#the deep hearts core

Escape. It would be that. Escape to when, though? And how? The words of Geilie’s spell chanted in his mind. Garnets rest in love about my neck; I will be faithful.

Faithful. To try that avenue of escape was to abandon Brianna. And hasn’t she abandoned you?

“No, I’m damned if she has!” he whispered to himself. There was some reason for what she’d done, he knew it. She’s found her parents; she’ll be safe enough. “And for this reason, a woman shall leave her parents, and cleave to

her husband.” Safety wasn’t what mattered; love was. If he’d cared for safety, he wouldn’t have crossed that desperate void to begin with.

His hands were sweating; he could feel the damp grain of the rough cloth under his fingers, and his torn fingertips burned and throbbed. He took one more step toward the split in the cliff face, his eyes fixed on the pitch-black inside. If he didn’t step inside…there were only two things to do. Go back to the suffocating grip of the rhododendrons, or try to scale the cliff before him.

He tilted his head back to gauge its height. A face was looking down at him, featureless in the dark, silhouetted against the moon-bright sky. He hadn’t time to move or think before the rope noose settled gently over his head and tightened, pressing his arms against his body.

“Brianna,” he said quietly behind her. She didn’t answer, didn’t move. He made a small snorting noise—anger, impatience?.Say it,” she said, and the words hurt her throat, as though she’d swallowed some jagged object.

It was beginning to rain again; fresh spatters slicked the marble in front of her, and she could feel the icy pat! of drops

that struck through her hair.

“I will bring him home to you,” Jamie Fraser said, still quiet, “or I will not come back myself.”

Drums Of Autumn

Diana Gabaldon

“I thought of it,” she said, with a deep breath. “As soon as I realized. I wondered if you could do—something like that, here.”

“It wouldn’t be easy. It would be dangerous—and it would hurt. I don’t even have any laudanum; only whisky. But yes, I can do it—if you want me to.” I forced myself to sit still, watching her pace slowly back and forth before the hearth, hands folded behind her in thought.

“It would have to be surgical,” I said, unable to keep quiet. “I don’t have the right herbs—and they aren’t always reliable, in any case. At least surgery is…certain.” I laid the scalpel on the table; she should not be under any illusions as to what I was suggesting. She nodded at my words, but didn’t stop her pacing. Like Jamie, she always thought better while moving.

A trickle of sweat ran down my back, and I shivered. The fire was warm enough, but my fingers were still cold as ice. Christ, if she wanted it, would I even be able to do it? My hands had begun to tremble, with the strain of waiting.

She turned at last to look at me, eyes clear and appraising under thick, ruddy brows.

“Would you have done it? If you could?”

“If I could—?”

“You said once that you hated me, when you were pregnant. If you could have not been—”

“God, not you!” I blurted, horror-stricken. “Not you, ever. It—” I knotted my hands together, to still their trembling. “No,” I

said, as positively as I could. “Never.”

“You did say so,” she said, looking at me intently. “When you told me about Da.”

I rubbed a hand across my face, trying to focus my thoughts. Yes, I had told her that. Idiot.

“It was a horrible time. Terrible. We were starving, it was war—the world was coming apart at the seams.” Wasn’t

hers? “At the time, it seemed as though there was no hope; I had to leave Jamie, and the thought drove almost everything else out of my mind. But there was one other thing,” I said.

“What was that?”

“It wasn’t rape,” I said softly, meeting her eyes. “I loved your father.”

She nodded, her face a little pale.

“Yes. But it might be Roger’s. You did say that, didn’t you?”

“Yes. It might. Is the possibility enough for you?”

She laid a hand over her stomach, long fingers gently curved.

“Yeah. Well. It isn’t an it, to me. I don’t know who it is, but—” She stopped suddenly and glanced at me, looking

suddenly shy.

“I don’t know if this sounds—well…” She shrugged abruptly, dismissing doubt. “I had this sharp pain that woke me up

in the middle of the night, a few days…after. Quick, like somebody had stabbed me with a hatpin, but deep.” Her fingers curled inward, her fist pressing just above her pubic bone, on the right side.

“Implantation,” I said softly. “When the zygote takes root in the womb.” When that first, eternal link is formed between mother and child. When the small blind entity, unique in its union of egg and sperm, comes to anchor from the perilous voyage of beginning, home from its brief, free-floating existence in the body, and settles to its busy work of division, drawing sustenance from the flesh in which it embeds itself, in a connection that belongs to neither side, but to both. That link, which cannot be severed, either by birth or by death.

She nodded. “It was the strangest feeling. I was still half asleep, but I…well, I just knew all of a sudden that I wasn’t alone.” Her lips curved in a faint smile, reminiscent of wonder. “And I said to…it…” Her eyes rested on mine, still lit by the smile, “I said, ‘Oh, it’s you.’ And then I went back to sleep.”

Her other hand crossed the first, a barricade across her belly.

“I thought it was a dream. That was a long time before I knew. But I remember. It wasn’t a dream. I remember.”

I remembered, too.

I looked down and saw beneath my hands not the wooden tabletop nor gleaming blade, but the opal skin and perfect

sleeping face of my first child, Faith, with slanted eyes that never opened on the light of earth.

Looked up into the same eyes, open now and filled with knowledge. I saw that baby, too, my second daughter, filled

with bloody life, pink and crumpled, flushed with fury at the indignities of birth, so different from the calm stillness of the first—and just as magnificent in her perfection.

Two miracles I had been given, carried beneath my heart, born of my body, held in my arms, separated from me and part of me forever. I knew much too well that neither death nor time nor distance ever altered such a bond—because I had been altered by it, once and forever changed by that mysterious connection.

“Yes, I understand,” I said. And then said, “Oh, but Bree!” as the knowledge of what her decision would mean to her flooded in on me anew.

She was watching me, brows drawn down, lines of trouble in her face, and it occurred to me belatedly that she might.

take my exhortations as the expression of my own regrets.

Appalled at the thought that she might think I had not wanted her, or had ever wished she had not been, I dropped the

blade and reached out across the table to her.

“Bree,” I said, seized with panic at the thought. “Brianna. I love you. Do you believe I love you?”

She nodded without speaking, and stretched out a hand toward me. I grasped it like a lifeline, like the cord that had

once joined us.

She closed her eyes, and for the first time I saw the glitter of tears that clung to the delicate, thick curve of her lashes. “I’ve always known that, Mama,” she whispered. Her fingers tightened around mine; I saw her other hand press flat

against her stomach. “From the beginning.”

Drums Of Autumn

Diana Gabaldon

The night stood still around him, paused as time had paused so long before, poised on the edge of a gulf of dread, waiting. Waiting for the next words, known beforehand and expected, but nonetheless…

“And then,” the voice said, loving, “then I’ll hurt you very badly. And you will thank me, and ask for more.”

He stood quite still, face turned upward to the stars. Fought back the surge of fury as it murmured in his ear, the pulse of memory in his blood. Then made himself surrender, let it come. He trembled with remembered helplessness, and clenched his teeth in rage—but stared unblinking at the brightness of heaven overhead, invoking the names of the stars as the words of a prayer, abandoning himself to the vastness overhead as he sought to lose himself below.

Betelgeuse. Sirius. Orion. Antares. The sky is very large, and you are very small. Let the words wash through him, the voice and its memories pass over him, shivering his skin like the touch of a ghost, vanishing into darknes

The Pleiades. Cassiopeia. Taurus. Heaven is wide, and you are very small. Dead, but none the less powerful for being dead. He spread his hands wide, gripping the fence—those were powerful, too. Enough to beat a man to death, enough to choke out a life. But even death was not enough to loose the bands of rage.

With great effort, he let go. Turned his hands palm upward, in gesture of surrender. He reached beyond the stars, searching. The words formed themselves quietly in his mind, by habit, so quietly he was not aware of them until he found them echoed in a whisper on his lips.

“ ‘…Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ ”

He breathed slowly, deeply. Seeking, struggling; struggling to let go. “ ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’ ”

Waited, in emptiness, in faith. And then grace came; the necessary vision; the memory of Jack Randall’s face in Edinburgh, stricken to bare bone by the knowledge of his brother’s death. And he felt once more the gift of pity, calm in its descent as the landing of a dove.

He closed his eyes, feeling the wounds bleed clean again as the succubus drew its claws from his heart.

He sighed, and turned his hands over, the rough wood of the fence comforting and solid under his palms. The demon was gone. He had been a man, Jack Randall; nothing more. And in the recognition of that common frail humanity, all power of past fear and pain vanished like smoke.

His shoulders slumped, relieved of their burden.

“Go in peace,” he whispered, to the dead man and himself. “You are forgiven.”

The night sounds had returned; the cry of a hunting cat rose sharp on the air, and rotting leaves crunched soft

underfoot as he made his way back toward the house. The oiled hide that covered the window glowed golden in the dark, with the flame of the candle he had left burning in the hope of Claire’s return. His sanctuary.

He thought that he should perhaps have told Brianna all this, too—but no. She couldn’t understand what he had told her; he had had to show her, instead. How to tell her in words, then, what he had learned himself by pain and grace? That only by forgiveness could she forget—and that forgiveness was not a single act, but a matter of constant practice.

Drums Of Autumn

Diana Gabaldon