Frederick did not answer that. His attention had already shifted past the conversation for half a breath, his gaze moving toward the open arch that led to the western stair.
No sign of them.He turned the corner without slowing.
“They will ask whether the lass was violated,” Lennox continued, his voice lowered as they passed a pair of servants carrying folded blankets. “And they will ask it in poor taste.”
Frederick’s mouth flattened. “Then answer before they do. Say that Erin examined her. Say she gave no cause for further alarm on that front.”
“Aye.”
They moved through the keep at speed, the familiar corridors narrowing and opening around them in turns. Frederick could have walked blind. He knew where he needed to be. He knew what had to be said. Another woman taken, a second trail crossing into another clan’s ground, a returned captive with little memory and too much fear. The council would need facts. They would need calm. They would need direction before rumor reached them first and made cowards of half the room.
He could manage all of that.
What he could not seem to stop doing was looking.
The doorway ahead.Empty.
A shadow by the lower hall.Only a servant girl with a basket.
Left turn toward the south gallery.Nay red hair. Nay small dark head at her side.
He kept speaking as though nothing in him had wandered.
“Fergus said they made her walk most of the way back,” Frederick said. “That matters.”
Lennox glanced at him briefly. “Because they meant her to be found.”
“Aye. Or because they wanted us to think so.” Frederick’s gaze flicked toward the narrow opening that led to the inner court before returning to the corridor ahead. “Either way, it was deliberate.”
“Ye still think it is tied to the earlier attack.”
“I think too many things point in the same direction for me to ignore it.”
That much was true. Also true was the dull, persistent pull in the center of his thoughts that had very little to do with captors, trails, or council votes.
He had left their breakfast too quickly.
At the time, it had seemed unavoidable. Word from the north. A returned lass. Possible answers where there had only been questions. He would have gone in any case. It was his duty to go.
Still, as he passed another chamber and found it empty, he felt the weight of the abruptness in a way he had not expected. He had left Iona at the table with Jamie and a truth only half settled. Left the child with a few words and no time to see how they landed. Left before he had any right to assume either of them understood what he had meant.
He should have looked at Jamie more clearly before he went. Should have said something steadier than a promise implied in passing. The child had been watching him with those wide, too-careful eyes, and he had turned away because duty had called and because he had trusted time to mend the rest.
“The hounds still have nae returned,” Lennox said, drawing his mind back. “That will stir the old men into another argument about borders and permission.”
“It will stir them regardless,” Frederick replied. “Better they argue with the truth on the table than whisper about it after the fact.”
“Aye. And if one of them suggests waiting again?”
“Then I will ask him how many of the clan’s daughters he intends to lose before caution has had its fill.”
Lennox huffed what might have been approval, though his eyes turned slightly, following Frederick’s brief glance into yet another side passage. The movement was small. Frederick regretted it at once.
They descended two shallow steps into the wider hall that led toward the council room. Tapestries hung along the left wall, the woven figures dark in the afternoon light. To the right, a line of arrow-slit windows cast pale strips across the floor. Frederick’s gaze moved across each pool of light and each opening beyond it in the same quick pattern, controlled enough that another man might have mistaken it for habit.
“They will ask whether we mean to send riders to the neighboring clan before we have more,” Lennox said.
“We daenae,” Frederick answered at once.