The crown breaks with them into three pieces. No human magic can ever repair it.

Sister turns on brother, cousin on cousin. Forests burn to ashes. Blood spills across the broken landscape.

No more unity. No harmony between people and land anywhere.

Until …

A dark-haired, round-bellied sorceress creeps through the night, holding tightly to the hands of one tight-lipped friend and one small, frightened boy with shadows in his eyes.

The sorceress wraps strong spells of protection around the wild forest that she enters, holding it safe from all the battles outside. The forest folds her into its own heart in gratitude. When her babe is born and the forest hears those rare, raw tears that she weeps for her child’s future—and overhears her final, desperate plan to hide her newborn child … then the forest chooses to help her in return, stirred by more reasons than it can fathom for itself.

For once, all the different, fractured pieces of the land are working in unison again.

Two creatures for the spell, they send: a newborn hare and a fox cub, who both pad into the sorceress’s keeping exactly when she needs them. The whole land pours its green magic into her spell as she casts it—and what a spell it becomes!

With human or land magic alone, it would have been impossible. Working together, something miraculous takes place. An act of transformation: two new babes, to hide the third one in plain sight.

She’d only wanted the three babes tied together for her own babe’s protection, to hide her true child from any seeking eyes.

But every spirit of the land feels the click of true connection when it forms. It knows that the moment they’ve awaited for decades has arrived at long last.

Humanity and wildness, heart and spirit and fierce protection, all tie together once more in a bond that must never be broken.

Raven’s Nest still carries the memory of that final moment as it rippled through every piece of the broken kingdom, filling it with the wildest, most desperate hope and joy.

Three human infants lie together on a white cot by the castle window, snuggled into one another: three parts of a perfect whole. Even their soft breaths are shared.

The same size. The same skin. So nearly interchangeable.

“No one can ever know the truth.” The sorceress’s low voice carries through the open window to the listening, watching forest outside. “We can’t even tell Connall. He’s been through so much already. He’s too young to bear such heavy secrets. If we ever have to run as a family, we’ll tell him—but not until then.”