The Scottish Prisoner

“Mr. Fraser you’ll be,” he said, and held out a piece of paper. “Mr. Qui

He knew what it was: Qui

He nearly threw the note away, but some obscure impulse of civility made him open it. He glanced cursorily at it, then stiffened.

It was neither addressed nor signed.

You’ve a great loyalty to your friends, and God himself will surely bless you for it on the last day. But I should be less than a friend myself, did I not tell you the truth.

It was the Englishman who did for Major Siverly. I saw him with my own eyes, as I was watching from the wood behind the summerhouse.

Captain Twelvetrees is a great friend to our cause, and with Major Siverly dead, the means lie now in his hand. I urge you to protect him and give him what help you can when you return to London.

God willing, we will meet there and, with our other friends, see the green branch burst into flower.

By reflex, he crumpled the note in his hand. John Grey had come out of the abbot’s office, pausing there to turn and say something to Brother Ambrose.

“Friends!” he said aloud. “God help me.” He grimaced and, putting the rosary back in his pocket, tore the note to tiny pieces, which he scattered to the wind.

28

Amplexus

JAMIE REFUSED TO ALLOW GREY TO TRY TO HIRE HORSES, ON grounds that the Irish liked gossip as much as did Highlanders, and were Grey to be seen in his uniform, the castle would know it by noon of the following day.

So they walked through the night from Lough Ree, keeping to the fields in the crepuscule, resting in the woods during light of day—when Jamie went into Ballybonaggin for food—then coming out onto the roads again at dark, where they kept up a fine pace, lighted by a sympathetic moon that rose above them huge, pale, and mottled as a ball of gleaming alabaster.

The countryside was empty of people—and anything else.

They had passed from open meadows into a wooded area, and the trees clustered thick and dark, roots intruding into the road, branches overhanging, so that they walked through pools of darkness, the road invisible beneath their feet, emerging suddenly into clearer spots where the trees drew back a little, and the moon caught the sudden white flash of face or shirtfront, the glint of a sword hilt.

Even the shuffle of their feet was lost in the murmur of the woods, a fresh wind rising, rattling the new leaves. John felt the night as something wild creeping upon him, the force of spring itself rising from the ground into his feet, his legs, bursting through his body ’til the blood throbbed in his fingers, pulsed in his chest.

Perhaps it was freedom, the exhilaration of their escape. Perhaps the excitement of a hunt by night, adventure and danger before them. Or the knowledge that he was an outlaw—with pursuit and danger certainly behind him.

The road was narrow, and they jostled against each other now and then, blinded between the dark wood and the brilliance of the rising moon. He could hear Jamie’s breath, or thought he could—it seemed part of the soft wind that touched his face. He could smell Jamie, smell the musk of his body, the dried sweat and dust in his clothes, and felt suddenly wolflike and feral, longing changed to outright hunger.

He wanted.

Master me, he thought, breathing deep, or shall I your master be?

There were frogs in the ditches, in the bogs that lay beyond the scrim of trees. They called, high and low, shrill and bass, cascading over one another in a vast, pulsating chorus. At a distance, sitting on a lawn with that chorus as background, watching the stars come out, the sound might be no more than a pastoral, the song of spring.

This close, it was still the song of spring, but that song was revealed to be what the pagans had always known it to be—the blind urge to seize, to mate, to spill blood and seed heedlessly into the earth, wallow in crushed flowers, writhe in the juices of grass and mud.

Those bloody frogs were shriekingtheir passion, raw-throated and triumphant. Hundreds of them. The racket was deafening.

Distracted by the vision of amphibians in their thousands locked in slime-wrapped sexual congress amid the dark waters, he caught his foot in a root and fell heavily.

Fraser, close beside, felt him go and grabbed him, catching him round the middle and jerking him upright again.

“Are ye all right?” he asked, low-voiced, his breath warm on Grey’s cheek.

“Croakle dum-ho,” he said, breathless and dazed. Fraser’s hands were still tight on his arms, steadying him.

“What?”

“Great Lord Frog to Lady Mouse. It’s a song. I’ll sing it to you later.”

Fraser made a sound in his throat that might have been either derision or amusement—maybe both—and let go Grey’s arms. He swayed, almost staggering, and put out a hand to steady himself. He touched Fraser’s chest, warm and solid through his clothes, swallowed hard, and took his hand away.

“This seems the sort of night on which one might meet the Wild Hunt itself,” Grey said, starting to walk again. His skin prickled and jumped, and he would not in fact have been surprised in the slightest to see the Queen of Faerie come riding out of the wood, fair and spectral as the sailing moon, terrible in her hunting, her pack of attendants all young men, lithe and sharp-toothed, hungry as wolves. “What are they hunting, do you suppose?”

“Men,” Fraser said without hesitation. “Souls. I was thinking the same myself. Though ye see them more on a storm-tossed night.”

“Have you actually seen them?” He believed for an instant that it was quite possible, and put the question in all seriousness. Rather to Grey’s surprise, Fraser took it the same way.

“No,” he said, but in a tone verging on doubt. “At least—that is—”

“Tell me.”

They walked in silence for a few moments, but he could feel Fraser gathering his thoughts and kept silent himself, waiting, feeling the shifting rhythms of the bigger man’s body as he moved, soft-footed, on the uneven ground.

“Years back,” Fraser said at last. “It was after Culloden. I lived on my own land then, but hidden. In a wee cavern in the rocks. I’d come out at night, though, to hunt. And sometimes I’d have need to go far afield, if the hunting was poor, and often it was.”

They had emerged momentarily into a spot where the trees fell away, and the light of the moon shone bright enough for Grey to see Fraser tilt his head back, as though considering the orb.

“It wasna a night like this, really,” he said. “Nay moon at all, and the wind going through your bones and moaning like a thousand lost souls in your ears. But it—it was wild, ye might say. Wild in the way this is,” he added, dropping his voice a little and gesturing briefly at the dark countryside surrounding them. “A night when ye might expect to meet wi’ things, should ye venture out.”

He spoke quite matter-of-factly, as though it were entirely commonplace to meet with “things.” On a night like this, Grey could believe that completely and wondered suddenly how many nights the other had spent roaming alone beneath blazing stars or a clouded vault, with no touch on his skin save the wind’s rough caress.