If Hannah was anywhere, she was there.
But the stables had been searched. Turlow had seen to it.
So, Cori turned toward the garden and kept searching.
The east wing was empty.
James moved through it with methodical thoroughness, not allowing his mind to go to the one place he couldn't afford to go. Every room had been checked. Every wardrobe. Every corner. They'd been doing this for the better part of an hour, and the castle was running out of rooms, the grounds were running out of outbuildings, and the staff and guests alike were running out of places to search. A horrible thought had been hovering just out of reach since it began. It was coming into focus now, and the shape of it stopped his breath.
The moors.
He had grown up on those moors. He knew every drop in the terrain, every stretch of boggy ground, every place where the land looked solid and where it was not. He knew exactly what could happen to a child who wandered out onto open moorland in the early morning before the household was awake.
He shoved the thought aside again and checked a room that had already been checked before.
Empty.
He moved to the next one.
The kitchen garden was empty. The orchard wall had been walked. The glasshouse on the south side of the garden had been checked by one of the housemaids, who reported nothing.
Cori stood in the middle of the kitchen garden in the grey morning light and looked at the castle, wondering where she would go if she was a precocious five-year old.
Not where might she go, but where would she go. A five-year-old who loved animals above all other things, who had arrived at this castle and gone straight to the stables, who had spent every waking hour since talking about foals and naming them and planning future visits.
Where would a child like that go in the middle of the night when she could not sleep?
The stables had been searched.
But the stalls were many, and it was dark in the night and a small child might not be immediately visible to a man with a lantern moving quickly through a stable block at half past seven in the morning.
Cori moved toward the stables at a clip.
James found Daniel in the east corridor, coming from the direction of the library.
"Anything?" James asked.
"Nothing." His brother shook his head. "You?"
"Nothing."
They stood in the corridor for one torturous moment, staring at each other.
"James," Daniel began slowly, looking away as he said it.
"Don't say it."
"I haven't said anything."
"You were about to."
Daniel was quiet for a moment. Then, very quietly he said, "The moors."
There it was. The word James had been refusing to let fully form since seven o'clock. He’d known Daniel was going to say it. He’d known it the moment he saw his brother's face in the corridor. He’d been waiting for it and dreading it with equal measure, because the moment someone said the word aloud, it stopped being a thing James was managing and became a thing he had to act on.
"She's inside Acklan," James said. "She has to be in the castle grounds. Somewhere."
"Turlow's men have been through the kitchen garden and the orchard," Daniel said. "The housemaids have done every room on the nursery floor twice." His voice was quiet and steady, the voice he used when he was frightened and didn’t want James to know it. "She's not inside."
