That single note sang around the field from a dozen different angles at once, rising up into unearthly harmony.

Giles had grasped full control over his own sorcery in their frantic flight past the soldiers at Mount Corve … and now his voice echoed from everywhere at once. It swirled through the landscape, piercing the air with its purity.

Commanding. Inescapable.

Singing the truth:

Burned-out houses

Broken land

Where our homes

Should all still stand …

His words were rich, golden bells that pealed down the hillside, into the city and across the field into every soldier’s ear. It was an incredible, unheard-of, magical performance—and Cordelia recognized his haunting, melancholy tune immediately. It was the same melody he’d hummed for days as they’d traveled through the blasted landscape, witnesses to devastation.

A loud, wet gulp sounded beside her as his song pealed over the hillside. Cordelia turned and stared as Rosalind wiped a glistening stream of tears off her face.

“Shut up!” Rosalind hissed when she caught Cordelia looking. “Don’t you dare tell him. I just …” She trailed off, brown eyes still suspiciously bright in her reddened face.

She wasn’t the only one. A strange, hushed silence had fallen over the sea of adult soldiers. As the three triplets walked together down the wide dirt path into the valley, the armed men and women ahead watched in openmouthed silence …

… And Cordelia spotted more than one of them surreptitiously rubbing their own eyes.

The land was listening, too. Cordelia felt it tremble, deep at its core, as Giles’s voice rose and fell, filled with a pain and yearning that resonated perfectly with the earth below.

His song carried the same message that the land had screamed for decades, desperate for anyone to listen:

Broken. Broken. Broken. Heal us!

Land in pieces

Families lost

So much death

Too high a cost …

A soldier at the front of the line dropped his pike to the ground as he toppled to his knees, scrubbing his fists across his lowered face.

“Up!” His commander’s face was screwed tight and angry, her shoulders held martially tight. “To your feet, man!”

But all around her, dozens of other men and women fell to their knees like broken leaves from autumn trees, dropping their weapons as Giles’s song curled in lapping, wistful waves around them.

There was a time—

Could come again—

When our cousins

Were our friends,

When the land

Was ours to tend.

If fighting stopped,

This all could end …

Soldiers all across the field gave physical starts with the shock of sudden silence as Giles’s magically directed voice cut off, leaving them all stranded. His final word still hung in the air, a dissonant note waiting for resolution.

He had left the song, like his message, wide open. Hurting. Begging them:

Heal us—and stop this madness!