I’d decided, as I walked back down the mountain, alone, that Sir John had it wrong. An outlander doesn’t prove her love by dying young, but by living as long as she can. She eats berries grown in bad earth and licks the poison from her lips; she makes her wedding bed from barbed wire and cinder blocks; she falls in love at the end of the world. And when death comes for her—too soon, too fucking soon—she becomes something else. Something that survives.
