On her own, Cordelia would have had to beg the land to lead her, listening for directions with every step she took. Having her triplets by her side made everything so much easier. While she had trotted in horse form across the kingdom, keeping her focus on the mountains, and Rosalind had stayed alert to human threats, Giles had apparently drawn maps in his head and taken amazingly detailed note of everything they’d passed.
“I recognized the city where Mother’s being held,” he told them as they walked back down Mount Corve, ducking under twisted, overhanging branches and avoiding brambles. “It’s only two days from here, but that army wasn’t camped outside the walls when we passed it two days ago.”
Rosalind scowled consideringly as she pushed another branch out of her way. “Those flags in the army camp around it—they were boars, badgers, and falcons, weren’t they? So the duchess of Solenne and her allies are gathered there, trying to take the city for their own heir.”
“Yet another battle waiting to happen,” Cordelia said wearily. Inside her head, various pieces were moving through the near distance—the land keeping her aware of the positions of all nine soldiers still waiting outside the mist. They would be easy to slip past now that she’d welcomed the land’s guidance—but whole armies would be far trickier to avoid.
Rosalind nodded firmly. “The dukes of Lune and Arden must be holding the castle with Mother and Alys and Connall as their prisoners. Without the three of us, though, they can’t claim the Raven Throne—because everyone agrees that they aren’t the next heirs.”
“Who’s most likely to win that siege?” Giles asked.
“Who knows?” Rosalind shrugged. “All we need to know is that our family is trapped inside … and this time, we’re not running away from the battle.”
They didn’t. They aimed toward it instead once they slipped back through the mist. Cordelia became a sleek black horse once more, with a new makeshift sack hanging around her neck, while Rosalind and Giles rode together on her back. This time, though, every time they stopped to rest, she shifted immediately into girl form so that they could talk through all their memories and fears, trying to fill in the gaps in the history of their family.
Those gaps were still wide open and hurting. Giles hadn’t sung even once since they had left Mount Corve. He kept starting to, then stopping himself with a wince, shrinking inward as if some vital flame had faded to a bare flicker within him.
Rosalind seemed to have shrunk as well. She might have found her own way back to sorcery outside Mount Corve, but now, whenever their conversations died down and her practice sessions came to an end, she sat with her shoulders hunched and her expression dour.
Still, they were both staying with Cordelia, surrounding her—including her—and she needed them now more badly than she ever had before … because there was no closing off the land around her anymore. Every one of her internal barriers had been ripped away for good on the slopes of Mount Corve. Now, every step she took, whether by hoof or by foot, cast echoes ringing through her ears as a thousand voices cried into her head at once.
Broken! Broken! Broken! Heal us!
I’ll try, she promised them, again and again.
She still didn’t know how to heal the crown itself. None of them could work it out, no matter how many times they’d argued over different possibilities or even tried to press the pieces together with their hands—but she’d carried it with her in that sack anyway. Their long trip, along with her visions on Mount Corve, had taught her something that she could never forget: her family wasn’t all that needed saving.
Still, if her triplets hadn’t clustered around her nonstop, asking her endless questions and demanding her responses—if she hadn’t had their constant reminders of who she, Cordelia, was at her core—her own stubborn internal voice would have been drowned out by the end of the first day.
She’d spent all of her life desperate to escape the confining walls of Mother’s castle and plunge into the wild forest and world outside. According to her triplets’ new theories, the land had probably been calling to her all along—and it had finally managed to make real contact when she’d fallen asleep on the grass after her arrow wound. That had been the first time in her life that she had slept outside in her own true form, leaving herself entirely unshielded.
Now, whenever she closed her eyes at night, lying on hard ground, she could reach out with her senses and feel all the miles around her as if they stretched out from her own skin, pulling her body taut … and sinking her mind deep into the awareness of the earth that cradled all of them.
Humans moved across the ground in groups; one horrifyingly large, loud group busily burned and tore at the soil as the land shrieked in agony. Its attackers clanked with metal armor as they slashed down ancient trees, and the land cried endlessly to the only pair of ears that heard it:
Broken. Broken. Broken. Heal—
“Cordy!” Giles leaned over her, frowning as her eyes flew open. “Didn’t you hear us calling you?”
“Sorry.” She took a deep breath and pushed herself up. Dawn had broken over the nearby farmland. Rosalind—several feet away—looked as if she were finally nearing the end of her usual morning exercises, which had been increased to include new, magical elements ever since her battle at Mount Corve. “Just give me a minute and I’ll be ready.”
“We’re not far now.” Giles was still frowning down at her. “Maybe I shouldn’t have woken you up. If you really need more sleep—”
“I wasn’t sleeping.” She hadn’t truly slept since they’d left Raven’s Nest. She’d only drifted as the land had dragged her under every night. Even her triplets couldn’t manage to distract her from that while they slept.
“If you say so,” he said, “but you looked—”
“I was listening.” She climbed wearily to her feet. “There are a lot of people moving around right now between us and the closest city.”
“Well, that’ll be the army we saw before.” His frown deepened. “Cordy …”
“Everyone ready?” Rosalind’s face was red from exertion, and her short, thick hair stood away from her face in wild, sweaty, black hanks, but she grinned fiercely as she strode toward them, dusting her hands against her sides. Her sheathed sword hung ready at her hip, slapping briskly against her leg with every step. “Finally. Today’s the day we fight!”
“Don’t get too carried away,” Giles said. “Remember, you’re not taking on that whole army by yourself.”
She shrugged, her spine so tight that it looked ready to snap. “I wouldn’t need to take on the whole army. If I could figure out which ones are the dukes and duchesses—”
“Rosalind!” He ground the heels of both hands into his forehead. “Just follow the plan. First, we try to find a way to sneak past them all without being noticed. Then, if that works, we find Mother and Connall, get Mother’s collar off her neck, and then they’ll take care of any fighting that’s needed. Got it?”
“Ha.” She tilted her head at Cordelia. “Have you told her that?”
“Cordy isn’t the one who wants to go charging at hundreds of grown men with swords!”
“Of course not,” Rosalind said. “She has me to do that for her. Find some faith!”
Giles looked between the two of them and groaned piteously. “Just … try to stay quiet,” he begged. “We might still manage to sneak into the city without being noticed. It could happen.”
Rosalind rolled her eyes at Cordelia … who nodded in silent agreement.
She had tried to tell Giles how many soldiers she had sensed between them and those high city walls. Even she wasn’t prepared for the sight that greeted them when they finally arrived, though. From the hilltop where they stopped to stare, it looked as if the whole valley ahead had turned into a shifting quilt of martial colors, with barely a speck of grass left to be seen.
Boars, badgers, and falcons flew high on rippling flags around the strong stone walls. Hundreds of armed men and women in red-and-brown padded tunics surrounded every inch of stone and swept out around them in a wide circle of threat. Even if they had been the only obstacles, there would have been no sneaking past without being noticed for the triplets.
But even more soldiers had arrived since the day of their shared vision—and these ones carried the competing wolf and bear flags of the dukes of Lune and Arden. They had camped in a wider circle around the group of besiegers, hemming them in.
Between the two camps, two smaller groups stood facing each other in the middle of the field underneath a white flag, looking angrier and angrier with every sweeping gesture.
Sharp weapons bristled in every direction.
But it wasn’t Cordelia’s own fear that hit her like a tidal wave as she gazed down at the battlefield. It was a fear passed on to her by the land, and it originated beyond those high city walls … walls that could never withstand a battle of this size.
There were thousands of people crammed inside that city. They might have fled behind those walls for protection, but now, there was no way for any of them to escape. Cordelia’s heightened senses marked out every adult’s and child’s body currently packed into that suffocatingly constricted space, all huddled around one another in desperation … thousands of living, breathing human bodies that were about to become even more broken pawns in the dukes’ and duchesses’ endless wars for power.
Cordelia’s senses were tied into the land on which those people huddled, not into the people themselves. But their panic and terror were so intense, the emotions bled into the ground of the city like an infection, and the land fed every received emotion into her until her body shook with the horror of it.
She couldn’t stand by and simply let them all be slaughtered. But what could she do?
Mother and Connall were still hopelessly out of reach, trapped in their own cells in that huge box of a castle in the center of the crowded city. From her hilltop, Cordelia could glimpse small figures pacing around high stone turrets—archers waiting impatiently for the oncoming battle to spill, inevitably, through the city walls.
“All right, then,” said Rosalind. She drew her sword from the sheath that she’d made for herself across their journey.
“Wait, wait, wait. Let me think!” Giles jittered in place, eyes wide and fingers tapping a desperate rhythm against his side. “This can still work if we change the plan. Instead of all of us sneaking in, Cordy can shift into a bird while the two of us wait right here. Then she’ll fly over everything else to get to Mother—”
“And get herself shot down by arrows?” Exasperation leaked from Rosalind’s voice as she rocked to a halt, her sword still gripped tightly. “Can’t you see how nervous those archers are? They’re only waiting for an excuse to let fly at anything that moves.”
“Then she’ll turn into a bug instead! Something so small that no one will ever notice—”
“And she’ll reach Mother’s cell in a week.” Rosalind shook her head impatiently. “It doesn’t matter what kind of animal you choose, Giles. I know you hate the idea of fighting, but if all Cordy had to do was change shape to save Mother and Connall by herself, do you really think she’d still be standing here with the two of us?”
Giles slumped in place, letting out a low sigh of surrender.
Cordelia wrapped her arms tightly around her trembling body, trying to focus through the waves of received panic washing over her and the turmoil of her own emotions. “I wouldn’t just leave you two behind without talking it over first,” she muttered. “Not anymore.”
“Hmmph,” said Rosalind.
Giles’s ginger eyebrows rose meaningfully.
“It’s true!” She’d learned that lesson at Raven’s Nest, and in the long, painful days beforehand. Secrets had nearly destroyed her family. She had promised herself never to keep them anymore.
She had also promised herself never to take her triplets for granted again … even at moments like this one, when they gave each other looks so annoying that they practically deserved to be abandoned.
“I’m not leaving anyone behind,” she said more steadily, “but we have to win this battle for everyone’s sake—and it’ll take all three of us together.”
“To get Mother out of that awful collar?” Giles asked.
“Oh, no.” Rosalind’s lips curved into a fierce smile as she met her sister’s eyes and started back toward Cordelia and Giles. “That’s not the battle she’s talking about now. Is it, Cordy?”
“But—”
“We will get Mother out,” Cordelia promised, “and we’ll free Connall and Alys, too. But they’re not the only ones who need us now.” Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she loosened her arms and pointed at the stone walls beyond the sea of soldiers. “That city is full of people like the ones we met outside our forest. They have nothing to do with this stupid war! But they’re going to be killed by it anyway, and the land is going to be hurt even more badly—unless we do something to stop it now.”
“Us?” Giles demanded. “How can we stop both those armies? Didn’t you even watch the spirits’ vision at Raven’s Nest? I know the land wants you to be its queen, but this war has been going on for decades, Cordy. Everyone says it’ll never end until the crown is fixed, and that crown is still in pieces after everything we’ve tried. If they figure out who we are while it’s still broken, they’ll kill us before we can even try again! Do you really want the three of us to sacrifice our lives for no good reason?”
Sacrifice …
The word chimed like a bell, resonating deep under her feet with all the fractured pieces of the land.
A true sacrifice …
Cordelia caught her breath, her head spinning.
Of course! She finally understood. No wonder they hadn’t managed to put the crown together in any of their attempts. They’d been missing the most important element.
It was so simple … and so terrifying.
Her teeth started to chatter. She clenched them together.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bear it!
But the Raven Crown hadn’t been formed by the land and its people each pursuing their own paths. It had been sealed by true sacrifices made on both sides. That meant giving up something she loved—and Cordelia had learned, across their terrible journey, exactly what and whom she loved too much to ever sacrifice.
That left only one possibility.
“I can do this,” she breathed as shivers rippled through her. “We all can. We will, because no one else—no one—is going to die on this land today.”
That was worth any sacrifice.
Cordelia took a deep breath, lowered her chin, and braced herself against the ground. Grass prickled against her ankles. Deeper down—deeper—deeper—
“What are you doing?” Giles demanded. “Your eyes—”
“Shh!” Rosalind hissed. “Can’t you tell? She’s working.”
“Is she?” he asked. “Or is the land working through her? I’m not sure—”
“We have waited long enough.” Cordelia’s voice resonated with the full weight of Corvenne as her chin rose, drawing its gathered power through her. Echoes rippled down the hillside like an avalanche. The ground in the valley below gave a convulsive shake, sending every soldier stumbling to their knees. Screams sounded behind the city walls …
And Cordelia and the land spoke in unison, their words rolling down the hill like thunder:
“It is time.”