Virgins: An Outlander Novella Read Free Page B

Georges’s eyes. He felt Jamie make a brief, convulsive movement, but said, “No!” under his breath, and Jamie stopped.
    They could hear French cursing from the road, mingled with Père Renault’s voice.
“In nomine Patris, et Filii…”
Then struggling, spluttering, and shouting, the prisoner, the captain, and Mathieu, and even the priest, all using such language as made Jamie blink. Ian might have laughed if not for the sense of dread that froze every man by the water.
    “No!” shouted the prisoner, his voice rising above the others, anger lost in terror. “No, please! I told you all I—” There was a small sound, a hollow noise like a melon being kicked in, and the voice stopped.
    “Thrifty, our captain,” Big Georges said, under his breath. “Why waste a bullet?” He took his hand off Ian’s shoulder, shook his head, and knelt down to wash his hands.
    —
    There was a ghastly silence under the trees. From the road, they could hear low voices—the captain and Mathieu speaking to each other, and over that,
Père
Renault repeating,
“In nomine Patris, et Filii…”
but in a very different tone. Ian saw the hairs on Jamie’s arms rise, and Jamie rubbed the palms of his hands against his kilt, maybe feeling a slick from the chrism oil still there.
    Jamie plainly couldn’t stand to listen and turned to Big Georges at random.
    “Queue?” he said with a raised brow. “That what ye call it in these parts, is it?”
    Big Georges managed a crooked smile.
    “And what do you call it? In your tongue?”
    “Bot,”
Ian said, shrugging. There were other words, but he wasn’t about to try one like
clipeachd
on them.
    “Mostly just cock,” Jamie said, shrugging, too.
    “Or penis, if ye want to be all English about it,” Ian chimed in.
    Several of the men were listening now, willing to join in any sort of conversation to get away from the echo of the last scream, still hanging in the air like fog.
    “Ha,” Jamie said. “Penis isna even an English word, ye wee ignoramus. It’s Latin. And even in Latin, it doesna mean a man’s closest companion—it means ‘tail.’ ”
    Ian gave him a long, slow look.
    “Tail, is it? So ye canna even tell the difference between your cock and your arse, and ye’re preachin’ to me about
Latin
?”
    The men roared. Jamie’s face flamed up instantly, and Ian laughed and gave him a good nudge with his shoulder. Jamie snorted but elbowed Ian back and laughed, too, reluctantly.
    “Aye, all right, then.” He looked abashed; he didn’t usually throw his education in Ian’s face. Ian didn’t hold it against him; he’d floundered for a bit, too, his first days with the company, and that was the sort of thing you did, trying to get your feet under you by making a point of what you were good at. But if Jamie tried rubbing Mathieu’s or Big Georges’s face in his Latin and Greek, he’d be proving himself with his fists, and fast, too. Right this minute, he didn’t look as though he could fight a rabbit and win.
    The renewed murmur of conversation, subdued as it was, dried up at once with the appearance of Mathieu through the trees. Mathieu was a big man, though broad rather than tall, with a face like a mad boar and a character to match. Nobody called him “Pig-face”
to
his face.
    “You, cheese rind—go bury that turd,” he said to Jamie, adding with a narrowing of red-rimmed eyes, “far back in the wood. And go before I put a boot in your arse. Move!”
    Jamie got up—slowly—eyes fixed on Mathieu with a look Ian didn’t care for. He came up quick beside Jamie and gripped him by the arm.
    “I’ll help,” he said. “Come on.”
    —
    “Why do they want this one buried?” Jamie muttered to Ian. “Giving him a
Christian
burial?” He drove one of the trenching spades Armand had lent them into the soft leaf mold, with a violence that would have told Ian just how churned up his friend was if he hadn’t known already.
    “Ye kent it’s no a verra