“If when ye find your own place again. If ye should happen on a woman called Claire—” He swallows, then shakes his head. “No. Never mind.” A sadness touches his face as he glances away.
“Speak your mind.”
I allow my tone to take on the tinge of an order.
Fraser glances back at me, taking his time, but makes up his mind. He draws himself up to his full height, which is considerable, and speaks formally.
“Aye. Should ye meet with a woman called Claire Fraser—no, she’d be Claire Randall then—” A dark shadow crosses his face at the words, but he shakes it off. “A healer. Tell her that James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser, the Laird of Lallybroch, blesses her and wishes her and her child both health and joy.” His gaze goes far away for a moment, and he swallows again, before adding in a low voice, “Tell her that her husband misses her.”
I should probe that statement more, but there is no time. So I simply say, “I will.”
“Have ye a woman? There, I mean?”
I nod. “Her name is Cassiopeia.”
Just saying her name makes me smile. She would have loved this adventure. He stares sharply at me, as though suspecting a joke, but seeing that it isn’t, he nods soberly. “Think of her, when ye come to the stones. Go wi’ God, and may Michael and Bride protect ye.”
“Thank you,” I say again, which feels wholly inadequate.
I turn to leave and my eye falls on the canvas shelter, from which a muffled, drunken song is now issuing. “Does anybody ever try to escape? Surely it wouldn’t be that hard?”
He stares out across the endless moor, with eyes that seem incapable of illusion. “Where should we go? All that we knew is gone, and all that we have is each other.”
DARKNESS HAS FALLEN WHEN I find the stones, but a three-quarter moon, high on the scudding clouds, showers down a surreal ivory glow. I catch the quick, silent streak of a falling star across the southern curve of the heavens. A sign of good luck? Hopefully. But an owl hoots a sinister warning.
I stand for a minute, staring, afraid to look away for fear I am imagining them and the stones might disappear if I blink. A chilling air of pathos rises from the ruins. I have gone well past the point of feeling hungry, now more dizzy with tiredness than from a lack of food. I have no idea what I’ll say, if it works and I am sent back to my own time. How will I explain Kuznyetsov? The lost grimoire? Where I’ve been, and all that happened? As a Magellan Billet agent I’ve been involved with some incredible things. But the past two days has climbed to the top of that amazing list.
I walk around the stones and begin to be aware of a low buzzing noise, like a hive of bumblebees. I didn’t notice that before. Am I to utter some magic words? I smile at the thought. Then recall what Jamie Fraser said.
Think of her, when ye come to the stones.
The Scotsman had obviously been thinking about someone special. Claire. His wife. The memory almost painful.
I decide to take the man’s advice.
Placing one hand on the tallest stone, I whisper, “Cassiopeia.”
MY EYES ARE CLOSED, BUT scattered recollections flicker though my mind, fading, then growing stronger. There’s not as much motion or force in the journey like the first time—or maybe it’s just that I know what to expect—more like a silent process of shifting lights and shapes.
My lips quiver.
A shiver of panic tries to free itself from my brain. Familiar faces I had almost forgotten swim in and out, blur, and disappear.
Then everything goes quiet.
I open my eyes to a dazzling radiance, bright to the point of burning my pupils. Shadowy figures hover over me. Faces approach, then recede. I raise an arm to shield my vision and hear a voice shout, “He’s alive.”
I struggle to focus and see that I’m being loaded into the back of a van. All I can see is the beam of a bright flashlight, which confirms what I need to know. I made it. Then I catch a stench of blood and death. Beside me in the van lies a huge dead boar on a sheet of blue plastic. A man scrambles inside. My mouth is dry and sticky, and the sudden roar of an engine drowns out the first words I try to say.
“You awake then, mate?” a Scottish voice says. “How ye feeling?”
It belongs to a man in his fifties, with a deeply weathered but friendly face, wearing a waxed jacket.
“Where are we going?” I ask, resisting the urge to swat the flashlight away.
“Aye, well, if your name is Malone, we thought we’d maybe take ye to your friends at the castle. If ye’re no him, though, we should maybe carry ye down to the village. They’ve a wee cottage hospital there.”
“I’m Malone,” I assure him, then shut my eyes again, trying to gather strength, my memories a whirlwind of confusion.
Was the whole thing a dream?
Not real?
By the time the van turns into the paved drive that leads to the castle—once more ablaze with electric floodlights—I’m sitting up, passing a flask back and forth with one of my saviors.
“Archie McAndres, purveyor o’ fine game,” the man tells me, with a companionable slap on the flank of the dead boar. “The lad and I were headin’ along to the castle, when we saw ye stagger out o’ the moor. Thought ye were drunk, but then I remembered Mr. Chubb showin’ me the wee photie of ye when we brought the pheasants yesterday.”
“They were . . . looking for me?”
“Ach, aye. When they found your man Nyetski or whatever, lyin’ dead on the moor wi’ a bullet in him, there was a clishmaclaver from here to Inverness. When they found the things in his pockets, they thought ye maybe—”
“Things?” I ask. “What things?”
“Oh, I cannae just charge my mind, but it was bits o’ ivory, maybe icons. Was it icons, Rob?” the man bellows toward the cab. “What the Russian fella had?”
“Jewels, I heard it was,” Rob’s voice comes back over the thrum of the motor.
The flask returns to my hands.
“Have another drink. Seems the dead one wasn’t named Nyetski a’tall. He was one of the East European fellas. Known to the polis.”
I pass on more from the flask. Talk of Kuznyetsov makes me think of the missing grimoire I found at the base of the stone. In the dream I tucked it at the small of my back, beneath my sweater. Then lost it on the boat. I reach around and feel, but no book is there.
The van stops and the rear doors open.
A blue sky overhead promises a new beginning.
I am back at Castle Ardsmuir.
THE QUESTIONS COME IN RAPID fire, but I decide a lie is better than saying I may have traveled 262 years back in time. Besides, I’m not sure any of it ever happened. Kuznyetsov is definitely dead, though, but there is nothing linking me to that fact. Apparently, my gun has not been found. So it’s better to just do a Sergeant Schultz. I see nothing. I hear nothing. I know nothing.
“Ye don’t offer much,” a local police inspector tells me, businesslike and composed. “Ye never saw the Russian?”
I shake my head.
“No idea how he got shot and dead?”
This is the fourth time we’ve been through it, but I know the drill. Have someone say something over and over enough until they mess up. “Like I’ve already explained, I have no idea what happened to him.”
“Detective Inspector,” Malcolm Chubb says, interrupting. “My friend is exhausted. He’s been out on the moors with no food for nearly two days. For God’s sake, look at him. Can’t this wait until tomorrow?”
The finality of Chubb’s voice seems to outlaw any further discussion, and the policeman doesn’t look happy.