“But then why didn’t Mother—the duchess—bother to use it?” A fierce sob choked Rosalind’s voice. “If she was never really our mother all along—if she only brought in me and Giles to give you cover whenever the soldiers finally made it past all of her spells … then why wouldn’t she let me fight by her side in the end? Why would she even care whether I was hurt?”

“Maybe she had another plan by then. Nothing else had changed, had it?” Giles’s lips curved in an unhappy twist. “We were still the two spares that she planned to give up to keep her real child safe.” He exchanged a long look with Rosalind over Cordelia’s shoulder. “If real family is about love and loyalty … then I think we all know where we stand now. Don’t we?”

Panic spiraled in Cordelia’s gut.

She could lose them both right now. She could feel the connection that had held her steady all her life just waiting to snap.

“She didn’t give you up, though. She told all of us to run. She said that she loved us all.” Cordelia fixed her gaze on Giles’s bone-white face, willing him to listen. “There has to be more to it than we saw.”

He shook his head, looking unbearably weary. “Who knows? We can’t ask her about any of it now—and she would never answer questions anyway. But we all heard what she said in the beginning, and there’s nothing that you can say now to change it.”

He was right: words had never been Cordelia’s specialty. Those belonged to Giles, as fighting did to Rosalind. All that Cordelia had was her own inherent wildness. Her connection to the land.

… The connection that her triplets had gifted her when their two spirits had fused with hers. That was why the magic she’d inherited from Mother hadn’t turned into ordinary sorcery, as it had for all her siblings. Instead, it had fused with the first natures of her triplets. She’d given her inherited human sorcery to them, and they’d shaped her nature in return, giving her the gift of their wildness.

They were just like the pieces of the broken land itself. Each of them held their own singular powers, but they would always be strongest when they worked together.

Desperation gave her strength. She grabbed their hands and refused to let go when they both tried to pull away.

“Make a circle,” she snapped. “All in one. Exactly like those first founding magics wanted.”

She’d told them earlier that she couldn’t reach out to Mother. It had been the truth, as far as she had known at that point. She didn’t have the power to cast summonings, not like Connall.

But she had let the land in now. She had accepted its claim.