Pardoned on the Peak (Sequel to New World Sasanaichs)

One

January, 1757

        Morgan’s Peak, Rowan County, North Carolina

The frigid Air smacked thirty-five-Year-old James Jamie Fraser in the face the second he stepped out the front door of his family’s cabin, but it was a sensation he relished. Many Times over the Years, he’d nearly perished–after all, raiding cattle back in the Scotch Highlands was risky business, but so was standing up to a sadistic bastard who thought he was God, just ’cuz a King’d given him any amount of Power. Snakebites were also nothing to sneeze at when it came to whether or not one could cheat Death, and it was only with the help of a family he’d never thought he’d have that he’d survived that.

        With a deep breath that almost instantly froze his lungs–which wouldn’t kill him, even now since there were only three waysta kill an Elf–he waded through the waist-deep Snow so he could get to the barn. In the Years since making the voyage to the British Colonies and settling in, he’d decided that farming and making whiskey weren’t the only things he wanted to do in Life. The fact that neither of those things paid very well certainly woulda made him start looking for other alternatives–or at least, things he could add to those–and he’d been quick to discover a talent he was truly passionate about. It’d happened completely by chance, but he couldn’t say it was the worst choice he’d ever made any more than he could say that marrying a Natural-born Elf with whom he’d started a family was.

        Considering how remote his home was, the ginger man hadn’t been at all surprised that news could take not just weeks, but even monthsta Travel from one placeta another. The news could also get skewed when it Traveled by word of mouth, so what started at the Coast in New Bern or Wilmington might End drastically different by the Time it made it to the treaty line. However, he couldn’t constantly appear in different places without seeming to Travel by human methods, if he didn’t wanna start drawing unwanted attention to Morgan’s Peak. That was what’d made him decide he was gonna take a different approach–by starting a newspaper or the like that could be distributed by area residents.

        For that reason, Jamie’d managed to team up with his father-in-law–the proprietor Elf of Morgan’s Peak, Lachlan Morgan–to build a printing press from scratch. Once they’d done that and built something sorta like Lachlan’s smithy to house it, they’d turned their attention to getting other supplies he’d need, like the all-important ink. It was something that having connections no other human had came in handy for, and it hadn’t taken much longer to actually open his print shop for business.

        Over the Years since that Day in September of 1745, he’d kept his word–to himself, as well as Morgan’s Peak residents and those of surrounding settlements–by printing the Truth as he kent it. In addition to that, he’d added to his family’s revenue by taking up printing books of all kinds, and in pretty much every language he kent. The only books that weren’t distributed to the general public were the ones that were printed in various Elvin languages–whether any were printed in Quenya, Sindarin, or one of the others–since no one but his Elvin relatives’d be able to read them. Books that also dealt with Paganism were generally kept private, considering they didn’t want the hard work put into their homestead to be for naught, ’cuz the Land was razed by Witch-hunting humans who thought they were ridding the World of pure evil. Regardless of the language any given item was printed in, though, printing was a Passion of his just as much as whiskey-making, bringing him Peace like nothing else could.

        As he set up for yet another Day of messy work, the ginger man was just as oblivious as the rest of his family to the party making their way up the Mountain–as well as the news they brought with them that wouldn’t get printed. Only when his father-in-law broke into his Thoughts shortly after printing his first page of the Day would he become aware of their unexpected visitors, and how good that visit’d prove to be for him.