A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon Read Free Book Online

flaming sword.”

5

    THE SHADOWS WHICH
FIRE THROWS
    I ABANDONED IAN AND ROLLO to the juggernaut of Mrs. Bug’s benevolence—let Ian try telling
her
he didn’t want bread and milk—and sat down to my own belated supper: a hot, fresh omelette, featuring not only cheese, but bits of salty bacon, asparagus, and wild mushroom, flavored with spring onions.
    Jamie and the Major had finished their own meals already, and sat by the fire beneath a companionable fug of tobacco smoke from the Major’s clay pipe. Evidently, Jamie had just finished telling Major MacDonald about the gruesome tragedy, for MacDonald was frowning and shaking his head in sympathy.
    “Puir gomerels!” he said. “Ye’ll be thinking that it was the same banditti, perhaps, who set upon your nephew?”
    “I am,” Jamie replied. “I shouldna like to think there were two such bands prowling the mountains.” He glanced toward the window, cozily shuttered for the night, and I noticed suddenly that he had taken down his fowling piece from over the hearth and was absently wiping the spotless barrel with an oily rag. “Do I gather,
a charaid,
that ye’ve heard some report of similar doings?”
    “Three others. At least.” The Major’s pipe threatened to go out, and he drew on it mightily, making the tobacco in the bowl glow and crackle sudden red.
    A small qualm made me pause, a bite of mushroom warm in my mouth. The possibility that a mysterious gang of armed men might be roaming at large, attacking homesteads at random, had not occurred to me ’til this moment.
    Obviously, it had occurred to Jamie; he rose, put the fowling piece back on its hooks, touched the rifle that hung above it for reassurance, then went to the sideboard, where his dags and the case with its elegant pair of dueling pistols were kept.
    MacDonald watched with approval, puffing clouds of soft blue smoke, as Jamie methodically laid out guns, shot pouches, bullet molds, patches, rods, and all the other impedimenta of his personal armory.
    “Mmphm,” MacDonald said. “A verra nice piece, that, Colonel.” He nodded at one of the dags, a long-barreled, elegant thing with a scroll butt and silver-gilt fittings.
    Jamie gave MacDonald a narrow glance, hearing the “Colonel,” but answered calmly enough.
    “Aye, it’s a bonny thing. It doesna aim true at anything over two paces, though. Won it in a horse race,” he added, with a small apologetic gesture at the gun, lest MacDonald think him fool enough to have paid good money for it.
    He checked the flint nonetheless, replaced it, and set the gun aside.
    “Where?” Jamie said casually, reaching for the bullet mold.
    I had resumed chewing, but looked inquiringly at the Major myself.
    “Mind, it’s only what I’ve heard,” MacDonald warned, taking the pipe from his mouth for a moment, then hastily putting it back for another puff. “A homestead some distance from Salem, burned to the ground. Folk called Zinzer—Germans.” He sucked hard, cheeks hollowing.
    “That was in February, late in the month. Then three weeks later, a ferry, on the Yadkin north of Woram’s Landing—the house robbed, and the ferryman killed. The third—” Here he broke off, puffing furiously, and cut his eyes at me, then back at Jamie.
    “Speak, o, friend,” Jamie said in Gaelic, looking resigned. “She will have been seeing more dreadful things than you have, by far.”
    I nodded at this, forking up another bite of egg, and the Major coughed.
    “Aye. Well, saving your presence, mum—I happened to find myself in a, er, establishment in Edenton. . . .”
    “A brothel?” I put in. “Yes, quite. Do go on, Major.”
    He did, rather hurriedly, his face flushing dark beneath his wig.
    “Ah . . . to be sure. Well, d’ye see, ’twas one of the, er, lasses in the place, told me as she’d been stolen from her home by outlaws who set upon the place one day without warning. She’d no but an auld grannie she lived with, and said they’d kilt the