A Breath of Snow and Ashes

leaves.

“We dinna need to get it out of the creekbed, aye?” he asked. “Only move it a few feet, so ye can cut through the bank beyond it?”

“That’s it.” Rivulets of sweat, trapped by her thick eyebrows, ran tickling down the sides of her face. She’d been digging for the best part of an hour; her arms ached from heaving shovelsful of heavy mud, and her hands were blistered. With a sense of profound gratitude, she surrendered the spade and stepped back in the creek, stooping to splash cold water on her scratched arms and flushed face.

“Heavy work,” her father observed, grunting a little as he briskly finished undermining the boulder. “Could ye not have asked Roger Mac to do it?”

“He’s busy,” she said, perceiving the shortness of her tone, but not inclined to disguise it.

Her father darted a sharp glance at her, but said no more, merely busying himself with the proper placement of his oak staves. Attracted like iron filings to the magnetism of their grandfather’s presence, Jemmy and Germain appeared like magic, loudly wanting to help.

She’d asked them to help, and they’d helped—for a few minutes, before being drawn away by the glimpse of a porcupine high up in the trees. With Jamie in charge, of course, they leaped to the task, madly scooping dirt from the bank with flat bits of wood, giggling, pushing, getting in the way, and stuffing handsful of mud down the back of each other’s breeches.

Jamie being Jamie, he ignored the nuisance, merely directing their efforts and finally ordering them out of the creek, so as not to be crushed.

“All right, lass,” he said, turning to her. “Take a grip there.” The boulder had been loosened from the confining clay, and now protruded from the bank, oak staves thrust into the mud beneath, sticking up on either side, and another behind.

She seized the one he indicated, while he took the other two.

“On the count of three . . . one . . . two . . . heave!”

Jem and Germain, perched above, chimed in, chanting “One . . . two . . . heave!” like a small Greek chorus. There was a splinter in her thumb and the wood rasped against the waterlogged creases of her skin, but she felt suddenly like laughing.

“One . . . two . . . hea—” With a sudden shift, a swirl of mud, and a cascade of loose dirt from the bank above, the boulder gave way, falling into the stream with a splash that soaked them both to the chest and made both little boys shriek with joy.

Jamie was grinning ear-to-ear and so was she, wet shift and muddy children notwithstanding. The boulder now lay near the opposite bank of the stream, and—just as she had calculated—the diverted current was already eating into the newly created hollow in the near bank, a strong eddy eating away the fine-grained clay in streams and spirals.

“See that?” She nodded at it, dabbing her mud-spattered face on the shoulder of her shift. “I don’t know how far it will erode, but if I let it go for a day or two, there won’t be much digging left to do.”

“Ye kent that would happen?” Her father glanced at her, face alight, and laughed. “Why, ye clever, bonnie wee thing!”

The glow of recognized achievement did quite a bit to dampen her resentment of Roger’s absence. The presence of a bottle of cider in Jamie’s creel, keeping cold amongst the dead trout, did a lot more. They sat companionably on the bank, passing the bottle back and forth, admiring the industry of the new eddy pool at work.

“This looks like good clay,” she observed, leaning forward to scoop a little of the wet stuff out of the crumbling bank. She squeezed it in her hand, letting grayish water run down her arm, and opened her hand to show him how it kept its shape, showing clearly the prints of her fingers.

“Good for your kiln?” he asked, peering dutifully at it.

“Worth a try.” She had made several less-than-successful experiments with the kiln so far, producing a succession of malformed plates and bowls, most of which had either exploded in the kiln or shattered immediately upon removal. One or two survivals, deformed and scorched round the edges, had been pressed into dubious service, but it was precious little reward for the effort of stoking the kiln and minding it for days.

What she needed was advice from someone who knew about kilns and making earthenware. But with the strained relations now existent between the Ridge and Salem, she couldn’t seek it. It had been awkward enough, her speaking directly to Brother Mordecai about his ceramic processes—a Popish woman, and speaking to a man she wasn’t married to, the scandal!

“Damn wee Manfred,” her father agreed, hearing her complaint. He’d heard it before, but didn’t mention it. He hesitated. “Would it maybe help was I to go and ask? A few o’ the Brethren will still speak to me, and it might be that they’d let me talk wi’ Mordecai. If ye were to tell me what it is ye need to know . . . ? Ye could maybe write it down.”

“Oh, Da, I love you!” Grateful, she leaned to kiss him, and he laughed, clearly gratified to be doing her a service.

Elated, she took another drink of cider, and rosy visions of hardened clay pipes began to dance in her brain. She had a wooden cistern already built, with a lot of complaint and obstruction from Ronnie Sinclair. She needed help to heave that into place. Then, if she could get only twenty feet of reliable pipe . . .

“Mama, come look!” Jem’s impatient voice cut through the fog of calculation. With a mental sigh, she made a hasty note of where she had been, and pushed the process carefully into a corner of her mind, where it would perhaps helpfully ferment.

She handed the bottle back to her father, and made her way down the bank to where the boys squatted, expecting to be shown frog spawn, a drowned skunk, or some other wonder of nature appealing to small boys.

“What is it?” she called.

“Look, look!” Jemmy spotted her and popped upright, pointing to the rock at his feet.

They were standing on the Flat Rock, a prominent feature of the creek. As the name suggested, it was a flat shelf of granite, large enough for three men to occupy at once, undercut by the water so that it jutted out over the boiling stream. It was a favorite spot for fishing.

Someone had built a small fire; there was a blackened smudge on the rock, with what looked like the remnants of charred sticks in the center. It was much too small for a cooking fire, but still, she would have thought nothing of it. Her father was frowning at the fire site, though, in a way that made her walk out onto the rock and stand beside him, looking.

The objects in the ashes weren’t sticks.

“Bones,” she said at once, and squatted down to look closer. “What kind of animal are those from?” Even as she said it, her mind was analyzing and rejecting—squirrel, possum, rabbit, deer, pig—unable to make sense of the shapes.

“They’re finger bones, lass,” he said, lowering his voice as he glanced at Jemmy—who had lost interest in the fire and was now sliding down the muddy bank, to the further detriment of his breeches. “Dinna touch them,” he added—unnecessarily, as she had drawn back her hand in instant revulsion.

“From a human, you mean?” Instinctively, she wiped her hand on the side of her thigh, though she had touched nothing.

He nodded, and squatted beside her, studying the charred remains. There were blackened lumps there, too—though she thought these were the remains of some plant material; one was greenish, maybe a stem of something, incompletely burned.

Jamie bent low, sniffing at the burned remains. Instinctively, Brianna drew a deep breath through her nose in imitation—then snorted, trying to get rid of the smell. It was disconcerting: a reek of char, overlaid with something bitter and chalky—and that in turn overlaid with a sort of pungent scent that reminded her of medicine.

“Where could they have come from?” she asked, also low-voiced—though Jemmy and Germain had begun pelting each other with mudballs, and wouldn’t have noticed if she’d shouted.

“I havena noticed anyone missing a hand, have you?” Jamie glanced up, giving her a half-smile. She didn’t return it.

“Not walking around, no. But if they aren’t walking around—” She swallowed, trying to ignore the half-imagined taste of bitter herbs and burning. “Where’s the rest? Of the body, I mean.”

That word, “body,” seemed to bring the whole thing into a new and nasty focus.

“Where’s the rest of that finger, I wonder?” Jamie was frowning at the blackened smudge. He moved a knuckle toward it, and she saw what he had seen: a paler smudge within the circle of the fire, where part of the ashes had been swept away. There were three fingers, she saw, still swallowing repeatedly. Two were intact, the bones gray-white and spectral among the ashes. Two joints of the third were gone, though; only the slender last phalanx remained.

“An animal?” She glanced round for traces, but there were no pawprints on the surface of the rock—only the muddy smudges left by the little boys’ bare feet.

Vague visions of cannibalism were beginning to stir queasily in the pit of her stomach, though she rejected the notion at once.

“You don’t think Ian—” She stopped abruptly.

“Ian?” Her father looked up, astonished. “Why should Ian do such a thing?”

“I don’t think he would,” she said, taking hold of common sense. “Not at all. It was just a thought—I’d heard that the Iroquois sometimes . . . sometimes . . .” She nodded at the charred bones, unwilling to articulate the thought further. “Um . . . maybe a friend of Ian’s? Uh . . . visiting?”

Jamie’s face darkened a little, but he shook his head.

“Nay, there’s the smell of the Highlands about this. The Iroquois will burn an enemy. Or cut bits off him, to be sure. But not like that.” He pointed at the bones with his chin, in the Highland way. “This is a private business, ken? A witch—or one of their shamans, maybe—might do a thing like that; not a warrior.”

“I haven’t seen any Indians of any kind lately. Not on the Ridge. Have you?”

He looked at the burned smudge a moment longer, frowning, then shook his head.

“No, nor anyone missing a few fingers, either.”

“You’re sure they’re human?” She studied the bones, trying for other possibilities. “Maybe from a small bear? Or a big coon?”

“Maybe,” he said flatly, but she could tell he said it only for her sake. He was sure.

“Mama!” The patter of bare feet on the rock behind her was succeeded by a tug at her sleeve. “Mama, we’re hungry!”

“Of course you are,” she said, rising to meet the demand, but still gazing abstractedly at the charred remnants. “You haven’t eaten in nearly an hour. What did you—” Her gaze drifted slowly from the fire to her son, then snapped abruptly, focusing on the two little boys, who stood grinning at her, covered from head to foot in mud.

“Look at you!” she said, dismay tempered by resignation. “How could you possibly get that filthy?”

“Oh, it’s easy, lass,” her father assured her, grinning as he rose to his feet. “Easy cured, too, though.” He bent, and seizing Germain by the back of shirt and seat of breeks, heaved him neatly off the rock and into the pool below.

“Me, too, me, too! Me, too, Grandda!” Jemmy was dancing up and down in excitement, spattering clods of mud in all direction.

“Oh, aye. You, too.” Jamie bent and grabbed Jem round the waist, launching him high into the air in a flutter of shirt before Brianna could cry out.

“He can’t swim!”

This protest coincided with a huge splash, as Jem hit the water and promptly sank like a rock. She was striding toward the edge, prepared to dive in after him, when her father put a hand on her arm to stop her.

“Wait a bit,” he said. “How will ye ken whether he swims or not, if ye dinna let him try?”

Germain was already arrowing his way toward shore, his sleek blond head dark with water. Jemmy popped up behind him, though, splashing and spluttering, and Germain dived, turned like an otter, and came up alongside.

“Kick!” he called to Jemmy, churning up a huge spray in illustration. “Go on your back!”

Jemmy ceased flailing, went on his back, and kicked madly. His hair was plastered over his face and the spray of his efforts must have obscured any remnants of vision—but he went on valiantly kicking, to encouraging whoops from Jamie and Germain.

The pool was no more than ten feet across, and he reached the shallows on the opposite bank within seconds, beaching among the rocks by virtue of crashing headfirst into one. He stopped, thrashing feebly in the shallows, then bounced to his feet, showering water, and shoved the wet hair out of his face. He looked amazed.

“I can swim!” he shouted. “Mama, I can swim!”

“That’s wonderful!” she called, torn between sharing his ecstatic pride, the urge to rush home and tell Roger about it—and dire visions of Jemmy now leaping heedlessly into bottomless ponds and rock-jagged rapids, under the reckless delusion that he could indeed swim. But he’d gotten his feet wet, in no uncertain terms; there was no going back.

“Come here!” She bent toward him, clapping her hands. “Can you swim back to me? Come on, come here!”

He looked blankly at her for an instant, then around him at the rippling water of the pool. The blaze of excitement in his face died.

“I forget,” he said, and his mouth curled down, fat with sudden woe. “I forget how!”

“Fall down and kick!” Germain bellowed helpfully, from his perch on the rock. “You can do it, cousin!”

Jemmy took one or two blundering steps into the water, but stopped, lip trembling, terror and confusion starting to overwhelm him.

“Stay there, a chuisle! I’m coming!” Jamie called, and dove cleanly into the pool, a long pale streak beneath the water, bubbles streaming from hair and breeks. He popped up in front of Jemmy in an explosion of breath and shook his head, flinging strands of wet red hair out of his face.

“Come along then, man,” he said, scooting round on his knees in the shallows, so that his back was to Jemmy. He looked back, patting his own shoulder. “Take hold of me here, aye? We’ll swim back together.”

And they did, kicking and splashing in ungainly dog paddle, Jemmy’s shrieks of excitement echoed by Germain, who had leaped into the water to paddle alongside.

Hauled out onto the rock, the three of them lay puddled, gasping and laughing at her feet, water spreading in pools around them.

“Well, you are cleaner,” she said judiciously, moving her foot away from a spreading streamlet. “I’ll admit that much.”

“Of course we are.” Jamie sat up, wringing out the long tail of his hair. “It occurs to me, lass, that there’s maybe a better way to do what ye want.”

“What I w—oh. You mean the water?”

“Aye, that.” He sniffed, and rubbed the back of his hand under his nose. “I’ll show ye, if ye come up to the house after supper.”

“What’s that, Grandda?” Jemmy had got to his feet, wet hair standing up in red spikes, and was looking curiously at Jamie’s back. He put out a tentative finger and traced one of the long, curving scars.

“What? Oh . . . that.” Jamie’s face went quite blank for a moment. “It’s . . . ah . . .”

“Some bad people hurt Grandda once,” she interrupted firmly, bending down to pick Jemmy up. “But that was a long time ago. He’s all right now. You weigh a ton!”

“Papa says Grandpère is perhaps a silkie,” Germain remarked, viewing Jamie’s back with interest. “Like his papa before him. Did the bad people find you in your silkie skin, Grandpère, and try to cut it from you? He would then of course become a man again,” he explained matter-of-factly, looking up at Jemmy, “and could kill them with his sword.”

Jamie was staring at Germain. He blinked, and wiped his nose again.

“Oh,” he said. “Aye. Um. Aye, I expect that was the way of it. If your papa says so.”

“What’s a silkie?” asked Jemmy, bewildered but interested. He wiggled in Brianna’s arms, wanting to be put down, and she lowered him back to the rock.

“I don’t know,” Germain admitted. “But they have fur. What’s a silkie, Grandpère?”

Jamie closed his eyes against the sinking sun, and rubbed a hand over his face, shaking his head a little. Brianna thought he was smiling, but couldn’t tell for sure.

“Ah, well,” he said, sitting up straighter, opening his eyes, and throwing back his wet hair. “A silkie is a creature who is a man upon the land, but becomes a seal within the sea. And a seal,” he added, cutting off Jemmy, who had been opening his mouth to ask, “is a great sleek beastie that barks like a dog, is as big as an ox, and beautiful as the black of night. They live in the sea, but come out onto the rocks near the shore sometimes.”

“Have you seen them, Grandpère?” Germain asked, eager.

“Oh, many a time,” Jamie assured him. “There are a great many seals who live on the coasts of Scotland.”

“Scotland,” Jemmy echoed. His eyes were round.

“Ma mère says Scotland is a good place,” Germain remarked. “She cries sometimes, when she talks of it. I am not so sure I would like it, though.”

“Why not?” Brianna asked.

“It’s full of giants and water horses and . . . things,” Germain replied, frowning. “I don’t want to meet any of those. And parritch, Maman says, but we have parritch here.”

“So we have. And I expect it’s time we were going home to eat some.” Jamie got to his feet and stretched, groaning in the pleasure of it. The late-afternoon sun washed rock and water with a golden light, gleaming on the boys’ cheeks and the bright hairs on her father’s arms.

Jemmy stretched and groaned, too, in worshipful imitation, and Jamie laughed.

“Come on, wee fishie. D’ye want a ride home?” He bent so that Jemmy could scramble onto his back, then straightened up, settling the little boy’s weight, and put out a hand to take Germain’s.

Jamie saw her attention turn momentarily back toward the blackened smudge at the edge of the rock.

“Leave it, lass,” he said quietly. “It’s a charm of some kind. Ye dinna want to touch it.”

Then he stepped off the rock and made for the trail, Jemmy on his back and Germain clutched firmly by the back of the neck, both boys giggling as they made their way through the slippery mud of the path.

Brianna retrieved her spade and Jamie’s shirt from the creekbank, and caught the boys up on the trail to the Big House. A breeze had begun to breathe through the trees, chilly in the damp cloth of her shift, but the heat of walking was enough to keep her from being cold.

Germain was singing softly to himself, still hand-in-hand with his grandfather, his small blond head tilting back and forth like a metronome.

Jemmy sighed in exhausted bliss, legs wrapped round Jamie’s middle, arms about his neck, and leaned his sun-reddened cheek against the scarred back. Then he thought of something, for he raised his head and kissed his grandfather with a loud smacking noise, between the shoulder blades.

Her father jerked, nearly dropping Jem, and made a high-pitched noise that made her laugh.

“Is that make it better?” Jem inquired seriously, pulling himself up and trying to look over Jamie’s shoulder into his face.

“Oh. Aye, lad,” his grandfather assured him, face twitching. “Much better.”

The gnats and midges were out in force now. She beat a cloud of them away from her face, and slapped a mosquito that lit on Germain’s neck.

“Ak!” he said, hunching his shoulders, but then resumed singing “Alouette,” undisturbed.

Jemmy’s shirt was thin, worn linen, cut down from one of Roger’s old ones. The cloth had dried to the shape of his body, square-rumped and solid, the breadth of his small, tender shoulders echoing the wide set of the older, firmer ones he clung to. She glanced from the redheads to Germain, walking reed-thin and graceful through shadows and light, still singing, and thought how desperately beautiful men were.

“Who were the bad people, Grandda?” Jemmy asked drowsily, head nodding with the rhythm of Jamie’s steps.

“Sassunaich,” Jamie replied briefly. “English soldiers.”

“English canaille,” Germain amplified, breaking off his song. “They are the ones who cut off my papa’s hand, too.”

“They were?” Jemmy’s head lifted in momentary attention, then fell back between Jamie’s shoulder blades with a thump that made his grandfather grunt. “Did you kill them with your sword, Grandda?”

“Some of them.”

“I will kill the rest, when I am big,” Germain declared. “If there are any left.”

“I suppose there might be.” Jamie hitched Jem’s weight a little higher, letting go Germain’s hand in order to hold Jemmy’s slackening legs tight to his body.

“Me, too,” Jemmy murmured, eyelids drooping. “I’ll kill them, too.”

At the fork in the trail, Jamie surrendered her son to her, sound asleep, and took back his shirt. He pulled it on, brushing disheveled hair out of his face as his head came through. He smiled at her, then leaned forward and kissed her forehead, gently, putting one hand on Jemmy’s round, red head where it lay against her shoulder.

“Dinna fash yourself, lass,” he said softly. “I’ll speak to Mordecai. And your man. Take care of this one.”



“THIS IS A PRIVATE BUSINESS,” her father had said. The general implication being that she should leave it alone. And she might have, save for a couple of things. One, that Roger had come home well after dark, whistling a song he said Amy McCallum had taught him. And two, that other offhand remark her father had made about the fire on the Flat Rock—that there was a smell of the Highlands