The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle (586 page)

“Yes?” I said skeptically. “And what else?”

He glanced up at me and grinned.

“What, ye dinna think I have ulterior motives, do ye, Sassenach?”

“No, I don’t think so—I know so.”

He laughed and bent his head over his gun. After a few moments’ swabbing and cleaning, though, he said, not looking up, “Aye, well. I thought it no bad idea for the lass to have friends among the Cherokee. In case she should need a place to go, sometime.”

The casual tone of voice didn’t fool me.

“Sometime. When the Revolution comes, you mean?”

“Aye. Or … when we die. Whenever that might be,” he added precisely, picking the gun up and squinting down the barrel to check the sight.

It was bright Indian summer still, but I felt shards of ice crackle down my back. Most days, I managed to forget that newspaper clipping—the one that reported the death by fire of one James Fraser and his wife, on Fraser’s Ridge. Other days, I remembered it, but shoved the possibility to the back of my mind, refusing to dwell on it. But every now and then, I would wake up at night, with bright flames leaping in the corners of my mind, shivering and terrified.

“The clipping said, ‘no living children,’ ” I said, determined to face down the fear. “Do you suppose that means that Bree and Roger will have gone … somewhere … before then?” To the Cherokee, perhaps. Or to the stones.

“It might.” His face was sober, eyes on his work. Neither one of us was willing to admit the other possibility—no need, in any case.

Reluctant though she had been to come, Brianna too seemed to be enjoying the trip. Without Roger, and relieved of the chores of cabin housekeeping, she seemed much more relaxed, laughing and joking with the Beardsley twins, teasing Jamie, and nursing Jemmy by the fire at night, before curling herself around him and falling peacefully asleep.

The Beardsleys were having a good time, too. The removal of his infected adenoids and tonsils had not cured Keziah’s deafness, but had improved it markedly. He could understand fairly loud speech now, particularly if you faced him and spoke clearly, though he seemed to make out anything his twin said with ease, no matter how softly voiced. Seeing him look round wide-eyed as we rode through the thick, insect-buzzing forest, fording streams and finding faint deer paths through the thickets, I realized that he had never been anywhere in his life, save the area near the Beardsley farm, and Fraser’s Ridge.

I wondered what he would make of the Cherokee—and they of him and his brother. Peter had told Jamie that the Cherokee regarded twins as particularly blessed and lucky; the news that the Beardsleys would be joining the hunt had delighted Tsatsa’wi.

Josiah seemed to be having fun, too—insofar as I could tell, he being a very contained sort of person. As we drew closer to the village, though, I thought that he was becoming slightly nervous.

I could see that Jamie was a trifle uneasy, too, though in his case, I suspected the reason for it. He didn’t mind at all going to help with a hunt, and was pleased to have the opportunity to visit the Cherokee. But I rather thought that having his reputation as the Bear-Killer trumpeted before him, so to speak, was making him uncomfortable.

This supposition was borne out when we camped on the third night of our journey. We were no more than ten miles from the village, and would easily make it by mid-day next day.

I could see him making up his mind to something as we rode, and as we all sat down to supper round a roaring fire, I saw him suddenly set his shoulders and stand up. He walked up to Peter Bewlie, who sat staring dreamily into the fire, and faced him with decision.

“There’s a wee thing I have to be sayin’, Peter. About this ghost-bear we’re off to find.”

Peter looked up, startled out of his trance. He smiled, though, and slid over to make room for Jamie to sit down.

“Oh, aye,
Mac Dubh
?”

Jamie did so, and cleared his throat.

“Well, ye see—the fact is that I dinna actually ken a great deal about bears, as there havena been any in Scotland for quite some years now.”

Peter’s eyebrows went up.

“But they say ye killed a great bear wi’ naught but a dirk!”

Jamie rubbed his nose with something approaching annoyance.

“Aye, well … so I did, then. But I didna hunt the creature down. It came after me, so I hadna got a choice about it, after all. I’m none so sure that I shall be of any great help in discovering this ghost-bear. It must be a particularly clever bear, no? To have been walking in and out of their village for months, I mean, and no one with more than a single glimpse of it?”

“Smarter than the average bear,” Brianna agreed, her mouth twitching slightly. Jamie gave her a narrow look, which he switched to me as I choked on a swallow of beer.

“What?” he demanded testily.

“Nothing,” I gasped. “Nothing at all.”

Turning his back on us in disgust, Jamie suddenly caught sight of Josiah Beardsley, who, while not guffawing, was doing a little mouth-twitching of his own.

“What?” Jamie barked at him. “They’re no but loons”—he jerked a thumb over his finger at Brianna and me—“but what’s to do wi’
you
, eh?”

Josiah immediately erased the grin from his face and tried to look grave, but the corner of his mouth kept on twitching, and a hot flush was rising in his narrow cheeks, visible even by firelight. Jamie narrowed his eyes and a stifled noise that might have been a giggle escaped Josiah. He clapped a hand across his mouth, staring up at Jamie.

“What, then?” Jamie inquired politely.

Keziah, obviously gathering that something was up, hunched closer to his twin, squaring up beside him in support. Josiah made a brief, unconscious movement toward Kezzie, but didn’t look away from Jamie. His face was still red, but he seemed to have got himself under control.

“Well, I suppose I best say, sir.”

“I suppose ye had.” Jamie gave him a quizzical look.

Josiah drew a deep breath, resigning himself.

“ ’Twasn’t a bear, always. Sometimes it was me.”

Jamie stared at him for a moment. Then the corners of his mouth began to twitch.

“Oh, aye?”

“Not all the time,” Josiah explained. But when his wanderings through the wilderness brought him within reach of one of the Indian villages—“Only if I was hungry, though, sir”—he hastened to add—he would lurk cautiously in the forest nearby, stealing into the place after dark and absconding with any easily-reached edibles. He would remain in the area for a few days, eating from the village stores until his strength and his pack were replenished, then move on to hunt, eventually returning with his hides to the cave where he had made a cache.

Kezzie’s expression throughout this recital hadn’t changed; I wasn’t sure how much of it he had heard, but he didn’t appear surprised. His hand rested on his twin’s arm for a moment, then slid off, reaching for a skewer of meat.

Brianna’s laughter had subsided, and she had been listening to Josiah’s confession with a furrowed brow.

“But you didn’t—I mean, I’m
sure
you didn’t take the baby in its cradleboard. And you didn’t kill the woman who was partly eaten … did you?”

Josiah blinked, though he seemed more baffled than shocked by the question.

“Oh, no. Why’d I do that? You don’t think
I
ate ’em, do ye?” He smiled at that, an incongruous dimple appearing in one cheek. “Mind, I been hungry enough now and then as I might consider it, if I happened on somebody dead—providin’ it was fairly recent,” he added judiciously. “But not hungry enough as I’d kill someone a-purpose.”

Brianna cleared her throat, with something startlingly like one of Jamie’s Scottish noises.

“No, I didn’t think you ate them,” she said dryly. “I just thought that if
someone
happened to have killed them—for some other reason—the bear could have come along and gnawed on the bodies.”

Peter nodded thoughtfully, seeming interested but unfazed by the assorted confessions.

“Aye, a bear’ll do that,” he said. “They’re no picky eaters, bears. Carrion is fine by them.”

Jamie nodded in response, but his attention was still fixed on Josiah.

“Aye, I’ve heard that, forbye. But Tsatsa’wi said he did see the bear take his friend—so it
does
kill people, no?”

“Well, it killed that one,” Josiah agreed. There was an odd tone to his voice, though, and Jamie’s look sharpened. He lifted a brow at Josiah, who worked his lips slowly in and out, deciding something. He glanced at Kezzie, who smiled at him. Kezzie, I saw, had a dimple in his left cheek, while Josiah’s was in the right.

Josiah sighed and turned back to face Jamie.

“I wasn’t a-goin’ to say about this part,” he said frankly. “But you been straight with us, sir, and I see it ain’t right I let you go after that bear not knowin’ what else might be there.”

I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck, and resisted the sudden impulse to turn round and look into the shadows behind me. The urge to laugh had left me.

“What else?” Jamie slowly lowered the chunk of bread he had been about to bite into. “And just … what else
might
be there, then?”

“Well, ’twas only the once I saw for sure, mind,” Josiah warned him. “And ’twas a moonless night, too. But I’d been out all the night, and my eyes was well-accustomed to the starlight—you’ll know the way of it, sir.”

Jamie nodded, looking bemused.

“Aye, well enough. And ye were where, at the time?”

Near the village we were headed toward. Josiah had been there before, and was familiar with the layout of the place. A house at the end of the village was his goal; there were strings of corn hung to dry beneath the eaves, and he thought he could get away with one easily enough, provided he didn’t rouse the village dogs.

“Rouse one, ye’ve got ’em all a-yowling on your tail,” he said, shaking his head. “And it wasn’t but a couple of hours before the dawn. So I crept along slow-like, looking to see was one of the rascals curled up asleep by the house I had my eye on.” Lurking in the wood, he had seen a figure come out of the house. As no dogs took exception to this, it was a reasonable conclusion that the person belonged to the house. The man had paused to make water, and then, to Josiah’s alarm, had shouldered a bow and quiver, and marched directly toward the woods where he lay hidden.

“I didn’t think as he could be after me, but I went up a tree quick as a bob-tail cat, and not makin’ no more noise than one, neither,” he said, not bragging.

The man had most likely been a hunter, making an early start for a distant stream where raccoon and deer would come to drink at dawn. Not seeing any need of caution so near his own village, the man had not displayed any, walking through the forest quietly, but with no attempt at concealment.

Josiah had crouched in his tree, no more than a few feet above the man’s head, holding his breath. The man had gone on, disappearing at once into the heavy undergrowth. Josiah had been just about to descend from his perch when he had heard a sudden exclamation of surprise, followed by the sounds of a brief scuffle that concluded with a sickening
thunk!

“Just like a ripe squash when you chunk it with a rock to break it open,” he assured Jamie. “Made my arse-hole draw up like a purse-string, hearin’ that noise, there in the dark.”

Alarm was no bar to curiosity, though, and he had eased through the wood in the direction of the sound. He could hear a rustling noise, and as he peered cautiously through a screen of cedar branches, he made out a human form stretched upon the ground, and another bending over it, evidently struggling to pull some kind of garment off the prone man’s body.

“He was dead,” Josiah explained, matter-of-factly. “I could smell the blood, and a shit-smell, too. Reckon the little fella caved in his head with a rock or maybe a club.”

“Little fella?” Peter had been following the story with close attention. “How little d’ye mean? Did ye see his face?”

Josiah shook his head.

“No, I saw naught but the shadow of him, movin’ about. It was full dark, still; the sky hadn’t started to go light yet.” He squinted, making a mental estimate. “Reckon he’d be shorter than me; maybe so high.” He held out a hand in illustration, measuring a distance some four and a half feet from the ground.

The murderer had been interrupted in his work of plundering the body, though. Josiah, intent on watching, had noticed nothing, until there came a sudden crack from a breaking stick, and the inquiring
whuff
of a questing bear.

“You best believe the little fella run when he heard that,” he assured Jamie. “He dashed right past, no further from me than you are now. That was when I got the only good look I had at him.”

“Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” I said, as he paused to take a gulp of his beer. “What
did
he look like?”

He wiped a line of foam from the sparse whiskers on his upper lip, looking thoughtful.

“Well, ma’am, I was pretty near sure he was the devil. Only I did think the devil would be bigger,” he added, taking another drink.

This statement naturally caused some confusion. Upon further elucidation, it appeared that Josiah merely meant that the mysterious “little fella” had been black.

“Wasn’t ’til I went along to that Gathering of yours that it come to me that some regular folks just
are
black,” he explained. “I hadn’t never seen anybody who was, nor heard tell of it, neither.”

Kezzie nodded soberly at this.

“Devil in the Book,” he said, in his odd, gruff voice.

“The Book,” it seemed, was an old Bible that Aaron Beardsley had taken somewhere in trade and never found a buyer for. Neither of the boys had ever been taught to read, but they were most entertained by the pictures in the Book, which included several drawings of the devil, depicted as a crouching black creature, going about his sly business of tempting and seduction.

“I didn’t see no forked tail,” Josiah said, shaking his head, “but then, he went by so fast, stood to reason I might have missed it in the dark and all.”

Not wanting to draw the attention of such a person to himself, Josiah had stood still, and thus been in a position to hear the bear giving its attention to the unfortunate inhabitant of the village.