Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(31)

“Really.” She was fascinated: sufficiently so as to put aside her reluctance to look ignorant. “I didna ken…I mean…so the different orders do quite different things, is that what ye’re saying? What other kinds are there?”

He shot her a brief glance but then turned back, narrowing his eyes against the wind as he thought.

“Well…there’s the sort of nun that prays all the time—contemplative, I think they’re called. I see them in the cathedral all hours of the day and night. There’s more than one order of that sort, though; one kind wears gray habits and prays in the chapel of St. Joseph, and another wears black; ye see them mostly in the chapel of Our Lady of the Sea.” He glanced at her, curious. “Will it be that sort of nun that you’ll be?”

She shook her head, glad that the wind-chafing hid her blushes.

“No,” she said, with some regret. “That’s maybe the holiest sort of nun, but I’ve spent a good bit o’ my life being contemplative on the moors, and I didna like it much. I think I havena got the right sort of soul to do it verra well, even in a chapel.”

“Aye,” he said, and wiped back flying strands of hair from his face. “I ken the moors. The wind gets into your head after a bit.” He hesitated for a moment. “When my uncle Jamie—your da, I mean—ye ken he hid in a cave after Culloden?”

“For seven years,” she said, a little impatient. “Aye, everyone kens that story. Why?”

He shrugged.

“Only thinking. I was no but a wee bairn at the time, but I went now and then wi’ my mam, to take him food there. He’d be glad to see us, but he wouldna talk much. And it scared me to see his eyes.”

Joan felt a small shiver pass down her back, nothing to do with the stiff breeze. She saw—suddenly saw, in her head—a thin, dirty man, the bones starting in his face, crouched in the dank, frozen shadows of the cave.

“Da?” she scoffed, to hide the shiver that crawled up her arms. “How could anyone be scairt of him? He’s a dear, kind man.”

Michael’s wide mouth twitched at the corners.

“I suppose it would depend whether ye’d ever seen him in a fight. But—”

“Have you?” she interrupted, curious. “Seen him in a fight?”

“I have, aye. BUT—” he said, not willing to be distracted, “I didna mean he scared me. It was that I thought he was haunted. By the voices in the wind.”

That dried up the spit in her mouth, and she worked her tongue a little, hoping it didn’t show. She needn’t have worried; he wasn’t looking at her.

“My own da said it was because Jamie spent so much time alone, that the voices got into his head and he couldna stop hearing them. When he’d feel safe enough to come to the house, it would take hours sometimes before he could start to hear us again—Mam wouldna let us talk to him until he’d had something to eat and was warmed through.” He smiled, a little ruefully. “She said he wasna human ’til then—and, looking back, I dinna think she meant that as a figure of speech.”

“Well,” she said, but stopped, not knowing how to go on. She wished fervently that she’d known this earlier. Her da and his sister were coming on to France later, but she might not see him. She could maybe have talked to Da, asked him just what the voices in his head were like—what they said. Whether they were anything like the ones she heard.



NEARLY TWILIGHT, and the rats were still dead. The comte heard the bells of Notre Dame calling sept and glanced at his pocket watch. The bells were two minutes before their time, and he frowned. He didn’t like sloppiness. He stood up and stretched himself, groaning as his spine cracked like the ragged volley of a firing squad. No doubt about it, he was aging, and the thought sent a chill through him.

If. If he could find the way forward, then perhaps…but you never knew, that was the devil of it. For a little while, he’d thought—hoped—that traveling back in time stopped the process of aging. That initially seemed logical, like rewinding a clock. But, then again, it wasn’t logical, because he’d always gone back farther than his own lifetime. Only once he’d tried to go back just a few years, to his early twenties. That was a mistake, and he still shivered at the memory.

He went to the tall gabled window that looked out over the Seine.

That particular view of the river had changed barely at all in the last two hundred years; he’d seen it at several different times. He hadn’t always owned this house, but it had stood in this street since 1620, and he always managed to get in briefly, if only to reestablish his own sense of reality after a passage.

Only the trees changed in his view of the river, and sometimes a strange-looking boat would be there. But the rest was always the same and no doubt always would be: the old fishermen, catching their supper off the landing in stubborn silence, each guarding his space with outthrust elbows, the younger ones, barefoot and slump-shouldered with exhaustion, laying out their nets to dry, naked little boys diving off the quay. It gave him a soothing sense of eternity, watching the river. Perhaps it didn’t matter so much if he must one day die?

“The devil it doesn’t,” he murmured to himself, and glanced up at the sky. Venus shone bright. He should go.

Pausing conscientiously to place his fingers on each rat’s body and ensure that no spark of life remained, he passed down the line, then swept them all into a burlap bag. If he was going to the Court of Miracles, at least he wouldn’t arrive empty-handed.