A hoarse craawk! announced that his assailant was a raven. Similar cries gave notice of the arrival of reinforcements in the trees nearby, and within seconds, another black missile whizzed past, within inches of his ear.
“Hey, bugger off!” he exclaimed, ducking away from yet another croaking buzz bomb. He was plainly near a nest, and the ravens didn’t like it.
The first raven sailed back for another try. This pass knocked his hat into the dirt. The mobbing was unnerving, the sense of hostility out of all proportion to the size of his adversaries. Another came in, zooming low, and struck him a glancing blow as its claws ripped at the shoulder of his coat. Roger snatched up his hat and ran.
A hundred yards up the trail, he slowed to a walk and looked round. The birds were nowhere in sight; he’d passed their nesting place, then.
“And where’s Alfred Hitchcock when you need him?” he muttered to himself, trying to shake off the sense of danger.
His voice was damped at once by the thick vegetation; it was like talking into a pillow. He was breathing heavily, and his face felt flushed. All at once, it seemed very quiet in the forest. With the ceasing of the ravens’ racket, all the other birds seemed to have stopped as well. It was no wonder the old Scots thought ravens birds of bad omen; spend much longer here, and all the old ways that had been no more than curiosities would be flourishing away in his mind.
Dangerous, dirty, and uncomfortable as it was, he had to admit the fascination of being here—of experiencing at firsthand things he’d read about, seeing objects he knew as museum artifacts being casually used in daily life. If it wasn’t for Brianna, he might not regret the adventure, in spite of Stephen Bonnet and the things he had seen aboard the Gloriana.
Once more his hand went to his thigh. He had been luckier than he’d dared hope; Bonnet had had not one gemstone, but two. Would they really work? He ducked again, having to walk half crouched for several steps before the branches opened up again. Hard to believe that people lived up here, save that someone had cut this trail, and it must lead somewhere.
“You can’t miss it,” the girl at the mill had assured him, and he could see why. There wasn’t anyplace else to go.
He shaded his eyes, looking up the trail, but the drooping branches of pine and maple hid everything, presenting only a shadowy, mysterious tunnel through the trees. No telling how far it might be to the top of the ridge.
“You’ll make it by sundown, easy,” the girl had told him, and it was late midafternoon now. But that had been when he had a horse. Not wanting to be caught on the mountainside in the dark, he picked up his pace, straining his eyes for sunlight ahead that would show him the openness of the ridge at the end of the trail.
As he walked, his thoughts ran inevitably ahead of him, quick with speculation.
And how had it gone, Brianna’s reunion with her parents? What had she thought of Jamie Fraser? Was he the man she’d been imagining for the last year, or only a pale reflection of the image she had built up from her mother’s stories?
At least she had a father to know, he thought, with a queer little pang at the memory of Midsummer’s Eve, and that burst of light in the passage through the stones.
There it was! A lightening of the dense green shadow ahead; a brightening as tongues of sun struck autumn leaves in a flare of orange and yellow.
The sun dazzled him for a moment as he came out of the tunnel of greenery. He blinked once, and found himself not on the ridge, as he had expected, but in a small natural clearing, edged with scarlet maples and yellow scrub oak. It held the sunlight like a cup, dark forest spreading beyond on all sides.
As he turned about, searching for the continuation of the trail, he heard a horse’s whicker and whirled to find his own elderly mount, jerking its head against the pull of a rein tied to a tree at the edge of the clearing.
“Well, I’ll be buggered!” he exclaimed in astonishment. “How the hell did you get up here?”
“The same way you did,” a voice answered him. A tall young man emerged from the wood beside the horse, and stood pointing a pistol at Roger; his own, he saw, with a sense of outrage as well as apprehension. He took a deep breath and choked down his fear.
“You’ve got my horse and my gun,” Roger said coolly. “What else d’you want? My hat?” He held out the battered tricorne in invitation. The robber couldn’t possibly know what else he carried; he hadn’t shown them to anyone.
The young man—couldn’t be more than in his teens, in spite of his size, Roger thought—didn’t smile.
“A bit more than that, I expect.” For the first time, the young man took his eyes off Roger, shifting his glance to one side. Following the direction of his gaze, Roger felt a jolt like an electric shock.
He hadn’t seen the man at the edge of the clearing, though he must have been there all the time, standing motionless. He wore a faded hunting kilt whose browns and greens blended into the grass and brush, as his flaming hair blended with the brilliant leaves. He looked as if he’d grown out of the forest.
Beyond the sheer unexpectedness of his appearance, it was his looks that stunned Roger into speechlessness. It was one thing to have been told that Jamie Fraser resembled his daughter. It was another to see Brianna’s bold features transmuted into power by the stamp of years, and fronting a personality not only thoroughly masculine, but fierce in aspect.
It was like lifting his hand from the fur of a handsome ginger cat, only to find himself staring into the unblinking gaze of a tiger. Roger barely kept himself from taking an involuntary step backward, thinking as he did so that Claire had not exaggerated a single thing in her descriptions of Jamie Fraser.
“You’ll be Mr. MacKenzie,” the man said. It wasn’t a question. The voice was deep but not loud, barely lifted above the sound of the rustling leaves, but Roger had no difficulty hearing him.
“I am,” he said, taking a step forward. “And you’ll be…ah…Jamie Fraser?” He stretched out a hand, but quickly let it drop. Two pairs of eyes rested coldly on him.
“I am,” said the red-haired man. “You’ll know me?” The tone of the question was distinctly unfriendly.
Roger took a deep breath, cursing his own dishevelment. He didn’t know how Brianna might have described him to her father, but Fraser had evidently expected something a good deal more prepossessing.
“Well, you—look quite a bit like your daughter.”
The young man gave a loud snort, but Fraser didn’t look around.
“And what business have ye wi’ my daughter?” Fraser moved for the first time, stepping out from the shadow of the trees. No, Claire hadn’t exaggerated. He was big, even an inch or two taller than Roger himself.
Roger felt a stab of alarm, mingled with his confusion. What the hell had Brianna told him? Surely she couldn’t have been so angry that—well, he’d sort that out when he saw her.
“I’ve come to claim my wife,” he said boldly.
Something changed in Fraser’s eyes. Roger didn’t know what it was, but it made him drop his hat, and half raise his hands in reflex.
“Oh, no, ye’re not.” It was the boy who had spoken, in an odd tone of satisfaction.
Roger glanced at him, and was still more alarmed to see the lad’s big, bony knuckles white on the pistol’s grip.