It was good to be an animal. Good that her triplets—that Giles and Rosalind—were still asleep, not awake and asking unanswerable questions.
Cordelia left them piled in the cedar chest. In bear form, she hauled it out of the cottage, bursting through the doorframe and leaving the entrance in shambles behind her. She shifted back to a girl only for long enough to put together a harness out of Lady Elianora’s belongings, to drag the heavy chest behind her.
Even that was almost too much thinking to endure. She could hardly stand to wait until everything was safely fastened, until she could finally shift and run, straining every muscle with effort, as fast and as hard as she could, away from the cottage.
“Trust me. Trust Mother, trust Alys, and thank all the surviving spirits of the land that you and Giles and Rosalind are still together.”
Did Connall not know the truth about Cordelia, either? Or had he been lying to her all along?
Did he even think of himself as her brother?
Her roar sent birds scattering from all of the branches ahead. She tipped her head down and pushed herself faster.
Lady Elianora’s wall of air had broken when she’d lost consciousness. Cordelia would have burst through it anyway in this mood. She wanted to crash hard against something. To break things. She wanted to fight someone with slashing claws and teeth.
She wanted …
She burst through the tree line, panting. The sight ahead of her made all four paws slam to a halt. The heavy chest landed against her with a thump. She sagged to the ground, barely aware of the collision.
The forest had ended. It had actually ended! She was looking outside for the first time in her life … and it looked nothing like she had imagined.
All those books that Mother had read aloud and the ballads that Giles had learned from his books were full of great houses and colorful pageantry—or crowded towns overflowing with adventures. She’d expected to find tall buildings everywhere, flying bright flags and full of people.
What she saw instead was a wasteland.
There were no buildings on the vast plain that stretched before her, only bare brown dirt that spread to rolling, dead-brown hills in the far distance. Long furrows branded the plain like scorch marks. She could make out faded patterns in the dirt where rows of plants might once have grown … but no more. Some disaster had ravaged this place and left nothing alive in its wake.
There was no birdsong in the open, echoing air and no hum of insects to tug her forward. Wildflowers and weeds should have covered the abandoned earth. The forest should have sent forth strong roots to gain new ground.
But her big bear body understood why none of that had happened, because the warning shot up through her paws, the scent and message unmistakable to any animal instinct:
Stay away!
This place smelled overwhelmingly wrong. It was broken.
She had nowhere else to go.
Cordelia wanted her fierce, enraging mother so intensely that she would have howled with pain if she’d only had the strength left. She would have given anything to close her eyes and find herself back inside the protective walls of their stone castle, with no poisonous whispers or hidden truths ever to be uncovered.
Even when Mother’s decisions had been infuriating, Cordelia had always known that she was safe, because Mother was in charge, Mother was all-powerful, and Mother would do anything to protect her family.
Mother was a prisoner now, because of Cordelia.
… And Cordelia might not even be her real daughter.
Was that why Mother had always said there was no point in trying to harness Cordelia’s powers? What kind of magic did Cordelia have, anyway? All four of the children were supposed to have been born with the same magical potential to control the world around them with sorcery … but all Cordelia could ever do was shift her own shape. She’d always been half-animal inside, anyway.
Why didn’t her magic work like Connall’s and the others’? She had always taken that difference for granted, just as she’d taken her jostling, noisy family for granted … until now.
Even without any real training, when Giles had really needed it, he’d been able to use his natural magic to affect the world around him. Mother had always said that Rosalind could do that, too. Cordelia was the only one who’d been deemed untrainable … and not only in the way that her magic worked.
She was the only one Mother hadn’t trusted to know about that tunnel under the moat—because she was the one who had been half-feral from the moment she’d been born. She was the one who’d been constantly tugged beyond the safety of their castle walls by an invisible hook in her chest that never seemed to touch any of the others … as if she’d secretly never belonged inside with them in the first place.
Was that why the land was talking to her now and the others couldn’t hear it? The thought made a shudder ripple through her massive body.
Every time she’d ever flown away to explore, she had known that her family, noisy and loving and aggravating, would be waiting for her when she returned. But now …
“We wouldn’t be here at all if she ever stayed where she was supposed to be.” That was what Giles had said about her that first night, after they’d all been forced to flee.
He’d been right.
Had he and Rosalind even thought they’d had any choice about forgiving her? They still thought she was their sister—the only family they had left.
If they ever found out that she wasn’t …
She would lose them right now if she sat thinking any longer! Lady Elianora was still too close behind. Those dukes and their knights wouldn’t give up hunting for them, either.
So Cordelia lumbered back up onto all four padded paws, groaning with the pain of the effort.
She had been waiting all her life to explore outside the forest. Now she picked up one paw at a time and forced herself onto the rough, scarred, and broken earth, aiming for those bare hills in the far distance and pulling the heavy cedar chest behind her.
It was almost three hours later, and early evening, when the bumping of the cedar chest against the ground suddenly changed. It was rocking back and forth behind her now, jerking against the makeshift harness and yanking hard. Muffled voices sounded inside.
Finally. Her triplets were awake.
The bubbling feeling that stirred up inside her felt as much like dread as like relief.
She could still pretend she hadn’t noticed—
“Cordelia!” they both yelled at once.
“Grr!” Growling with frustration, Cordelia’s furry body tipped to a halt on the dry, cracked ground. She would have stayed in bear form to avoid any awkward questions, but she needed human fingers to unstrap the harness and manage the big key in its lock. She turned it carefully until it clicked—
And they had her.
“Thank goodness!” Rosalind surged upward, flinging open the lid. “I thought I’d choke in there. Giles’s stink—”
“My stink?” Giles’s red head popped up behind her. “I’m not the one who—oh.” He blinked at the vast brown earth around them. “Where are we? Where’s Grandmother?”
“We’re not in the forest anymore.” Rosalind frowned. “Did those soldiers reach Grandmother’s house after all? Did she send us ahead while she fought them off?”
Cordelia opened her mouth … then shut it again. There was too much. She couldn’t possibly sum it all up, and her throat was too parched to talk comfortably anyway.
Rosalind was already clambering out of the chest, stepping carelessly across Giles and ignoring his grunts of protest along the way. “You could’ve at least taken the time to wake me first.” She landed on the ground and put her hands to her waist, stretching out her back with a grimace. “I’m bruised all over from being rattled around in there. Couldn’t you have tossed in a pillow or two?”
“You had a pillow, Ros.” Still crouching in the crate, Giles cranked his neck from side to side. “I was the one stuck on the bottom with you bumping across me all the way.”
Rolling her eyes, Cordelia turned away from their squabble to keep on trudging up the steadily rising brown slope. It wouldn’t take much longer to reach the hills themselves; she’d been telling herself that for the last half hour, just like she’d been telling herself for a long time that she didn’t need a drink. She was on two legs, not four anymore, though, and she felt unbalanced by the shift—and by the loss of the harness she had worn. There was nothing tethering her down with the others anymore; she could just soar alone into the sky and—
“No!” Strong hands seized her right arm. “No changing shapes! I can see you thinking about it.” Short black hair mussed and cheeks bright red, Rosalind glowered at her ferociously. “You are not flying off and leaving us to work out everything for ourselves. Not this time! Just because we happened to fall asleep doesn’t mean you get to go all feral and—”
“Oh no.” Giles stared at her, slack-jawed. “Please tell me you didn’t go into a panic and sneak us all away from Grandmother without telling her!”
Cordelia clenched her own jaw hard.
“Cordelia!” He clutched his rumpled hair, eyes squeezing shut in agony. “I know you didn’t take to her, but you have to use your brain sometimes, not just your almighty animal instincts. She’s—”
“I saved you!” The words burst from between Cordelia’s teeth. “You didn’t just fall asleep, you fools. It was a potion that she fed us! And Connall said—”
“Connall was there?” Rosalind’s head swiveled around, searching. “Where—?”
“Connall found me in a vision, and Lady Elianora wanted to trade us to the dukes. That was her plan all along! She was going to use us to get back into power—just like she took Connall prisoner years ago, just to get Mother back under her control.” Cordelia wrenched herself free from Rosalind’s loosened grip. “I got us away from her while you slept. You’re welcome. Now you can both take care of yourselves!” She flung herself into the air in a furious whirl of feathers.
It should have been a satisfyingly dramatic escape—but Giles lunged upward and caught her by one thin bird leg.
She hated how tall he’d become!
“Shh,” he said as she screeched at him and flapped her wings in challenge. Ignoring all her struggles, he tucked her against his side, his grip firm and inescapable. She would have to genuinely hurt him to get free … and they both knew she never would.
“Just shush, Cordy.” His voice wobbled. “We didn’t understand what had happened. That was all.” The bump in his long neck bobbed as he swallowed above her, his face pale. “We’ll talk it all over later. Right now, though …” He looked back and forth across the long, bleak landscape, beneath the gradually darkening gray sky. “Those dukes are still going to be hunting us … and I suppose Grandmother will be, too. Ros? Which way do you think we should go?”
Cordelia stuck her head under her left wing just to spite them. She’d had a perfectly good plan already. If they’d only bothered to ask …
“Might as well keep going this way, at least for now.” Rosalind’s brisk voice carried through all of Cordelia’s shielding feathers. “Until we get over these hills, we won’t know what’s out there. And we’re too obvious here. There’s nowhere to hide.”
Well, they weren’t wrong about everything. Cordelia was too exhausted and thirsty to sort them out anyway.
She’d dragged both of them for hours while they’d slept. It was time to close her eyes and let them take a turn. No longer struggling, she burrowed into Giles’s lean side and let sleep wrap dark, enveloping wings around her. It closed her off from all the terrible questions she couldn’t bear to ask or answer …
And dropped her into a nightmare not her own.