The Last Ever After

  “You and Agatha have each other. You don’t need me.”

  “She and I could barely be in the same room together until we came to find you. We should never have left you behind.” She felt his skin on her wrist, the loosening of a knot. “This journey to find you and fix our past mistakes ended up making Agatha and I closer. You brought Agatha and I together, like you always have before.”

  The velvet cuff fell away, setting Sophie free. She stared into his eyes, his last words stinging her.

  “Come with us, Sophie,” Tedros said, tilting her chin up, the way he once asked her to a Ball. “Come with Agatha and me to Camelot.”

  Sophie curled into his chest, making him hold her. “Maybe you can’t see it. But now you brought me and Rafal closer too,” she whispered, almost to herself.

  “What?”

  “If I go with you, I won’t find love again,” Sophie said, nuzzling Tedros tighter. “My story proves it. I’m unlovable by anyone else. My best friend. My father. My prince. Not even Hort wants me anymore.”

  “Because you’ve forgotten what love really is. Good is the path to love, Sophie. Not Evil.”

  “Rafal is my only path now,” she said, remembering what it was like to be this close to a prince . . .

  “There has to be a way,” Tedros pressed. “There has to be a way to make you come with us.”

  “No, it’s too late . . .” Sophie inhaled his scent, trying to wrest herself away, trying to let him go. “Take Agatha and leave.”

  “Not without you,” he said, his lips at her ear.

  “I won’t leave him . . . I won’t leave my true love,” Sophie fought, looking to Rafal’s ring for strength.

  Only now she saw something else on her finger . . . rubbed raw by the binds . . . her heart’s only answer all along . . .

  “Unless . . . ,” she whispered.

  “Unless . . . ?” Tedros breathed.

  Sophie clasped his hand.

  Tedros looked down and stiffened.

  Because now he saw his name on her flesh too.

  “Unless I had you back,” Sophie said.

  20

  Last Stop on the Fairy Dust Express

  A clock struck somewhere across the bay. 11:30.

  Thirty minutes to find Excalibur. What happens if I’m not at the gates by midnight? Agatha thought, scuttling through the air shaft to follow the School Master. Will Tedros come looking for me? Will he try to get into the castle? She couldn’t let that happen. He’d be walking into a death trap—

  She stopped short.

  Agatha stared at a wall of black rock sealing off the vent, as the sound of the School Master’s footsteps receded into the buzz of villains hunting her.

  Alarmed, she was about to turn back and search for another route to the museum, when she noticed there was a small gap in the vent before the dead end. Agatha crept to the edge of the gap and looked down.

  A black void.

  Either she backtracked to the last crossroads in the vent and risked losing the School Master . . . or she took a stupidly lethal chance.

  Agatha slid her legs over the edge of the gap.

  She let go.

  Gravity blasted her into free fall—then her backside clamped onto a smooth stone slide, rocketing her through darkness. Without warning, the slide swerved left and Agatha was thrown onto her side with no idea where she was going. There were no more gratings, no more rays of light, just merciless black, with the odd green flicker of a dead fairy, caught in the sealed-off maze. Crossing her arms over her chest, Agatha let go like a swimmer in a riptide as she veered at the sharpest, scariest angles, convinced this would all end in a gruesome death, before she shot off the slide like shrapnel, skidded onto a smooth metal surface, and halted face-first over a steel grating.

  Ow.

  Agatha pried off the slats, rubbing the welts on her cheeks. Through the grate, she could see an empty room underneath her, lit by a weak green torch. No one inside it, nothing on the walls, nothing on the sooty black floor. And yet, something about the place seemed familiar. Bending closer to the grate, she squinted across the room, until she made out an ash-spattered door and its simmering red letters:

  THE EXHIBITION OF EVIL

  Evil’s museum.

  Agatha bobbed to her knees. Given how quickly she crossed the castle, there was no way the School Master could have gotten here already, which meant . . .

  I made it before him.

  Sweating in the shadows, Agatha waited for him to come and lead her to the weapon that could kill him.

  She waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  A clock in the castle tolled once.

  11:45.

  Something stopped him on the way, she thought. But there was no more time to wait. In fifteen minutes, Merlin would be at the gates.

  She grabbed hold of the steel grating, which dislodged easily from stone. She left her remaining clump behind and lowered down through the hole, hanging on to the sides of the shaft. Arms stretched, she kicked the air as if to dismount a swing and landed on her soles without a sound.

  Agatha scanned the museum, once filled with relics of Evil’s scant victories and now wiped clean. True, she hadn’t expected Excalibur to be waiting on a table for her, but there was nowhere in this room that Tedros’ sword could possibly be hidden. The floor was a single slab of stone, every case and frame was gone, every wall bare—

  Not every wall, Agatha realized, moving towards the corner.

  For on the far wall, hidden in shadows, there was one painting left.

  Agatha stalked closer, her eyes adjusting to the dark, until she realized it was a painting she knew well.

  In a village square, raging children heaved storybooks into a bonfire and watched them burn. Behind the village, a dark forest went up in flames, blanketing the sky with red and black smoke.

  The colors were gauzy and impressionistic, the style unmistakable. It was the work of Professor August Sader, a blind seer who once taught History before he sacrificed his life fighting the School Master. Agatha recognized the scene as the last in his Reader Prophecy, a series of paintings once mounted in the Gallery of Good. As part of the Prophecy, Sader had predicted pairs of Readers kidnapped to the School for Good and Evil, leading up to her and Sophie. But there had been no more Readers predicted after them . . . instead, only this scene of Gavaldon’s children burning its fairy tales as smoke clouds closed in.

  And yet they weren’t smoke clouds, Agatha remembered now from her first year, focusing harder on them. They were shadows, hulking and monstrous, invading the town . . . and as Agatha leaned closer, her nose to the canvas, she began to see familiar shapes in the smoke . . .

  A giant’s bald head . . . a wolf’s toothy snout . . . a stepmother’s coiled bun . . . a captain’s round hook . . .

  These weren’t just shadows.

  These were villains. Real villains.

  All coming to Gavaldon.

  Agatha backed up, hearing the stepmother’s ominous warning: “Every story changed brings us one step closer to the Reader World . . .”

  Before his death, Sader had seen this too: the School Master’s Dark Army crossing into her village.

  But why? What could the School Master possibly want in Gavaldon?

  Terrified, Agatha studied the shadows harder, trying to understand . . .

  But something else caught her attention in the painting now.

  Behind the bonfire, in the recesses of the square, there was a tiny slash of gold beneath the canopy of Mr. Deauville’s hollowed-out book shop. Agatha made out a pattern of diamonds on a golden hilt and the start of a wide silver sword, buried blade-first in an anvil. She rubbed her eyes.

  No doubt about it.

  Excalibur was inside the picture.

  Flummoxed, Agatha ran her hand along the surface of the oil-painted canvas, hard and stubbly . . . until her fingers touched the sword hilt. All of a sudden, the texture was different: warm, smoot
h, and metallic. She pushed harder against the canvas and watched her nails slowly penetrate the tight, viscous surface, a strange wetness soaking her fingertips. Further and further her hand sucked in, all the way to the wrist, before Agatha began to see her fingers appear within the painting itself, reaching for the hilt of the sword. Eyes widening, she grasped Excalibur’s handle from inside the picture, her knuckles locking a firm grip, and pulled as hard as she could. The sword flew out of the anvil like a flower out of water—Agatha reeled as hand and sword ejected from the frame, and the weight of the blade sent her toppling to the floor.

  Slowly, Agatha raised her head and looked at Excalibur, still clenched in her fist. Then she looked up at the painting, where an empty anvil posed in front of Mr. Deauville’s.

  Oh my God.

  She launched to her feet, thrusting her prince’s sword into the torchlight.

  I did it.

  I really did it!

  Mission complete.

  With ten minutes to spare.

  A beam of pride and relief ripped across her face and she whirled to the door, sword in hand, ready to mogrify out of this depraved castle —

  Agatha dropped the sword.

  “I never underestimate you, Agatha,” the young School Master said, leaning against a wall, barechested in black breeches. “And yet you underestimate me. A sorcerer who defeats death, returns to youth, takes your best friend as my queen, and here you think that I can’t hear your breath in a vent ten feet over my head . . . that I’d randomly announce my need to secure a museum . . . that I’d willfully leave the search for an intruder in my castle . . . all for no good reason . . .” The beautiful boy arched a brow. “Unless, of course, I knew you’d overhear it.”

  Agatha’s heart imploded. “Then w-w-why didn’t you just kill me in the hall?”

  “For one thing, I’ve been suspecting for a while that a pesky old wizard has been advising you and your prince as to how to defeat me, and now I have proof my suspicions are correct. For another, I was curious as to whether Excalibur is really as powerful as Merlin believes. So I put a charm on the sword when I hid it in the painting, so that no one except me could retrieve it. Which means that if you pulled it out, Excalibur’s magic indeed exceeds mine, at once able to recognize its allies and surely powerful enough to destroy the ring that keeps me alive. But I suppose there’s also a third reason I haven’t killed you just yet, Agatha. I thought you should meet the boy who’s claimed your best friend’s heart, up close and personal. You may call me, Rafal, by the way.” He smiled, striding towards her. “Sophie does.”

  Agatha snatched the sword and flung it out at him, halting his advance. “Why did Sader paint the villains in Gavaldon? What’s the painting mean?”

  Rafal eyed the sword blade, bemused. “Agatha, can you recall what I told you when you and Sophie visited my tower first year? I gave you a riddle to solve and sent you back to your schools, but you were angry with me. You said I should prey on other villages and leave yours alone. Do you remember what I answered?”

  Agatha could feel herself transported back to that very moment, his reply vivid in her memory . . . the old masked School Master, so different from this young boy in front of her, leaving her with a single question as she and Sophie free-fell into a sea of white . . .

  A question that had tormented her for two years.

  A question that never made any sense.

  “What other villages?” she whispered.

  “That’s the one,” Rafal grinned. “You see, Agatha, all this time you thought the Reader World was the ‘real world’ far away from the realm of magic . . . when, in fact, your world is part of the Endless Woods. For how can a land of stories exist without Readers to believe in them?”

  Agatha paled. “Gavaldon is in the Woods?”

  “Why do you think Readers from your village are the only ones kidnapped? Why do you think any attempt to escape your village leads right back to it?” said Rafal. “Yours is the one unenchanted kingdom of our world, but still part of the fairy-tale world—as much a part of fairy tales as Camelot, or Netherwood, or this school itself. It is why no class here is ever complete without two Readers: one who believes in Good and one who believes in Evil.”

  Agatha felt her brain whirring, trying to grasp the enormity of his words.

  “Actually, the only access I have to Readers is to make sure they are fairly and safely represented at my school, like every other realm of the Woods,” Rafal went on. “Our world needs new Readers to survive just as much as it needs new stories. That is why there are magic gates that protect Gavaldon from the rest of our world. That is why we call it the Woods Beyond. Because Readers keep our stories alive, long after the people in them are dead and gone. You could even say that Readers are the one force in our world more powerful than me. Because as long as there are Readers who believe in Good’s power over Evil, Good will still win, even if I obliterate every Ever kingdom in the Woods. Because there will always be Readers, no matter what I do. Readers who put their faith in the Old stories, passing them down, forever and ever, keeping Good alive beyond my control . . .”

  The young School Master paused. “And yet, what if Readers learn that the Old has been made New, just like all your fellow students? What if the one power to keep stories alive discovers that the Good stories they hold dear are all a lie? That Evil always wins, has always won, and always will? What then?” His sapphire eyes reflected the fires of the painting. “The gates to Gavaldon will open for the true ending to your fairy tale—an ending that will erase every Ever After down to the very last one . . . and put an end to Good forever.”

  Agatha was corpse white. “What’s the ending? What do you want with Gavaldon?”

  “Me?” Rafal cocked a grin. “Oh no. It isn’t me you should be worrying about, Agatha. If there’s one thing you should have learned from Evelyn Sader, it’s that the most dangerous person in a fairy tale is the one willing to do anything for love. A description that fits your best friend, doesn’t it?”

  The School Master held out his palm and Excalibur flew out of her hand and into his. He smiled wider, handsome as the devil.

  “And it just happens your best friend’s love is me.”

  “Me?” Tedros leapt off the bed. “Have me back?”

  Sophie lifted to her knees on the mattress. “I know you chose Agatha over me, Teddy. I know she’s your princess now. All I’m asking is that you keep yourself open before you decide for sure. The End isn’t written yet, is it? I’ll come with you and Aggie to Camelot. I’ll do anything you want. Just give me another chance to be your Ever After.”

  Tedros looked like he’d been kicked in the pants. “I . . . I don’t know what you’re saying . . .”

  “That if you’re asking me to question my happy ending, so should you,” said Sophie.

  Tedros shrank against a wall, clutching the shreds of his shirt. He could see the Storian furiously capturing the two of them, alone in the School Master’s chamber. “And if I won’t?”

  Sophie’s fingertip glowed pink. “Then I’ll choose Rafal and my loyalty will be to him. Which means I have to tell him you’re here.”

  “Listen to yourself, Sophie. Listen to what you’re asking me,” Tedros pleaded. “You’re dazzling, intelligent, and absolutely mental in every way and I can’t imagine my life without you. From the moment I saw you first year, I thought you were my future queen. But we already tried to be together. No matter how good we might seem on paper, in the end, we’re meant to be friends. Just friends. Like we were last year—”

  “When you tried to kiss me?” said Sophie.

  “That . . . that’s irrelevant . . .” Tedros stuttered. “What matters is that Agatha and I are happy together—”

  “Really?” said Sophie, sliding off the bed and moving towards him. “You said I was the one who brought you two back together. Which means you two had broken apart. Which means you two aren’t particularly happy if it takes a third person to fix your love.”
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  “Look, happy endings take time and work and commitment,” Tedros retorted. “Mine and Agatha’s won’t be the last Ever After that wrestles and doubts and fights to hold on to love. Just look at your own.”

  Sophie paused. “You’re right, Teddy. That’s why I asked my heart to tell me my real ending. And this is what it said.” She held up the ink on her skin, desperation creeping into her voice. “I want to love Rafal. I want to love anyone but you. You bring me nothing but pain and hurt and humiliation. Yet my heart only knows your name, Teddy. What else can I do but see if it’s right?” She gazed at him through tears. “Our fairy tale brought us back together, here and now, because it wants a different ending. Why else would you be here alone without Agatha? Why else would you be the one to rescue me instead of my best friend?”

  Tedros went rigid, thinking of all the twists and turns that brought him and Sophie to this very moment. The two of them alone, face-to-face, no disguises, no tricks, for the first time in two years. Then his cheeks went apple red. “I could never do that to Agatha. Neither could you, Sophie. You’re not a witch, anymore—”

  “And yet, Agatha and I had our own Ever After until you made her reconsider,” Sophie said, treading closer. “So if asking you to open your heart makes me a witch, then you’re one too, Tedros. Because you did the same thing to Agatha when she was my princess.”

  Tedros was speechless.

  “But now it’s time for all of us to face the truth. It’s time for the last Ever After,” Sophie pressed, cornering him. “Don’t you want to know who your princess is without a doubt, Teddy?” She stared into his eyes. “Wouldn’t your father want you to look closer one last time?”

  Tedros’ turned away, gritting so hard she could see the bones of his jaw. “You know nothing about my father,” he said.

  “Teddy, listen to me. I’ll leave Rafal, just like you ask,” said Sophie gently. “I’ll destroy his ring and commit my heart to Good forever. I’ll follow you and Agatha to your kingdom, fully accepting you might choose her and I’ll end up alone, the sidekick to your happy ending. All I ask of you is a simple promise: that you’ll give me another chance before picking your princess forever.”