Being a horse was fantastically useful. Once the soldiers were left behind, Cordelia slowed to a steady, ground-covering trot. It wasn’t long after that before Rosalind and Giles started calling out for her to stop—but with both of them safely trapped on her back, none of their noisy threats made any difference.
By the time she finally collapsed by a stream, panting and trembling and streaming with sweat, they were miles closer to Raven’s Nest.
“That was a low trick!” Rosalind landed on the ground with a groan and rolled immediately onto her back, eyes falling shut. “Tomorrow …” Her voice broke into a yawn. “Tomorrow I’ll tell you exactly …”
But Cordelia was busy slurping up fresh, cold water with her long snout stuck into the stream. She paid no attention to Rosalind’s dire predictions or complaints. They faded away soon enough, shifting into loud, rattling snores.
There. Her triplets were both safe, and they were all heading exactly where they needed to go.
Giles didn’t fall asleep so quickly, though. He sat beside Cordelia on the grass, one hand resting on her skin as she drank. He was strangely quiet as he sat there, in a way that might have worried her if she hadn’t been so tired. When she raised her head from the water at last, the only sounds in the predawn darkness were the soft burbles of the stream as it flowed past and Rosalind’s snores rising beside them.
The soft grass smelled delicious, but Cordelia was too exhausted even to nose around and eat it. She had run as long and as far as she could, well beyond her new body’s limits of endurance. Now she tucked up her long legs and prepared to fall flat onto her side for the few remaining hours of darkness.
Giles’s voice stopped her. “I know you’re keeping secrets from us.” He didn’t look away from the rippling dark water, but his fingers tightened against her. “Even Ros’ll figure that out soon enough.”
With a sigh of surrender, Cordelia slipped back into girl form. Cold, damp grass poked through her dress. Her human head ached.
“I’m not keeping any secrets you need to know,” she whispered softly. “I’ll tell you everything Connall said about our father—and about Mother, too.”
“So Connall isn’t the one who upset you. I knew it!” Giles’s whisper vibrated with intensity. “Cordy, Grandmother’s our family just as much as yours. I know she turned out to be awful. You saved us, and I’m grateful for it! But whatever she said that you’ve been burning up about ever since—we deserve to hear it, too.
“And when it comes to Raven’s Nest—I don’t believe for one second that Connall wanted us to go questing halfway across the kingdom to some mythical, dangerous place in the mountains. I know our brother—so I know he must have told you we should hide and stay safe. Didn’t he?”
Cordelia’s shoulders hunched. “He did tell me about Raven’s Nest—and he said the spirits there hold all of the deepest secrets in the land. If they can share any of those secrets with us—if they can tell us what we need to know to get Mother and the others free, and who … well, we just have to go, Giles! It’s our only chance to save our family.”
“But you didn’t take the time to talk us into it. You just dragged us here against our will.” Giles shook his head grimly. “You can’t shut us out and make all of the decisions! Otherwise, you’re acting just like Mother—and at least I trusted her to make those decisions for our own good.”
His words stabbed into Cordelia’s chest. Was she imitating everything that had always outraged her in Mother?
She was keeping secrets from the others. But she couldn’t help it! If she told Giles the other question that was hissing and coiling like a viper in her chest, it would change everything. She couldn’t bear it.
She needed a real answer from those spirits, or Grandmother’s words would poison everything for good.
“We only have one another now, Cordy. Just the three of us.” Giles let out a shuddering sigh. “If I can’t even trust my own sisters anymore …”
“You’re not even their real sister.”
She would never tell him that!
In a heartbeat, Cordelia was a horse again. She tipped her big body over and fell flat on her side, whiffling air pointedly through her lips. Horses didn’t have to answer questions. Even Giles couldn’t talk forever to an animal who wouldn’t answer back.
When he finally did fall silent, though, he stood up and moved three feet away from her before curling up on Rosalind’s far side … and Cordelia felt every inch of the new distance he had put between them.
The next morning, she woke to find her triplets huddled together, whispering to each other with their backs turned against her. The sight felt wrong—as painfully off-kilter as the fractured land that had creaked and moaned its misery into her dreams, leaving her fragile and desperate for comfort. Still sleep-fogged and aching in every muscle, Cordelia rolled up from the grass and shook herself off in preparation to shift back into girl form and join them.
Then she looked down and froze.
Tiny white starflowers dotted the grass where she had lain, springing up to catch the early-morning light.
Sharp, cold fear pierced her chest as she stared down at them.
Coincidence?
No. They formed a perfect outline—but not of the big horse body she wore. In the grass, she could see the outline of the small girl body that was her true form.
Remembered voices whispered in her ears: “You are ours and always have been.”
No. I’m not! I won’t be! I have a family! She stumbled backward, tripping over all four long legs.
Her triplets both turned at her movement. Their flat, identical expressions halted her midtangle, her mind still racing in panicked, useless circles.
“You win,” said Giles grimly. “We’re going to Raven’s Nest, because you’re our sister and we want to trust you. But once we get there, you have to tell us everything. That is the only bargain that either of us will agree to.”
He stalked off to wash his face and hands in the stream, while Rosalind strode in the opposite direction to stand guard without a word … and the delicate white starflowers waved in the morning breeze, a silent but unmistakable reminder.
Even the land knew that Cordelia didn’t really fit in with the others, no matter how hard she tried to hide.
She stayed in horse form for the rest of that morning, even when they stopped for rests. Neither of her triplets asked her to change back. They only spoke to each other. They barely even looked at her.
It was exactly what she’d wanted. No arguments. No interference. She didn’t have to share any terrifying truths.
If she had been a wolf, she would have bitten them. Hard!
She trotted instead on long, strong legs, hooves pounding against the rutted dirt roads that stretched past abandoned farms and watchtowers. Half the crops had been left rotting in the fields, while burned-out husks of stone buildings rose like skeletons nearby. Rosalind’s legs clamped tighter and tighter around Cordelia’s back with every new wreck that they passed, while Giles hummed a low, unhappy melody, gangly legs twitching in tempo with his wordless tune of discontent.
From time to time, his voice echoed around them from random angles as he practiced more of the sorcery he’d managed in the forest—but at least half the time, the sound faded within seconds. The rest of the time, it didn’t emerge at all.
“It’s no use!” Panting hard, he slumped over Cordelia’s neck. “I can’t do it on command. I should have stuck with Mother’s training after all!”
At that, Cordelia snorted grumpily through her muzzle. Atop her back, Rosalind made just as skeptical a sound. “You always said you’d dry up into a husk if we didn’t let you spend enough time singing. Remember?”
“It’s true,” he mumbled dolefully, “but at least then I’d have some way of being useful. Cordy can turn herself into a lion. You know how to fight with weapons. I don’t even have a lute here to mistune! What am I supposed to do the next time we’re attacked if I can’t figure out how to use my magic? Sing a bunch of soldiers into giving up?”
If Cordelia had been in girl form, she would have laughed at that image. But she couldn’t speak through her horse muzzle, and after a long silence, Rosalind said, “Who do you think is going to attack us?”
“Oh, I don’t know. There are too many possibilities!” He laughed painfully against Cordelia’s mane, his shoulders shaking. “The dukes of Lune and Arden, maybe? They want to force one of us onto the throne just so they can run the kingdom for themselves. But if we’re unlucky enough to stumble across the duchess of Solenne or her allies, they’ll want us dead to get us out of the way of their own heir. Oh, and then there’s that wicked sorceress grandmother of ours who wants to trade us to the dukes in our own family!”
He let out a heavy sigh that ruffled against Cordelia’s skin. “Arden and Lune, at least, must know by now that we’ve left the forest. It’s not as if anyone else could have been those three children who came running out and got spotted by everyone along the way.”
Rosalind grunted. “That man who reported us to the soldiers thought we were demons.”
“Ha.” Drawing a deep breath, Giles straightened in his seat. “I don’t think the dukes will be so easily fooled.”
Grandmother wouldn’t be fooled, either, if she heard. Cordelia chewed over that thought unhappily as she trotted onward, dust kicking up around every step.
Grandmother hadn’t had any stables behind her cottage to hold a horse ready to ride. She certainly couldn’t catch up with them by foot.
But Cordelia remembered the blaze in those dark eyes—“I’ve had twelve years to learn from my mistakes.”
Even in horse form, she shivered hard.
Lady Elianora would never give up at her first setback … and next time, she wouldn’t be nearly so easy to surprise.