An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon Page A

that two objects cannot exist in the same space, whether said objects were subatomic particles or elephants. That being true, it would explain why one couldn’t exist twice in the same time period, he supposed.
    He assumed it was that phenomenon that had come so close to killing him on his first attempt.
    He had been thinking of his father when he entered the stones, and—presumably—of his father as he, Roger, had known him. Which was, of course, during the period of his own life.
    He tapped the pen on the page again, thinking, but could not bring himself just now to write about that encounter. Later. Instead, he flipped back to the rudimentary outline in the front of the book.

    A Practical Guide for Time-Travelers

    I. Physical Phenomena
    1. Known Locations (Ley Lines?)
    2. Genetic Inheritance
    3. Mortality
    4. The Influence and Properties of Gemstones
    5. Blood?
    He’d scratched through that last one, but hesitated, looking at it. Did he have an obligation to tell everything he knew, believed, or suspected? Claire thought that the notion of a blood sacrifice being required or useful was nonsense—a pagan superstition without real validity. She might be right; she was the scientist, after all. But he had the uneasy memory of the night Geillis Duncan had gone through the stones.
    Long blond hair, flying in the rising wind of a fire, the whipping locks silhouetted for an instant against the face of a standing stone. The gagging scent of petrol mingled with roasting flesh, and the log that was not a log lying charred in the center of the circle. And Geillis Duncan had gone too far.
    “It’s always two hundred years, in the old fairy tales,” Claire had told him. Literal fairy tales; stories of people stolen by the fairies, “taken through the stones” of faerie hills. It was a time, two hundred years ago , such tales often began. Or the people were returned to their own place—but two hundred years past the time they had left. Two hundred years.
    Claire, Bree, himself—each time they had traveled, the span of time was the same: two hundred and two years, close enough to the two hundred years of the ancient tales. But Geillis Duncan had gone too far.
    With great reluctance, he slowly wrote Blood again, and added a parenthetical (Fire??) , but nothing beneath it. Not now; later.
    For reassurance, he glanced at the spot on the bookshelf where the letter lay, weighted down by a small snake carved of cherrywood. We are alive… .
    He wanted suddenly to go and fetch the wooden box, pull out the other letters, rip them open and read. Curiosity, sure, but something more—wanting to touch them, Claire and Jamie, press the evidence of their lives against his face, his heart, erase the space and time between them.
    He forced back the impulse, though. They’d decided—or rather, Bree had, and they were her parents.
    “I don’t want to read them all at once,” she’d said, turning over the contents of the box with long, gentle fingers. “It’s … it’s like once I’ve read them all, then they’ll be … really gone.”

    He’d understood. As long as one letter remained unread, they were alive. In spite of his historian’s curiosity, he shared her sentiment. Besides …
    Brianna’s parents had not written those letters as journal entries, meant for the eventual eyes of a vaguely imagined posterity. They’d been written with the definite and specific intent of communication—with Bree, with him . Which meant that they might well contain unsettling things; both his in-laws had a talent for such revelation.
    Despite himself, he rose, took down the letter and unfolded it, and read the postscript once more, just to assure himself he hadn’t been imagining it.
    He hadn’t. With the word “blood” ringing faintly in his ears, he sat back down. An Italian gentleman . That was Charles Stuart; couldn’t be anyone else. Christ. After staring off into space for a bit—Mandy had now started in on “Jingle