Boars, badgers, and falcons flew high on rippling flags around the strong stone walls. Hundreds of armed men and women in red-and-brown padded tunics surrounded every inch of stone and swept out around them in a wide circle of threat. Even if they had been the only obstacles, there would have been no sneaking past without being noticed for the triplets.

But even more soldiers had arrived since the day of their shared vision—and these ones carried the competing wolf and bear flags of the dukes of Lune and Arden. They had camped in a wider circle around the group of besiegers, hemming them in.

Between the two camps, two smaller groups stood facing each other in the middle of the field underneath a white flag, looking angrier and angrier with every sweeping gesture.

Sharp weapons bristled in every direction.

But it wasn’t Cordelia’s own fear that hit her like a tidal wave as she gazed down at the battlefield. It was a fear passed on to her by the land, and it originated beyond those high city walls … walls that could never withstand a battle of this size.

There were thousands of people crammed inside that city. They might have fled behind those walls for protection, but now, there was no way for any of them to escape. Cordelia’s heightened senses marked out every adult’s and child’s body currently packed into that suffocatingly constricted space, all huddled around one another in desperation … thousands of living, breathing human bodies that were about to become even more broken pawns in the dukes’ and duchesses’ endless wars for power.

Cordelia’s senses were tied into the land on which those people huddled, not into the people themselves. But their panic and terror were so intense, the emotions bled into the ground of the city like an infection, and the land fed every received emotion into her until her body shook with the horror of it.

She couldn’t stand by and simply let them all be slaughtered. But what could she do?

Mother and Connall were still hopelessly out of reach, trapped in their own cells in that huge box of a castle in the center of the crowded city. From her hilltop, Cordelia could glimpse small figures pacing around high stone turrets—archers waiting impatiently for the oncoming battle to spill, inevitably, through the city walls.

“All right, then,” said Rosalind. She drew her sword from the sheath that she’d made for herself across their journey.

“Wait, wait, wait. Let me think!” Giles jittered in place, eyes wide and fingers tapping a desperate rhythm against his side. “This can still work if we change the plan. Instead of all of us sneaking in, Cordy can shift into a bird while the two of us wait right here. Then she’ll fly over everything else to get to Mother—”