فصل 19

19

Old School Reunions

Do girls have softer heads than boys?

All Tedros could feel was drool dripping off his lip, his scraped-up cheek, and his skull ripping with pain. He couldn’t feel his eyes, let alone open them, and he wondered if this is how mangos felt when they fell off trees and smashed to bits, before he realized mangos don’t have feelings and he was likely suffering from a violent concussion.

Between pangs of nausea, he tried to touch the back of his head and check for blood, but his hands wouldn’t budge.

Slowly he slit open his eyes to see he was still in a girl’s body, splayed on a white canopied bed, his mouth gagged and wrists lashed to bedposts with red velvet sheets.

Stomach sinking, he turned his head to see Sophie perched on a stone altar table in the corner, the Storian paused over a blank page.

“Well, Essa—if that is indeed your name—you’ve told me so many lies that listening to you, ‘girl to girl’ seems rather pointless, don’t you think? But let me tell you what I do know. You’re not a new student. You’re not a Never assassin. You’re not a Never at all. You and your ‘cousin’ are spies for Good, here to destroy my happy ending. Only you’re too late, Essa dear. Agatha and Tedros are long gone, as this blank page attests, and Rafal and I would be in the throes of a heavenly romantic evening if it wasn’t for you.” Tedros garbled urgently into his gag.

“Still have something to say? Oh dear,” Sophie drawled, standing up. “Well, since the School Master and you are such bosom buddies, why don’t you just tell it to him.” She raised her fingerglow towards the window, about to shoot a flare into the sky— Sophie dropped her hand, eyes widening.

On the bed, Essa’s long hair was lightening from black to gold.

It shrank into her scalp, as her chin dimpled and her cheeks hardened, amber stubble stippling her jaw. Faster now, her legs and arms sprouted with fuzz, her feet ballooned two sizes and her shoulders and chest broadened, shredding her shirt seams. As the girl stranger writhed in pain, her calves chiseled, her biceps rippled, her forearms swelled, bursting the knots of her binds, until at last she tore away the gag with a virile roar, no longer a girl or stranger at all, but a prince in his body like a lion uncaged.

Sophie backed into a corner. “Teddy?”

A familiar scratching sound filled the chamber and Sophie looked down to see the Storian spill a new scene on the blank page: a bow-legged, helmet-haired girl hurtling across Halfway Bridge into the School for Old.

“Aggie?” Sophie squeaked.

She looked up at Tedros, legs shaking, breath shallowing.

“Don’t panic,” the prince soothed, as he inched across the bed. “Just don’t panic, sweet pea . . .” He reached for her, breaking into a winning smile. “A prince is here to rescue you, okay? Everything is just fi—” Sophie panicked. She lurched for the window, finger glowing, and shot a hot pink flare into the night— A blast of gold light obliterated it and Sophie spun to see Tedros’ glowing finger pointed at her.

“Listen. I’m a boy now. So either we do this the easy way or the hard way,” he warned, waiting for Sophie to stop hyperventilating and come to her senses.

Instead, she ran for the window, trying to fire off another flare.

“Hard way it is,” sighed Tedros.

Two minutes later, Sophie was cuffed to the bedpost with red velvet sheets, shouting every possible curse word into her gag.

Tedros glared back from the altar table, shirt ripped and covered in scratch marks.

“Now, for once in our lives, Sophie, the two of us are going to have a normal conversation.” The Storian knows where I am, Agatha thought, as she stole through a dark corridor, back in her girl body. It was only a matter of time before the School Master came hunting her.

A clock clanged high in the castle. Eleven o’clock. One hour left.

Her clump steps quickened, muffled by loud drips from the moldy ceiling. She had to find Tedros’ sword now. Excalibur was their only hope to destroy the School Master’s ring—and thus the School Master himself.

But where was it?

Even with a head start, she had no idea what was inside the School for Old, let alone who was lurking within its castle or where to look for a single sword blade that could be hidden anywhere: in a secret cabinet, behind a fireplace, under a doormat, through an invisible door, beneath the stones she was treading on. . . . Who was she kidding! This was a fool’s mission!

Agatha buckled against a wall, trying not to throw up. I can’t do this. I’ll never find it.

An old voice answered inside of her.

“Do not fail.”

Merlin’s last words.

The same as her mother’s.

The wizard had put Good’s fate in her and Tedros’ hands for a reason.

Maybe she doubted herself. But she didn’t doubt Merlin.

Do not fail.

This time the voice was hers.

On a deep breath, Agatha turned into the foyer.

The entrance chamber was quiet, empty, and insufferably humid. Any trace of the military-themed, refurbished School for Boys had been rubbed out, with the black stone foyer back the way it was first year: leaky, lumpy and dimly lit by gargoyles wielding torches in their mouths. With no sign of guards, Agatha scampered into the sunken anteroom adjoining the foyer, where three twisting staircases ascended to the dormitories. The portraits of the new Nevers were gone, no doubt moved across the bay. But the rest of the walls were still jam-packed with old Evil students, each frame carrying a portrait next to a scene of what they became after graduation.

Only now, as Agatha inched closer, she saw that the frames of Evil’s most famous villains had all been defaced.

Captain James Hook’s old student portrait as a young, broodingly handsome boy was splotched in graffiti from multiple people: DON’T BLOW IT THIS TIME!

Payback for Pan!

NO ONE BEATS HOOK TWICE!

Over a gluttonous boy who became Jack’s giant, there were more scribbled exhortations: SECOND CHANCE AT GLORY!

KILL HIM AND HIS LITTLE COW TOO!

JUST STEP ON THE LAD!

Agatha scanned more frames along the wall: a willowy girl who’d become a famous Evil fairy (“NO SPINNING WHEELS THIS TIME!”), a blond boy with a scanty blue moustache who’d become Bluebeard (“YOU GONNA LET A GIRL WIN AGAIN?”), and dozens more notorious villains, their portraits splashed with more motivational creeds . . . until her eyes stopped on a Nevergirl whose face looked eerily familiar. Then Agatha noticed the graduation scene next to it: a raven-haired witch standing in front of a gingerbread house with her daughter. It was the same picture as the one on Hester’s night table, only here scrawled with a single taunt: Hear your kid’s a better witch than you!

Agatha inched closer. Who did all this?

Voices suddenly floated from the foyer—

She dove behind a staircase.

An undead ogre and an undead hobgoblin stalked into the stair room, both stitched up and shedding off skin like the zombie villains she’d seen in the Woods. The ogre, bald and potbellied, had a thick gray hide, a serrated spine, and wielded a wooden cudgel, while the slimy, green hobgoblin with stumpy white horns carried a twisted brass dagger.

“Turnin’ fog to chocolate? Bloody good prank if you ask me,” chortled the ogre in a gravelly voice. “Few’a those New whippersnappers might amount to somethin’ after all.” “Don’t know why you think this is funny,” piped the shrill-voiced goblin. “Came back to do our stories over again, not patrol empty halls and chase candy. Why can’t I be in class upstairs with the others?” “Henchmen guard the castle, not go to class,” groused the ogre. “Best git back to yer’ post. Anyone breaks in and the School Master will shove us back inna graves we came from.” The goblin sighed and the two parted ways into opposing halls.

Behind the stairwell, Agatha didn’t move. “Class?” What classes were taught in the School for Old? And more importantly, who was taking them?

On instinct, she tiptoed from her hiding place and up a staircase, quite sure that whoever the students were at this school were the same hooligans who’d defaced the portraits.

The classrooms were lined up in an airless corridor off the first floor of Malice tower, Agatha recalled, but as soon as she turned off the landing, she saw two spear-toting guards down the hall and ducked behind the banister.

Of course the classrooms are guarded, you idiot. But how else was she supposed to get a view inside?

She racked her brain for a plan, listening to the trolls pace up and down the hall, feeling a cold breeze raise goosebumps on her skin . . .

A cold breeze? In an airless hall?

She looked up. High over her head there was a hollow air shaft, boxed out of the ceiling.

Moments later, Agatha’s bare toes clung to the banister like a balance beam, her clumps tucked into the waist of her breeches, as she reached for the sides of the vent, trying not to make a sound. She unfurled her fingers as far as they’d go, but they were still two inches short. Leaning on her tiptoes, she stretched her hands higher, higher, feeling her shoulders strain out of their sockets, and clawed her finger pads into the mildew coating the vent. Hoisting herself up with desperate strength, Agatha had almost jammed her head and neck through, when she felt one of her clumps sliding out of her shorts. Gasping, she swung one-armed from the vent like a monkey, lunging to catch it, only to see her shoe fall through the gap in the staircase and crash far below with an ear-splitting boom.

Crap.

Instantly, she propelled herself back into the vent, nearly breaking her elbows, and crawled as fast as she could through the cramped stone shaft, hearing the trolls’ stunned voices and footsteps racing towards the stairs.

Soon she didn’t hear them anymore, only the swirling air in the vent churning past her. The light from the staircase dwindled and she was in pitch-dark, with no clue where she was headed, until she began to hear a growing clamor and glimpsed wintry gray light spraying into the vent from a grating ahead. The buzz grew louder as Agatha drew closer, knees skinning along stone, before she flattened her belly against the grates and peered down through the slats.

Her mouth fell open.

Lady Lesso’s old frozen classroom was teeming with famous villains, stitched up and undead—at least 40 of them, hunched at desks, jammed under chairs, stuffed into corners, practically sitting on laps, so that there wasn’t an inch of frosted floor untaken. She recognized many of these crusty, stitched-up Nevers, either from storybooks she’d read in Gavaldon, their gravestones on Necro Ridge, or the portraits downstairs. There was runty Rumpelstiltskin, the frog-faced Witch of the Wood, bloodshot Bluebeard, wizened old Baba Yaga, and even Jack’s oafish Giant, looking bruised and battered from his encounter with Princess Uma’s army.

No wonder we didn’t see more of them in the Woods, Agatha thought. The villains had all been at their old school.

But doing what?

At the front of the classroom was a slender, ferocious-looking woman in a tattered silver gown, with a full face of makeup, a coiled bun of white hair, and skin stitched up like the rest.

“A month since the School Master brought us back to school and what do we have to show for it? Five old stories turned Evil. FIVE! We’ll never make it to Woods Beyond with five stories. You heard the School Master. Every story changed brings us one step closer to the Reader World.” Agatha’s heart stopped. Reader World? Woods Beyond? Was she talking about . . . Gavaldon?

“I have my own work to do, it seems,” the old woman’s voice harrumphed. “Cinderella is alive, out there in the Woods, and my worthless daughters have yet to locate her. Can’t have another turn at a fairy tale unless you find your old Nemesis first, can you?” She glowered at two hideous undead girls in the corner. “Now, for homework the School Master asked each of you to pinpoint the mistake that made you lose your story the first time. Giant, let’s start with you.” Jack’s giant held up a storybook, open to a painting of him sleeping in his castle as Jack sneaked past him. “Nappin’ on the job,” he sulked.

“Is that what got you beat by Princess Uma and a buncha animals too? ‘Nappin’ on the job’?” Rumpelstiltskin snorted.

“Just ‘cause you redone your story already don’t mean you can be rude,” the giant fired.

“Who’s next?” Cinderella’s stepmother snapped.

As the old villains continued presenting their worst moments, Agatha crept ahead to the grating over the next classroom.

Dozens of undead villains milled between corkboards blanketed in hand-drawn maps of the Woods, covered with red and blue pins and scraps of multicolored notes. At first, Agatha didn’t recognize many of these witches and monsters . . .

Then her stomach plunged.

Near the far wall, Snow White’s rotted old witch and Red Riding Hood’s wolf, nursing a black eye and bandaged leg, were both having an intense conversation with a third villain Agatha had never met before: a man, tall and darkly handsome, despite his zombified skin, with curly black hair, a pirate’s hat, and instead of a right hand, a gleaming silver hook.

“Wolf found them on Necro Ridge and I saw them here at Cottage White,” grunted Snow White’s witch, tapping a yellowed fingernail on a map.

“Which means League Headquarters must be north of Maidenvale,” Captain Hook surmised in a deep, silken voice. “I’m guessing within a mile of Knobble Hill . . .” He smiled thinly, stroking his hook. “Mmm, thirteen heroes at once. Wouldn’t that be dandy?” Agatha’s heart was in her throat. A mile from Knobble Hill? That’s precisely where League Headquarters was! She had to warn Merlin as soon as she got back. But first things first; she had a sword to find— Suddenly ogre howls rang through the castle like a fire alarm. The door burst open and a troll guard crashed in.

“INTRUDER! Intruder in the castle! Double meals to whoever finds it!” Villains raucously stampeded out of the room after the troll, leaving Agatha petrified. She skirted to the wall and skittered through the vent like a cockroach, stopping at each grating, catching glimpses of five classrooms of undead Nevers emptying into the hall with bloodthirsty whoops . . . until she saw Captain Hook again right under her, speaking to a tall, shirtless boy, gorgeous and lean with spiked white hair and alabaster skin.

Agatha froze.

Him.

And he was holding her clump.

“Troll found this,” the young School Master snarled. “Agatha’s inside this castle. And either that mincing prince is with her or he’ll come to us once we capture her. I need you to command the rest and—” He stopped cold. His eyes rose to the ceiling and Agatha dove away from the grating just in time. Hidden in shadow, she held her breath. Keep talking . . . keep talking . . . please, please, please— “Search the dungeons and the belfry,” the School Master’s voice continued. “Leave no stone unturned.” Agatha almost fainted in relief. As long as he was here, away from the Storian, he couldn’t know she was hiding right over his head.

“But I want Agatha alive. It’s time I had a little talk with our dear princess,” said the School Master. “Now marshal the men while I secure the museum. Understood?” “Yes, Master,” Hook said.

Agatha peeked through the grate and watched them part ways. Captain Hook, the Captain Hook, was looking for her? And not only him, hundreds of villains, just as famous and deadly? She was dead . . . more than dead . . . she was horse meat— And yet, as she watched the mob of hooting villains combing the castle, something the School Master said was still gnawing at her.

Secure the museum.

He had the chance to find and kill her and he was worried about the museum? Of all the things in the castle, why would an invincible sorcerer possibly need to secure a muse— Agatha choked and bolted upright, smacking her head into the vent. Scrambling onto her hands and knees, she started down the air shaft in the direction he went.

There was only one thing in the world the Woods’ greatest villain needed to secure.

The one weapon that could destroy him and his minions forever.

A holy sword Agatha never thought she could find.

And now the School Master was surely taking her right to it.

Tedros used magic to whisk away Sophie’s gag, because he was afraid she’d bite his face if he got too close.

“Better pray I never get out of these,” Sophie spat, flailing against the velvet sheets binding her to the bedpost.

“Now hold your horses,” Tedros growled, trying to salvage what was left of his shirt.

“Rafal will be here any moment, so I suggest you take your horses and scat if you don’t want to end up dissected for Evil research. Where’s Agatha?” “Getting my sword from the School for Evil. You’ll need it to destroy your ring—” Tedros started, only to instantly regret it when he saw Sophie’s face.

“My ring? My Queen’s ring?” Sophie shot back. “That’s why you were ogling it on the shore? Because you want me to destroy it?” “Uh, it’s how we k-k-kill the School Master,” Tedros stammered, knowing he was talking too much. “It’s how you’ll be free—look, we can discuss this later, once we get out of—” “Free?” Sophie hissed, shielding her ring. “By killing the boy who loves me? By taking me away from the one place where I might finally be happy? So I can live Ever After following you and your princess like a dog?” “Be reasonable, Sophie. You can’t stay with the School Master! He’s a monster!” “His name is Rafal, he’s different now, and for your information, we were supposed to have our first date tonight—” “Where you’d probably end up drinking the blood of little children together,” Tedros retorted. “Now hear me out before I gag you again—” “Don’t you dare threaten me,” Sophie scorched. “You can’t hurt me more than you already have, Tedros. You made Agatha pick you over me. You made her believe she couldn’t have her best friend and her prince. You tried to send me back home alone to no mother, a rotten father, a haggish stepmother, stepbrothers who’ve already moved into my room, and a town where no one—no one—cares about me. You and your princess sent me to hell with a kiss, and just when I found my way to a boy who truly cares about me, to a happy ending that might finally be real . . . here you are riding in on your white horse again to take it all away.” Tedros gazed at his once-princess tied up on the bed. “Sophie, don’t you get it? He isn’t what he looks like. He isn’t your true love. He’s Evil. And if you stay with him, that makes you Evil too. There’ll be no way back to Good this time.” Sophie’s eyes sparkled. “Do you know why I wanted a fairy tale my whole life? Because a fairy tale means love that never ends. I thought that love was you, Tedros. Then I thought it was Agatha. But it’s him. It has to be him.” Tedros stood up from the table. Sophie watched the prince move towards the bed, his hair haloed in torchlight, as he slipped onto the sheets next to her. Their legs touched as they sat in silence.

“You think we’d come all this way if we didn’t love you?” he said softly. “We’re your best friends.” Sophie turned away. “No, Agatha was my best friend. My only friend. I needed her, Tedros. More than I needed anyone. But you made Agatha choose between a boy and her friend. And now you’re trying to make me choose too.” Sophie shook her head, letting tears fall. “How could she do it? How could she just throw me away?” “She made a mistake, Sophie,” Tedros said. “When you fight for love, sometimes you think it’s you against the world. You become scared. You see what isn’t there. It happened to Agatha. It happened to me. And now it’s happening to you.” She felt him reach up behind her, undoing her first bind.

“But there’s nothing holding us back anymore,” he said. “We can all be together now.” “Even fairy tales have limits,” said Sophie. “Three people can’t have an Ever After. Not without me being alone.” “You won’t be alone, Sophie.” She could feel his forearm caress her neck as it reached for the other bind. “You’ll have two people who want to see you happy. And until we have you in our lives again, we can’t be happy either.” “You and Agatha have each other. You don’t need me.”

“She and I could barely be in the same room together until we came to find you. We should never have left you behind.” She felt his skin on her wrist, the loosening of a knot. “This journey to find you and fix our past mistakes ended up making Agatha and I closer. You brought Agatha and I together, like you always have before.” The velvet cuff fell away, setting Sophie free. She stared into his eyes, his last words stinging her.

“Come with us, Sophie,” Tedros said, tilting her chin up, the way he once asked her to a Ball. “Come with Agatha and me to Camelot.” Sophie curled into his chest, making him hold her. “Maybe you can’t see it. But now you brought me and Rafal closer too,” she whispered, almost to herself.

“What?”

“If I go with you, I won’t find love again,” Sophie said, nuzzling Tedros tighter. “My story proves it. I’m unlovable by anyone else. My best friend. My father. My prince. Not even Hort wants me anymore.” “Because you’ve forgotten what love really is. Good is the path to love, Sophie. Not Evil.” “Rafal is my only path now,” she said, remembering what it was like to be this close to a prince . . .

“There has to be a way,” Tedros pressed. “There has to be a way to make you come with us.” “No, it’s too late . . .” Sophie inhaled his scent, trying to wrest herself away, trying to let him go. “Take Agatha and leave.” “Not without you,” he said, his lips at her ear.

“I won’t leave him . . . I won’t leave my true love,” Sophie fought, looking to Rafal’s ring for strength.

Only now she saw something else on her finger . . . rubbed raw by the binds . . . her heart’s only answer all along . . .

“Unless . . . ,” she whispered.

“Unless . . . ?” Tedros breathed.

Sophie clasped his hand.

Tedros looked down and stiffened.

Because now he saw his name on her flesh too.

“Unless I had you back,” Sophie said.