𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐖𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐁𝐞 | 𝐉𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐞 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐫 ✅

Prologue

Two Years Previously (1736)

Eira MacCraig's POV

Jenny watched from a hundred yards away as Jamie took my hand in his own and pulled me behind the hay cart which was always stuck in the middle of the stableyard. We both giggled, not caring if Jenny could still see. At that moment, all we wanted was to be together.

I was Jamie's best friend, but he was so much more than that to me. To me, he was the reason that I got up in the morning and the reason I dreamed at night. Jamie Fraser was my birthday cake and my smile. He was my happiness and my intrigue. He was my heart, and had been for as long as I could remember.

We spent everyday together, and had done so since we ourselves had been wee bairns on our fathers' shoulders and at their sides... but that was some years behind us, and we were now coming to realise that we were on different paths... or rather, I was.

Jamie was sixteen, and I was only thirteen. He was a man almost, but I was scarcely more than a child.

And he was being sent away to foster with his mother's brother, his uncle, Dougal MacKenzie. I would soon be without my best friend, and he would be gone for two years.

When he returned, then he truly would be a man... and I would be a young woman... or mother had told me so last night when I had cried in her arms and begged her to let me go with him.

"Dinna look so sad, Eira." Jamie had always had a way of pronouncing my name that nobody else did; Eyr-Ra instead of Eye-Ra, as it was supposed to be said... but I didn't care. It was another thing that we had between just the two of us. Jamie put a hand to my cheek and I sighed, feeling my eyes brim with tears. I fought back the urge to cry, and instead, I put my arms around his middle and buried my head in his midriff - Jamie was just over two feet taller than me. He put his arms around me and stroked my coal-black hair softly, trying to calm me.

"Ye're leaving me, Jamie..." I cried quietly into his shirt, soaking the fabric.

He didn't care, "if it were up to me, I'd stay. If it were up to me, ye'd be by my side every day for the rest of my life and even after." He sighed softly, letting me sob for a moment before he said, "Dinna cry, Mo Chridhe."

The sorrow which I felt caused me to not linger over the sweet nickname which he had bestowed upon me, not one that he had used before. My sweetheart.

I wanted to stop. I wanted to stand up straight and face him as bravely as I could, but I could not. My heart was breaking in two, and he was going to take a piece of it with him.

"Ye'll forget me." I sniffled, taking in the scent of him from the fabric of his shirt, trying to cement the smell in my mind. I wished that I had done so at some point in the past, but making a memory of him had never seemed as important as it did now. "Ye'll find a wife away at Beannachd and ye'll forget all about me. Ye'll never come home -"

Jamie cut me off by peeling me from him and holding me at arm's length. He looked directly into my lapis lazuli eyes and didn't blink. I knew that what he was about to say next was very serious and that he would mean every word.

"Listen to me, Eira," he spoke slowly, punctuating every syllable. It seemed like time had stopped around us. The birds didn't sing as they had before he had pulled me behind the hay cart, and the sun seemed to stop moving across the sky. I heard no horses braying in the stable nor the calls of the Lallybroch farmers to each other across the fields. "When I come home - and I will come home - ye and I will spend some time together. We'll both be older then, and different people. We'll need to get to know each other -"

"Jenny!" I jumped, hearing the sound of Brian Fraser, Jamie and Jenny's father, calling out to his daughter. He sounded close by. Jamie looked over my shoulder briefly and his eyes caught something briefly before he turned back to me, this time more hurried. "Jenny, have ye seen yer brother!?" Jenny, I knew, would cover for us for as long as she could, but both Jamie and I knew that we had mere moments before he was snatched away from me and sent down to the house to greet his uncle Dougal and to mount his horse for his long ride to Beannachd, his uncle's house.

"Jamie, I'm going to miss ye so much -"

"I'll miss ye, too," he promised me. There was something behind his words - pure emotion - it sounded like he was holding back a choke. I wondered if he wanted to cry half as badly as I did. "But when I come home, it'll be just us, aye?" I nodded. "Until then, ye've got Jenny -"

"Jamie!" His father had spotted us. We both looked over my shoulder to see Brian Fraser hurrying over. We had seconds left in which to say goodbye.

"Ye've got Jenny, and ye've got this." He reached into the pocket of his breeches and pulled out a length of blue ribbon, the precise colour of his eyes. The eyes that I was in love with. He pushed it into one of my hands and then balled my fist up in his own. His father reached us.

"Come along, Jamie! Your uncle is waiting, and he's in a hurry - reckons there's to be rain, though I dinna see it myself -"

"One moment, father -"

"Now." Brian was a force to be reckoned with, and when he narrowed his eyes, his children - and his tenants, sometimes - knew that they were in trouble.

"But Eira -" He was being pushed away from the hay cart. I was looking after him helplessly, trying to memorise the way the sun shined from the crown of his coppery redhead and the way that his shoulders moved up and down as he took each breath.

"- will be here when ye get back."

Laird Broch Tuarach did not allow his son - now his only living one since Jamie's older brother William had died of smallpox - to say another word. We watched him cross the yard and reach the house. We watched Jamie greet his uncle, a broad man, and then climb onto his horse, the same that he always rode when he and I - and sometimes Jenny, too - would ride together. Brian Fraser and I watched Jamie and Dougal MacKenzie ride away. I was crying. I hadn't stopped. Jamie's father put a hand on one of my shoulders and said, "he'll be home soon, lass. Dinna fash."

Two years felt like a lifetime to wait, but I had no choice. But as I watched the redheaded boy that I loved so dearly disappear from my view, I promised myself that I would think of him every day and that I would not forget. I promised myself that James Fraser would live at Lallybroch for the next two years, but instead of sleeping in his bedroom, he would sleep in my broken heart.