Page 76 of Duke of Sapphire

“A second search party.” He looked at Ian, who had slowed the horse to a walk and was listening with his head tilted. Then he looked back at Charlotte. “No positive signs. Same as the first.”

Ian pulled the horse to a stop. “What search party?”

Charlotte looked at Henry. Henry looked at Ian.

“Men I have sent to look for your father and mother,” Henry said. “To find out where they are.”

Ian’s grip tightened on the reins. “How many men?”

“Several.”

“Are they lookin’ in the right place?”

“We believe so.”

“Did they look at the road?” Ian’s brow was furrowed in the particular way it got when he was working through something with great seriousness. “Where the carriage went off? Da told me once about a road in the hills that goes close to the edge.”

“They have looked at the road,” Henry said.

“Did they look below the road?” Ian pressed. “If the carriage went off the edge, they would have to look down, not on the road.”

“They looked below it as well.”

Ian was quiet for a moment. Then: “Did they ask the people who live near there? There are farmers. Crofters.” He said the word with authority, the Highland brogue coming through on it. “Crofters ken everythin' that happens on the roads.”

“They spoke to everyone nearby,” Henry said. “Everyone who might have seen anything.”

Ian looked at the mare's mane. He ran one hand down her neck, slowly. “I think about them every day,” he said. It came out very flat, not dramatic. He simply stated a fact. “I daenae say it. But I think it.”

Charlotte held perfectly still.

“Every mornin' when I wake up,” Ian continued. “And when I see other people’s mas. And when I’m on the horse.” He looked up then, directly at Henry, with the clear, unblinking gaze that cut through everything.

“Are me mam and da dead?”

CHAPTER 21

Ian’s question wound around all three of them like a tentacled ghost. Henry went very still for a moment. Then he said, “We do not know that.”

“But they might be.”

Henry crouched down to the boy’s level, his good coat in the mud without a single thought for it. “What I know is this: Men are looking. Good men, Ian, who know those roads. And until they tell me otherwise, I am not prepared to accept it.”

Ian’s chin wobbled once. “But what if they find⁠—”

“They have not found it.” Henry kept his voice level. “So that is where we stand.”

Ian looked at the horse. Then at the ground. His nose was running, his eyes were full, and he was fighting both with the stoic misery of a child who had been trying hard for an exceptionally long time not to fall apart in front of anyone.

Henry looked at Charlotte.

It was the most unguarded she had ever seen him. Not frightened, not helpless—Henry was neither of those things.

Charlotte crossed the yard just as a groom was assisting Ian from his mount.

She did not say anything clever, nor did she offer reassurance she could not support. She simply sat down on the low mounting block at the yard’s edge, put herself at Ian’s height, and said, “Come here.”

Ian came. He pressed himself into her side and she wrapped her arm around him. He was shaking, just slightly, the fine trembling of a child holding something enormous.