In the forest, Cordelia had slept surrounded by cool green whispers, soothing and healing her in her dreams. Here, all she could hear in her sleep was endless, anguished screaming.
BROKEN! BROKEN!
This part of the land was in agony. Screams battered deafeningly at her ears. Blinding red filled her vision. Red everywhere.
Flames had raged across this patch of earth again and again, burning every plant that dared shoot out a green bud.
Endless blood had spilled across the ruined crops. Worse yet, it had been family blood that drenched them—cousins killing cousins again and again, poisoning the already wounded ground.
All of the old contracts broken. Betrayed!
No wonder plants wouldn’t grow or animals venture onto this scorched plain. Trapped in the endless screams of the earth, dream-Cordelia curled in on herself, covering her ears and squeezing her eyes shut. It didn’t work. Red bled through everything, turning her hands and eyelids transparent. She couldn’t escape the land’s pain. It was everywhere, shrieking for her to understand and do something.
BROKEN! BROKEN!
“Ahhh!” She jerked awake, flailing, and tumbled from Giles’s grip onto the rock-studded brown slope. She landed hard, in girl form, at all the wrong angles.
“Careful!” Giles stared down at her, shaking out the arm he’d used to carry her bird body. “We’re safe now, remember? You don’t need to panic.” He slid a quick glance down the barren hillside, toward the dark forest far in the distance. “No one’s spotted us yet, as far as we can tell, and we’re nearly to the top, so—”
“Made it!” Rosalind shouted the words from fifteen feet ahead. She was standing on the rounded summit above them, hands on her hips, glowing with triumph in the last, fading light of evening. “There are so many places to take shelter nearby. Look! We’ll be safe here overnight, and then—”
“We can’t stop anywhere near here! I can’t.” Trembling convulsively, Cordelia picked herself up. Her fresh bruises ached with every awkward movement. The land’s screams echoed in her ears. Now that she’d heard them in her dream, she couldn’t shut them off again. They were battering at her from all sides, almost as loudly as they had in her sleep, stealing her sense of balance … and trying their best to suck her back under their red veil.
Giles had already started loping up the final slope toward Rosalind, but he paused between them now, frowning at her. “What do you mean, you can’t? It’s getting dark. You know we’ll have to stop soon.”
Rosalind scowled impatiently down at them both from the top of the hill. “Are you two coming or not?”
Cordelia closed her eyes, fighting for clarity through the haze of echoed pain and fear and dizzying thirst.
Every fear of her own that she’d left behind in sleep was back again, even stronger than before … and the land’s screams were just one more unbearable sign of separation between her and the only family she had left.
They couldn’t hear those screams. If she told them that she could, then they would know she was even more different than they’d realized before. Even more wrong.
“Not even their real sister …”
“Cordelia,” Giles said, his voice suddenly much closer. “What’s going on?”
Cordelia hated it when people wouldn’t answer simple questions. But she couldn’t explain. She’d lost so much already. She couldn’t risk losing any more. She could barely even think through the screaming of the land.
And there was only one thing that she truly knew—one line that she had recognized in the nightmare the land had sent her.
“All of the old contracts broken …”
Connall had called those old contracts “the founding magics,” hadn’t he? He’d said something else about the broken crown that was linked inexorably to them:
“They just buried the broken pieces at Raven’s Nest, high in the mountains where the oldest spirits of the land are still hiding and holding all our deepest secrets safe.”
There was so little she could be certain of anymore. They had so many impossibly powerful enemies and so little knowledge on their side.
Raven’s Nest, she thought now. That’s where all the secrets are …
And the land’s screaming stopped. For one glorious moment, she was surrounded in the hush of perfect silence. Then the sound of bells exploded all around her, ringing with glorious certainty.
Air gathered tangibly behind her, ready to push her forward if she wavered.
That way. Go!
“Connall told me where to go next,” she said. “We need to find Raven’s Nest.”
They were still arguing ten minutes later, as all three stood on the high hilltop gazing down through thick sapphire air at the vast kingdom spread before them. It was all so much bigger than Cordelia had expected! Farms and marshes and high-walled towns dotted the dark landscape, along with burned-out fields and ruined castles rotting in broken solitude. Silver rivers snaked across the horizon, while tiny, wounded woodlands clumped in patches.
In the distance, Cordelia glimpsed a line of moving shadows that might have been another army, marching.
There was so much waiting for them in the land beyond, like it or not … and a line of high mountains rose beyond all the rest, their distant peaks hidden by clouds.
“So Raven’s Nest is just ‘up in the mountains,’ eh?” Rosalind waved furiously at the horizon. “Well, that’ll be easy to find, then. Just an hour or two of wandering around, d’you think, before we’ll spot it? Or maybe a month or two? While we leave the others to rot so we can chat with a bunch of mythical spirits who might not even exist anymore?” Her voice rose to a roaring bellow.
“Connall said—” began Cordelia.
“Connall isn’t here,” Rosalind spat. “If we do what you want, he never will be again! Bah!” Rolling her eyes, she stomped down the other side of the hill and disappeared into the growing shadows.
There was green grass on that side of the hill. There were knotted tree roots, too, and tangles of brambles that swarmed treacherously across the ground. A moment after Rosalind had disappeared, a loud thump sounded through the evening air. The grumbling that came afterward was even louder as Rosalind picked herself up from her fall.
Giles sighed. “We’d better give her a minute to cool down.”
The argument still seethed, unresolved among them, as they all staggered and slid down the far side of the hill in the deepening darkness, bumping into stones and roots and brambles along the way. Cordelia’s head was still full of those looming, impossible mountains, and her whole body ached with the remnants of those final screams from the brown land they’d escaped. She didn’t dare turn animal again, not yet—not even to see better in the dark. She couldn’t bear to be separated from her triplets again, not even simply in her shape.
It was a relief to hear birds rustling nearby at their bumbling movements and to catch the soft whisper of a fox slipping past them. At least this part of the land hadn’t broken.
So many burned-out patches across the kingdom …
Would their own forest look like that when the dukes were through with it?
“Oi, Cordy.” Catching up, Giles bumped her arm companionably with his. “Can you guess what I’m thinking about?”
Cordelia rolled her eyes, glad to be shaken out of the dark forest of her thoughts. “Food? As usual?”
“Even better. This would make a perfect ballad. Admit it! The three of us questing to save our family, one of us maybe ending up as the king or queen—”
“No!” Cordelia flinched, stumbling to a halt in the darkness. “No one can stay king or queen while the Raven Crown is broken—and Connall says they’ve all given up on even trying to fix it. Anyone who gets pushed onto that throne now will die.”
“Well, a lot of the best ballads do have tragic endings.” Giles gave a melodramatic sigh, his voice turning into a soft, lilting croon. “I could be the great lost king, the flower of the land, the fairest son who e’er sung—”
Cordelia snarled, “That isn’t funny!”
Bracing herself against the call of the land around her, she shifted into wolf form after all and loped ahead to scout for hidden dangers in the night.
Giles’s voice floated plaintively after her. “Has anyone spotted any berries we could eat yet?”
Cordelia scented no berries on that dark, tangled hillside. Farther down, though, she scented plenty of people—and danger, too, waiting for the triplets at the bottom of the hill.