“Then let me help,” Jack said, rushing to keep stride with the captain. He remembered Maisie sitting next to him at breakfast, mere days ago. How curious and charming she had been, giving him a gap-toothed smile. It made Jack feel sick to know she was missing. “Tell me what to do.”

Torin stopped abruptly on the road. His guards were in the distance, moving on to the next croft.

The wind soughed as Jack waited. He expected Torin to send him back to the house—Jack had never been strong enough or good enough to be one of the East Guard—but then the captain looked at him and nodded.

“Very well,” he said. “Come with me.”

Jack soon gathered all the pieces of what had happened the previous night. It galled him, to think that while he had been sitting on the coast and singing for the water, a man had walked across the hills, assaulted Sidra, and kidnapped Maisie.

Torin’s orders were urgent. He told his guards to search the hills, the glens, the mountains, the caves, the coast, the city streets, and the byres and storehouses of crofts. To study the knoll between his land and his father’s property for a blood trail and broken grass from boots that had fled, to look for a man with a wound in his back.

No one would be spared, Jack had discovered.

Torin challenged his guards to question even their own fathers, their brothers, their husbands, and friends. To doubt their kin, down to every branch and root of their family tree. To doubt those they loved most, for sometimes love was like dust in the eyes, a hindrance when it came to seeing truth.

The culprit could be any one of them in the east, and the air felt grim and heavy with disbelief as the news spread—another lass was missing, and the spirits were not to blame.

Jack had searched five crofts and the span of eleven different men’s backs when Adaira appeared, riding a mud-splattered horse. Her countenance was rosy from the wind, her hair braided into a crown. She was dressed in a simple gray dress with a red plaid knotted across her body. She dismounted before the mare had even come to a halt, and Jack watched from where he stood in a yard as she went to her cousin.

She knew about Maisie then. Jack could see it on her face as she spoke to Torin. The panic, the fear, the desperation. The cousins spoke for a moment, low and urgent. Adaira’s eyes suddenly flickered beyond Torin to find Jack in the shadows. Her gaze remained on him, the tension easing in her expression.

It still shocked Jack when she called him over. He felt like he was intruding on a private moment, especially when Torin raked his hand through his tangled hair.