Free Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone by Diana Gabaldon

he’d obviously meant it by way of explanation—or at least the best he could do by way of explanation. I don’t suppose you could describe what it is you actually do when you heal someone, could you?”
    I smiled at that without opening my eyes. “Oh, I might have a go at it. But there’s an implied error there; I don’t actually heal people. They heal by themselves. I just…support them.”
    A sound that wasn’t quite a laugh made his larynx execute a complicated double bob. I thought I could feel a slight concavity under my thumb, where the cartilage had been partially crushed by the rope…I put my other hand round my own throat, for comparison.
    “That’s actually what he said, too—Hector McEwan, I mean. But he did heal people; I saw him do it.”
    My hands released both our throats, and I opened my eyes.
    He gave me a quick précis of his relations with William Buccleigh, from Buck’s role in his hanging at Alamance, through the reappearance of his ancestor in Inverness in 1980, and Buck’s joining him in the search for Jem, after Brianna’s erstwhile co-worker, Rob Cameron, had kidnapped the boy.
    “That was when he became…a bit more than a friend,” Roger said. He looked down and cleared his throat. “He came with me to search for Jem. Jem wasn’t there, of course, but we did find another Jeremiah. My father,” he said abruptly, his voice cracking on the word. I reached by reflex for his hand, but he waved me off, clearing his throat again.
    “It’s okay. I’ll—I’ll tell you about that…later.” He swallowed and straightened a little, meeting my eyes again. “But Buck—that’s what we called him, Buck—when we came through the stones in search of Jem, we were both…damaged by the passage. You said, I think, that it got worse, if you did it more than once?”
    “I wouldn’t say once isn’t damaging,” I said, with a small internal shudder at the memory of that void, a chaos where nothing seems to exist but noise. That, and the faint flicker of thought, all that holds you together between one breath and the next. “But yes, it does get worse. What happened to you?”
    “To me, not that much. Unconscious for a bit, woke up strangling, fighting for air. Muck sweat, disorientation; couldn’t keep my balance for a bit, staggered all over. But Buck—” He frowned, and I saw his eyes change as he looked inward again, seeing the green hilltop of Craigh na Dun as he woke with the rain on his face. As I had waked three times. The hair on my neck rose slowly.
    “It seemed to be his heart. He had a pain in his chest, his left arm, and he couldn’t breathe well, said it was like a weight on his chest, and he couldn’t get up. I got him water, though, and after a bit he seemed okay. At least he could walk, and he brushed off any suggestion that we stop and rest.”
    They had separated then, Buck to search the road toward Inverness, Roger to go to Lallybroch, and—
    “Lallybroch!” This time I did grab him by the arm. “You went there?”
    “I did,” he said, and smiled. He clasped my hand, where it lay on his arm. “I met Brian Fraser.”
    “You—but— Brian ?” I shook my head in order to clear it. That made no sense.
    “No, it didn’t make sense,” he said, plainly reading my thoughts from my face and smiling at the results. “We…didn’t go where—I mean when —we thought we were going. We ended in 1739.”
    I stared at him for a moment, and he shrugged helplessly.
    “Later,” I said firmly, and reached for his throat again, thinking, “In medias res.” What the devil did McEwan mean by that?
    I could hear distant childish shouts from the direction of the creek, and the high, cracked screech of a hawk in the tall snag at the far side of our clearing; I could just see him—or her—from the corner of my eye: a large dark shape like a torpedo on a dead branch. And I was beginning to hear—or to think I heard—the thrum of blood in Roger’s neck, a faint