“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.

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

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.