Free A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon

father!”
    She smiled, since he couldn’t see her.
    “You did really well,” she said mildly.
    “Mmphm,” he said, with another brief snort. “As for eloquence . . . if there was any, it was none of mine. All I did was quote bits of some psalm—I couldna even tell ye which it was.”
    “It didn’t matter. Why did you pick—what you said, though?” she asked, curious. “I sort of thought you’d say the Lord’s Prayer, or maybe the Twenty-Third Psalm—everybody knows that one.”
    “I thought I would, too,” he admitted. “I meant to. But when I came to it . . .” He hesitated, and she saw in memory those raw, cold mounds, and shivered, smelling soot. He tightened his grasp on her hand, and drew her closer, tucking the hand into the crook of his elbow.
    “I don’t know,” he said gruffly. “It just seemed—more suitable, somehow.”
    “It was,” she said quietly, but didn’t pursue the subject, choosing instead to steer the conversation into a discussion of her latest engineering project, a hand pump to raise water from the well.
    “If I had something to use for pipe, I could get water into the house, easy as anything! I’ve already got most of the wood I need for a nice cistern, if I can get Ronnie to cooper it for me—so we can shower with rainwater, at least. But hollowing out tree limbs”—the method employed for the small amount of piping used for the pump—“it would take me months to manage enough just to get from the well to the house, let alone the stream. And there’s not a chance of getting any rolled copper. Even if we could afford any, which we can’t, bringing it up from Wilmington would be—” She threw her free hand up in frustration at the monumental nature of the undertaking.
    He considered that for a bit, the chuff of their shoes on the rocky trail a comforting rhythm.
    “Well, the ancient Romans did it with concrete; the recipe’s in Pliny.”
    “I know. But it takes a particular kind of sand, which we don’t happen to have. Likewise, quicklime, which we likewise don’t have. And—”
    “Aye, but what about clay?” he interrupted. “Did ye see that plate at Hilda’s wedding? The big brown and red one, with the beautiful patterns?”
    “Yes,” she said. “Why?”
    “Ute McGillivray said someone from Salem brought it. I dinna recall the name, but she said he was quite the big noise in potting—or whatever ye call making dishes.”
    “I’ll bet you any amount of money she didn’t say that!”
    “Well, words to that effect.” He went on, undeterred. “The point being that he made it
here;
it wasn’t something he’d brought from Germany. So there’s clay about that’s suitable for firing, eh?”
    “Oh, I
see.
Hmm. Well, now, that’s an idea, isn’t it?”
    It was, and an attractive one whose discussion occupied them for most of the rest of the journey.
    They had come down off the Ridge and were within a quarter-mile of the McGillivrays’ place when she began to have an uneasy feeling down the back of her neck. It
could
be only imagination; after the sights they had seen in that deserted hollow, the dark air of the wood seemed thick with threat, and she had been imagining ambush at every blind bend, tensing with the anticipation of attack.
    Then she heard something crack in the trees to her right—a small dry branch breaking, in a way that neither wind nor animal would break it. Real danger had its own taste, vivid as lemon juice, by contrast with the weak lemonade of imagination.
    Her hand tightened on Roger’s arm in warning, and he stopped at once.
    “What?” he whispered, hand on his knife. “Where?” He hadn’t heard it.
    Damn, why hadn’t she brought her gun, or at least her own dirk? All she had was her Swiss Army knife, carried always in her pocket—and what weapons the landscape offered.
    She leaned into Roger, pointing, her hand close to his body to be sure he followed the direction of her gesture. Then she stooped, feeling about