you do with your knowledge of every battle, the generals and consuls, all their decisions and the consequences on the Republic's fate? Would you prevent Ceasar from rising to power? Go back before Cannae and warn Paullus and Varro of Hannibal's strategy, therefore preventing the massacre of fifty-thousand Roman soldiers?"

"It's nah as easy as it seems," Jamie replied, smiling. He'd missed their friendship, especially their old habit of reenacting ancient battles in John's quarters in Ardsmuir. "And Rome won the second Punic war in the end, anyway. Ye wouldna change much history with that battle."

"Adrianople, then. A success of the legions on the eastern borders of the Empire would have squelched any further ambition from the barbarians to challenge Rome."

"Maybe for some time, but if we learnt something from Culloden, Claire and I, it's that history is hard to steer in any direction, simply because it seldom is a single event or a single man's actions that are in play. No one is that important. That's hubris to think otherwise."

"Perhaps. But the world is full of such men who will try nonetheless. Your daughter told me last night of what a woman named Geilis Duncan did. And an Indian man, Wendigo something. They both wanted to correct the past, one for power, the other to ease the suffering of his race. Richardson, for his part, wanted to end slavery. God only knows how many more of them are there outside trying to change our lives. Would I be sitting here with you today having this conversation with you if not for Richardson? Where else should have I been? Talking with whom? Would I even be alive? A lot can happen to a man in one year. Disease, accident, that fucking war." John looked down at Frank's book on his lap. 

There was some truth in what John said, but it didn't serve anything to overthink what could or could not have been. He'd gone there enough times on his own, and he'd always come to the same conclusion: there was a reason God had brought Claire to him, and this reason he could maybe know one day, when in His Kingdom. For as long as he breathed, he would thank the Lord every day for His gift and wonder what he had done to deserve it. 

"I dinna ken where ye would be, and never will ye, John," Jamie said, understanding his friend’s turmoil all too well. "I never told ye how we met, Claire and I?”

John shook his head slightly, eyes narrowing in curiosity.

“It was during the Rising. She'd been with her husband, Frank, in Inverness, in her time. The man was doing some research on his genealogy, and he'd found one of his ancestors had been killed at Culloden. Claire wasna too interested in dusting off century old military archives. She’d gone on a research trip of her own, for medicinal herbs. That's what she was doing at the ancient circle of stones on Craigh Na Dun that afternoon, unaware that she was one of a verra few who could travel through the stones. To you and me, those stones are just stones, but people like Claire, they hear them, like they are hollow and bees live inside. She was intrigued. I imagine I’d be too in her place. So she leaned her ear on it to hear them. And next thing she knew, she woke up on the ground in our time. She didna ken that at first. Thought she'd fainted. She tried to go back to the village but the road she'd used to come to the stones wasna there anymore. Ye speak of rationality, and ye're right about that. There was nothing rational in what was happening to her. She thought she'd lost her way and tried to cut across the forest to return to Inverness on foot. That's when she saw him. Frank's ancestor. He was an officer in the British army." Jamie pointed a finger toward Frank's picture on the book. "He looked a bit like him and at first she felt relieved to see him, curious to ken why he was wearing a uniform. She, herself, was lightly dressed, as it is the custom for women in the future, and approached him with the familiarity of a wife toward her husband." 

"But he wasn't her husband," John said. His eyes briefly narrowed to two slits. Then, they showed white all around. "Oh, God. I wondered why this face was familiar. If we're talking about the same person, she's lucky to be alive. That officer was infamous for his misogyny and cruelty toward anyone he perceived as an enemy. And believe me, he had a rather broad definition of the term. Even his superiors were scared of him."

"Sounds like him, indeed." Jamie dug his nails into his palms. He had not forgotten John's outburst the previous night, before the incident with the horse thief. Black Jack Randall certainly wasn't the only depraved bastard in the English camp, and John never said when or where he'd been assaulted. A wee, handsome lad like him would have been vulnerable in a military camp but his brother's influence should have protected him from harm. Nobody would have dared touch a hair of his head, not even Randall. 

Jamie felt a queasy feeling settling in his stomach at the thought. Even his superiors were scared of him, indeed. "Did ye ken him well?"

"Randall? You mean personally? Not really. Hector had warned me to stay clear of him."

Jamie let out a breath of relief. If Black Jack Randall had been John's assailant, he'd have expected to see at least a flash of anger on John's face. He'd seen only confusion at the meaning of his question. 

"Mind you, he was there the next morning when I was found. He was compassionate at first. Everybody knew who I was, even him. He asked me if I was unharmed, gave me water from his canteen. Then he asked if I knew what had happened to the cannons."

Jamie's guts turned into a pack of knots as John recounted how he wasn't scared to admit his responsibility and did so, even giving Randall a detailed account of what Red Jamie had done to him to trick him into betraying his camp, unaware of the kind of fury his confession would unleash. 

"Someone had brought him a cane during the interrogation. But Randall sent him back to fetch the cat instead. Didn't I agree that a man's mistake required a man's punishment? I remember his voice. He was calm, self-controlled. I was too stunned with cold, hunger, pain, and shame to protest. Had he raised his voice, perhaps I'd have fought back and defended myself from what he proposed to do with me. I didn't even resist when he removed my shirt, carefully, not to hurt my arm. Scotchmen are savages, but we English know how to be civilized, especially when we must inflict punishment on our own. I remember wanting him to stop talking and be done with it, for I didn't know how much longer I could stay on my feet and not dishonor myself further by begging him on my knees to let me go." 

By the grace of God, John’s hide was saved by his brother's timely intervention. But the crime was signed. It was Randall who had assaulted John in his youth. There wasn't any doubt now. If John hadn't said it was him, Red Jamie, who'd tricked him, he might have escaped the sick bastard's ire, but once his name had been thrown into the air, like a devil out of a bottle, there was no place on Earth John could have escaped Black Jack Randall's vengeance.

Jamie’s fingers curled and his nails dug into the flesh of his palms, drawing blood. To think that he had later accused John of preying on boys when he was the one who had thrown him into Randall’s claws. Christ! At least he'd been a man when that had happened to him, his bones solid enough.nHe still remembered John's frail body and his arm snapping like a twig as he broke free from his grasp.

"I must beg for your forgiveness," Jamie said, his voice but a whisper. 

John shrugged. "We both agreed a long time ago that it was my own foolishness that caused this whole debacle."

"Aye, we agreed on that, but I meant for what happened to ye later."

"What? You mean that near punishment? Hal saved my ass. Besides, I was a brat. If anything, our encounter taught me a well-needed lesson."

John still didn't get it. Maybe it was better that way. He didn’t know what pushed him to say his next words, they just flowed out of his mouth in a whisper so low he wondered if he’d actually said them out loud. “Flogging wasna the only way that sick bastard took his pleasure.”

"Oh, God." John suddenly sucked air into his lungs. "Oh, God." 

Jamie closed his eyes. Now it was out. A heavy silence fell onto the stables as the late afternoon breeze brought in a slight chill.

"For what it's worth," John added after a moment, "I don't believe a man like him would need any pretext or excuse to do evil to others. Hal was the only person that he was afraid of. I might well have paid for his resentment toward my brother. As for your own suffering at his hands... we all have a cross to bear, but I shall be relieved to say for certain that, despite my crime, there is only my blood on it. I deeply believe that the determination to act honorably in the face of evil is the essence of one's soul, and that in itself makes our soul unattainable from any torment here on Earth."

Jamie was quite certain that there was the blood of many on John's cross or his for that matter. Both of them had killed many men during their lives as soldiers. Still, he saw what John truly meant. There was no innocent blood on John's cross. He couldn't say the same for himself. Geneva Dunsanny had died because of his weakness, and yet the Lord had given him a son despite his crime, and he loved William beyond his soul. 

The daylight was fading in the stables and Jamie was relieved that the shadows falling in the corner where they sat concealed the tears rolling down his face. Damn him! The wee bugger had done it again. John had made his peace with what had happened to him, at Black Jack Randall's hands and Richardson's as well. Now, he was showing Jamie the way to his own resolution.

After all these years, that wee lad who'd tried to kill him, despite his state of weakness and turmoil, was there for him like he'd been there for Claire, Bree, and Ian back in Jamaica. Had God Himself sent John to him as a test to reveal the true nature of his heart? If he had failed that test, his life would have been so different. Much shorter for one thing. Pardloe would never have spared his life at Culloden. He might have not killed him on the spot, but rather sent him to the Tower to be executed on the gallows. Claire would never have come back, and he wouldn't be sitting in the stables with John, speaking about how people from the future could change their lives for better or worse. 

"I forgive ye for that moment of blind agony and drunkenness with Claire when ye thought I was dead. I ken for sure that if not for yer presence, I'd have come back to an empty house, and that would have effectively put me in my grave–" Jamie raised a hand to keep John from reacting, for he needed to say more and didn't want to stop now. "If not for my jealousy and bitterness, William woulda come sooner to ask for my help to find ye. Or I woulda seek ye out after Kings Mountain, if only to make sure ye were alive. Chances are I would have figured sooner that Richardson had kidnapped ye. I wasna there when ye needed me. I'm deeply sorry about that." 

Both had tears in their eyes and their jaws were clenched with emotion. Had they been both up on their feet, they'd have embraced each other. That same thought must have crossed John's mind, for he extended his hand. Jamie accepted it warmly. The tension vanished, relieving the heaviness on his chest. In that awkward moment of silence, both men sniffed, trying to keep themselves from crying. They both rolled on their sides and tried to get up. Knees and backs cracked, followed by grunts and curses against the firmness of the ground as they grabbed anything within arm’s reach to haul themselves on their feet. This almost caused them to fall back since John caught Jamie's arm, and Jamie mistook John's shoulder for a solid pole. Panting, they both ended up in a tight embrace that they maintained for longer that should have been necessary, both mistrusting his own legs. 

"Are ye sure ye meant it when ye said ye never loved me the other day?" Jamie asked, his tone unexpectedly joyfully sarcastic considering he could feel John's crotch hardening against his thigh. 

"That is my hip," John said, letting go of him.

"Ye sure?"

"Quite sure," John said, limping toward the door. "I thought I loved you, but you would agree that love out of selfishness isn't true love." 

Pressing a hand against his lower back, Jamie followed him. His horse had come back and was munching on the grass just outside the stables. "Selfishness, huh. So now ye admit it was lust after all," he said, dragging the horse inside.  

John glanced at him with despair as he secured the horse back into his pen. "I meant the selfishness of one's survival instinct."

"With a hundred men to protect ye, dinna tell me ye were scared I'd killed ye."

"A thousand men could do nothing to make the nightmares stop, but love could. And removing your fetters."

Jamie snorted and unconsciously rubbed his wrists. "Must have shocked ye, to see me in the courtyard in Ardsmuir on yer first day."

"Shock doesn't even begin to describe it." John stopped walking and looked around him with sudden apprehension. Dusk was almost upon them and the light of the candles glowed behind the windows of the house. "Do you think they're right? That there is one of those apocalyptic weapons here on the Ridge?"

"I dinna ken, but it is time for me to have a talk with my grandson," Jamie said, narrowing his eyes as he caught sight of Claire talking with Jo and Roger in the soft shadows surrounding the porch. There was another man with them. It was the horsethief's brother, Bradley Shaw. What was he doing here, armed with a rifle?

As they came closer, Bluebell sprung to her paws and ran to him. 

“The villagers think something is roaming the Ridge," Claire said as he patted his dog. 

“There were some fresh tracks near the river.” Jamie frowned as his wife shook her head. “I’ll go back tomorrow at dawn to check them out.”

"It can't wait tomorrow! There’s a chance that Jo’s brother is still alive," Shaw protested. "I'm no letting that demon kill anyone else. And neither is everyone else."

“A demon?” John asked as Jamie noticed the presence of half a dozen men in the shadows down the road. 

"Kezzie should have been back by now, and he’s no scared of bears," Jo said, "We need ye and the reverend. I beg ye, will ye come wi' us, please?"

Jamie grunted as he met Claire's annoyed gaze. Did he have a choice?

Chapter Text

From a distance, an observer would have found nothing out of the ordinary in their company; armed men on horses with their dogs walking by their side, to all appearances, an ordinary hunting party. One might argue that it was a little late to go hunting, the risk of accidentally shooting a fellow hunter instead of a deer were greater at dusk. It would be safer to wait for the morning. 

Roger had used this argument to convince the men to go home and sleep on it. 

"But aren't demons nocturnal creatures?" Jo Beardsley had replied, an effective counterargument that prompted the other fellows to nod and grunt in agreement. 

Living in the darkness of souls and hearts, indeed, Roger thought. He and Jamie understood that nothing they could say would calm the scared villagers. 

His twelve-year-old son was missing, a new tenant had been slaughtered, and Kezziah Beardsley had not yet come back from hunting. That those three things were unrelated didn't make a difference, it was more than enough for a village to erupt in panic.

It had begun with Malva's murder, or so the villagers had concluded with a thought process that would have won an award in the old inquisition days. Since only a demon could commit such an abomination, her brother must have been possessed, but now that these two innocent souls had passed on, where was the demon? Such was the question whispered in every home this night. Roger had his own thoughts on the subject. The world didn’t need demons with innocent people like Malva Christie and her brother roaming the earth. Roger sighed heavily. It wasn’t a charitable thought. But it was all he could muster.

The shadow of the ruins of the old house appeared at the end of the dirt road, the skeletal beams like dark stakes sprouting from the ground, still visible against the backdrop of the forest. The garden lay some sixty feet to the left of the burnt out porch. The grass had grown knee high during the summer. Claire and Brianna usually maintained the path when they had the time, but that had been impossible in the last few months. Roger was more concerned about rattlesnakes on the prowl for rats rather than a demon on the lookout for a new soul to possess. Although, given the snakes' bad rap in the Bible, he dreaded that if one of the men was bitten, he'd have to perform an impromptu exorcism on the unfortunate fellow who would no doubt bear that black spot for the rest of his life anyway, and be condemned to be the village's scapegoat for the rest of his life.

It didn't matter, of course, that he wasn't trained to practice exorcisms, he thought as they all dismounted.

"Here ye go, Reverend," Jamie said, giving him his horse's bridle with a noticeable smirk while the men lit up their torches and lanterns.

"This is blasphemy," he muttered, just loud enough for Jamie to hear as he continued to the garden on foot, leading Jamie's stallion; a white stallion which, according to folklore, could sense ghosts and evil better than any other living thing in God's garden. 

"Ye won't invoke the name of the Lord in vain if ye keep those men from combing the forest, Rogermac. Last thing Jem needs is dogs picking up his scent."

Roger nervously scratched a sudden itch on his scalp and breathed deeply to calm down his own frayed nerves. "I don't even know what to say."

"It's nah what ye say that will matter to them so much as the way ye say it," Jamie said as he walked by him in the grass. His boots were high enough that he feared no bite. "People just need to be reassured that their souls are safe from harm. They have enough to deal with being scared for their lives with the war."

"That's over now."

"Aye, but they dinna ken that yet."

Roger agreed on that point. There was a great deal these men didn't know indeed, but Jamie was right. He stopped briefly to look at the edge of the forest, completely lost in darkness now. His son was out there, close too if he was, as they thought, protecting them from an unknown danger – not a demon though. What were the odds that Jeremiah was looking at him right now, wondering what was going on? Roger snorted. He thought his son was probably entertained by their display of villagers straight out of a horror movie, on their way to slay Count Dracula. 

His heart warmed with a sudden rush of pride in his son.

From what Claire and Jamie had told him about the insalubrious conditions in which they'd found Lord John, he doubted that the man would have survived much longer in jail. Claire was now convinced that without Jem's quick intervention, Lord John would have died on the pillory before they could spring him. 

A pain dulled by compassion knotted his guts at the thought, but with less force than before. The man had survived his ordeal, like he, Roger, had the hanging. That part of him that had remained in that tree had shrunk with time, but there was still a shard of flesh in it. 

Roger lifted his eyes toward the night sky and the first lights of the stars and wondered for the love of God, what was he doing here? 

He'd be more useful in the house, helping a man who had been nothing but kind to his family, a blessing even, dealing with the painful trauma vengeful men had inflicted on him and the inner demons that would keep him awake for many nights from now on, than performing a blasphemy act to reassure men who mistook superstition with faith. 

The garden had become overgrown during the summer months, but with the cold nights and the first autumnal rains, it had deteriorated into an entanglement of brown sticks, mottled leaves, and withered flowers. 

"Those lupines should still be blue," one of the men uttered in complete dismay. 

His belief twas echoed by his fellows. They needed nothing more to suspect that some evil in the ground had poisoned the flowers, that they’d found certain proof that they were in the right place. Jamie crossed himself, prompting all the men to do the same. Roger closed his eyes and nodded to himself. No fact or call to reason would reach any of them now. Fear was itself a demon, a cannibal one, eating reason for breakfast and logic for dinner, and by night having men scared of their own shadows, let alone their neighbors’. 

In total silence, Roger lifted his hands toward the sky and, to not make this moment totally vain, gave a little time to pray, silently, for God to comfort Lord John with his merciful love. Meanwhile, the men gathered around him, holding their hats between their legs since they couldn't let go of their rifles, pistols, and lanterns. One produced a wooden stake. Roger added to his silent prayer a request for the Lord to keep the men behind him from letting their fear control their hearts, for crimes and sins trudged never far behind fear. Then, he began out loud. 

"Our Heavenly Father, we ask for Your forgiveness in this garden where one your sweetest children was denied the plentiful life you wanted for her and her unborn son, an innocent soul to whom great evil was done," he said, noticing with some annoyance the growing agitation of the dogs. "As a community, we are responsible for each other's lives and happiness. But instead of offering her the protection of our love, we gave her the sharpness of our judgment because we were blind to the evil that was at work right under our imperfect eyes," he continued. He was not in the least embarrassed to ruffle the villagers' feathers a bit, but was aware that he shouldn't push too far in that direction, less he convince the men that this demon running afoul their grounds was a punishment for their mundane pettiness. Although why not? "Our hearts were closed to Malva and her inner struggles. Instead of enlightening her with our kindness and goodwill, we let her walk astray of your path and into darker roads. Your Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ said, for if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. Today, tonight, we are here, gathered next to this now peaceful garden to admit our fault in the tragedy that befell Malva Christie and her unborn child."

The dogs barked, causing their owner to pull on their leashes and admonish them. Jamie bent toward him. "Weren't ye supposed to reassure them that there's no demon here? Now they'll think it's the girl's ghost that's out for vengeance on the village."

"If that can teach them to be more sincerely loving of each other and less judging, I wouldn't have wasted my time."

Jamie's answering grunt was lost in a sudden cacophony of barking. 

In the end, all it took was for a deer to cause a chain reaction leading to men and their dogs chasing after a perceived demon into the forest. The creature had popped its head above the shrubs to watch the gathering of men in the garden where it used to graze peacefully at night, and madness had ensured.  

"Oh, for the love of God. How much more insane can this turn?"

"A lot more, Rogermac, a lot more," Jamie said as a gunshot burst, then two and three echoed high into the dark, cloudless sky. 

***

I stared at the night slowly but surely engulfing everything into thick shadows. From the kitchen window, the stables were always the last edifices visible. Once they were gone, the night was total. It is now. 

"You'll wish good night to Daddy and grandpa for me?" Mandy asked softly.

After dinner, the girls had spent some time with me in the kitchen putting everything back in order as silently as we could not to disturb John, who had laid down on the bed in the surgery, asserting that his legs were too sore to climb the stairs. Considering all the exercise he'd done today, his reason was indisputable. Besides, I'd rather have him get a good night of sleep in the surgery than spend a restless night in the guestroom, no matter how much more comfortable the bed upstairs was. 

"I will. Goodnight sweetheart," I replied before kissing Fanny goodnight as well. 

I walked with the girls to the bottom of the stairs and listened to the noises of the house as they climbed. Save for the creaking of the steps, there weren't any. Brianna had probably fallen asleep rocking David to sleep. Now that his tooth had emerged, he seemed intent on catching up on his sleep, good news for everybody in the house. 

Feeling run down but too agitated for bed, I returned to the kitchen, considered pouring myself a stiff drink, then grabbed the brandy instead. 

After waiting for a few more villagers to join them, the men had left for Malva's garden about forty minutes ago. How long would they wait there for the demon to rise from the ground? I had no idea but hoped it wouldn't stretch too long into the night. Realistically, I expected to find a dozen men waking up all grumpy, hungry, and cold into the high grass tomorrow morning. 

I didn't have the time to warn Jamie to keep the villagers off the ruins, but it was well known to be unsafe, with all those rusted nails. It wasn’t a major concern for now, as nobody would notice a black, radioactive backpack hidden between old planks, but what about tomorrow?

I dismissed the risk. I'd hidden the bag there for the reason that it would be safe from discovery, even during the day, and close enough to the edge of the forest so that  if Jem wanted to retrieve it, he could. Now I was concerned that the villagers would stumble upon my grandson fetching his belongings, amongst other things. 

"Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ," I muttered, forming a fist but resisting the urge to slam it on the table. John was sleeping. 

Will I ever know what peace feels like? I wondered, not for the first time. I was asking myself that question not even six months into the second world war. 

Peace is an illusion, Frank answered from the depths of my memory.

Well before the first german tank had crossed the border with Poland, Frank had read the signs of the coming conflict in the news. He'd sensed that the weight of unrest hovered more and more heavily over the world, like the smell of ozone thickening as clouds gathered on the horizon. He wasn't surprised when the storm had broken, and even forecast the hurricane it would become, a part of it at least.

I hadn't, but I wasn't a student in history back then. 

It was the end of the Revolutionary war and the part of me that had longed for years to reach that moment where peace would at last come no longer existed. A darker threat was upon us, one that was familiar. I had lived a good chunk of my life during the Cold War but annihilation had never felt so close as it did tonight, raising the visceral fear in me, and Brianna, Roger as well, that dawn would rise on a different tomorrow. Or not at all. 

Too concerned to sit and wait for Jamie to come back, I snuck into the surgery. After reviving the fire and laying a blanket on John, who was mumbling incoherently in his sleep, I retrieved the small lead box – a compulsive buy from the last time I was in Philadelphia – in which I kept the letter and returned to the kitchen table.

The date written on it was now glowing like a countdown from Hell. 

In four days, I will write this. Why? From where? Should I go upstairs now and make sure I have a piece of writing paper with me at all times? My gaze shifted toward the half-closed door to the surgery. John was still wearing his ring. I sipped down my glass and read the letter over again. Another thought pierced through the tiredness and the fear, like a blunt needle slowly pushing against a balloon, stretching the material that became more and more translucid under the pressure. Until it popped. What if the letter was from a future that no longer existed? 

"Are ye Mrs. Fraser, ma'am?" a man asked. 

Caught off guard, I literally jumped off my chair and faced a man in his fifties, holding his hat between his hands. 

"Beg ye pardon, ma'am," he stumbled, "I didna want to scare ye but nobody answered the door and my companion's hurt. They told me at the village that ye were a healer."

My heart was slowly returning to its normal speed as I breathed in and out deeply. "Of course. Is it serious or can he wait until tomorrow morning?"

"I dunno, Ma'am if he can wait. He's not talking at all but he sure doesna look good. Lost quite a bit of blood from where he banged his head. He's just waiting outside on your front steps."

"Can you bring him–" I stopped myself, remembering that John was sleeping in my surgery. "Wait, I'll go examine him outside first."

Peace is an illusion, I repeated to myself as I hurried down the corridor toward the front door, grabbing a lantern on my way out. The fresh wind sharpened my senses as I looked down the stairs and saw a horse grazing the grass at the bottom of the steps. Great, I had another concussed patient wandering loose on my land. 

"You said he was–" A sharp sting on my neck froze my heart. Trembling on my feet, I drew a tight, shaky breath as the night became a dark, senseless abyss.

***

If the burning gates of Hell existed, they might look like a large sycamore tree with its amber autumnal foliage lit up by torches with men shooting indiscriminately at its branches. 

"Let's burn that tree!" a man shouted as the dogs barked. 

"Are ye lot out of yer effing minds?!" Jamie bolted toward the man who was attempting to ignite the grass at the base of the trunk, snatched the torch out of his hands, and stamped on the nascent flames to keep all of the vegetation from catching fire. Bluebell ran to his side and showed her back teeth to keep another man from coming too close to her master for her own comfort. The smell of their masters' fear, likely mixed with the presence of a terrified squirrel in the branches, had all the other dogs in a frenzy, trampling and circling the tree, while sniffing the ground and howling. 

"The dogs saw it climb up there."

"I saw it too! It didn't even have a face! It was like a ball of flames!"

"It's up there on that branch but the branch is not even burning! That's not natural!"

"Oh, for the love of God, what I saw was a raccoon," Roger intervened. "It's all in yer scared minds. I've blessed the garden. There's no evil here anymore. Now go home before one of you shoots his friend because a possum snatched a twig behind him!"

As Roger admonished the villagers, Jamie turned toward Shaw. The man was still aiming his rifle at the tree, a cold, vindictive expression on the face. Jamie could understand his feelings, but had had enough. He raised his hands in an appeasing gesture then cautiously pushed the barrel of the rifle down. 

"I'm sorry yer brother's dead, Shaw," he said, "but if the Reverend senses no evil here, then there's none." Jamie pointed in the direction of the garden. "Besides, my horse would have followed us if there'd been one."

That was, surprisingly, received with unanimous nods of agreement. 

"Go home to yer wife and kids, then," Roger said, "and beg them to forgive ye for scaring them half to death." 

To Jamie's relief, the men complied, dragging Shaw with them when they noticed that the poor man was reluctant to give up on their mission. "Ye come and have a drink and a bite to eat at my house," one of the men said. "Ye dinna have to be alone tonight, mate." 

Resisting an urge to look up at the tree, Jamie patted Roger on the shoulder. "Let's follow them a bit," he said softly. He didn't know if Roger had seen the blur Jem created when he moved that Claire had spoken of. Some of the men and dogs had this time, and he was quite certain that Shaw had been aiming straight at it. "We need a bearskin," he muttered. "That, and Kezzie coming back unscathed.”

“And don’t forget an explanation of how your grandson is suddenly an adult."

"Aye. That too. Although that one’s lost on me. It's probably why he won't show himself, even to us." Jamie halted on the path and reconsidered his words. "When Claire came back, she looked like she hadn't aged a day since the last time I'd seen her. She was beaming with joy when she came to the print shop, but I could tell she was scared too. Of my reaction."

"Aye, Claire was scared indeed that you had made a life for yourself all that time she was gone. She had. Jem doesn't have this issue with us. We're his parents. Bree thinks–" Roger paused in a way that told Jamie he wasn't going to like what he was about to hear. "She thinks that if Jem's indeed a grown man now, we might say that he's a young cousin of mine, he lost his parents, and has come to live with us. But that would require us to maintain the masquerade that he is missing, and she doesn't know if she can do it. There's another option, though."

"Ye all go back to the twentieth century," Jamie said as they stepped out of the forest. 

A harvest moon had risen high into the sky and was flooding the land with a silvery light. 

Down the road, a scintillating swarm moved in the darkness. It was coming from the lanterns and torches that had almost set his forest ablaze sooner. But he didna mind their sight now. The men were riding back toward the village.

"Or to a larger city. We don't know yet." 

Jamie nodded. "Because there's no need to decide anything yet," he said as he spotted his white horse near the ruins. Bluebell went on alert and in a second he saw it, a presence moving in the half darkness. 

"Calm down, a nighean," he said, patting his dog's head. "You ken who it is."

The hound growled low in obvious disagreement.

***

Exercise, food, and wine consumption usually did the trick. John settled into bed after a light dinner, hoping to effortlessly drift off to sleep and wake up feeling fully rested the following morning. Regrettably, his year of summary – and at times brutal– detention had irremediably altered this truth about him. 

So he lay in the semi-darkness. The door to the kitchen was slightly ajar, allowing a beam of light to illuminate the opposite corner of the room. He could hear the hushed conversations and the clatter of dishes being washed and stacked. Claire and the two girls were being extremely careful to minimize any unnecessary noise, and in truth the noise was not keeping him awake. Perhaps it was the annoying feeling of being on a boat. It wasn't the first time he'd experienced this sensation of floating before falling asleep, prior to his imprisonment on the Palas that was. There, it had been a real thing, not a hallucination. Claire had explained it to him once during their brief marital status. It usually happened to a person before they would fall rapidly into REM sleep. He didn't remember what the acronym stood for; only that it had to do with the part of the sleep during which one dreamt. Perhaps that was the issue. His body resisted surrendering control of his mind to unconsciousness for the simple reason he'd rather have a dreamless night. 

John breathed deeply. He felt an urge to press the palms of his hands into his eyes, but as that would have required to move his arms, he gave up on the idea. Oh, God. He was so exhausted that even closing his eyes was an effort, and yet he couldn't keep them open either. He didn't think it was possible to be more tired than he was. 

"Count sheep," Hal said. 

John sighed. Hal knew where he could put his advice. No need to point that out. He was not six anymore. Counting sheep had never worked for him. 

"Try goats," Hal suggested.

"Let your worship keep count of the goats the fisherman is taking across, for if one escapes the memory there will be an end of the story, and it will be impossible to tell another word of it," John recited the lines from Don Quixote to himself, surprised that he still remembered that passage. How could that be?

Did he care why? John thought, tears of frustration burning in his eyes. He just wanted to sleep, not to investigate the intricacies of his memory. Why did he never forget a single fact and yet couldn't remember what he had for breakfast? 

One goat, two goats.

As the thirty-second goat jumped the ditch behind the farm he'd created in his mind, he vaguely became aware of Claire's presence in the room. She rearranged the logs in the hearth, and put the fire screen delicately back into place. He lay still, expecting to feel the slightly cold touch of her hand on his forehead to check if he had any fever. He didn't think he had one, but that wouldn't keep her from diligently doing her duty. He didn't start in surprise as she did so, although her hand wasn't as cool as he thought it would be. Perhaps she was running a fever. She'd seemed quite exhausted all day herself. Taking care of others was a taxing activity, and he felt guilty for being such a charge to her as she drew a heavy quilt over him. 

In the end, the combined effect of warmth and weight was all he needed. The bed stopped its annoying rocking movement and his mind drifted effortlessly toward the silent realm of unconsciousness. Just before the lights completely went out, Claire's face appeared in the half darkness, bending over him. The moon cast a silver glow on her smooth face, and her dark hair was one with the night. She was a beautiful, fascinating woman, one of a kind across all centuries. She was asking him something, but it was drowned out by the deafening thumping of his own heart. A smell of manure invaded his nostrils. John wiped off the thick sweat off his face and looked down in alarm at his fingers, stained with dark blood in the moonlight.

As a detonation exploded right next to him, John opened his eyes and sat up straight in bed, panting. 

"Oh, God," he whispered, realizing it was a nightmare. No, not a nightmare. A memory, he corrected himself as he realized that the voices coming from the kitchen were different. 

"I beg ye pardon, Ma'am." 

What? Suddenly wide awake, John shook the remnants of his nightmare away to focus on the conversation. The man's companion was injured and Claire's help was required. John’ instinct told him something was off. He wearily grabbed his breeches from the chair, and struggled to put them on. Then, barefoot, he trudged across the surgery as if it were a steep, muddy incline instead of a flat wooden floor. He glanced into the kitchen just in time to see Claire walking out the door and the man following her. Darn. John leaned a hand on the doorjamb as an unpleasant tingle on the back of his neck put him on guard. The man's voice was familiar. The accent felt forced in some minor way. He could tell because he'd developed an ear for those details during his years under Bowles' service. Likewise, he didn't need to see a man's face to recognize the set of his shoulders as he walked away. The way he walked. 

His eyes widened in horror as he realized who the visitor was. Filled with pure rage, he stormed into the kitchen, took the rifle on top of the Welsh dresser, and left in a hurry. 

"What the hell?" Brianna yelped as he bumped into her at the bottom of the stairs.

"Richardson!" he yelled, not as much to answer Jamie's daughter's question as to call after the man.

"Oh, my God, here? Is he not dead?"

Obviously not. In the shadows of the night, what he saw was no phantom but a solid man who threw Fraser's wife on the back of a horse. John ran after them but skidded to a halt to avoid the horse's hooves as Richardson took off.

"Mama!" Bree screamed as kidnapper and victim disappeared into the shadows enveloping the road.

John's blood was boiling. Thinking quickly on his feet, he decided against firing a shot out of fear of scaring the horse and causing a lethal fall. Instead, he dashed to the stables to throw himself into the pursuit. He couldn't run far; his lungs burnt like the air was filled with white hot shards of metal and his heart was beating so fast he feared it might burst out of his chest. 

This was futile. Richardson had already disappeared out of sight. Pursuit would have to wait for dawn to shed light on the tracks left by a horse carrying two people. He'd noted their direction, which was most important. 

As he reached the stables, John dropped to his knees and hands. Clay slipped under his nails as he dug his fingers into the ground, imagining he was wringing Richardson's neck instead of grass. 

A violent cramp twisted his insides. There was nothing he could do to avoid losing his dinner. The spasm left him panting, trembling, and in an even fouler mood. 

Come on, get up on your fucking feet! Provoked or not, he'd kill Richardson with his bare hands. The man didn't deserve an honorable death, and he had no problem being the one to deal the killing blow. He had no doubt that Jamie Fraser would be animated by the same desire for blood. The man had kidnapped his wife! It struck John just then to wonder why. What could Richardson possibly want from her? Had he even been aware that his previous victim was lying in the next room? Had he followed them all the way here from Wilmington? And why wasn't the fucking bastard dead?!

"Oh, God. Oh, God." 

Gasping for air, John fought to quiet his mind and steady his painfully racing heart. But the foreboding presence of the stables seemed to only intensify the influx of haunting images in his brain. Eyes wide with dread, he watched Claire glide out of the shadows like a ghost levitating above the ground. Her face glistened under the silver moonlight. She stared at the headless body lying next to him, then she looked at him. John let out a shaky breath as he remembered where-or more exactly when he was. Yesterday evening. Time had moved backwards in his mind. 

Focus!

John gasped. Claire's voice was calling his name from afar. Therefore she couldn't be standing in front of him. 

It wasn't her.

The face bore some resemblance, perhaps. But it was a young man with a thin face. No older than twenty, except the eyes. The eyes were older. Decades older. Silent, contained rage burnt cold in them, like ice. Sharp, burning ice. The eyes of a soldier whose battlefields had aged prematurely. 

"Lord John!"

Jamie was calling him now. His voice was getting closer. 

The young soldier realized he was about to be caught, but showed no panic. He quietly seized the horse thief and pulled the lifeless body towards the woods. 

"Oh my God, are you hurt?" Brianna asked, as she knelt next to him.

John sat back on his heels and wiped cold sweat from his forehead. All day they'd been convinced that it was Jeremiah who'd saved his life the previous evening, but it wasn't. The boy had his grand-father's bones. The young man he'd faced had been too thin, without the same set of jaw. It wasn't a demon that haunted Fraser's Ridge. It was the future, and it was raging a war against the past. 

"Come on, Lord John, help me here," the young woman said, hauling him to his feet with an ease that disturbed him. 

Feeling on the edge of total collapse, John looked up at Jamie's daughter as she half carried him back to the house. "It's not your son," he said weakly. "It's not him. You have to warn your father."

Chapter Text

It was one of those clear nights where the moonlight and the stars keep the complete darkness at bay. The skeletal remains of the old house looked like one of Mr. Willowby's drawings in China ink. The thought of his lost friend gave Jamie a short pang but he didn't have time to let his mind wander into memories. He was hunched in the grass with Roger – who had cautiously trimmed the lantern – and Bluebell whose body was tightening like a spring by the second. The man in the ruins had stepped into the charred remains of the kitchen. What was he searching for?

For a fleeting moment, he wondered if it was Mrs. Bug, the old woman condemned for eternity to retrieve the Stuart's gold that she and her husband had buried right beneath his floor.. More than one ghost could claim the right to haunt these ruins. 

Bluebell shifted nervously and growled low again. 

Jamie's sight wasn't what it used to be, especially when it came to reading, but under such a gleaming sky it was enough to see what his dog had detected a few seconds before him. 

"Do you see that?" Roger whispered as a dark shadow came out of the forest and moved toward the ruins. 

Jamie squinted his eyes to try to make out a silhouette. It wasn't totally dark. In fact, the more it got away from the tree line, the more it seemed to become silvery, like the faint veil of a cloud passing in front of the moon. 

"What sort of camouflage is this?" Roger whispered. "It's like seeing a ghost."

"Or a blur," Jamie replied. A blur that was walking with a limp. Jem must have hurt his ankle jumping down the tree he'd climbed into to escape the dogs and the men. 

Jamie muttered a curse under his breath as he pondered whether or not to warn his grandson that someone was hiding in the ruins. Whatever Jem was wearing made him difficult to spot. If not for Bluebell, they wouldn't have noticed him. 

Brianna's scream echoed down the road. 

"DA! Where are you, Da?!" 

Jamie froze with dread. "Iffrin," he whispered, just as gunfire rang out from the ruins. "Get down, mo nighean!" 

"Oh, God no. Jem’s hit!" Roger yelled, scrambling to his feet. “JEM!” 

Fighting his fatherly and grandfatherly instincts, Jamie gripped Roger's shoulder to force him to stay down and unleashed Bluebell on the killer in the ruins instead. It wouldn't help either Bree or Jeremiah if they got shot in the back while trying to help. Better let Bluebell get rid of the danger first. It was a rational reaction. Yet, his body ached under the insufferable tension, and his mind writhed in agony as he waited for his dog to crawl under the cover of the grass toward the ruins. It had to be Shaw, he thought, recalling  vividly the man's dark gaze as he aimed at the tree earlier. Something in the man's eyes as he reasoned with him to give up their insane hunt for a demon had alerted him. It wasn't fear Shaw had felt at the moment. It wasn't anger either. It was something colder, lacking emotion. Professional. "Christ," Jamie muttered under his breath. Shaw must have known Jem wasn't far from the house and had used this demon theory of his to hunt his grandson down, to flush him out, and to kill him. A cold rage boiled into Jamie's veins as Bluebell pounced above the foundations like a devil springing out of the depths of the Earth. "Here's yer demon, Shaw." 

As his dog's angry growls resonated in the night, Jamie crept toward the ruins to neutralize Shaw once and for all, assuming Bluebell didn't have her teeth sunk into his throat already. He didn't care if that meant one more gruesomely disfigured body on his land. He'd disappear the body if needed. Shaw would go to Hell and be welcomed there by Lionel and his men and all the others who had harmed his family.

The fire of vengeance burning in all his body, Jamie crouched behind the charred bricks of the hearth, glanced to assess the situation, and almost felt disappointed to see that his first wish had been granted. 

His heart slowing down, he climbed over the foundations and crouched next to the convulsing body. A thick flow of dark blood was gushing out of Shaw's slack lips, a ten inch long nail protruding from the mouth, open in a scream, the muscles of the face stiff in agony. Bluebell was still standing square on his chest, biting the man's arm. Shaw had likely impaled on the nail when his dog had knocked him over. 

The man let out a weak, bubbling grunt, and his body relaxed in the stillness of death. 

Jamie pulled his dog away. "Enough, a bhalaich." 

He said a quick prayer for Shaw's soul, and thought to ask forgiveness from God for thinking that the man's death could easily be ruled an accident. Maybe later, when his ire cooled down and he would mean his words of contrition. For now, he was glad that he'd listened to his wife and let the nails rust. After the fire, Claire had talked him out of even trying to knock them all down. With all the burned planks and heavy beams threatening to crumble, the old house could never entirely be made safe. In her opinion, better an obvious hazard than a sly one, and certainly not one that potentially carried tetanus. It was what doctors of her time called lockjaw disease. Shaw's death by impalement on a nail across the mouth was a ghastly but somewhat bittersweet irony. 

"DA! Where are you?"

"I'm here, mo nighean. Are you hurt?" He asked as Bree hurried toward him. She stopped short of entering the ruins, and leant on the mantel to catch her breath.

"I'm fine," she panted. "But Richardson got Mama!" 

It was like a nail piercing into his heart. "Who did ye say?"

"He showed up at the house when I was upstairs with David. And Lord John – Oh God, Lord John rushed after him, but he could barely stand on his own two feet, and the shock it gave him, it was –" Bree waved her hand in a frustrated manner. "He sent me to warn – who's this? And what is Roger doing over there?"

"Bree!" Before Jamie could grab her arm or tell her about Shaw, his daughter was rushing through the grass toward her husband, and, God forbid, her dead son. 

"Tell me it's not Jem!" she cried, exhaustion, panic, and terror in her voice. 

To Jamie's relief, Roger caught her in his arms. "It's not him, Bree, it's not him." 

"Oh, thank God!" she replied, resting her head against her husband's chest.

Not his grandson! Jamie felt his heart leap of joy too at the news. "Who is it, then?" he asked, pushing the grass to get a clearer view of the dark silhouette lying on the ground as Roger lit up the lantern.

"Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ," Bree whispered, falling to her knees. "Now I know what mama felt when she first met Jack Randall and thought he was Frank."

Jamie was feeling close to collapsing himself. Tears came to his eyes, out of exhaustion and shock. Amazement. Disbelief. He wanted to rush to the house and bring back Claire so she could see and he could witness the same emotions in her eyes. And then he remembered what Bree had told him just a few minutes ago. Anger swept everything away. "Is he alive?"

"What makes you think he's a boy?" Bree asked, pressing her fingers to her descendant's neck. Because there could be no doubt. This was not Jem, but he was related to them one way or another. 

"He looks like a lad," he replied to his daughter. "Maybe sixteen, not much older than that."

"You saw mama once with short hair. It's not unusual for women in our time, you know. And thank God, she's breathing."

"Lad or lassie, that young person is definitely not from our time," Roger said. To prove his point, he brought the lantern about one foot above the unconscious person. The top of the body seemed to burst into flames and the sides melted into the grass. 

Jamie stumbled back. "What the devil is this?"

"Wow!" Bree exclaimed. 

Roger chuckled. "That's pushing camouflage to a whole new level, isn't it?"

"No wonder the villagers thought they saw a demon," Jamie muttered as Roger gave a piece of fabric to Bree.

"She was wearing this on her head," he said. "It's made of the same material."

Bree slipped her hand in the only opening. "A mask with no holes?" she asked, stretching the material in her hands. "Feels like fish scales." 

Bree put the mask near the lantern. Jamie didn't startle this time when it seemed to erupt in flames.

"That's certainly an interesting feature. Verra handy for a spy," Jamie said as his daughter put the mask on her head. 

"Nope. I can't see anything in it," she said, and as she removed it, "but I guess she can or it wouldn't be of much use, would it?"

Jamie stared back at the pale, boyish figure lying in the grass. Now he could see how striking the bairn’s resemblance to Claire was. Could his daughter be right? Jamie’s shoulders twitched involuntarily at the idea. No, it had to be a lad. The only thought of a lassie, even one coming from a bloodline that could only sire formidable women, shooting a man's head and dragging his body through the forest made his skin crawl in freezing horror. He could fathom women being doctors or engineers like Claire and Bree. He was very proud of their accomplishments in their field. Saving lives and building houses and tools were noble occupations. But war? No. War from the dawn of time and in any century, was a man’s burden. 

What about the Amazons? John said in his mind. 

Shut up ye wee bugger. Jamie rolled his eyes at himself. Damn. John. 

They needed to go back to the house. According to Bree, seeing Richardson alive had given John a terrible shock. He knew all too well the kind of turmoil this had undoubtedly brought back, and he was afraid of where John's exhausted and tormented mind would take him. Anyway, that wee laddie needed to be taken care of. 

"Let's bring him back home," he said, crouching with a grunt at the boy's side. 

But as he hauled him on his shoulder, his load gasped in pain and twisted like a salmon out of his grasp, delivering a painful kick in Jamie’s knee in the process. Being kicked in the balls wouldn't have been worse. A long curse in Gaelich – one of Murtagh's favorites – flowed out his mouth. He raised his burning eyes toward the sky and warned his godfather not to laugh at him. 

"Take it easy," Roger said to the lad.  "You were shot."

The boy’s eyes were squeezed shut and he clutched his right arm. Panting, he struggled to stand up and collapsed on his knees. 

"No kidding." The voice was angry and definitely feminine, the words hissed out between coughs.

"It's all right. The man who shot you is dead. There's no threat anymore," Bree said. Bluebell begged to differ.

The young woman froze and lifted a dark gaze at the dog. "Bite me and I'll cook you." 

Not one to take any sort of threat well, Bluebell showed her back teeth and growled deep in her throat. Bree, who didn’t seem to appreciate the tone either, crossed her arms over her chest. 

"Tell me where my son is and I'll tell her to back down," she said. 

"Calm down, a nighean," Jamie said, not sure for whom this order was meant. He hopped toward his dog. At least he trusted Bluebell to obey. 

The hound let out a short whimper and sat down next to him, her tail tapping the ground in annoyance. Freed from the threat, the young woman sat up on her heels, groaning curses as she cradled her right arm against her chest. Whatever she was wearing had stopped the bullet from entering her flesh, but the impact had caused damage. 

Jamie raked sweaty fingers through his hair. Christ. A lass.

Bree turned around and exhaled deeply in frustration. Jamie gently squeezed her shoulder. He wanted answers too. This young woman might even know why Richardson had taken his wife, but if she was anything like Claire, it was fair to assume her ancestor’s hot temper in tough circumstances was part of her make-up. Every indication so far pointed that way. Best to show compassion first, he thought. 

"Long day, huh?" he said.

"No more than the others." 

The voice was weak and raspy with pain and exhaustion, but Jamie chuckled at the defiance in the tone. At least, the apple had not fallen far from the tree, unlike Frank and Black Jack Randall. Looks could be deceiving. A deception that in the Randall's case had almost been deadly. Hearing the lass say words that could have come from Claire’s mouth was a tremendous relief. 

Jamie held out a hand. "Come back to the house wi' us so we can take a look at yer arm. There'll be a good meal and a warm bed for the night if ye want it."

The young woman ignored his hand and hauled herself to her feet. "Where the fuck is my mask?" she asked, staggering. 

"Oh, here," Roger said. "Sorry, I thought you were my son, lying dead." 

Without a word, she snatched the mask out of Roger’s hands and put it on her head. It was a singular sight. Now that he knew what to look for, Jamie could see the distinct shape of the lass in the blurry shadow limping toward the ruins. 

"How many steps can she manage before fainting, you think?" Roger asked. 

"If she's anything like mama, she'll keep on going even if she has to crawl." 

Jamie thought it was likely true. "Christ," he exhaled, shaking his head as the young woman climbed over what was left of the kitchen foundation. "You want to be careful there, lass. There are nails everywhere."

His warning came too late. Jamie cringed at the sound of more profanity echoing from the wreckage. How many generations could foul temper go before being diluted enough not to plague his descendants? He found it difficult to believe that the introduction of more ill-tempered blood in his lineage could be possible, although nothing could be certain. There were bound to be many people of that sort of ill disposition between now and the future. That said, he couldn’t blame the lass for not being in a good mood after being chased by dogs, confronted by angry villagers, and shot at close range. 

He was sincerely feeling for his descendant when she stopped next to Shaw's body, lifted the man's arm, and aimed it at his own head. 

As a gunshot sent flocks of startled birds into the sky, she pulled a knife, cut something out of the burst head, and staggered toward the old pantry with a bloody string hanging from her hand. 

"Iffrin," Jamie cursed, bile rising in his throat as Roger quickly put the lantern down and turned away, heaving and coughing. Bree pressed a hand over her mouth and muttered through clenched teeth, "Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ."

“Shaw was looking for something too,” Jamie said as the blur disappeared inside the hole where he used to store wine and liquors. With that thought, Jamie took out his flask and swallowed a mouthful of whiskey. With the use of his legs restored, he headed for the house.

“The bag. Mama hid it there when you were at the village,” Bree explained as she and Roger followed him. They all stopped short from coming inside the ruins.

Roger lifted the lantern up again to see what the lass was doing now. 

"Turn that fucking light off," the young woman barked. 

"You have night-vision in your mask," Bree said as Roger hid the lantern behind a beam. "But how do you see in it? Is there a screen of some kind?"

"Might not be the best moment to talk technology," Roger whispered as the young woman retrieved a box, the one that contained the weird syringes and the medication. She unzipped her outfit from the neck down, rolled up her underneath piece of garment, and then injected herself with the syringe. 

Jamie's stomach churned at the gasp she made as she leaned heavily on a beam. “Ye better sit down before ye collapse and impale on a nail by accident like him,” he said gently, making a small nod toward Shaw. He’d gone through enough battles and injuries to recognize a soldier burning fast through their last inch of wick. 

His daughter, however, didn't. 

"On the contrary. I think it's the perfect time to ask questions," Bree replied more aggressively as the young lass fiddled once more in the bag. "For instance, Is there a nuclear bomb on the ridge?"

"What makes you think there's a nuke here?" their descendant asked, short of breath as she took out the flat device and put the bloody thing she'd cut from Shaw's head on it. The device glowed faintly silver, just bright enough to reveal a small, rectangular item no bigger than a fingernail in the middle of strings that looked like jellyfish tentacles. 

"Because all your stuff is radioactive for starters," Bree said. "What is that bloody thing?"

The young woman sat on the edge of the floor and removed her balaclava with a sigh of relief. "That bloody thing is a crude, fourth generation NXi. Integrated neural haptics implants. And my stuff's radioactive because you've got no fucking idea of what you're doing. Living a few years here and another few there, using the timehole like it’s a fucking airport," she said, her tone calm but sharp, hardly concealing her anger as she methodically put everything back in her bag. She tried to haul it on her valid shoulder but let go with a grunt and sat back down, holding her injured arm. She squeezed her eyes shut, made a fist with her good hand, and slammed it on the floor. 

“Haptics?” Bree asked. “Like for video games consoles? In someone’s brain? That’s barbaric.”

“Yeah… you tell me…” the lass whispered, scratching the back of her own neck.

Bree gasped. “You have one in your head too?” 

The lass grunted. “Ninth generation’s not so bad.”

Jamie's faith in the future, which had already taken a serious blow, sunk to greater depths at the idea of having anything implanted in one's brain. "Ye're military, aren't ye, lass?" he asked, holding out his flask of whiskey. 

She opened her eyes and considered it for a few seconds, then shook her head. "Runs in the family."

"Aye, it does. Sorry about that."

She snorted back. "What makes you think it's coming from your side?" she said, before lying down with a grunt. 

Bree kneeled down next to her. "You need a doctor. My mom–”

“Mid-twentieth century quack? With all due respect, hard pass.”

Jamie was glad to see that Bree’s Fraser temper had cooled off enough not to answer to the insult, but nonetheless, he put a hand on his daughter's shoulder. "Let's go back home. Tomorrow will be here soon enough. And we all need to rest before it comes. And ye’re coming wi’us, lass, even if I have to knock ye unconscious for it, which soldier to soldier, ye’re not far from being anyway."

There was no answer to that. Hot temper, in any century, had its limits, even the Fraser temper. 

As they rode back to the house, Jamie couldn't keep his tired mind from drawing strange parallels. Bree had his appearance, but her mother's determination. The unconscious one he was holding in front of him resembled Claire, but had inherited his warrior soul. Was it only a misfortune that such an arrangement should befall a woman instead of a man, or was it the will of God? Surely He would have known that by bringing Claire to him, by allowing them to mix their blood and their souls, their future children would show some alarming dispositions toward violence, unyielding fortitude, and recklessness. And, to be fair, bravery as well, intelligence, resilience, a sense of sacrifice and an unkillable instinct of survival. 

"Christ, Sassenach," he whispered with a smirk. "What have we done?"

***

A pounding headache gradually brought me back from a dark abysm, one painful heartbeat at a time. Part of me said to ignore an urge to wake up. Surely consciousness could wait another hour or two? Or eternity. I didn't care that much. What I cared about was the damn fresh wind that was biting my face and ruining my perfectly unenjoyable hangover. I didn't remember drinking, but that was an argument in favor that I must have. Had I left the window open? Jamie would have closed it when he came back. Which meant he was sleeping rough again near the old house. Thinking about Jamie's probably sore back made me aware of my own left shoulder. It was so numb it felt stuck underneath me. No, it was actually stuck. How? Tied. My wrists were tied. Fear jolted me awake. 

Oh, God, no. Not again. NO!

As the daylight exposed the crude reality of my situation, I strained against my ties hard to break free, but to no avail. The shadow of a man suddenly appeared above me. I was gently but firmly grabbed and propped up against a nearby tree. 

"I would say good day to you, Mrs. Fraser, but I've never been able to stomach hypocrisy. Such a  despicable trait." It was the man who'd come asking for her help yesterday evening.

"You bastard! JAMIE!!!"

A burning slap across the face silenced me. I glared at the man through watery eyes. "Who the bloody hell are you, and what do you want?" 

"My apologies," the man said, taking out a knife. "I should, at least, have the courtesy to introduce myself," he added as he casually sliced an apple and offered me a piece. "My name is Ezechiel Richardson." 

The man paused, watching for my reaction with the look of a bird of prey. Meeting his eyes with rage was all I could do not to show the fear gripping my intestines. 

"You should eat. If the sky is as clear as yesterday night, we will be riding until late again tonight."

"Go to Hell," I muttered as bravely as I could. 

"Hell is a relative concept. Ask any living slaves about their thoughts on the matter. Although living might be too generous a term. But not let us be led astray into semantics. Time is a precious good, in any century." The man stood up and walked to the horse. He reached into his saddlebag and came back next to me with a wooden box. 

"I am certain, as a fellow time traveler, that you are aware that one can bring a few things of interest from the future, and so I have."

Richardson opened the box so I could see its contents. It was a thin syringe with a dark brown, tar-like substance inside. My throat went dry. 

"Curare is a very potent poison, as you know. I've mainly used it for hunting purposes, especially when I arrived twelve years ago, a bit in advance of my schedule. Anyway, this one is for whoever would come to your rescue. Do we understand each other, Mrs. Fraser?"

As I slowly nodded, the man smiled agreeably. "Good."

"What do you want?" I repeated, finding his insincere politeness insufferable. 

"The same thing I wanted from your estranged husband, Lord John Grey. How is he doing, if I may inquire?"

"You may not. He is dead."

Richardson smiled. "Of course, I understand. He protected you from me once, and you are returning the favor now. Have no fear. I have no intention of revealing the subterfuge that allowed you to spring him out of jail, although my agent said he believed his lordship wouldn't live long anyway. The stone he'd thrown at him that same morning was quite heavy."

I clenched my jaw hard. "You had him killed on the pillory?"

"To put an end to his suffering. You may believe whatever you wish from me, but I did not enjoy having to use him, especially since, in the end, it was for nothing. I've unfortunately made the mistake of underestimating the political power and the all-too-favorable public opinion that the Grey brothers enjoy in London's high society. My attempts to discredit the Duke of Pardloe and Lord John Grey only sped up the outcome I worked to avoid. Ironic, isn't it?"

"You've got to be kidding me."

The man’s severe look at my remark only increased my anger. 

"It's not so easy to play God," I added with disdain. My head was spinning. The man had gone to great lengths to ruin John's honor, his life, and his family. That suffering was real and John would deal with the consequences for the rest of his life.

"No, it isn't, indeed, as you know personally, since you worked hard to avoid the defeat of the Stuarts’ Jacobites during the Rising and failed miserably. But thanks to you, my failure is merely a setback."

Richardson's face suddenly shifted from sullenness to a predatory excitement. 

"As a doctor, I imagine that you are familiar with the most venomous and painful stings and bites of the animal world?”

"Why?" I replied curtly, surprised by the sudden change in topic as my mind immediately brought back the pit viper that had almost killed Jamie years ago. 

"Why, you ask. Two reasons. The first, so we can put behind us all your questions about how I convinced Lord John Grey to go along with my plan." Richardson paused again to measure my reaction. To see if I was going to play his game or not. I considered disappointing him, but I knew my survival relied on his arrogance. If he believed I was submissive, he might become less vigilant.

“What is the second reason?” I hissed through clenched teeth.

"Amongst the insect world, did you know that the warrior wasp has one of the most nasty stings?”

I shook my head, keeping my lips tight.

“Its venom tricks its victim's brain, giving it the illusion of a gaping injury that forces the body to react as if it was bleeding to death. I imagine that you have an idea how painful this process can be. It’s hard to witness, believe me. Thankfully, a timely dose of heroin is a most efficient way to make the victim comfortable. Although greater and greater doses are inevitably required to provide such comfort." 

"And cause addiction, you bastard." 

The man was a psychopath. 

I forced back the tears burning my eyes, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing my distress. A clearer, clinical image of what John had gone through formed in my mind, and I remembered his aggressive outbursts since we left Wilmington, his reckless consumption of Manoke's psychotropic herbs mix, and his prostrate, almost catatonic episode the previous evening and at other times during our return. Even more vividly I remembered Jamie's remarks, how he was disturbed that John was not behaving like himself anymore. No, he wasn't, and I finally knew why. All these changes were the manifestations of protracted heroin withdrawal. 

Richardson lifted his eyes toward the canopy. "We better get on our way."

The sky was heavy and the smell of ozone was announcing a stormy day that I saw as a divine intervention to make our progress slower than Richardson wanted. At this point, I took everything that could get in his way as a good omen. 

"To where?" I asked as he hauled me on my feet. I couldn't help but shake his hands off of me, every fiber in my body reacting violently to his contact. My fight was short lived. A sting in my wrist suddenly sent my whole body up in flames. I collapsed on my knees, gasping for breath. 

"And this is the second reason. Tell me now, are you done resisting?"

Richardson pulled me back on my feet. And as he put his hand on my arm to keep me from swaying, I jerked away once more, albeit with less energy than I’d shown previously. "Obviously not. Maybe you wish to experience a stronger dose?" 

I stared at the tiny needle hidden in his hand with dread and shook my head, meaning it, this time. 

"Very well,” he said, capping the needle and putting the small injector in his pocket. “We are going to Ocracoke Island. You are going to take me to the next point in time, when we still might avert all this chaos. To eighteen hundred and twelve, my dear."

The second British war? "That's impossible," I said, almost laughing as I cut him off before he could make any threat. "The stones don't work that way."

"Oh, but they do, for you and your family. I suspect there's some genetic aspect to this. Out of the few people who can travel through the stones, you are the only ones who exert such fine control over the timing of your arrivals."

"How do you know this?"

Richardson's lips twitched. "Information is the nerve of all war, whatever the century, as I'm sure your first husband must have told you."

"Frank? What do you know about Frank?"

"Enough not to understand why, with all your power, you didn’t come back to save his life."

"Because it's impossible."

This was absurd. I had assumed the stones must include a mechanism to prevent the paradox of having the same person appear twice in any point in time. I had not even considered trying to use them in such a fashion.

"I beg to differ,” Richardson said with the same maddening mock courtesy. “But perhaps a simple ride to Ocracoke will prove one of us wrong."

"And what if you are the one who's wrong?"

"In that case, without any other civilized solution to keep the colonies in the British empire, a nuclear device will go off, causing widespread death and destruction, setting off forest fires like the ones in hell, and terrifying any survivors into abandoning the region, possibly a good portion of the East Coast. That should be enough to convince George Washington and his Continental congress to surrender. After all, it worked with the Japanese." 

"I don't believe you," I whispered, breathing shakily. "How could you even possess such a bomb?"

"It is incredible what you can acquire on the black market when you have time travel and, consequently, access to the rarest art and artifacts looting can provide.” 

My chest was too tight to breathe. Even if I had wanted to retort, I couldn’t. My brain was frozen in fear. 

"I was surprised at how easy it was. A suitcase bomb isn't an actual suitcase, did you know that? More like a large backpack, but still small enough for a single man to carry."

"You are a sick, evil man," I said, my voice shaking. I found it harder and harder to believe his claims that he had not enjoyed torturing John. 

"Maybe so,“ he shrugged. “Help me jump forward to eighteen twelve, and if you get the date right, I will give you the location of the device I hid on your land and the code to disarm the trigger."

"And what if I'm right and I can't get you to eighteen twelve?"

"Well, then, I'm afraid nothing will survive in a ten-mile radius around Fraser's Ridge, and the good people of North Carolina all the way to Wilmington will suffer from an illness akin to the Black Death."

Chapter Text

Chapter 9 - The Monarch from Nowhen

Each minute that passed took her farther away from him. 

He should be accustomed to the maddening mix of terror and rage building inside him. It wasn't the first time he’d felt it. It was only one man this time, which meant he wouldn't lose time gathering his men come morning, and that was for the better. Under the circumstances, few villagers, if any, would agree to abandon their families so close to winter and follow him to his wife's rescue. 

Iffrin! Jamie shot upright in the darkness and sat on the edge of the bed. He had to do something about Shaw's body. 

The man's gruesomely beheaded body couldn't be found on his property. And what about the lass? Claire knew a great deal about the future. The lass came from even further away in time. It was only logical to assume that her knowledge about the past might be more extensive. Would it be relevant to his situation, though? And there was John. Surely he'd seen where Richardson had taken off. Any information he'd provide would save him precious time to find their track.

Jamie crumpled the bedsheets in his fists as he debated the possibility – for the sake of his nerves at least – of going down to the surgery and shaking its two occupants awake. 

Don't you dare wake them up! Claire had threatened him each time in his tortured mind. They need to rest and so do you. Aye, he did, but that was not in the realm of the possible, he thought as he forced his body to lie back down. Despite the coldness of the night, he was burning. A kick sent the blanket at his feet, then down the floor.  

What could Richardson possibly want from his wife? Not a ransom, or he'd have left a note, a verbal statement of his intentions at the very least, but he had left none. Was it personal, then? John had given Claire and his family the protection of his name once against the man. Was he looking for revenge for this act? 

Jamie growled at the reminder of John’s wedding to Claire. He turned on his side, as if to escape the memory. But tonight more than ever, it was unavoidable. His wife had been taken away from him.

Jamie forced his fingers to release the sheet.

John’s nay the one ye’ve got an issue with, he reminded himself to escape the vision of John penetrating the sanctuary of his wedding to Claire. Time had passed. Just enough that the voice of reason was able to pierce through the haze of fury tormenting his body and his soul and show him his true terror. 

Was Richardson one of those vile men? One that would dishonor a woman, just because he could, or to break her to his will? God knew that Claire wasn't one to let herself be kidnapped without a fight. At the first opportunity, she'd try to escape. What would happen if she failed?

Tortured by the scenarios dancing like dismembered puppets in his mind, and even more scared of what his dreams would bring to life if he dared to fall asleep, Jamie got up. The stairs creaked under his weight as he made his way down in total darkness. The surgery door had been left ajar, and he stood there for a moment, silent. The only sound aside from his own heart solidly beating in his chest, was the soft breathing of the two people inside. Roger had volunteered to stay and watch over John and the lass for the night, but they had finally decided that everybody needed a good night of rest. Besides, if the lass wanted to give them the slip, there was little they could do to prevent her. As for John, it wouldn't surprise him if he slept around the clock. Since he was the only one not sleeping, he might as well to stand guard, he supposed. 

Jamie grabbed his rifle and went to sit outside in the rocking chair on the porch. The air was cold, but not yet biting. They still had a few weeks before winter. As his eyes slowly became accustomed to the darkness, his mind circled back to Richardson like a hawk judging its prey from a distance.

Was it vengeance, then, that animated the bastard? Had Richardson come for John and been surprised by his wife and decided to take her instead. Or had he come for Claire specifically, unaware of the presence of his previous victim behind the walls of the surgery? There was a logical case to be made for either possibility. The true answer escaped him. 

For now, he muttered to himself in the night. 

Whenever the man came from, he had preyed upon his family one time too many. His son, John, and now Claire. As far as Jamie was concerned, it was time for this to stop, once and for all.

An hour before dawn the darkness lifted to reveal the powdered heights above Fraser Ridge. Jamie set himself to the most chilling endeavor to sink Shaw's mutilated body at the bottom of the lake. A thin fog rose from the prairie as he rode back to the house. Against the backdrop of the trees, the house was still a dark mass, porch and windows indistinguishable from the wooden walls. Then his stallion flattened his ears and tensed his body under Jamie’s thighs. He spotted a lonely figure slowly walking up the road. 

Jamie squinted slightly. Although he needed glasses to read, his far sight was still excellent. However, he didn't need to see the person's face to recognize who it was. No matter how frail his friend had become during those last two years, John still walked like a British soldier. With a ramrod up his ass! Murtagh replied in his mind. Jamie chuckled softly and addressed a short prayer for his godfather's soul before prompting his stallion into a light trot. 

"How's yer hand?" he asked as he came up by John's side and dismounted. 

His friend grabbed the reins from one hand, glancing at the light bandage covering the other with an appreciative look. "Surprisingly fine. I apologize for your window, by the way. As soon as I find myself in a position to access my bank account again, I'll repay you for the cost of the repair." John leaned his forehead against the stallion's neck, seeking comfort from the powerful animal. Despite being shy and usually nervous around strangers, his horse nudged him gently in return. Jamie smiled, not surprised that his stallion would accept John’s presence without difficulty. The shared love for those beautiful creatures had always been one element of their friendship. 

"Aye, dinna fash about that," Jamie replied as they both started toward the house.  

The window was the least of his problems right now, but the sight of it sent another chill down his spine. 

Last night, upon their return from the ruins, he'd found John sitting in the middle of glass shards, holding an empty bottle of whiskey in one hand and dripping blood on the floor like a stuck pig from the other. The lass, shaken from her own torpor by the bloody scene, had retrieved her medical bag, poured a white powder on the deep cut, and pressed a small bandage on it, holding it for a minute or so. Before their mesmerized gazes – save for John's, as his eyes had been entirely lost in the brumes of alcohol – the bleeding had stopped almost instantly. 

"I'm sorry I couldn't stop him from taking her.” John took a deep shaky breath then looked toward the lake. “They're heading East. Found the horse's tracks up there." John waved toward the left side of the road. 

"Ahr. The bastard willna go far if he's heading that way, or not fast anyway. The villagers say that the patriots are everywhere down the valley. But I'm the one who should apologize. I meant to take ye to my home so ye could rest and gather yer strength. This is not quite it."

"No, it isn't. Perhaps it's just fate." There was something deeper than exhaustion in John's voice that alarmed Jamie.

"I thought ye werena a great believer in that sort of thing."

John sighed deeply. Then, he fumbled with his coat pocket and handed him a piece of crumpled paper. "I didn't believe one could travel back from the future either. But there's that."

It was Claire's letter, from the future indeed. John had scrawled a few words in the margin. "Mueller's mill. Ye decoded it. How?" 

"It was a date cipher, like you'd guessed."

"I've tried all the ones that have meaning for Claire."

John came to a halt. "Well, you forgot one," he muttered. 

Jamie saw John's thin throat move as he swallowed, his knuckles turning white as his grip on the stallion's reins tightened. "Look at the initials she wrote next to my seal," John said after taking a deep breath.

"L. J. For ye. In case yer seal wasna obvious enough of a clue." Claire was a firm believer in redundancy when it came to matters of life or death.

"I dare say your wife is more subtle than you give her credit for, which you are well aware of. And like her, you perfectly well know that I never sign my name that way. Although you might be right in some respect. That clue was meant for me to uncover. Or at the very least, to be more easily discovered by me than you."

"In what way, pray ye?" Jamie asked with a forced politeness as John resumed walking toward the house. There was some light behind the windows now. 

"Lady John. That was how she was addressed during the brief period we were..." John waved his hand. 

Jamie stopped dead as the realization hit him like a punch in the gut. "Your wedding date. Why would she do that?"

"Close. She used the date you returned from the dead. As for why would she used this particular date, it is quite clever, actually. Think. This date is written nowhere but in our heads, only known to us three. And William, of course, if he can remember something else of that day save the shock of discovering his true lineage."

"She wanted to make as difficult as possible the task to decode the letter if it was to fall into wrong hands," Jamie concluded. "Aye, that sounds like Claire, indeed."

"The name Mueller is familiar to me, but I can't remember where I've heard it. Perhaps you could refresh my memory?"

"He was one of my earliest tenants. His family died of measles. T'was about the same time you came down with the sickness at our cabin." 

William had been there too, Jamie remembered, but had been too young to remember the Muellers’ horrifying tragedy. Besides, the boy had been too focused on his agony of fear of losing John to the disease, so soon after having lost his stepmother from the bloody flux. 

John's eyes narrowed briefly, then memories surfaced. "Oh! Yes, I do remember now. The man had murdered a native woman thinking she'd cursed his wife and offspring and, by some twisted logic in his sick, murderous brain, had rushed over to check on your wife's welfare. What happened to him?"

"The Indians killed him and burnt his house," Jamie said as he pushed the front door open.

The sense memory of burning ash penetrated Jamie's nostrils but dissipated as he stepped inside the warm entrance, where it was replaced by the actual smell of strong coffee brewing in the kitchen from which soft voices and laughter escaped. 

Mandy and the lass were sitting at the table, the first drinking hot chocolate, the second holding a cup of coffee. As they entered, the lass's gentle expression turned to surprise, then without a word she walked away to stand at the broken window, with tension in her shoulders and her gaze fixed on the forest line fifty yards away. 

Jamie gently squeezed his granddaughter's shoulder. "Why don't ye go wake up yer parents, sweetie," he said with a low voice. 

"She's blue too, like grannie," Mandy whispered into his ear before retreating. 

Discarding the fact that his granddaughter didn't seem the least disturbed by the presence in the kitchen of a woman from another time who was a mirror image of her grand-mother, Jamie poured himself a cup of coffee, and showed the reserve of tea to John. Then, once these mundane morning activities were accomplished, he pulled a chair and sat down quite heavily in it.

"Yer coffee's getting cold," he said to the lass, his nerves too taut to start the conversation in a more civil manner.

The young woman returned his impassive gaze. Her face flushed, she stepped toward the table, picked up her cup, then returned to the window without a word. 

"That was you in the lake," John blurted. "You pulled me out."

An expression of surprise flashed on her face again, and this time, gave way to a brief chuckle. "Next time you go for a swim, I heard the Caribbean’s is nice this time of year. Might want to try that instead."

"I don’t know if sharks are a good swap for trout, but the water would certainly be nicer than a cold lake,” John said with some amusement and, to Jamie’s slight irritation, a better sense of civility. As always. “I guess I should thank you for saving my life."

The lass's shoulders twitched and she gave a brief nod of acknowledgment in which Jamie detected a mix of relief, pain, and fear. He cursed between his teeth. God, like Claire's, her face was an open book. Or was it that her expressions spoke the same language as Claire’s, a language he knew so well? 

He was about to ask the reason for her presence when he heard the stairs creaking. He looked over his shoulder to see that Mandy was watching them from the doorstep. "Go back upstairs, honey," Roger said to his daughter as Bree came in. 

Her eyes were red and her face gaunt, betraying how difficult sleeping had been for his daughter as well. 

In the tense silence that filled the kitchen, Jamie's gaze moved between his daughter and the lass. The latter had gone back to her blank stare, a soldier’s stare, wary and restrained. The turmoil of emotions was now on Bree's face, which was not so unexpected. To see the daylight confirm what they'd perceived at the feeble light of lanterns the previous night was a shock, there was no doubt about that. Although now he could see there were a few differences, minor, but real. For one, the lass was three or four inches shorter than her ancestor. The jaw was thinner than Claire's, more angular, the nose a bit shorter and wider. The whole body also seemed lighter and yet he’d bet she didn't lack in strength. He knew a fighter when he saw one. It was the eyes though. And the mouth. They were Claire's. God, Claire, he muttered to himself as the memory of his encounter with his wife flashed in his mind. 

"Where's Jemmy?" Brianna asked, a slight tremor in her voice. "Where's my son?"

The lass gulped the last of her coffee and put the cup on the windowsill. "Nowhen," she replied with a dispassionate tone.

"Nowhen? What does that even mean?" Bree shot back, her brows pulling together as she grew upset. 

"That time travel is a tricky business."

Roger gently squeezed his wife's shoulder. "But he's alive?"

"Yeah. Maybe. Or not. What the fuck do I know? String theory is your son’s department. Not mine." The lass pushed herself from the window and went into the surgery. Her shoulder didn’t seem to bother her much anymore, Jamie noticed. He honestly didn’t know what to think of it. 

“My son?” Bree stepped in with her. “Who is he to you?" she asked as Roger, who'd followed his wife, turned around on the doorstep in slight embarrassment. 

"Changing clothes," he said through a cough as he sat down at the kitchen table with John and Jamie. 

"Grandfather," the reply came from the surgery. 

Jamie, who had got to his feet to satisfy an urgent need to pace back and forth, collapsed back down on his chair. Had he heard right? His grandson was a grandfather? 

As Bree staggered backward, Roger quickly pulled a chair so she could sit down too, and they all looked at each other in utter disbelief.

"It's not possible," Bree said in a whisper. "My little boy, a grandfather? But he just turned twelve." Her eyes were full of tears and she looked desperate as she clasped Roger’s hand.

"Unless she went through cosmetic surgery, her face is evidence enough," Roger said, his voice trembling from the emotional shock this discussion was generating. "She's about what? Eighteen, maybe even sixteen? That means Jem could be well into his sixties or even seventies."

“If I may say so, your mother-in-law always looked younger than her age,” John said as the lass returned, clad in an ugly brown and green outfit that weren’t entirely in tatters, but close. Short-sleeved, the tight-fit shirt outlined her thin, feminine waist, soft bosom, and let the well-defined muscles of her arms bare, for all to see. On the right biceps, a dark, skeletal shape resembling a butterfly with human skulls for wings and knives for body and antennas was drawn in black ink. It was outrageous, barbaric even, but Jamie refrained from voicing his thoughts on that subject. The lass glared at everyone, forestalling any such remarks. She put the small, flat device that she had used on the thing from Shaw’s head down on the table, and sat down with them. 

"I'm twenty-two, and the last time I saw Jem, he was eighty-three. You wanted time travel? You've got it. Now that this matter is settled, I believe you have a letter for me from your wife and no more time to lose."

Jamie felt his guts twist into a ball as the lass looked at him directly. 

"How do you know there's a letter?" Bree asked, looking cross with good reason. John muttered to Jamie, "Brutally honest too. If you needed any more proof, aside from physical attributes I mean."

Jamie groaned at the sarcasm in the statement. Was John suggesting that he shouldn't feel angry at the lass's lack of civility?

"Your daughter told me about it. She said there was a monarch drawn on the envelope."

Bree shrugged, obviously wondering what importance a little drawing could have. "Yeah, Mandy drew it. She likes butterflies."

"I know. She was telling me all about it. The letter, please."

"Iffrin," Jamie muttered as he fumbled in his coat and unfolded the paper on the table. "What's yer name?"

"Mac," the young woman replied indifferently. She had her elbows on the table and her head in her hands, she focused on the letter, muttering to herself unintelligibly. 

"Mac?" John repeated, exchanging a puzzled look with Jamie. What sort of name was this for a lass? Jamie shrugged, not having much interest in arguing the point. Besides, Claire had told him about that mania to shorten all names in the future. Mac could stand for MacKenzie, since she was Jem's granddaughter and might therefore have his name. Which also meant Jemmy had a son at some point in the future. But that wasn't the most troubling thing. How could she have the key to decipher the letter?

"Did Jem give ye the key to decode the letter?"

With an annoyed glare, the young woman returned to the window. His attention turned toward the device she’d left on the table. It hadn’t glowed when he’d taken the letter out like it had with Bree the other night. His daughter had noticed as well.

“Is your geiger counter not working anymore?” she asked.

"You’ve noticed, huh?”

Bree inhaled loudly. “What is wrong with her?” she mouthed, waving her hands up in the air. 

“You've got to be fucking kidding me! He knew. He fucking knew.” The lass turned a dark gaze toward them. “Where's that mill? Mueller's?"

"Why? It’s just a ruin," Bree said suspiciously.

"A ruin with a nuke.” 

All the chairs creaked on the floor as everybody jerked to their feet. 

"A nuclear bomb here on the Ridge?" Bree cried, eyes wide with a terror that transformed into anger as she looked at the young woman. "Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

"It's a true nightmare," Roger said, leaning on the table for support as his legs gave way, forcing him to sit down fast. 

"Nightmare my ass! You’ve got no fucking notion how much worse than that it is.” 

"I grew up during the cold war," Bree snarled back. “I’ve got a fucking notion, thank you very much .”

“What’s going to happen to us, and to the world if that bomb goes off here and now?” Roger added, although he was more talking to himself.

"Oh, that bomb won’t go off here, don’t you worry about that,” the lass said angrily. “Although now I know why there’s been a bloody fucking target on all your heads.”

“Why?” Jamie asked, a growl in his voice. They were getting answers, finally, not the ones he wanted, but you don’t get to choose those things. “Why is such a bomb from yer time on my property?” he insisted in an accusatory tone.

The  young woman stared back at him. “You think I know everything?” she replied with animosity. And fear. Jamie shuddered. No, she didn’t know. She was pissed, but not at them. Somehow that brought him a measure of peace. Not a very big one. A flake if anything. Past, present or future, soldiers are not privy of all the ins and outs of a strategy deployed at higher levels. All they are asked to do is obey and execute their duty to the best of their abilities. Since they were all still alive, and in spite of the obvious fact that his wife had been kidnapped, the lass was doing her job. 

“That bomb? That's the Apocalypse. I trust you can all understand that reference to its full nightmarish extent," she added as she grabbed the poker by the hearth and threw the letter in the fire. "I need someone to take me there now. Someone who knows the place well, and how to fight.” 

That certainly decreased the possibilities. Jamie rubbed his face with his hands. 

"No," Bree whispered in protest as she read his thoughts. "You have to go after Richardson and mama." 

"I'll go find your mother," John said, then he nodded toward Jamie. 

"I canna ask ye to do this, John. The tracks lead East, back to Wilmington for all we know. The risk of ye getting caught on the way is too high. And forgive me for stating the obvious, my friend, but ye're in no shape to take on that bastard alone."

John smiled sadly at the lass who had her gaze back on the window and the forest beyond. "Oh, but I won't be alone, will I? 

As she nodded, John got up and opened the door. "It's all right, Manoke. You can come out."