How did you keep this by you?" Grey demanded abruptly. "You were searched to the skin when you were brought back." The wide mouth curved slightly in the first genuine smile Grey had seen. "I swallowed it," Fraser said. Grey's hand closed convulsively on the sapphire. He opened his hand and rather gingerly set the gleaming blue thing on the table by the chess piece. "I see," he said. "I'm sure you do, Major," said Fraser, with a gravity that merely made the glint of amusement in his eyes more pronounced. "A diet of rough parritch has its advantages, now and again.

But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that they are really nothing. In that moment when time stops, it is as though you know you could undertake any venture, complete it and come back to yourself, to find the world unchanged, and everything just as you left it a moment before. And it's as though knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.

Men go where they will, they do as they must; it is not a woman's part to bid them to stay, nor yet to reproach them for being what they are-or for not coming back.

When you're reading, you're not where you are; you're in the book. By the same token, I can write anywhere.

Do ye not understand?"he said, in near desparation. "I would lay the world at your feet, Claire-and I have nothing to give ye!" He honestly thought it mattered.

Do ye want me?" he whispered. "Sassenach, will ye take me - and risk the man that I am, for the sake of the man ye knew?

It was a beautiful bright autumn day, with air like cider and a sky so blue you could drown in it.