Page 93 of Hold Fast

“Someone might have needed her assistance. I am certain there is a perfectly logical explanation for where she has gone,” he said with a confidence he didn’t feel as he turned and left the Hall.

Behind him, he heard Cat clap her hands loudly. “Why are you lot still standing here? Be gone!”

A half hour later, Ewan descended the steps that led to the first watchtower. None of the guards on the wall had seen her leave. They hadn’t seenanyoneleave. That gave him hope that she was within the walls and they had just missed her. Perhaps she’d been in the stables with Greer or had gone to their chamber to fetch something after he’d gone.

But that hope began to crumble as he saw his brothers standing in the bailey, talking closely and quietly with David.

“Nothing?” Ewan asked as he approached.

“Nay,” Angus said quietly. “Nae one in the village has seen her, and Rabbie says the only people in the stable are the master and grooms.”

Ewan’s heart pounded. He racked his brain trying to think of where else she might have gone. There was a small chance, the slightest of chances, really, that she could have slipped out without the guards noticing her, that she had gone to the woods to gather medicines, as she had done often before he’d confined her to the blasted keep.

“The woods,” he said flatly.

“You think she snuck out? Hard for a lass in her condition to sneak anywhere,” Kenneth said, but without any of his usual jesting tone.

“If she kept to the shadows, aye. She’s clever, and she’d have gone out of her way to avoid being seen.”Because of him.

Guilt felt like poison in his veins. If anything happened to her, the blame rested squarely on his head.

He called for the stable master to ready his horse. Calman stamped impatiently as the groom saddled him. Ewan, his brothers, and David mounted their horses, and before Ewan even gave the command, Calman raced out of the bailey and through the gate as if his tail was ablaze, running over the dead grass toward the forest. Ewan leaned low over Calman’s neck with Mathan close behind. They’d had to lock Greer and the puppies in the stable, and he’d heard her howling long after he’d passed through the gate.

“Fan out,” he called over his shoulder as they approached the tree line. They searched a broad swath of the woods, following any path she might have taken and walking deeper into the forest than she was likely to have gone, just to be certain.

Una was not there.

Ewan’s heart pounded. He racked his brain trying to think of where else she might have gone. She couldn’t have gotten far, not in her condition. He pulled frantically on his hair and tried to think but panic made his thoughts hard to grasp. Anything could have happened to her. She had vanished without a trace.

David pulled his horse up close to Calman. “Ewan,” he murmured. “You dinnae think—”

Ewan swallowed thickly. Because the possibility was entirely too terrible to consider. And yet what other possibility was there?

“Do you think she went back to her da?” Connor asked. “Is that it?”

“Nay!” Kenneth answered. “She once told me she’d die before she went back.”

“What about to the Stewarts?” Angus asked.

Ewan shook his head. The Stewarts had been her backup plan. And it was very likely that she would want to go there now, especially after he had been such an unmitigated ass. But she wouldn’t have gone without telling him.

“She would nae go there on her own.” Ewan closed his eyes and fought back the bile rising in his throat. “I dinnae think she went anywhere on her own.”

There was a long pause as they all considered that statement.

“You think she was taken,” Angus asked.

Ewan looked at David, whose face was as drawn and tight as his felt.

“Ewan,” Angus pressed, narrowing his eyes. “Do you have reason to suspect that Cameron took her?”

He didn’t need to answer that from the way his brothers were glaring at him, no one more fiercely than Rabbie.

Ewan marshaled himself. He should have been more forthcoming with his brothers as well as Una, should have told them of his concerns. He’d kept it between himself and David and the men on watch. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust his brothers, but that he hadn’t wanted to worry them.

He was a damned fool. He should have been up front when the first scouts had been seen. Una was a reasonable person. What was more, she would die before she returned to the Camerons. Hadn’t she told him as much? She would have cooperated. Hell, she could have given him valuable insight. But it didn’t matter now, and no amount of should-haves would change that.

“We’ll split up. You three keep searching the woods just in case. Take Mathan and look for her, for a sign of something she left behind, a trail, anything.”