The Last Ever After (40 page)

Sophie paused, letting these words echo in the quiet room. “I was with Merlin, Tedros, and Agatha the past two weeks. I was face-to-face with all those wretched heroes in their cave. I know their weaknesses and how to beat them. And if you still doubt me, then perhaps you should remember that the last rite of any coronation is a queen's wish for her kingdom. I didn't have a chance to make my wish then, but I'll make it now. My wish is to do what I couldn't do the first time I was at this school: to lead this war against Good and know that righteousness is on
our
side. All of you may not trust Evil can win this war. You may choose to stay behind with the students and cower from the future. But not me. I'll prepare our Dark Army for war. I'll stand with Rafal at the front line. I'll do whatever it takes to show the world that Evil can win. Because this isn't just my fairy tale now. It's all of ours. And in the end, my life is worth risking if it means more rebel hearts will finally have a happy ending.”

Her cheeks were red, her chest thumping.

The teachers gazed back at her. They weren't snickering anymore. Instead their eyes shined with a new hope, as if Evil finally had a chance indeed.

Rafal clasped Sophie's hand. “Well, then,” he said proudly. “I believe we've found our Training Leader.”

Sophie gave him a regal smile and turned to Lady Lesso,
expecting her to be just as proud of how far her former student had come . . .

Only Lady Lesso didn't look proud of her at all.

Once lunch was served, Merlin cleared his throat and prepared to speak, but no one paid the slightest attention. They were far too busy with the food.

With more than twenty people to serve—thirteen old heroes, three young witches, a former queen and her knight, a future queen and king, and a loveless weasel—Merlin's hat had hidden away in the kitchen, letting out shrieks of stress, until one by one, silver platters began magically floating through the swinging door. Soon the dining table was a smorgasbord of colorful, cosmopolitan delights: truffled crab salad, curried venison with beetroot jelly, shredded duck in a citrus marinade, peppered-ham pizza on roasted pitas, a yogurt-and-mint olive tapenade, fennel and wildflower salad, and a chocolate bouchon cake with crispy honeycomb.

With the old League heroes starving from their travails in the Woods and the youngsters deprived of breakfast by the morning's events, the dining room quickly turned into a battle scene, so crowded and muggy with jostling bodies and hands stabbing for pizza and cake that Agatha didn't even bother looking for Tedros. Nor did she search for her prince after lunch, for she'd eaten too much and too fast and had to hide behind a sofa in the den where she could clutch her belly and burp in private. Glancing up, she saw everyone else had the same idea; each nook and cranny of the farmhouse was filled
with a young or old body, nursing indigestion or passed out in a food coma.

Agatha yawned and closed her eyes, about to join the comatose, when she heard three backsides plunk to the floor.

“After everything we did to get you in and out of that school, after risking our lives for you, you couldn't even get Sophie to destroy the
ring
?” Hester's voice attacked.

Agatha opened her eyes. “I tried, Hester—”

“First of all, you can't talk to your friends in a diamond crown. It's pretentious,” said Anadil.

Agatha had forgotten she even had it on. She quickly pulled off the diadem and shoved it behind her back.

“Can I wear it for a bit?” Dot asked, mouth full of pizza turned to chocolate. “I bet it'll look nice on me.”

“If it can fit around that head,” Hester mumbled.

Dot hurled her pizza at her, smacking Hester in the cheek. “Do you know how unfair that is, you contemptuous git! You made me gain weight in order to stay in the coven and now you're making fun of me for it? Are you that insecure that you needed me to be fat to feel okay about yourself? Well, you picked the wrong piggy tail to pull, honey. I love myself no matter what I look like, so nothing you say to me will ever make me feel ugly again. Because unlike you, Hester, I'll never be ugly
inside
.”

Hester gaped at Dot like she was a rabid bear. “Agatha. Give the girl the damned crown before she stays this way forever.”

Dot snatched the diadem out of Agatha's hands and
admired herself in a brass urn as she jammed it on (upside down and backwards, but no one said a thing).

“Now where were we,” said Anadil. “Oh right. The part where Agatha fails us all.”

Any pleasure Agatha took from Dot's tirade evaporated. “Listen, I thought I could convince Sophie to destroy the ring. We'd even gotten close again in the last few days. It was like she was the old Sophie and I was the old me and I thought she'd listen . . .” She remembered their last moments together and guilt rushed through her. “I had my chance. I should have taken it—”

“You don't have to defend yourself, Agatha. The truth is it doesn't matter what you would have done,” Hester said with awkward sympathy, clearly smarting from Dot's words. “We've warned you since the day you got here. All three of us did. Sophie was sorted into the School for Evil for a reason. And no matter how much you love her or try to change her, that's where she was always going to end up.”

“We just didn't think it'd be as the School Master's
queen
,” said Anadil. “How we're going to make Sophie destroy his ring now . . .”

A quiet doom fell over the witches' faces and Agatha realized why everyone had ignored Merlin when he'd tried to speak before lunch. They wanted a few precious moments before they had to face the truth.

The truth that Sophie destroying her own ring was the only way to kill the School Master and stop him from killing
them
. And now that Sophie had returned to Evil, there was no
hope of her destroying that ring at all.

“Did you see her when she came back?” Agatha asked softly.

“Saw her the way we saw you when we first came through the portal: wearing her new crown,” said Hester.

“Only with four hundred more people in the audience,” said Dot, still making kissy-faces in the urn.

“She did look beautiful, I have to say,” Anadil added thoughtfully. “Paraded into the Theater of Tales on a handsome boy's arm, just like the old Sophie, who believed her destiny was so much bigger than everyone else's. The strange thing was how calm and composed she was. Not like that warty, deranged witch who savaged anything in sight. It was as if Evil had finally opened her path to a happy ending.”

“As if Evil had the right to win,” nodded Dot.

“As if Evil was Good,” Hester finished.

Agatha thought of Sophie, who just a few days ago had nuzzled her head against her as they rode across the moors. Sophie, her prissy, pink-dressed best friend who fantasized about being a princess for Good. Sophie, who would draw glass castles, ponder her future prince's name, and mull what her Evil archenemy would look like—while Agatha had been branded as Evil from the day she was born. She'd retaliated by ironically playing along, wearing black and lurking in her graveyard and nursing her hateful little cat . . . until the irony wore off and even she believed she'd end up a witch.

Now here they were. She, the queen for Good. Sophie, the queen for Evil.

“How'd we get so lost?” she breathed. “How can two best
friends end up at war against each other, even though they still love each other?”

“Because each of you is fighting for something bigger than yourself now,” said Hester.

Agatha hung her head. “I miss the days where my biggest worry was surviving makeovers in Beautification.”

“Speaking of makeovers, anyone notice Hort's looking even juicier than he did at school?” chirped Dot, biting into the cocoa-pizza she'd swiped off the floor. “Saw him when we came in and he has this swarthy tan from working the moors and mud stains on his cheeks, like he's Captain Lumberjack or something. But you know how I like woodsy types, with my crush on Robin Hood and all. Anyway, I sneak behind and give him a good sniff and notice he smells like a man now, nothing like that boy who used to wear frog pajamas and reek of baby powder, and all I could think was since there aren't too many rooms in this place, I wonder if I can get Merlin to put me and him in the same—”

“Over my dead body,” bellowed Hort, who stuck his head out from around the corner.

Hester glared back, demon twitching. “That can be arranged.”

Hort muttered something obscene and vanished behind the wall.

Hester saw Dot goggling at her. “What now?”

“Did you just
defend
me?”

“Only because you look so stupid in that crown,” Hester grumped.

All the girls laughed, even Dot.

“What'd I miss?”

They looked up at Tedros, licking yogurt off his fingers.

“Ugh. The old ball and chain,” Hester moaned.

“Nice to see you're as awful as always, even when you're working for our side,” said the prince.

“Let's go,” said Hester to her coven-mates as she stood up. “The smell of spoiled prince makes me sick.”

Anadil and Dot followed her, but not before Tedros swiped at Dot's head and snatched back the crown.

He waited until the witches were out of earshot and peered down at Agatha. “I don't, uh, you know . . . smell, do I?”

“Hester thinks Reaper is
cute
,” said Agatha.

“Point made.” Tedros sat down next to her, still in his grass-stained shirt and ragged breeches, but he'd taken a bath, because his hair was wet and he smelled of the tea-scented soap Guinevere kept by the tub. He leaned over and fixed the crown back on her head.

“I knew you'd do that,” Agatha sighed. “I'm not even a real queen, Tedros. For one thing, you have to be crowned king first—”

“I will be in a week.”

“If we're alive, which is looking more and more doubtful,” said Agatha. “And even if you are crowned king, I'm too young to be a queen . . . officially, I mean . . . you know . . .”

“No one's asking you to be official. Yet,” said Tedros, straightening her crown. “But you
are
my queen. No one but you. And I like seeing you wear it. Because as long as you do, I
know you still love me. And given our history of miscommunication, physical cues are helpful.”

Agatha snorted.

“This is where you tell me how I can show my love,” Tedros prodded.

“Uh, romance isn't really my thing,” said Agatha, resting her head on his shoulder. “Every year, there's a Valentine's Day dance in Gavaldon. One year, I got so annoyed by all the couples I set off a flaming skunk bomb and cleared the place.”

“I hope they punished you for it.”

“They were too scared I'd boil their children in a witch stew.”

Tedros put his arm around her. “Remind me never to give you something for Valentine's Day.”

Through the archway, Agatha could see Guinevere in the dining room, collecting dirty dishes by herself.

“There's nothing I'd want anyway,” she said. “Only gift I'd ever want is to talk to my mother one more time.”

Tedros looked at her.

“Though if you could find a time to talk to your mother, just the two of you, that would mean nearly as much,” said Agatha.

Tedros looked away. “I think I've come far enough on that front.”

“You asked me for a way to show your love,” said Agatha. “I didn't know it had limits.”

Tedros didn't answer and Agatha didn't press him. Soon
both of them were asleep in each other's arms.

By three o'clock, Merlin's hat had finished floating around the den, serving coffee and tea, and one by one, everyone began to drift back to the dining room, where the wizard was sitting at the head of the table. No one sat with him. Instead, the old heroes hugged the walls and the young students crouched on the floor, engaged in idle chatter, while the wizard just waited patiently. When an ominous silence fell, the old heroes quickly began filling it with stories of how they'd survived these past two weeks.

Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, for instance, had bunkered with the mermaids of Neverland, while Cinderella and Pinocchio had hidden in Rapunzel's tower, reasoning that if Rapunzel was already dead, then the old villains certainly weren't going to frequent the place.

“Her tower is a museum now, like Snow's house, so there's a rope that lets tourists climb all the way inside,” said Pinocchio. “Shoulda seen Ella climb, swinging and slamming against the tower like a wrecking ball. Kept whistling for birds to help, but with all her squawking and cursing, they just stood back and let nature take its course—”

“If nature took its course, you'd be
firewood
,” Cinderella snarled.

Hansel and Gretel had used a similar strategy, for they'd returned to their witch's old gingerbread house, also an Evers' landmark now.

“Zombie witch is stupid but not so stupid to think we go
back to her house,” explained Hansel. “My idea, of course.”

“
Your
idea! Only thing you did was eat half the roof!” Gretel barked.

Agatha noticed Hester gnashing her teeth as she listened to this. . . . Suddenly Agatha's eyes flared, remembering the witch's defaced portrait in the School for Old. “Hester, that's
your
house!” she whispered. “Your mother was that witch! She's alive—somewhere in the Woods—”

“She's
not
alive, Agatha. She's a zombie under the School Master's control,” Hester hissed. “I'm not stupid or sentimental enough to think whatever dead-eyed goon he's brought back from the grave is my
mother.
”

“Hester, I know you pride yourself on being strong,” Agatha whispered worriedly, “but how can you just sit here with them talking about her like that? They
killed
her!”