Three sisters stand in a dim cavern. On a curving vault of sandstone, three shapes of coursers are pressed into the rock with pigmented dirt.  The shapes have small black heads and swooping red backs. They are stacked, one in front of the other, in offset succession like ghosts, or the imprint of the sun on the sisters' retinas. They are snapshots in time. The strokes of a gallop. Draig twists his claws in Blodwen's mane, his little green head turning to follow where the...

White. The tree is white. Down here, sunless, forgotten, it has lost all its colour to the ground beneath it, leeched away into leaf-coloured moss and bark-coloured stone. Blodwen, born of clay and the magic of the dungeon with her sisters, has never heard of such a tree. If any courser ought to know, it would be the sisters. The walls here are quiet, though. Damp. Dampening. Keeping their secret from the rest of the whispering stone and gossiping ferns. Count Blodwen int...

"Those look heavy," Terrence said. He was smiling, which Ffion didn't like. Was he meant to be joking? She snorted and looked up the path, but the mercenary lengthened his stride to keep pace when she tried to pull away. He covered more ground than her legs could manage, which was annoying, and he loomed in towards her the way adults always did when they expected an answer. She didn't like his eyes, either. The shock of their color made them pointed, and their quickness was hungry. Hungry for...

Solitude was unimaginable to Ffion. Some days, while bounding shoulder-to-shoulder down the corridors with Angharad and Blodwen, she felt like one leg of a larger animal. Her hooves would thunder in sync with her sisters, their sighs forced out by synchronized strides so that she imagined they all shared one breath, that it simply traveled between them out of one breast then into another. A single spirit. A single life. Ffion and her sisters had entered this world as a trio. Though dis...