They can have the throne, she thought bitterly. But, of course, it made no difference what she thought. Lune and Arden wouldn’t listen even if all three triplets begged on their knees to give it up. All they cared about was seizing power for themselves … and keeping the duchess of Solenne’s alternate heir from gaining it.

Who was that other possible heir, anyway? Would they care about this broken kingdom?

Someone had to do something, for the sake of every innocent pawn in the dukes’ and duchesses’ schemes … and for the sake of the land itself, whose pitiful moans echoed endlessly through Cordelia’s ears.

Broken. Broken. Broken!

The triplets camped out of sight of farmhouses that still stood. They foraged for their food in abandoned fields. They didn’t talk to anyone else along their journey … but then, after everything they saw on their first day, they barely even spoke to one another.

The only sound that accompanied them across the miles, apart from the steady thumping of Cordelia’s hooves along the road, was the mournful tune that Giles hummed to himself over and over throughout the days. For once, neither of his sisters asked him to stop. Its melancholy lilt perfectly echoed the wreckage that they passed.

Rosalind brooded in dangerous silence, her shoulders drawing tighter and tighter with every burned-out castle or farm that they glimpsed. Cordelia stayed animal and tried with all her might to shut out the cries of the land around her … but every night in her dreams, they wrung her out and left her reeling, groggy and half-deafened by endless screams, pleas, and demands.

BROKEN. BROKEN. DO SOMETHING!

And every night as she slept, white starflowers grew beneath her in her true shape, as if to taunt her. We know what you truly are.

This wounded land expected her to somehow fix it. Mother, Connall, and Alys needed her to rescue them from their powerful captors. And with every step toward that highest, cloud-wreathed mountain, she was drawing closer to the moment when she would have to let her own most terrible words out into the air, to fulfill the bargain that her triplets had demanded.

Then they would finally know the truth about her, and—

No!

She couldn’t even let herself think it.

She kept her eyes trained on the thickly forested slopes of Mount Corve as they drew closer with every passing minute. She kept her hooves moving steadily as she trotted up steep, sloping dirt roads and around jutting boulders, and she squeezed her inner ears shut as hard as she could to the cries of the land on every side.

So she almost missed the trap that was waiting for them.