“Who…?” William breathed.
“He has your stubbornness,” I said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “He cut his hand on a broken bottle at Helwater and refused to cry. I watched from the kitchen window. You were mending a fence. You both bled, and neither of you made a sound.”
Jamie’s hand stopped. The silence between us was a living thing, a third presence in the room. outlander s07 m4b
“I have killed men,” he said, his voice a low rumble, like distant thunder. “Englishmen. Frenchmen. My own kin, in a way. But I have never felt a blade turn in my gut until I saw him ride past at Ticonderoga. He has my face, Sassenach. And he looked at me as if I were a stranger.”
And then I saw him.
Jamie moved. Not as a general. Not as a Jacobite. As a father.
The map was not of land, but of time.
Jamie looked at me then, and I saw the boy I met at Leoch. The one who was flogged for my sake. The one who believed honor was a currency that could not be debased.
