فصل 11

11

The School Master’s Riddle

As the two schools slept, two heads surfaced outside in the black moat. Sophie and Agatha peeped out at the thin silver tower that divided lake from sludge. Too far to swim. Too high to climb. A cyclone of fairies guarded its spire, while an army of wolves with crossbows manned wooden planks at its base.

“And you’re sure he’s up there?” Sophie said.

“I saw him.”

“He has to help us! I can’t go back to that place!” “Look, we just beg him for mercy until he sends us home.” “Because that’ll work,” Sophie snorted. “Leave him to me.” For the last hour, the two girls had mulled every possible way to escape. Agatha thought they should sneak into the Woods and find their way back to Gavaldon. But Sophie pointed out that even if they did get past the gate snakes and any other booby traps, they’d just end up lost. (“They’re called the Endless Woods for a reason.”) Instead, she proposed they hunt for enchanted broomsticks or magic carpets or something else in the school closets that might fly them over the forest.

“And what direction would we fly in?” Agatha asked.

The two girls discarded other options—leaving a trail of bread crumbs (that never worked); seeking a kindly hunter or dwarf (Agatha didn’t trust strangers); wishing for a fairy godmother (Sophie didn’t trust fat women)—until there was only one left.

But now, peering up at the School Master’s fortress, they lost all hope.

“We’ll never get up there,” Sophie sighed.

Agatha heard a squawk in the distance.

“Hold that thought.”

A short while later, they were back in the Blue Forest, caked in sludge, eyeing a nest of big black eggs from behind a periwinkle bush. In front of the nest, five skeletal stymphs slept on indigo grass, littered with the blood and limbs of a half-eaten goat.

Sophie scowled. “I’m back where I started, covered in smelly ooze and who knows how many flesh-eating maggots and—what are you doing!” “As soon as they attack, we jump on.”

“As soon as they what?”

But Agatha was already tiptoeing to the eggs.

“The shoes burnt your brain!” Sophie hissed.

As Agatha inched towards the nest, she caught a closer look at the sleeping stymphs’ jagged teeth, gnarled talons, and spiked tails that shred flesh from bone. Suddenly doubting her plan, Agatha backed up, only to trip on a branch and fall on a goat leg with a loud crack. The stymphs opened their eyes. Her heart stopped.

Unless a villain wakes them up.

The pink dress wouldn’t fool them.

Agatha glowered at the waking fiends. She couldn’t give up now! Not when she had Sophie willing to go home! She lunged for the nest, snatched an egg, sprang up for the blitz— “Can’t watch, can’t watch—” Sophie mewled, squinting through fingers for spewing limbs and blood.

But the vicious birds were nuzzling Agatha, like puppies seeking milk.

“Ooh, that tickles!” she squealed. Sophie folded her arms.

Clumping back, Agatha handed the egg to her. “Your turn.” “Oh, please, if they like you, they’ll try to mate with me. Animals worship princesses,” said Sophie, sashaying towards the birds— The stymphs unleashed a war cry and charged.

“Helllllp!” Sophie threw the egg to Agatha, but the stymphs still chased Sophie, who ran in circles like a lunatic, five stymphs high stepping behind her in a moronic maypole parade until everyone forgot who was after who and the birds knocked into each other dizzily.

“See? I outsmarted them,” Sophie beamed.

A stymph bit her bottom. “Ayyyiiieee!” Sophie ran for the nearest tree. Only she couldn’t climb trees, so she hurled mashed gooseberries at the bird’s eye, but the bird had no eye, so the berries went right through bony socket and plopped to the ground.

Agatha watched stone-faced.

“Aggie, it’s coming!”

The stymph charged for Sophie, only to stop short and find Agatha perched on its back.

“Get on, you dimwit!” she shouted at Sophie.

“Without a saddle?” Sophie scoffed. “It’ll leave chafe marks.” The stymph lunged for her—Agatha walloped its head and slung Sophie by the waist onto the bird’s spine.

“Hang on tight!” Agatha yelled as the bird thrashed up to flight, somersaulting over the bay to get the girls off its back. Four more stymphs exploded from blue trees in murderous pursuit; Agatha kicked at the bird’s thighbones, Sophie holding on to her for dear life—“This is the worst plan evveerrr!” Hearing squawks and screams, the fairy and wolf guards squinted into the sky, only to see the intruders vanish into fog.

“There’s the tower!” Agatha cried, spotting the silver spire through the mist. A wolf’s arrow whizzed between the stymph’s ribs, almost slicing Sophie in half. Fairies stormed out of the fog, shooting golden webs from their mouths, and the stymph dove to avoid them, spinning to elude a new hail of wolf arrows. This time neither girl could hold on and tumbled off its back.

“Noooo!” screamed Agatha—

Sophie caught the last bone of the stymph’s tail. Agatha caught the last bit of Sophie’s glass shoe—“We’re going to die!” Sophie howled.

“Just hold on!” bellowed Agatha.

“My hands are sweaty!”

“We’re going to die!”

The stymph zoomed for the tower wall. But just as it whipped its tail to smash them, Agatha saw a window glint through fog.

“Now!” screamed Agatha. This time Sophie listened.

Golden nets shot from every direction and the stymph let out a helpless screech. But as fairies watched it plunge to its death, they looked at each other curiously.

There were no riders on its back.

The crash landing through the window left Sophie’s entire right side bruised and Agatha’s wrist gashed. But pain meant they were still alive. Pain meant they still had hope for getting home. With a chorus of groans, they staggered to their feet. Then Sophie saw the worst of the damage.

“My shoe!” She held up her glass heel, snapped to a serrated stump. “They were one of a kind,” she mourned. Agatha ignored her and limped ahead into the murky gray chamber, barely lit by the window’s dawn glow.

“Hello?” Agatha called. Echoes died unanswered.

The girls inched farther into the shadowy room. Stone bookcases cloaked gray brick walls, packed top to bottom with colorful bindings. Sophie dusted off a shelf and read the elegant silver letters on the wooden spines: Rapunzel, The Singing Bone, Thumbelina, The Frog King, Cap O’Rushes, The Six Swans . . . All the stories the children of Gavaldon used to drink up. She looked over at Agatha, who had made the same discovery across the room. They were standing in a library of every fairy tale ever told.

Agatha opened up Beauty and the Beast to find it written in the same elegant script as the spine, illustrated with vivid paintings like the ones in the foyers of both schools. Then she opened up The Red Shoes, Donkeyskin, and The Snow Queen and found that they too were written in the same regal hand.

“Aggie?”

Agatha followed Sophie’s gaze to the darkest part of the room. Through the shadows, she could make out a white stone table pressed against the wall. There was something looming over it: a long, thin dagger dangling magically in midair.

Agatha ran her fingers along the cold, smooth surface of the table and thought of all the blank headstones behind her house, waiting for bodies. Sophie’s eyes fixed on the hovering knife, eerily still a few feet above the white slab.

That’s when she saw it wasn’t a knife at all.

“It’s a pen,” she said softly.

It was made of pure steel and shaped like a knitting needle, lethally sharp at both ends. One side of the pen was engraved with a deep, flowing script that ran unbroken from tip to tip.

Suddenly the pen caught a sliver of sunlight and scattered blinding gold rays in every direction. Agatha turned from the glare. When she turned back, Sophie was climbing onto the table.

“Sophie, no!”

Sophie walked towards the pen, eyes wide, body rigid. The world dissipated in a blur of gray around her. All that remained was the shimmering, spindle-sharp pen, strange words reflecting in her glazed eyes. Somewhere inside, she knew what they meant. She reached for the tip.

“Don’t!” Agatha cried.

Sophie’s skin kissed ice-cold steel, blood about to pierce through— Agatha tackled her and both girls crashed to the table. Sophie broke from her trance and peered at Agatha suspiciously.

“I’m on a table. With you.”

“You were about to touch it!” Agatha said.

“Huh? Why would I touch a—”

Her eyes drifted up to the pen, which was no longer still. It dangled an inch from their faces, pointing between them with its deadly sharp tip as if weighing who to kill first.

“Don’t move,” Agatha said between clenched teeth.

The pen seared hot red.

“Move!” she cried.

The pen plunged and both girls rolled off the table, only to see the razor-sharp nib lurch to a stop just before it hit stone. A puff of black smoke and a book suddenly appeared on the table beneath it, bound with cherry-red wood. The pen flipped the cover open to the first blank page and began to write: “Once upon a time, there were two girls.”

The same elegant script as all the others. A brand-new fairy tale.

Sophie and Agatha gaped from the floor, terrified.

“Now that’s odd,” said a gentle voice.

The girls whipped around again. No one there.

“Students at my school train and toil for four years, venture into the Woods, seek their Nemeses, fight vicious battles . . . all just for the hope the Storian might tell their story.” The girls spun around. No one in the room at all. But then they saw their shadows merge on the wall, into the crooked shadow that kidnapped them. The girls turned slowly.

“And here it starts one for two first-year, unskilled, untrained, clumsy intruders,” said the School Master.

He wore silver robes that billowed over his hunched, slender frame, hiding his hands and feet. A rusted crown sat off center on his head of thick, ghostly white hair. A gleaming silver mask covered every last shred of his face, revealing only twinkling blue eyes and wide, full lips, curled in a mischievous smile.

“It must suspect a good ending.”

The Storian dove to the page:

“One was beautiful and beloved and the other was a lonely hag.” “I like our story,” Sophie said.

“It hasn’t gotten to the part where your prince punches you,” said Agatha.

“Homeward ho,” Sophie sulked.

They looked up and saw the School Master studying them.

“Readers are unpredictable, of course. Some have been our greatest students. Most have been embarrassing failures.” He gazed at the distant towers, turning his back to the girls. “But this just shows how confused Readers have become.” Agatha’s heart pounded. This was their chance! She jabbed Sophie. “Go!” “I can’t!” Sophie whispered.

“You said leave him to you!”

“He’s too old!”

Agatha elbowed her in the ribs, Sophie elbowed her back— “Many of the faculty say I kidnap you, steal you, take you against your will,” the School Master said.

Agatha kicked Sophie forward.

“But the truth is I free you.”

Sophie swallowed and took off her broken shoe.

“You deserve to live extraordinary lives.” Sophie crept towards the School Master, raising her jagged heel.

“You deserve the chance to know who you are.” The School Master turned to Sophie, shoe poised over his heart.

“We demand our release!” Agatha cried.

Silence.

Sophie dropped to her knees. “Oh, please, sir, we beg for mercy!” Agatha groaned.

“You took me for Good,” sobbed Sophie, “but they put me in Evil and now my dress is black and my hair’s dirty and my prince hates me and my roommates are murderers and there’s no Groom Rooms for Nevers so now”—she let out a soprano wail—“I smell.” She bawled into her hands.

“So you’d like to switch schools?” the School Master asked.

“We’d like to go home,” said Agatha.

Sophie looked up brightly. “Can we switch schools?” The School Master smiled. “No.”

“Then we’d like to go home,” Sophie said.

“Lost in a strange land, the girls wanted to go home,” the Storian noted.

“We have sent students home before,” the School Master said, silver mask flaring. “Illness, mental incapacity, the petition of an influential family . . .” “So you can send us home!” Agatha said.

“Indeed I could,” said the School Master, “if you weren’t in the midst of a fairy tale.” He eyed the pen across the room. “You see, once the Storian begins your story, then I’m afraid we must follow it wherever it takes you. Now the question is, ‘Will your story take you home?’” The Storian plunged to the page: “Stupid girls! They were trapped for eternity!” “I suspected as much,” said the School Master.

“So there’s no way home?” Agatha asked, eyes welling.

“Not unless it’s your ending,” the School Master said. “And going home together is a rather far-fetched ending for two girls fighting for opposing sides, don’t you think?” “But we don’t want to fight!” Sophie said.

“We’re on the same side!” said Agatha.

“We’re friends!” Sophie said, clasping Agatha’s hand.

“Friends!” the School Master marveled.

Agatha looked just as surprised, feeling Sophie’s grip.

“Well, that certainly changes things.” The School Master paced like a doddering duck. “You see, a princess and a witch can never be friends in our world. It’s unnatural. It’s unthinkable. It’s impossible. Which means if you are indeed friends . . . Agatha must not be a princess and Sophie must not be a witch.” “Exactly!” said Sophie. “Because I’m the princess and she’s the wi—” Agatha kicked her.

“And if Agatha is not a princess and Sophie is not a witch, then clearly I’ve got it wrong and you don’t belong in our world at all,” he said, pace slowing. “Maybe what everyone says about me is true after all.” “That you’re Good?” Sophie said.

“That I’m old,” the School Master sighed out the window.

Agatha couldn’t contain her excitement. “So we can go home now?” “Well, there is the thorny matter of proving all this.” “But I’ve tried!” Sophie said. “I’ve tried proving I’m not a villain!” “And I’ve tried proving I’m not a princess!” said Agatha.

“Ah, but there’s only one way in this world to prove who you are.” The Storian stopped its busy writing, sensing a pivotal moment. Slowly the School Master turned. For the first time, his blue eyes had a glint of danger.

“What’s the one thing Evil can never have . . . and the one thing Good can never do without?” The girls looked at each other.

“So we solve your riddle and you . . . send us home?” Agatha asked hopefully.

The School Master turned away. “I trust I won’t see either of you again. Unless you want a rather depressing end to your story.” Suddenly, the room started disappearing in a sweep of white, as if the scene was being erased before their eyes.

“Wait!” Agatha cried. “What are you doing!” First the bookshelves vanished, then the walls— “No! We want to go home now!” Agatha yelled.

Then the ceiling, the table, the floor around them—the two girls lunged to a corner to avoid being erased— “How do we find you! How do we answe—” Agatha ducked to avoid a streak of white. “You’re cheating!” Across the room, Sophie saw the Storian furiously writing to keep up with their fairy tale. The pen sensed her gaze, for the words in its steel suddenly seared red and Sophie’s heart burned again with secret understanding. Scared, she clung to Agatha— “You thief! You bully! You masked-face old creep!” Agatha screamed. “We’re fine without you! Readers are fine without you! Stay in your tower with your masks and pens and stay out of our lives! You hear me! Steal children from other villages and leave us alone!” The last thing they saw was the School Master turn from the window, smiling in a sea of white.

“What other villages?”

The ground vanished beneath the two girls’ feet and they free-fell into emptiness, the School Master’s last words echoing, blending into the wolves’ call to morning class— They woke, blinded by sunlight, swimming in puddles of sweat. Agatha looked for Sophie. Sophie looked for Agatha. But all they found were their own beds, in towers far apart.