The Last Ever After (19 page)

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 August 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.”

Tedros and Agatha choked, mouths full. “Sophie is a
teacher
?” the prince blurted.

“Her first day of class was yesterday. The students gave her a rather chilly welcome, I hear,” said Merlin.

“How do you know any of this?” asked Agatha. “You said the School Master barred you from ever getting through the gates—”

“Hold on. That's just the School for New,” Tedros broke in, studying the other rotted castle. “What's in the original Evil castle . . . the School for Old?”

Merlin fiddled with his beard. “That I cannot say for sure. Only that the word ‘Old' on its gates is surely no accident. The answer to why the School Master is rewriting old fairy tales may very well be within that castle and it is an answer we must find. The problem, however, is that there is no way
inside
. The School Master forbids both students and teachers from crossing to the School for Old and Halfway Bridge still carries an impassible barrier. Even if someone did miraculously manage to cross that Bridge, the Old towers are well guarded. Which all leads me to one conclusion . . .” Merlin squinted across the bay. “Clearly the School Master is protecting something in the School for Old he doesn't want found.”

“Well, it doesn't matter. You said Sophie is teaching in the School for New,” said Tedros, licking cheese off his fingers. “All we have to do is break in and convince her to destroy the ring.”

Merlin looked amused. “Ah, the simple-mindedness of youth. There are three wrinkles in that plan, dear boy. First, remember that
only
Sophie can destroy the School Master's ring and no one else, if the School Master is to be killed forever. And yet, Sophie took his ring because she believed him her true love. Convincing her to destroy that ring will be no easy task.”

Agatha bit her lip, knowing Merlin was right. Sophie hadn't just taken the School Master's ring, she was a teacher
now—a teacher for
Evil
—as if willingly taking sides against Good. Was it too late to bring her back?

“The second problem,” said Merlin, “is that the School Master's ring is surely crafted by the darkest magic, born of Evil. Therefore, it can only be destroyed by a weapon equally powerful, born of Good—a weapon that no Evil can withstand. I know of only one on earth that fulfills such a description . . .”

“What is it?” said Agatha expectantly.

But Merlin was looking at Tedros.

The prince's eyes bulged. “
Excalibur!
My sword! The Lady of the Lake made it for my father and he gave it to me before he died. The Lady of the Lake is Good's greatest witch . . . that means Excalibur can destroy anything—”

“Including the ring!” Agatha jumped in quickly. “Sophie just has to use Tedros' sword!”

“Indeed,” nodded Merlin. “So if you can just
produce
this sword . . .”

Agatha's and Tedros' smiles dissipated at the same time.

“Oh no,” Agatha breathed.

“He . . . he has it . . . ,” Tedros sputtered. “The School Master—”

“And it's no accident that he does,” said Merlin. “He knew full well to take it from you the night he came back to life. As long as
he
has Excalibur, Sophie cannot destroy his ring, even if she wanted to.” The wizard's gaze hardened. “No doubt he's hidden your sword in an impenetrable fortress . . . somewhere neither Sophie nor any other student is allowed to go . . .”

Agatha and Tedros slumped deeper. “The School for Old,” they groaned.

“And that is only your
second
problem,” said Merlin, pulling a shaker from his hat and seasoning a scoop of eggs.

“How can there be a third?” Tedros rasped. “It can't get any worse.”

“I'm afraid it can,” snarfled Merlin as he chewed. “The School Master knows you're coming.”

“What?”
Agatha said.

“The Storian writes your story, after all,” replied the wizard, reposing against a shrub. “As long as you remain Agatha and you remain Tedros, the Storian will tell him precisely when and where you break into his school.”

“We're
doomed
,” said Agatha and stuffed a block of walnut fudge into her mouth, waiting for Tedros to chime in with his usual pep talk. Instead, her prince shoved an even bigger piece of fudge in his mouth and twiddled with his sock. Agatha knew they were really doomed now: Tedros never gave up, no matter how dire a situation, and he cared too much about his body to eat dessert two days in a row.

“Goodness, you're both a sight,” chortled Merlin. “As if I'd have brought you all this way if I didn't have
something
up my sleeve. I am a Woods-famous wizard, after all.”

Tedros dropped his fudge instantly and he and Agatha looked up at Merlin with new hope.

“You see, we have two secret weapons that the School Master hasn't quite anticipated. Two secret weapons that will break you into school, right under his nose, without him knowing,”
said Merlin, peering down his spectacles. “The first explains just how I know so much about what's happening within those castle walls . . .” The wizard huddled in with a catlike smile.
“Spies.”

“You have spies
inside
the school?” asked Agatha, gobsmacked. “But who—”

Tedros waved her off. “Doesn't matter who. Even if you have spies to get us in, it still doesn't fix the problem of the School Master knowing we're coming—”

“Pay attention, boy. I said the Storian will tell him you're coming only as long as
you remain Agatha
and
you remain Tedros
,” the wizard said. “Which brings me to secret weapon number two.”

Like a magician performing his final trick, Merlin carefully pulled a tear-shaped vial from his hat into the glow of the rising sun. At first they were blinded by a purple glare and Agatha and Tedros shielded their eyes from the vial. But as they slowly leaned closer, they saw a purple potion fluorescing hot against the stopper . . . until a shred of its smoke slid out of the vial and Agatha caught a familiar whiff of wood and roses . . .

She rocketed to her knees. “Oh no . . . noooooo way—”

Merlin grinned mischievously. “It is
my
recipe after all. Made just enough for two.”

Agatha wheeled to Tedros, who looked utterly lost.

“What? I don't get it,” he said, shaking his head. “I mean, that isn't . . . that can't be—no, of course not. Right?” He saw Merlin's face and launched to his feet.
“Right?”
He whirled to
his princess, violent red. “He couldn't possibly make you into a . . . and me into . . . into a—”

But now he saw Agatha's face too.

Tedros stiffened like a corpse. “Oh my God!” He clutched his heart as if he'd been stabbed and crumpled for a second time into his princess's arms.

Merlin stared at the fainted prince a long while, before he pursed his lips and looked up at Agatha holding him. “Well, my dear. At least you can say you're even now.”

16
Edgar and Essa

“T
edros?” said the honey-edged voice.

“Tedros,” Sophie repeated sleepily, coddled in silky black blankets like a cocoon.

“What about him?”

“Who?” Sophie breathed, still deep in a dream.

“Tedros. You've been saying his name again and again.”

Sophie launched awake. Rafal was sitting in the window, peering out at the dull morning, looking younger than ever in a black sleeveless shirt and short leather breeches that showed off his pale, sculpted legs.

“Seems strange you'd whisper the name of the boy you're supposed to kill,” he said.

Suddenly remembering, Sophie looked down in a panic and saw TEDROS carved into
the skin beneath her ring. She smushed her hand under her thigh and sat up on her elbows. “Oh, um, just thinking . . . no matter where I go, he seems to follow me like a rash . . .”

Rafal pushed onto his feet. “Then you'll have to erase him once and for all, won't you? Along with his fair princess.”

Sophie gritted a smile, her wary eyes following him as he sauntered towards her storybook on the altar table. The Storian was paused abruptly over a painting of Agatha and Tedros, surveying the School for Evil from a clifftop. Sophie noticed the two Evers weren't holding hands anymore and that Tedros' body was leaning away from Agatha's.
Had something happened between them?
Her heart flipped at the thought—

She quashed it.
Are you insane?
a) Tedros already had a girl: her best
friend,
b) she already had a boy: Tedros' mortal
enemy
, and c) Tedros was on his way to kill that boy!

“Before you woke, the Storian drew Tedros and his princess only a few miles away and hasn't moved since,” Rafal mulled, black boots clacking on stone as he circled the table. “It's like there's a glitch in the story, preventing the pen from telling us where they've gone.”

“Maybe they gave up and went back to Gavaldon,” gushed Sophie hopefully. “Maybe we've won this story after all! Maybe I'll never have to see them, and if I don't have to see them, then I don't have to kill them—”

“Then why is the book still open? Why hasn't the sun restored?” Rafal narrowed his eyes at the storybook, his mouth a tight line. “No, Tedros and his love are somewhere close. . . . The Storian just can't find them yet. . . .” He glanced back,
unruffled. “But it doesn't matter, my love. As long as my name is the one written in your heart, their days are numbered.”

Sophie hacked a cough. “Right . . . course . . . sorry, allergies,” she wheezed, shunting her hand further beneath her leg.

She couldn't dare let him see Tedros' name under her ring! He'd know what it meant! And if Rafal knew he might not be her true love after all, he'd . . . he'd . . .

Kill me.

Sophie could feel her palm sticking to her thigh with sweat.
How is this happening?
All she'd ever wanted was love, and she'd finally found it in the snow-faced boy in front of her. But instead of reciprocating, instead of being faithful, now her heart was insisting her true love was
Tedros
? Tedros who'd rejected her twice for her best friend?

Rafal is my true love!
she begged herself.

Please. Change it to Rafal.

Rafal.

Rafal.

Rafal.

She peeked down at her hand.

TEDROS.

Sophie gulped. Whatever happened from here, she couldn't be anywhere near the prince again, let alone in the same room with him.

Ever.

She peered out at the iron-spiked school gates . . . the monstrous shadows guarding the School for Old . . . the pestilent green bay . . . all barriers to Tedros and Agatha finding her.
And yet, there was still a spy amidst the students, planning to break them in somehow. She needed to catch the mole
before
her friends breached the castle.

But who is it?
Sophie pictured her crowded classroom of Evers and Nevers, trying to recall if there were any clues . . .

“Sophie?”

She looked up at Rafal, who was staring at her. “Is there a reason you're hiding your hand?” he asked.

Sophie gaped like a toad. “Mmm?”

“You keep adjusting your position so that your hand stays covered.”

Sophie cleared her throat and straightened against the bedpost. “Honestly darling, I know you come from the Bluebeard school of love, but I haven't the faintest clue what you're talking about. While I have your attention, though, perhaps now's a good time to discuss campus business? Last year I found the choice of school play deeply underwhelming, to say the least. Given my light teaching load, I'm happy to take up the burden myself: namely, a grand one-woman show, with performances each night at 7:30 in the Supper Hall and an additional matinee on Sundays, followed by coffee and canapés.
La Reine Sophie
, we'll call it, an appropriate name, don't you think, for a sumptuous, 3-hour pageant of—”

“Let me see your hand,” Rafal said, glowering.

“W-w-what?” Sophie croaked.

The young School Master slunk towards the bed. “You heard me.”

“Excuse me. You might be Master of this school, but you
are not Master of my limbs,” Sophie puffed lamely, left hand sandwiched under her buttocks.

But Rafal was six feet away, suspicion glowing in his eyes.

Sophie's heart throttled against her sternum. “Really, darling, you're being utterly ridiculous—”

He was two feet away now.

“Rafal, please!”

He seized her arm, yanking it out from under her. In a flash, Sophie lanced her thumbnail hard into her ring finger, gashing the skin—

Rafal held up her hand and blood streamed down it, obscuring Tedros' name. His eyes flared. “You're hurt!”

“This is precisely why I hid it. Knew you'd overreact like you always do,” Sophie pooh-poohed, shoving her bloodied hand in her pocket and rushing past him. “Just a lingering blister that keeps reopening . . . a stupid little accident in the menagerie. Now about that show, darling. It begins with a saucy little number called ‘Thunder Down Tundra,' so I'll need glaciers, nubile
danseurs
, and a male lion, preferably tamed—”

“Wait. You touched Agatha and Tedros' kiss?” Rafal stalked towards her. “Manley made that scene poisonous, specifically to catch anyone still loyal to Good. No Never would get within ten feet of an Evers' kiss. Why would you
touch
it—”

“Oh heavens to Betsy, look at the time! Can you fly me down to my classroom, dear?” Sophie snatched her teacher's dress off a hook and bustled towards the window, back turned. “You know how Lady Lesso is about tardiness.
Wouldn't want her to think you're more irresponsible than she already does.”

This time Sophie felt very different in Rafal's arms as he flew her over the bay.

Instead of safe, she felt scared; instead of loved, she felt caged. With her right hand glued inside her pocket and the left clinging to him for dear life, she ground her teeth and clamped every muscle, as if riding a wild beast she'd tried to tame and lost control over. And yet, despite the roller coaster in her stomach, she realized Rafal was flying glacially slow, zigzagging off path. She glanced back and saw his leery blue gaze locked on her instead of the sky, clearly thinking about her behavior in the tower.

“Eyes on the road, darling,” Sophie chided, faking a smile.

The air was chillier than usual for a cloudless March day, the dappled sun streaking empty blue with copper and gold. She noticed a rawboned raven flapping and panting behind her; with the Woods decaying and its body weak, it was no doubt hunting in vain for a new home. Loud shouts echoed below and Sophie spotted a Woods Training class in the rotting Blue Forest, with Evers and Nevers, boys and girls, each spearing a stuffed effigy of Agatha, as Aric barked out a succession of swordplay moves.

Sophie took in this dying forest filled with Agathas, feeling like she'd wandered into a surreal dream.

All this time, she'd been obsessing about Tedros, Tedros,
Tedros and blocking out the one person that mattered more to her than Tedros ever could. Even thinking of Agatha's name kicked up a storm of opposites—
love hate friend foe lost found truth lies live die—
until words and labels slipped away and Sophie felt a hole at the center of herself, as if she was incomplete without Agatha and Agatha incomplete without her.

And suddenly, as she looked at forty stuffings of her bug-eyed, flat-browed, pasty-white best friend, Sophie found herself snickering, because she knew Agatha would snicker at them too. Sophie would needle Agatha about the time she'd tried to add “tweezers” and “suntan” to her vocabulary, only to see the poor girl erase an eyebrow and give herself second-degree burns, while Agatha would remind Sophie how she'd chased her down Graves Hill, one-browed, hair bleached orange, a turtle-egg-yolk mask dripping off her face as she walloped her with a broomstick . . . and before they knew it, they'd be rolling on the floor together, giggling at how terrible and wonderful they were to each other . . .

Sophie's smile shriveled. Just yesterday she'd felt like a witch again in Lady Lesso's office, ready to slay Agatha and her prince for Rafal, ready to do whatever it took to keep the young School Master as her true love and not be alone. And now today, she had Tedros' name tattooed on her skin, was reminiscing about makeovers with Agatha, and couldn't wait to get out of Rafal's cold arms.

What's happening to me?

Her feet skidded into stone and Sophie braced to see a black balcony off the old Honor Tower and students stampeding by
to get to their next sessions on time. Quickly Sophie scrunched her hand deeper into her pocket and broke away from Rafal without looking back—

“Find me at lunch, darling!”

“Sophie.”

Sophie slowly turned to Rafal, shadowed by the sun's glare against the railing.

“You will kill them. Tedros
and
Agatha.” His voice was a hot, teenage snarl. “Or I'll know whose side you're really on.”

His eyes flayed her for what seemed like an eternity, before he rocketed straight up into the sky and she lost him in ashes of sun.

Alone in the hallway, Sophie felt her hand sweating through her pocket.

Rafal was onto her.

If he saw Tedros' name carved into her . . . she was good as dead.

If she didn't kill Agatha and Tedros . . . she was even deader.

Which meant only one thing, Sophie thought.

It was her friends' lives or her own.

Sifting into the crowd of students, Sophie veered towards the lollipop room, determined to catch the spy for Good. If she caught the spy, then the spy couldn't break Agatha and Tedros into school. And if Agatha and Tedros couldn't break into school, then she'd never have to see them again, and if she never had to see them again, then she'd never have to kill them—