Drawing closer, Agatha began to smell a faint tinge of sandalwood mixed with a familiar scent she couldn’t quite place, and as they moved into a tiny clearing, she saw that the smoke plumes were coming from a hole in the dirt, half-covered with dead fern fronds. The rabbit kicked the ferns aside and disappeared down the burrow, before peeking his face through the gap impatiently.
Agatha paused, reluctant to follow a stranger into a hole—
Tedros barreled right by her. “Nothin’ to lose,” he mumbled.
Before Agatha could argue, her prince lowered Uma into the hole and slid in behind her. Irritated, Agatha lowered herself down after him, landing awkwardly in darkness before Tedros caught her into his chest, soaking her with sweat. He smells good, Agatha noticed, inhaling his minty fresh scent. How could a boy possibly smell like spring fields after everything they’d just been through? She suddenly thought of Sophie, who’d smelled of honeycream even after traipsing up Graves Hill in the worst heat. Maybe that’s why Tedros missed Sophie, Agatha thought bitterly . . . they could lie around all day sniffing each other, flawless gold-haired idols, while here she was, a “holy bloody mess,” reeking of stress, dirt, and undead witch—
“Anyone here?” Tedros called.
Agatha snapped to attention, embarrassed by her thoughts. It was pitch-black in the hole, the rabbit nowhere to be seen.
“Hello?” Tedros echoed.
Nothing answered him.
The prince held out his hand and felt a wall of solid earth in front of him. “Why do we always end up in dirt?”
Agatha’s stomach rumbled. “Maybe the dove was telling us to eat the rabbit instead of follow him.”
“Or maybe the rabbit was telling us to leave Uma here, while we go look for League Headquarters.”
“You want us to dump a petrified teacher in a hole and leave?” said Agatha, flabbergasted.
“It’s not like she’s going anywhere.”
“Suppose you’ll dump me in a hole the moment I’m inconvenient too,” Agatha murmured, strangely confessional in the dark.
“Huh?”
“Then you can go get your sweet-smelling, beautiful, vibrant Sophie all alone,” Agatha vented, unable to stop herself.
“You didn’t happen to eat any strange mushrooms on the way, did you?”
“Go ahead, laugh. You can name your children Blond and Blonder.”
“Never pegged you as a jealous type,” Tedros marveled.
“Jealous? Why? Because you almost kissed her as a boy and a girl? Because you can make her feel loved in a way that I can’t? Me? Jealous?” Agatha ranted, thoroughly ashamed of herself now.
“Isn’t Sophie supposed to be the crazy one?”
“Bet you wouldn’t leave her in a dark pit—”
“And we thought Tweedledee and Tweedledum were hopeless,” said a hoary voice.
Agatha and Tedros choked, recognizing it at once, and twirled to see a torch spark to flame in the grip of a white-bearded gnome wearing a belted green coat with a silver swan over the heart and a pointy orange hat. A gnome Agatha thought had been killed in a fire, but now here he was, alive in a secret den. She burst into a smile, glowing with relief—
Yuba didn’t smile back. “First you lose a teacher because you fail to protect each other in the face of mortal danger. Then you fight so often and loudly that you’ve alerted the entire Woods as to your whereabouts. Now you’re so busy insulting each other that you forget to use a simple glow spell to illuminate your surroundings in the time that a Cave Troll could have bashed both your heads to smithereens. If it wasn’t for a rabbit rescuing you from yourselves, you two nincompoops would be dead before dawn,” he lashed, fingers twitching on his white staff as if he wanted to beat them with it. “A Bad Group is one thing. But you two Evers might just be the Worst Evers . . . Ever.”
Agatha and Tedros looked down, humiliated.
Yuba sighed. “Lucky for you, the League needs you as much as you need it.”
Torches roared to flame, lighting up a squad of strangers behind him in a giant cave headquarters the size of a small house.
“Presenting the honorable League of Thirteen, legendary legion of Good and Enlightenment,” Yuba proclaimed with an imperious smile, clearly expecting the Evers to look impressed, awed, or at least grateful for the glorious platoon that they had come all this way to see.
Agatha and Tedros blanched in horror instead.
Because the League of Thirteen that was their only hope to save Sophie, the League of Thirteen that was their only hope to stay alive . . . were all very, very old.
10
The Missing Thirteenth
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Tedros cracked, as he and Agatha goggled at the saggy, ancient crew.
Agatha counted four men and four women—a geriatric gang of liver spots, turkey necks, hairy ears, foggy eyes, yellowed teeth, beady grins, bony limbs, and heads of sparse, colorless, or poorly dyed hair. Two of the eight were in rickety wheelchairs, three had walking canes, two were hunched and bandy-legged, and one was a morbidly obese woman in a muumuu, slathering on makeup at a mirror.
All of them had silver swan crests over their hearts, like Uma, Yuba, and the White Rabbit, badges of membership to a League her mother had trusted with her daughter’s life.
She sent us here for a reason, thought Agatha desperately. Would they rip off masks, revealing invincible warriors? Would they magically turn young like the School Master? Agatha held her breath, waiting and praying for something to happen . . .
The League blinked back, like fish in an aquarium, waiting for something to happen too.
“Told ya they wouldn’t recognize us,” grumped the fat woman at the mirror.
“Recognize you?” In the reflection, Agatha glimpsed the woman’s pink, hoggish pallor, squinty green eyes, wide jowls, hideously rouged cheeks, and nest of flat curls that she’d tried to dye brown and had turned blue instead. She looked like a doll salvaged from the bottom of a swimming pool. “I’m quite sure I’ve never seen you—or any of you—in my life,” Agatha said, scanning the group. She turned to Tedros, hoping he’d seen something in them she hadn’t, but her prince was red as a fire ant, about to explode.
“This is who’s supposed to get us to Sophie?” he barked, blue eyes raking the puke-colored carpet, flower-patterned sofas, moth-eaten curtains, and thirteen hard, thin mattresses split into two rows. “A retirement home for the about-to-be dead?”
Yuba yanked him to the corner. “How dare you speak that way to the League!” he hissed, peeking to make sure the others couldn’t hear. “You know the lengths I’ve gone to find them? To bring them here? And here you act as if they have to introduce themselves to you like common folk—you, a boy who has no accomplishments to his name—”
“Tell that to a king in a few weeks!” Tedros bellowed.
“You arrogant prat! The way you’ve bungled things, you won’t make it a few days, let alone to a coronation!” Yuba shot back.
“First thing I’ll do is outlaw old gnomes!”
“Listen, my mother knew the League would help us,” Agatha broke in, giving Tedros a “calm-down” look. “That’s why she wrote them. So clearly we’re missing something—”
“Yeah, like people who aren’t a thousand years old!” Tedros lashed, earning another miffed look from his princess. “What,” he said, turning his fury on her. “We barely escape our own execution, then we learn our best friend loves an Evil sorcerer, then we travel night and day, surviving zombies and witches and graves, all to find a League your mother promised would get us to Sophie and this is it? Bollocks. Let’s go. Better chance of breaking into the school ourselves—”
“She was my mother, Tedros,” Agatha said. “And I trust her more than anyone in this world to know what’s best for us. Even you.”
Tedros fell quiet.
Agatha glanced back and saw the old, swan-crested strangers completely ignoring them now, knitting, reading, napping, card playing, and pulli
ng out false teeth to eat their gruel. Her faith in her mother suddenly wavered.
“Listen to me, both of you,” said Yuba. “When our thirteenth member returns, your questions will be answered. Until then, you both need some strong turnip tea and a bowl of oat porridge. Having survived in the Woods these last few months after 115 years of sanctuary at school, I know firsthand how intense your journey must have been—”
“Thirteenth member?” Agatha skimmed the room. “I only count eight.” Then she noticed the White Rabbit in the corner, slicing a carrot into fifths on a plate, the silver swan over his heart glimmering in torchlight. “Um, nine.”
“Ten, actually,” said Tedros, and Agatha followed his eyes to the silver swan on Yuba’s green coat.
“A founding member of the League,” the gnome puffed proudly. “And Uma makes eleven, of course, and—” Yuba flushed. “Uma! Goodness me!” He whirled to the Princess petrified in the corner. “Leaving her there like a house cat! Tink! Tink, where are you!”
Something snored loudly behind Agatha and she turned to see a pear-shaped fairy the size of a fist bolt awake and fall off a dirty ottoman. The fairy craned up groggily, with poufy gray hair, a green dress eight sizes too small, ragged gold wings, and garish red lipstick. Eyes darting right and left as if she knew she was supposed to be awake but had no idea why, she spotted Uma frozen in the corner and yelped, flapping and sputtering towards her like a dying bee. Then she slipped her hand into her dress, snatched a handful of what looked like moldy soot, and dumped it goonishly over Uma’s head.
Nothing happened.
“Dad took me to Ali Baba’s harem for my birthday once. This is so much more embarrassing,” Tedros mumbled, stomping towards the entrance hole to leave—
Uma coughed behind him. Tedros swiveled to see the princess levitating three feet off the ground, her skin filling out from pasty white to its usual rich olive color. Uma stretched her smooth, lithe arms into the air with a yawn, smiled at the fairy glassily . . . and collapsed to the ground, asleep once more.
“Here you were worried about your fairy dust being too old, Tink,” Yuba chuckled, patting the fairy’s head.
The fairy still looked gloomy and spurted squeaky gibberish.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Tink. You can’t expect to have the same stamina as when you were sixteen. Besides, we didn’t need Uma to fly from here to Shazabah; we just needed your dust to unpetrify her. A few sound hours of sleep and she’ll be good as new. Now where were we,” the gnome mulled, turning back to the Evers. “Oh yes, rabbit makes nine, Uma makes ten, I make eleven, and Tinkerbell makes twelve, so that just leaves—”
“Tinkerbell?” Agatha blurted.
“The real Tinkerbell?” asked Tedros, staring at the fairy’s mottled face, potbelly, and ash-colored hair. “But she’s so . . . so . . .”
Agatha gave him a lethal look, but it was too late. Tinkerbell burst into sobs and hid under an ottoman.
“He didn’t mean it, Tink,” Yuba huffed and smacked Tedros in the backside with his staff.
“I don’t understand,” Agatha said, bewildered. “What is Tinkerbell doing here?”
“Really found yourselves some smarties, didn’t you, Yuba,” said a bald, skinny man in a green vest with elfish ears and delicate features, knitting a lime-green sock. “Still can’t see who we are.”
“Maybe we need to count your rings like a tree,” Tedros muttered, rubbing his behind.
“Go ahead, make all the old jokes you want, pretty boy,” the bald man fired. “As if you won’t get to our age yourself someday.”
“Well, it seems our two amateurs need introductions after all,” Yuba scolded, giving Tedros and Agatha furious scowls before shoving them into two of the rocking chairs. He turned back to his League. “Who wants to go first?”
“Don’t see why we should introduce ourselves,” the sock-knitting man crabbed. “Don’t see why we should let these two stay here at all.”
Yuba exhaled impatiently. “Because these two Evers are our only hope to—”
“What’s the point? You heard the boy. We’re on death’s door anyway,” the bald man pouted.
“Oh come now,” Yuba said, softening. “What’d you say when I came to fetch you from Neverland? Holed up in your tree house all alone, refusing to join the League, even when I told you your life was in terrible danger. But then I told you about these two young Evers and you lit up like a little boy. Told me you’d do anything to be around young people again . . . that they were the only ones who ever truly understood you, Peter . . .”
Peter looked up at Yuba, blue eyes glistening. Then he looked back down. “Tink made me come,” he muttered. The fairy squealed in protest and pelted him with a lump of gruel.
Agatha and Tedros gawped at each other. Peter? Peter Pan?
“I’m with Peter,” boomed the huge, blue-haired woman, spinning from the mirror. “Not even out of school, these little brats. Should be lickin’ our feet and beggin’ for autographs! Instead they somehow get their own fairy tale—students! a fairy tale!—and now that tale’s got its panties in a knot, wakin’ our old villains from the dead and draggin’ us straight out of our Ever Afters—”
“Ever Afters! Ha!” chimed a gangly, high-voiced man in suspenders and beige breeches, with big, twinkly eyes, a long nose, and a full head of white hair. Tiny round scars marked all the joints of his long, tanned limbs, as if he’d once been screwed together. “First of all, Peter can barely leave his house he’s so depressed at growing up. Second, I’d never have wished to be a real boy if the Blue Fairy told me real boys end up with arthritis and bad eyes and permanent constipation. And third, Ella told me herself she preferred sweeping cinders to being a queen.”
“When did I ever say that?” the fat woman squawked.
“Last night,” the long-nosed man replied, looking surprised by her question. “You drank a barrel of wine and told me you miss cleaning for your stepsisters, because at least you felt useful and stayed fit and now you’re old and bored and big as a house—”
“WHO ASKED YOU?” thundered the woman. “YOU SPENT HALF YOUR LIFE AS A PUPPET!”
“First they get mad at me for lying. Now they get mad at me for telling the truth,” moped the long-nosed man, curling into a sofa.
Agatha’s and Tedros’ eyes bulged even wider. “Pinocchio?” said Tedros.
“Cinderella?” said Agatha.
“Don’t give me that face,” Cinderella sneered back at her. “For bein’ Camelot’s supposed future queen, you ain’t much to look at yourself.” Her hawkish green eyes shot down to Agatha’s clumps. “Bet no one wants to see those feet in glass slippers.”
“Hey now! She’s my princess!” Tedros jumped in.
“I don’t blame you, handsome,” Cinderella smirked, voice smooth as an eel. “Your daddy didn’t have good taste in girls either.”
Tedros looked like he’d been kicked in the pants.
Yuba sighed. “Professor Dovey had just as much faith in Agatha as she did in you, Ella. So I suggest you treat our guests with respect—”
“We have the respect when these two studenten fix the mess!” croaked a wild-haired, hunchbacked man in a wheelchair with owlish gray eyes and a harsh foreign accent. “Think they’re special because Storian writes their story? Well, at least our stories have end, yes? But these two change ending again and again—‘Are we heppy yet?’ ‘Are we heppy yet?’ Bah. Fools! Now see! School Master young, Evil redoing stories, and dead witch hunting me I have to kill all over again—”
“I killed her, Hansel and I am not killing smelly witch again,” said a wild-haired woman in a wheelchair next to him with the same accent, her big gray eyes flaying Agatha and Tedros. “Your story bringing villains out of graves, your responsibility put them back.” She smiled phonily. “And I’m Gretel, since the bossy little gnome said we must introduce ourselves.”
“Which leaves me and Briar Rose (or Sleeping Beauty for the uneducated Reader), who were planning our fairy
-tale wedding until you came along,” said a freckle-faced man with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a brown tunic and white lederhosen. He was holding hands with an elegant, white-haired woman in a revealing puce gown. “Now we’re hiding from my man-eating giant and Rose’s curse-obsessed fairy—”
“When Jack and I should be picking out a cake,” Briar Rose glared.
“That makes seven of us who think these young twerps should sleep in the Woods,” trumped Cinderella.
Tink squeaked.
“Eight,” said Cinderella.
Tedros and Agatha gawked at the gang of famous old fairy-tale heroes who just voted them out of their cave.
“It’s why I tried to avoid you meeting Evers on the trails . . .” Uma yawned in the corner. “Everyone blames you for messing up the Woods.” She fell back asleep.
“Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think they’re adorable,” chirped a short, big-bottomed old woman with a dyed brown bob and a red-hooded cape. “Isn’t that what being old is for? Mentoring younger folk to get through their stories?”
“Oh go back to granny’s, you blithering ass,” growled Cinderella.
Red Riding Hood shut up.
“You all act as if we don’t need our young guests,” Yuba’s voice slashed through the cave.
Everyone twirled to see the old gnome standing in front of the moth-holed curtain hanging across the cave wall, the White Rabbit standing at his side like a magician’s assistant. “Let me remind you that one week ago, the School Master placed his ring on his queen’s finger, earning her vow of true love. That same night, the villains rose from their graves on Necro Ridge and the Crypt Keeper was killed.”
On Yuba’s cue, the rabbit drew the curtain back, revealing dozens of storybooks spread open to their last pages, tacked to the wall with sharpened sticks.
“Two days later, Rapunzel and her prince were kidnapped by Mother Gothel and hurled from her tower to their deaths,” the gnome declared, illuminating one of the storybooks with his staff and its gruesome new ending to Rapunzel’s story. “Then yesterday Tom Thumb was eaten alive by a giant, while Rumpelstiltskin killed the miller’s daughter who’d once guessed his name,” Yuba went on, lighting up two more storybooks with revised endings. “And today, Snow White and her seven dwarves have been murdered at Cottage White, where they once lived happily.” He snapped his staff like a whip, lighting up a last storybook with a loud crack. “All of these victims refused to leave their homes and join our League in hiding, as did many others who may soon suffer the same fate.”