Lallybroch on the horizon. Smoke from the hearth. A future that hasn’t happened yet. And Claire, wiping mud from her wedding ring, whispering to the wind:

“Take your hands off my wife.”

Then arrived.

Her hands. Not shaking. That surprised her. She’d held a scalpel in a war. She’d held Jamie’s face after a flogging. Now she held nothing but air and the memory of his voice: “You’re my home, Sassenach.” The magistrate’s voice droned like a wet bee. “Consorting with the devil. Causing blights. Speaking in tongues.”

Claire almost laughed. The “tongues” were French medical terms. The “devil” was a husband from 1945. And the blight? That was just rain. But reason had no seat at this bonfire.

The sky was the gray of old linen. The kind of Scottish twilight that made the 1940s feel like a fever dream she’d once coughed through. Claire’s dress—borrowed, torn, stained with ink from a grimoire she shouldn’t have opened—clung to her like a second skin of guilt.

“I believe you,” he says. “About the stones. About the other husband. About everything.”

She came through the stones for a man in a wool plaid, not for the witch-hunt. But there she was: , wrists bound, standing in the muddy heart of Cranesmuir, while a crowd that had once cheered her healing hands now chanted for her blood.