“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.”