Merlin pulled a wisp of cloud over the prince like a blanket and turned back to Agatha. “Why your mother fled to the world of Readers or how she got there we do not know. All we know is that just before her death, Callis sent a note with her cat, instructing the League of Twelve to protect you and help you rescue your best friend from the School Master. How Callis knew of the League’s existence remains a mystery to me. I would let you keep the note she sent us, but I myself never saw it, for it was intercepted by the wolf and giant who almost took your lives.” Merlin smiled wryly at Agatha. “But as I’m sure you know, Reaper is smart enough to read the contents of a note before he carries it.”
“Reaper?” Agatha breathed. “Reaper was . . . here?”
“He managed to locate Yuba in the Woods, who unfortunately didn’t speak a word of Cat. Luckily, Yuba had been hiding out with Princess Uma, who found the gnome after he’d barely escaped being burnt alive by Evelyn Sader. Once Uma translated Reaper’s message, Yuba urgently reconvened the League, with Uma added to the ranks, despite the others’ prejudice against youth and superstitions against thirteen as our final number.”
“Where’s Reaper now?” Agatha pressed. “Can I see him?”
“He’s away on League business, I’m afraid, which you’ll learn about in time,” said Merlin. “But that is where the story ends for now, Agatha, as it’s time for you to sleep.”
Agatha tightened. “But—”
“Any more questions will have to wait until the morning, my dear . . . except for two that I invite you to ponder in your dreams.”
Agatha looked up as Merlin leaned in, his dark eyes reflecting the stars.
“If your mother is the Never the Storian wrote about . . . if your mother is the Never who made it into a storybook . . . then why is it Sophie’s mother who has a villain’s grave in our world?” Merlin leaned closer, his face no longer friendly. “And if it’s your mother the School Master wanted, then why, after all these years, is it Sophie who’s the School Master’s queen . . . and not you?”
Agatha locked eyes with him as the cloud caved in beneath her and she plunged like an angel sent back to earth. Gasping, flailing, she looked up for Merlin, for Tedros, but her eyes were already closing, and soon she was lost to the dark, falling, falling, and never hitting ground.
15
The Magician’s Plan
Agatha dreamt of Reaper in the toilet, trapped in the bowl, unable to be pulled out. Her only choice was to flush him down and swim into the toilet after him, which seemed a perfectly logical choice at the time, so follow him she did, into swirling, funneling water, then a dim, snaky passage, and finally into open sea.
The water was ice-cold and a squalid, slimy green, obscuring any sign of her cat, until she saw Reaper’s bright yellow eyes floating far below like signal flares. Down she swam, into pitch-dark deep, holding her breath, until her feet touched the sand. Unable to see anything but his two disembodied eyes, blinking and darting in blackness, she focused on her finger until it glowed gold, lighting up the sea floor. Reaper was digging frantically at a grave with his bald, wrinkly paws, an oval-shaped headstone looming over him.
Breath running low, Agatha tried to pull Reaper away, since she knew Vanessa’s grave was empty, but he dodged her grip and kept clawing and digging into sand. She snatched him again, only this time Reaper bit her wrist hard and Agatha screamed, losing the rest of her air as droplets of blood blurred into the water. Incensed, she grabbed her cat by the neck to tug him to the surface, when she glanced down through the hole he’d been digging into Sophie’s mother’s grave . . . and saw two green eyes glaring back at her.
Agatha woke, soggy with sweat, to a sea of empty mattresses around her. Her whole body ached from the previous day’s journey and her forehead pounded so hard she had to squint, pulsing with the remnants of her dream and everything Merlin had told her last night. With a groan, she slid her feet onto the sandy cave floor and sat up on the edge of the bed.
The cave was fully lit, the League members eating porridge and stewed peaches at the dining table. They were watching Tedros doing shirtless push-ups, while old, paunchy Tinkerbell reclined on his back like a sunbather at the beach, enjoying the ride up and down.
“Should’ve seen my muscles when I was his age,” Peter Pan scoffed.
Tink made a low chinkling sound that sounded like a snort.
“Never fall for a handsome man. Think they’re entitled to the whole world, even once they’re bloated and balding,” pecked Cinderella, picking at Peter’s peaches once she’d lapped up her own. She caught Agatha watching and smirked back nastily. “Besides, if Pretty Boy chose that as his true love, means all the other girls said no. Probably doesn’t measure up, if you know what I mean.”
Tedros heard this and collapsed mid-push-up, sending Tinkerbell flying into the wall.
“Don’t be rude, Ella,” puffed Red Riding Hood. “You’re just jealous they’re young and happy.”
“Happy? Not what Uma says,” Pinocchio chuckled.
Everyone turned to Uma, Agatha included. Uma froze with a teapot in hand and turned straight back to Pinocchio.
“What? You told me all they ever do is fight and the girl thinks the boy should find a princess who’s cute and stupid and kisses his bum,” said the long-nosed old man.
Tedros looked at Agatha, stunned, before his blue eyes narrowed coldly. “Sounds pretty great right about now.” He stalked past her and vanished behind the curtain to wash up.
Agatha sagged at the edge of her bed, the cave dead silent around her.
“I’m never talking again,” sulked Pinocchio.
“Doesn’t matter, does it? Not like the whole Woods and all our lives depend on those two working together!” Jack cracked, clasping Briar Rose.
“Too bad it isn’t their ring that has to be destroyed,” sighed his bride-to-be. “It’d be done by tonight.”
“Ha!” Hansel pipped.
Agatha threw Uma an irritated look, then felt guilty, for her teacher had done nothing but try to help her. Tired, grimy, battling a migraine and now a resentful prince too, Agatha crawled out of bed in her pajamas—
A burlap satchel shoved into her chest, filled with toasted crackers, a laundered tunic, and a tin of lemon tea.
“And here I thought your prince would wake you. He’s been up for hours,” said Merlin, flouncing towards the cave entrance, a second satchel on his arm. “Come, come, off we go.”
“Huh?” Agatha croaked. “Go where?”
“To rescue your best friend, of course. Would you like ham croissants for breakfast later or masala pancakes? My hat is asking and he can be rather unpleasant if he doesn’t know the menu ahead of time.”
“But we can’t go back into the Woods yet! We haven’t even discussed the plan!” Agatha said, tailing him. “How are we supposed to get into school to see Sophie? How are we supposed to make her destroy the ring—”
“All that on the way. Need to get to the School for Good and Evil by lunchtime and we can’t be wasting time with plans. Take cover, dear.” Merlin twirled and flung the second satchel at her head. Agatha ducked and Tedros caught it on his shoulder as he elbowed past her, smelling fresh in a clean tunic, his hair still wet from a bath.
“Didn’t wake you on purpose,” Tedros said brusquely, not looking back. “Easier for me to rescue Sophie if you stay here.”
Barefoot in dirty pajamas, Agatha frowned, watching him climb after Merlin through the cave hole. “Shouldn’t we at least say goodbye?” she called at them, glancing back at the League members, obliviously playing cribbage at the dining table.
Merlin poked his head upside down through the hole. “Oh, it’s certainly not the last you’ll be seeing them, my dear. Besides, it’s too early in the morning for goodbyes.”
Outside the cave, the early morning was dark and grim, but there were no clouds to be seen. The sun was simply too weak to do anything but cast a pearlescent glow, leaving the sky ashy blue and the air bitter
ly cold. As Agatha lagged behind two men, one young, one old, she noticed the Woods looked deader than it did the day before, with bird corpses and slow-moving worms and bugs sowed throughout the mulchy path. Merlin left a trail of sunflower seeds, hoping struggling animals would sneak out to eat, but none appeared and soon the wizard had to magic the seeds away in case any dead villains came following.
“Dripping like an icicle now,” said Merlin, studying the sky. “We must seal your fairy tale quickly. Sun won’t last more than a few more weeks.”
“The sun is dying because of us?” said Agatha, surprised.
“And faster by the day—a sign your story is bringing our world further and further out of balance,” said the wizard. “Your fairy tale has been open too long, children. The pen must move on to a new story to keep the Woods alive . . . along with all of us in it.” Merlin twirled his beard around his finger. “Suppose this is what happens when the Storian tells a tale of amateur students instead of the properly trained.”
“Don’t blame it on me. It’s called The Tale of Sophie and Agatha for a reason,” growled Tedros. “Father never agreed with Readers being brought to school. Told me to stay away from ’em like the plague.”
“Maybe you should have listened to your father’s advice,” said Agatha. “Besides, it’s not like we asked for our fairy tale to be told.”
Tedros ignored her and glowered at the sun. “No way is the world dying before my coronation. Need to rescue Sophie quickly, get Excalibur back, and move on to Camelot. I can’t let my father’s kingdom languish any more than it has. Not after everything my mother did to disappoint them. The people need a king.”
“And queen,” Merlin added.
“A stupid queen who kisses my bum, apparently,” said Tedros.
“Look, I didn’t mean it that way,” Agatha argued.
“‘Stupid’ and ‘bum’ have alternate definitions I’m not aware of?”
Agatha didn’t bother responding.
“And to think, last night you two were sharing hot chocolate,” the wizard murmured.
The two young Evers didn’t speak another word to each other as Merlin led them out of the damp thicket and into Knobble Hill, a bumpy maze of brown mounds covered with thousands of mushrooms of every size and shape. Agatha wished she hadn’t said what she did to Uma . . . but it was true wasn’t it? In storybooks, queens were majestic and elegant and inspiring. She couldn’t possibly ever be one—
But if she stayed with Tedros, she would be one, wouldn’t she?
The one to take his mother’s place.
Agatha watched him scaling the hill, looking so gorgeous and well built against the sky that she couldn’t breathe. She’d been so focused on rescuing Sophie that she hadn’t thought of what would happen after it. A coronation . . . a kingdom . . . a queen? Her?
Her face went hot and she tried to put it out of her mind. Sophie was the priority now. Besides, the way she and Tedros were going, he’d dump her long before they ever made it to Sophie. As he crested the mushroom hill, she could see his square jaw clenching, his muscled arms flexed, the prince still stewing at her, with his ire no doubt compounded by his utter hatred of mushrooms. (Her mother had served them once for supper and he’d turned green: “Mushrooms are fungus and fungus reminds me of feet and I don’t eat feet.”)
But as her anxiety over Tedros grew, Agatha was suddenly distracted by a view of a small Ever kingdom beyond the hills, made entirely of red sandstone. She could see the ant-like figures of men and women, building up a giant wall of brick around their domain.
“What are they keeping out?” Agatha asked, confused. “They’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“As soon as the School Master came back to life, the Ever kingdoms started fortressing for a second Great War,” Merlin explained, as he led them down the slope into the misty valley. “They assume he will marshal his Dark Army and attack the Good realms any day now.”
“So why don’t the Ever kingdoms join forces and attack the School Master instead?” Tedros asked.
“For the last time, my boy, Evil attacks and Good defends. First bloody rule of the Woods. A rule you’ve had trouble with since birth,” said Merlin, firing him a look.
Tedros grumbled and dropped behind the wizard.
“Then what’s the School Master waiting for?” Agatha pushed, taking the prince’s place beside Merlin. “You said it yourself: he has an army of the greatest villains ever written. He could wipe out whole kingdoms of Evers. So why is he wasting time killing old heroes and rewriting old storybooks—”
Merlin raised a brow at her. “. . . unless the Old gives him power over the New.”
Before Agatha could press further, the wizard stopped cold. She and Tedros both followed his gaze to the mist clearing over a sprawling, half-frozen lake, spanned by an elaborate wooden bridge. Only the bridge had since been smashed to pieces and the lake’s glaciers and shore completely blanketed in splintered shivers and shards. Lying in a heap amidst the wreckage were three corpses, flesh eaten to the point they were practically skeletons. As Agatha and Tedros inched closer behind Merlin, they saw that the little skin left on the bodies was old and haggard, with downy coatings of gray and white hair.
“Those aren’t humans,” Tedros winced, repulsed. “They’re—”
“Goats?” Agatha kneeled for a closer look. “Who would do all of this for . . . goats?”
“Very special goats, my dear,” said Merlin, kicking aside scraps of wood to reveal a bloodstained storybook. It was open to its last page: a painting of a giant horned troll feasting on three goat brothers. “The End” was written beneath the scene in bold, black letters. Merlin crouched down and touched the words. Fresh ink smeared onto his fingertips.
He snapped the book shut. “Hurry, children,” he said, walking faster now. “Every second we delay, more of our old friends are at risk.”
As Agatha followed, she looked back at the storybook on the shore and its mud-soaked cover . . .
The Three Billy Goats Gruff
Keeping ahead of the young Evers, Merlin guided them through a snow-dusted valley between mountains of cliff rock that took nearly two hours to cross. The temperature plummeted as hulking gray clouds moved in over the melting sun and soon it began to rain. With a glacial wind lashing at them and the grass slippery with frozen droplets, Agatha and Tedros clung their cloaks to their bodies and battled forward, dropping farther and farther behind the wizard, who was moving like a man half his age. Agatha saw Tedros’ face chapped hot pink, his nose runny and red. She threw him a few darting looks, hoping he’d forgive her for what she’d said back at the cave, but Tedros looked away each time.
Agatha’s heart sank. Ever since Merlin had mentioned Tedros needing a queen, she’d felt self-conscious around her prince. . . . Was Tedros having the same doubts?
“Here we are, bang on schedule,” the wizard declared at last, looking fresh and bright as his charges caught up.
Hunched and haggard, Agatha eyed a dead end of rock fifty feet high. “Um, that isn’t a s-s-school,” she stammered, teeth chattering.
But Merlin was already climbing the rock wall, grinning down at Tedros. “Never beaten me, have you, dear boy?”
“You didn’t say ‘Go’!” the prince yelled, bounding after him.
“Always falling behind, then and now,” Merlin tutted, as he glided up the wall, pebbles raining down on Tedros’ head.
“That’s ’cause you always cheat—Hey! No magic! You’re not even touching the rock!”
“Something wrong with your eyes, boy. Must be getting old—”
Agatha watched Tedros straining after Merlin, the prince at once irate and puffing with laughter. She suddenly felt like a small girl again in Gavaldon, watching boys playing ball with their fathers, pelting each other with snow clumps, flicking and nudging each other for no reason at all. What would her father have been like? Would he have been mischievous and batty like Merlin? Would he have been quiet and gentle like Au
gust Sader? She’d tried to ask her mother about her father over the years, but she’d concede only that he’d died in a mill accident many years before and she hardly remembered him. . . . Her stomach knotted, thinking of all the lies her mother had told.
Was that story even true?
What if her father wasn’t dead at all?
A pebble smacked her in the chest. Agatha craned to see Tedros almost catch up to Merlin, who shot the prince with a spell that glued his foot to the rock wall, slowing him down. “Age before beauty!” Merlin crowed.
“Go back to honey-cheese land!” Tedros barked.
Agatha waited for her prince to look down and check on her as he pulled over the ridge to the top, but he never did.
“Don’t mind me,” she sighed, and climbed up the wall, using her fingerglow to painstakingly burn crevices that she gripped with frozen fingers, so that by the time she belly flopped over the cliff top, wind-whipped and pooped, her irritation had grown tenfold. “What’s next? Potato sack races and water balloon fights? While you two are chasing each other like frisky baboons, I’m worrying how we’re possibly going to get past an Evil School Master and make his queen destroy his ring, when we don’t even have a plan to get int—”
Agatha stopped.
She slowly rose to her feet and stepped beside Tedros. Together, they gazed silently at two black castles in the distance, towering against the horizon . . . one castle old and crumbling, one castle shiny and new, both ringed with slime-green fog over an eerie green bay.
Merlin smiled ominously at Agatha. “Now that, my dear, is a school.”
On a pocky clifftop peppered with rocks and shrubs, Merlin pulled all the ingredients for a picnic out of his hat: a quilted purple blanket, a bundle of logs that he lit into a fire, and a morning feast of ham and Swiss cheese croissants, truffled egg salad, avocado and tomato bruschetta, and chunks of walnut fudge.
“Listen carefully,” Merlin said, as the two Evers shoveled food into their mouths. “The School Master now divides his school into Old and New, but each is dedicated to the cause of Evil. Professor Dovey and the Good teachers have been imprisoned in a secret location. In their absence, the School for Good has been turned into the School for New Evil, where your fellow youth are being trained in the art of villainy—Evers and Nevers both. Which means all your young colleagues obey the School Master now, forced to prove their allegiance to Evil or suffer dire consequences at the hands of his teachers.” Merlin paused. “Sophie being one of them.”