“Never!” the man bellowed back. Agitated rustling sounded in the trees—more humans hurrying to take up places behind him. Metal clanked ominously. Voices whispered. Fear filled the air.

And then—

Cordelia couldn’t have caught it with human ears: the sound of a hastily muffled cry.

Wait. There were other children here. Babies, too—she could smell them. That was why these strangers were afraid! They were hiding in the dark, trying to protect their own families.

“Come on, Cordy.” Rosalind started forward. “Attack!”

The strangers started toward them in return.

Cordelia slammed herself in front of Rosalind in her big bear form. Then she shifted back into a girl. The shock of her transformation made the adults jerk back, breaths hissing loudly through their teeth.

Rosalind’s mouth dropped open, too. “What are you doing?” she hissed. “You can’t do us any good like that!”

It was true that Cordelia had no claws in girl form. But she needed distraction, not physical strength, to defuse this particular battle … and luckily, she knew someone who was always happy to be the center of attention.

“Giles,” she said to her triplet, “you can sing us that ballad now.”

It was the moment that Giles had been born for. As Cordelia watched in awe—and Rosalind groaned in despair—he flung both long arms out in a dramatic flourish and bounded to the center of the confrontation.

Both sisters knew exactly what that deep, indrawn breath heralded.

“My stomach!” His bell-like voice pealed at top volume through the air, throbbing with intensity and sending onlookers lurching involuntarily backward. “Oh, the tale of my stomach is a tale of woe, of pain even greater than my throbbing toe …”

On every side, weapons lowered as strangers stared in slack-jawed disbelief. Metal glinted in their hands, the source of those earlier clanking noises—but it was the metal of spades and weed hooks, not martial swords or spears. Cordelia pointed them out, wordlessly, to Rosalind—who scowled more ferociously than ever.

“… For berries are few, and now I rue that I never ate more of Alys’s stew …”

“He couldn’t have eaten any more of it,” Rosalind muttered under her breath to Cordelia. “He would have burst!”

“… And now that we’re here, I greatly fear that I may well shed more than one—”

“What is going on?” A tall, broad-shouldered older girl with skin a darker brown than Connall’s shoved past all the staring adults and held up a flickering candle to light the scene. “Where are those ferocious bandits you were ordering us all to hide from, Hal?”

“They … well …” The blond, bearded man who’d shouted back and forth with Rosalind shook his head now, blinking rapidly as he turned to face the new arrival. “This lot threatened us, Tilda, so we had to—”

“Threatened you?” She took one sweeping look across the group. “For goodness’ sake, they’re only children!”