“Dad,” Jem kept saying, gasping with sobs, “Daddy, Daddy . . .”
“I’m here,” he whispered into Jem’s hair, the tears running down his own face. “I’m here, I’m here. Don’t be afraid.”
Jem took a shuddering breath, managed to say, “I’m not afraid,” and cried some more.
At last, a sense of time crept back, along with the sensation of water soaking through the seat of his breeches. He breathed and shuddered a bit himself, smoothed Jem’s hair, and kissed his head.
“You smell like a goat,” he said, swallowed, brushed at his eyes with the back of a hand, and laughed. “Where the hell have you been?”
“In the broch with Mandy,” Jem said, as though this was the most natural statement in the world. He gave Roger a faintly accusing look. “Where have you been?”
“Mandy?” Roger said blankly. “What do you mean Mandy?”
“My sister,” Jem said, with the patience children occasionally show for the denseness of their parents. “You know.”
“Well . . . where is Mandy, then?” In Roger’s state of surreal confusion, Mandy might just as well have popped up beside Jem like a mushroom.
Jem’s face went momentarily blank with confusion, and he glanced round as though expecting Mandy to materialize out of the moss and heather at any moment.
“I don’t know,” he said, sounding mildly puzzled. “She ran away to find you, and then Mam fell down and broke something and—”
Roger had let go of Jem but grabbed him again at this, startling the breath out of the boy.
“Your mother’s here, too?”
“Well, sure,” Jem said, sounding mildly annoyed. “I mean—not here here. She’s up there, in the old fort. She tripped on a rock when we were running to catch Mandy.”
“Jesus, Lord,” Roger said fervently, taking a stride in the direction of the fort, then halting abruptly. “Wait: you said she broke something—she’s hurt?”
Jem shrugged. He was beginning to look worried again, but not very worried. Dad was here; everything would be okay.
“I don’t think it’s bad,” he assured his father. “She couldn’t walk, though, so she told me to run and catch Mandy. But I found you first.”
“Okay. She’s awake, though, she’s talking?” He had Jem by the shoulders, as much to keep him from disappearing—he half-feared he was hallucinating—as to compel an answer.
“Uh-huh.” Jem was looking vaguely about, a slight frown on his face. “Mandy’s here someplace. . . .” Wriggling free, he turned round slowly, face creased in intent concentration.
“Mandy!” Roger shouted up the hill. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled again. “BREE!” He scanned the fort and the hillside anxiously for Bree’s head popping up above the ruins or any sign of agitation among the vegetation that might be occasioned by a scrambling three-year-old. No head showed, but a breeze had come up and the whole hill seemed alive.
“Mandy ran away down this hill?” he asked, and, at Jem’s nod, he glanced behind him. The land flattened out into moor on the other side of the road, and there wasn’t a glimpse of anything that might be Mandy on it. Unless she’d fallen down and was lying in a hollow . . .
“You stay right here,” he said to Jem, squeezing his shoulder hard. “I’m going to go up the hill and look. I’ll bring your mother down.” He bounded up the gravel trace that was the nearest thing there was to a path, calling out Mandy’s name at intervals, torn between overwhelming joy and terrifying panic, lest it not be real, lest he actually had cracked and was simply imagining that Jem was there—he turned at every third step to check that he was there, still standing on the road.
Bree. The thought that she was up there, just above him . . . “Mandy!” he shouted again, his voice cracking. But it cracked from emotion, and he realized in a startled instant that he’d been shouting at full volume for minutes now—and it hadn’t hurt.
“God bless you, Hector,” he said fervently under his breath, and went on, beginning now to zigzag back and forth across the hill, beating through the sticks of dry broom and birch saplings, kicking at gorse and dead ferns in case Mandy should have fallen, maybe knocked herself out on a rock.
He heard the seagulls shriek above, thin and piercing, and looked up, hoping to see Brianna peering over the wall of the fort. She wasn’t, but something called again—thin and piercing, but not a gull.
“Daddeeeee . . .”
He whirled, almost losing his footing, and saw Jem running down the road—and coming round the bend of that road, Buck’s horse with Buck atop him, and a wildly squirming bundle with black curly hair cradled precariously in Buck’s arm.
He couldn’t speak at all by the time he reached them.
“Think ye might have lost something,” Buck said gruffly, and handed Mandy carefully down to him. She was a heavy, lively weight in his arms—and smelled of goats.
“Daddy!” she exclaimed, beaming at him as though he’d just come in from work. “Mwah! Mwah!” She kissed him noisily and snuggled into his chest, her hair tickling his chin.
“Where were you?” Jem was saying accusingly.
“Where was you?” Mandy countered, and stuck her tongue out at him. “Bleah.”
Roger was crying again, couldn’t stop. Mandy had burrs and foxtails stuck in her hair and in the fabric of her jacket, and he thought she might have wet herself somewhere in the recent past. Buck twitched the reins, as though about to turn and go, and Roger reached out a hand and grabbed his stirrup.