She turned bird again at dawn, taking flight in the morning chill before her grumpy, yawning triplets could even think to argue. She left them stumbling through the undergrowth, foraging for wild garlic and berries, kicking aside tangled obstacles and peering skeptically at every plant they saw.

She’d nabbed three spiders before she even left the ground. Now her striped wings whirred and her tiny firecrest body darted with ease between every leaf-heavy branch, drawn through the forest by a pull stronger than hunger.

The walls of the castle had sung to her veins all night. She wouldn’t get too close now; she would be good, she would follow Mother’s orders—but she had to see them for herself in bright daylight.

She had to know.

What if Mother and Connall had turned out the invaders but couldn’t call to the triplets from so far away? What if—?

A stick cracked sharply just ahead. Her body froze in midair, wings whirring as she hovered.

That sound hadn’t been made by a forest animal.

Neither was the curse that sounded after it.

“Quiet!” hissed a woman’s voice. It wasn’t Mother or Alys. It came from a knight without armor, creeping between the trees ahead with a quiver of arrows over her back. She carried a long, slender bow in one hand, and her tunic bore the image of a snarling wolf.

She belonged with the smooth-talking duke of Lune.

The man beside her wore a bear on his tunic, the angry duke of Arden’s symbol, and he growled at her like a bear himself. “I couldn’t help it. By my oath, that stick reached out and tripped me!”

“Remember what Their Graces told us,” she murmured. “This forest has belonged to the sorceress for years. We can’t trust anything we see or hear—and we can’t let anything hear us. Be a shadow, or we’ll never find them.”

“There are too many shadows here already for my liking.” His hand tightened around the vicious-looking spear that he carried … but at another look from his companion, he lowered it with an angry huff of air. “They’ll come running home soon enough on their own,” he muttered. “What kind of witch-child could survive in this forest?”

The woman shrugged, a sneer twisting at her lips. “Does it really matter? Your duke of Arden may declaim all he likes about family loyalty, but we both know our lords will run the kingdom for themselves while our new king or queen is a child—and none of these children will live long enough to take control. Like it or not, the duchess of Solenne and her allies will find some way to kill them off, sooner or later, in favor of her chosen heir. Then we’ll kill hers, and on and on it will go. But for now …”