“Send a guard to the outside door that opens onto the shoreline, in case she found the tunnel.” If it was low tide, she might be able to skirt around Girnigoe on the rocks. If it was high tide, she’d have to swim. Could she swim? The thought made him almost turn around, but he’d already reached his father’s chamber where Thomas barreled out.

Face red, eyes wide. “I was below this turn on the steps. I did not think—”

“Is she in there?” Cain cut through his sputtered excuse. Thomas shook his head, and Cain continued up to the tower room, throwing the door open. It banged against the wall as he walked in, scanning the small, circular enclosure. He paused. Because the room wasn’t empty. Boudica sat on the bed in the dim light of one of the windows up high in the tower’s cone. The kitten stared at him from a crouch as if readying to attack if he came closer.

Cain inhaled and rubbed the back of his neck. His muscles relaxed the smallest amount as details pulled together in his mind.

“I will gather a group of men to ride after her,” Gideon said, coming up behind him.

Cain turned to leave the room. “First, send Joshua to check if her horse is still in his stables.”

“You think she would take it?” Gideon asked.

“I know she would,” Cain said. He glanced back toward the tower room. “She did not leave the kitten this morning when she climbed out the window. If an animal is hers, she will not leave it behind.”

“But she left the kitten this time?”

Cain smiled. “Exactly.” He had studied strategy his whole life, through a multitude of chess games and the wisdom of his father, elderly warriors, and forthcoming chiefs of other clans. He’d read book upon book of battle and how to predict an enemy’s movements. If, after all of that, he couldn’t figure out the mind of a woman bent on escape, he was indeed a failure to his father and clan.

He walked into the larger bedchamber and inhaled the heaviness of George Sinclair’s presence. The tang of the man’s sweat mixed with the dust that he refused to have cleaned by the maids. Aye, Cain would see it scrubbed and aired before his own things were brought over. His father had been a warrior through and through, his comfort met with large furnishings of heavy wood. A small portrait of Cain’s mother sat on the mantel, but the only other adornments, besides the lopsided chessmen on the board, were the large tapestry and an ornamental long sword.

Walking to the shelves where the books hid the iron ring that would open the tunnel, he turned back to the room. He ignored Gideon who watched from the doorway. “I know ye are in here, lass.”

Silence.