Diana Gabaldon · @Writer_DG
2nd Oct 2013 from TwitLonger
#DailyLines #MOBY #WRITTENInMYOwnHEARTSBlood #Book8 #OutMARCH25th #warriors
Jamie strode toward his waiting companies, loosely assembled near the river. The breath of the water and the mist rising from it comforted him, keeping him wrapped for a little while longer in the peace of the night, and the deep sense of his kin, there at his shoulder.
He’d need the strength of his dead. Three hundred men, and he’d known them for less than three days. Always before, when he’d taken men into battle, they were men of his blood, of his clan; men who knew him, trusted him—as he knew and trusted them. These men were strangers to him, and yet their lives were in his hands.
He wasn’t worried by their lack of training; they were rough and undisciplined, a mere rabble by contrast with the Continental regulars who’d drilled all winter under von Steuben—the thought of the little barrel-shaped Prussian made him smile —but his troops had always been this kind of men: farmers and hunters, pulled from their daily occupations, armed with scythes and hoes as often as with muskets or swords. They’d fight like fiends for him—with him-- if they trusted him.
“How is it, then, Reverend?” he said softly to the minister, who had just blessed his flock of volunteers and was hunched among them in his black coat like a scarecrow protecting his misty field at dawn. The man’s face, always rather stern in aspect, lightened upon seeing him, and he realized that the sky itself had begun to glow.
“All well, sir,” Woodsworth said gruffly. “We are ready.”