The Last Ever After

  The knight saw the change in Tedros’ face. “Tedros, no! Don’t fight them alone!”

  But the prince was looking at Agatha, who’d taken Tedros’ hand, her teeth gritted, silently telling him he wouldn’t fight Evil alone.

  He would fight it with her.

  “Tedros . . . please!” Lancelot begged.

  The prince’s fear hardened to steel. Hand in hand with Agatha, he turned back to Sophie and Rafal, the scared and tremulous boy gone.

  Rafal looked thoroughly entertained. “They think this is one of their old storybooks, my queen. Join hands, fight for love, and everything will go Good’s way . . .”

  “At least Evil does love with dignity,” Sophie scoffed, studying their joined hands. “You two are like one of those cakes drowned in frosting so no one will notice it’s spoiled.”

  Agatha lost her poise. “A cake you did everything possible to get for yourself, remember?”

  “And I did, thanks to you,” Sophie replied coolly. She smiled at Tedros. “It just didn’t taste very good.”

  “You’re a witch,” Tedros hissed. “A witch who’s even uglier than the warty, bald-headed one you were before. Lucky that you found a freak as empty as you. Another black hole of a soul.”

  The venom in his voice took Sophie by surprise. Her cheeks blushed, before they paled again. “And yet we love each other just like you and your princess, Tedros. Nothing you say can make my love with Rafal mean any less. Nothing you say can take away our happy ending.”

  She pulled in tight to Rafal, who kissed her gently on the head.

  “Unless it’s hate, not love, that keeps you together,” said Agatha, watching them. “And hate can never win.”

  “Never win?” Rafal arched a brow. “Your steadfast wizard flees like a child the moment he sees our army. Your trusty knight proved even less useful . . . and yet still you’re pretending as if you have a chance?”

  Sophie glared at Agatha, fury building. “That’s the problem with Good, isn’t it? It tells you to believe in hope and faith, when those are just phantoms. Evil tells you to believe in the truth—the truth that’s staring at you in the face, no matter how scared you are of it. And here’s some truths for you. I was dreaming about Rafal all along. I was in the right school all along. I could have been happy being myself, instead of trying to be something I wasn’t. And if I’d just accepted that, I’d never have tried to be your friend in the first place. Because the only reason I knocked on your door with my big smile and my basket of cookies was so that a School Master would think I was Good. I was using you, Agatha. You were my Good Deed to get what I wanted. The same way you’ve used me to get closer to your prince. So don’t stand here and tell me what Rafal and I have isn’t love. What you and I had wasn’t love. Because that was a lie from the beginning.”

  All Agatha could hear was the sound of her own breaths, for Sophie’s eyes were like fireballs, scorching through hers.

  “But then again, you have hope and faith on your side, those never-failing weapons,” Sophie said cuttingly, “when all we have are axes, armies, and youth on ours.”

  “Is that all we have, my queen?” Rafal asked playfully.

  Sophie read his face. “How could I forget?”

  Fingertip searing pink, she thrust it skywards, directing the cloud of fairies higher into the trees and lighting up the Forest overhead.

  Thousands of bony, fleshless stymphs snarled down from the branches with their eyeless sockets, cawing with high-pitched screams at the sight of their Master and his new queen.

  Agatha and the heroes shielded their ears from the terrible shrieks, but Rafal just hummed along, as if listening to beautiful music.

  “They can scream all they like,” Tedros growled, trying to endure the sounds. “Stymphs won’t attack the Good. You only trained them to attack the Evil.”

  Rafal tried not to laugh. “What I admired most about your father when he was a student was that he never thought he was more than he was. He knew he was about as sharp as a flint stone, so he kept his mouth shut and made up for it with a pretty face.”

  Tedros reddened, looking unnerved.

  “You, on the other hand, despite having even less brains than Arthur, have somehow convinced yourself that you have something going on in that exquisite little head of yours,” Rafal cooed. “Must have your mother’s blood. Always thought she was quite the know-it-all.”

  “Whoever birthed you would slay herself on the spot if she knew you had her blood!” Tedros spat. “I’m proud to be my mother’s son.”

  Rafal’s stare chilled him to the bone. “Well, she won’t have a son after tonight.”

  Agatha felt Tedros tense against her.

  “And as for those stymphs . . . they are indeed trained only to attack the Evil,” Rafal said, leering at the prince. “But the Woods are no longer the Woods you once knew, little prince. Good used to be the side with happy endings. Good used to be the side with true love’s kiss. Good used to be the side with Evers fighting for it. But Evil has all those things now. Evil has become the new Good.”

  He raised his arms to the stymphs with a malevolent smile. “Which means to them . . . Good is the new Evil.”

  The young School Master bared his teeth. “KILL THEM!”

  The Dark Army roared with bloodlust and charged for the heroes—

  Rafal held his hand up and they skidded to a stop.

  He was still staring at the stymphs, who hadn’t moved from their posts. They weren’t screeching anymore either.

  “I said . . . kill them,” Rafal bellowed.

  The birds didn’t flinch.

  The Forest was quiet.

  “Yoo-hoo! Over here!” a voice pipped.

  Slowly Rafal raised eyes to Merlin, high in an elm tree, astride a stymph. “You see, I’m afraid Evil isn’t the new Good, my dear boy. Not if your Evers and Nevers are both on Good’s side.”

  At the top of every tree in the forest, shadows toting bows and arrows slid out onto the branches from behind the tree trunks. With a swish of his hand, Merlin magically lit all their arrow tips on fire, illuminating the archers’ faces.

  Agatha and Tedros blanched at the sight of her classmates—Chaddick, Mona, Arachne, Vex, Reena, Millicent, Ravan, and Kiko, beaming despite her goose-feathered limbs—along with nearly two hundred other Evers and Nevers, their flaming arrows pointed at the Dark Army.

  “I peed again,” Hansel said, alongside his fellow gaping League Members.

  Sophie was the color of ash. She looked at Rafal, who was just as dumbstruck. “Impossible . . . ,” he breathed.

  “They were at s-s-school—with the teachers—” stuttered Sophie. “Lady Lesso barricaded them inside—”

  “Just like she did inside her classroom every session this past week, preparing her students to fight for Good,” said Merlin cheerfully. “I should know, my dear. I was there, teaching the class with Lady Lesso while the old villains were asleep. The sleeping spell was my work, of course; as your friends will tell you, I have a specialty in putting things to sleep, whether the thorned trees outside the school gates, visitors to my Celestium, or a sadistic fleet of zombies. And here you thought Lady Lesso was teaching them black magic tricks for your idiotic training fights! (That was Beatrix by the way, who found the spells in her old library books, while supervising the infirmary.) But it proved a useful smokescreen for what Lady Lesso was really up to, once you became suspicious and visited the Dean’s room. Not that Lesso lied to you—she was helping the young students fight the old villains . . . just for a much bigger fight than your pointless classroom brawls. I was hiding under her desk the whole time you were there by the way, trying to disguise my sniffles. Terrible allergies to sour plums.”

  Sophie couldn’t find air. “You . . . I heard you . . .”

  Agatha and Tedros were just as floored. That’s why Merlin was gone all week, Agatha thought. That was the old friend he said he was visiting . . .

  Hester, Anadil, and Dot weren’
t his real spies.

  “It was Lady Lesso,” said Sophie, realizing it too. “She was the spy all along—”

  “Playing Evil’s fervent champion and your loyal mentor until I needed her. And with your return to Evil and the darkening of the Woods, that time finally came,” said Merlin.

  “You are a fool, old man, if you think a bitter, feckless hag of a Dean can make a difference in your fate,” Rafal sneered.

  “Given Lady Lesso has been Evil’s greatest Dean of all, I’ll happily play the fool,” said the wizard. “For even she knows that Evil cannot exist without Good, the two of them in constant tension, refining and defining each other as nature’s balance. Try to erase Good and you only tilt the balance more in Good’s favor. Which means despite all your efforts, you haven’t made Evil the new Good at all. . . . You’ve made Evil as old as it ever was.”

  The wizard smiled at Rafal. “And it seems you’ve trained your stymphs all too well.”

  He let out a piercing wolf whistle and with a rousing war cry two-hundred strong, the students leapt astride the birds and dive-bombed the birds off the trees, launching flaming arrows at the old villains—

  Arrow blades ripped through their targets, igniting zombie bodies on fire.

  Chaddick spiraled his stymph straight into the Dark Army, skewering three ogres with a single arrow . . . Beatrix managed a flying loop before she sparked fire to Snow White’s witch with an arrow to the neck . . . Arachne took out a cyclops’ eye with a straight shot and spinning dive . . .

  Agatha watched a fleet of Nevers spray arrows into more zombie heads, utterly flabbergasted. Neither stymph-flying nor archery was ever taught at school. How had students as bumbling as Brone or Mona or Millicent become bird-riding, weapon-firing warriors in a week?

  But it was only when Agatha saw Kiko, flying wildly with absolutely no direction, her hand puttering on her bow, unleashing an arrow miles off target, that Agatha realized what was really happening. For all of a sudden, Kiko’s stymph magically leveled and her arrow magically veered, before tearing through a troll’s throat and setting him aflame.

  Slowly Agatha looked up to see Merlin high up in his tree, waving his palms like a symphony conductor, managing the stymph and arrow flights of his Ever-Never army with a sorcerer’s touch. Leave it to me, he’d insisted all along. For if the School Master would bring forth an army under his control, so too would Merlin.

  He swished his arms once more and four unmanned stymphs with bows and fiery arrows in their mouths throttled towards the ground, scooping Hester, Anadil, Dot, and Hort onto their backs, who immediately began taking aim at zombie targets and letting arrows fly.

  “If Daddy could see me now . . . ,” Dot cheered, lancing a headless horseman through the chest.

  “He’d ask why we’re fighting for Good,” Anadil crabbed, taking out two Harpies.

  “Always the party pooper, Ani,” said Hester, firing arrows as her demon flung firebolts from its mouth, igniting zombies on the spot.

  “No wonder Good always wins,” Hort marveled as he flew above them, watching Merlin correct the witches’ shots. “You guys cheat!”

  For a moment, Agatha felt a surge of relief, knowing the wizard was in command of Good’s whole army—well, almost the whole army. The old heroes were trying to charge into the fray, but were held back to the trees by Princess Uma, Yuba, the White Rabbit, and Tinkerbell, who knew even one of their deaths would break the Readers’ shield. Meanwhile, Lancelot yelled for the wizard to help him off the tree, but Merlin was so distracted trying to orchestrate his army that he flicked his hand in the knight’s direction and accidentally buried the sword deeper into his shoulder. As Lancelot hollered in pain, Agatha started towards him, but stopped short—

  Tedros.

  Where was Tedros?

  She whirled to see him, Excalibur in hand, charging towards Rafal, whose back was turned. Agatha held in a scream as Tedros raised his sword—

  Rafal spun just in time, shooting a bomb of black glow which Tedros barely deflected with his blade.

  “Always so impulsive, little prince,” the young School Master snorted. “And now you’ve taken yourself into battle against someone who can’t be killed.”

  “When I’m done, you’ll be in so many pieces, I’d like to see you try to put yourself back together!” Tedros roared.

  As the two clashed viciously, Rafal firing more death spells and Tedros repelling them, Agatha could see her prince already losing ground. The School Master was rifling spells so fast and blasting away trees with such force that Tedros was diving behind stumps to avoid being toasted alive.

  Agatha couldn’t breathe. Her prince was going to die. She had to help him! But how? The School Master was invincible. There was no way to save Tedros unless—

  The ring.

  She looked up urgently and saw Sophie, crimson with rage, firing spells at stymph birds and crashing them with their riders to the ground. Sophie sensed something and froze still, before she turned and saw Agatha glowering at her . . . at the ring on her finger . . . her jaw set with determination. Slowly the two friends locked eyes.

  Sophie took off, fleeing through the Forest.

  Agatha started chasing, then heard Tedros cry with pain. She whirled and saw him crawling through flaming bodies, clutching his singed arm, as he tried to dodge Rafal’s spells.

  At the same time, the Dark Army was starting to regain a foothold in battle, thanks to Jack’s giant, knocking down stymphs with his fist, while Captain Hook slashed his weapon, sending students careening to the ground. Merlin’s gestures were increasingly frantic, and he had the same anxious look that he’d had when he’d lost control of his fairy-dust train.

  Agatha swiveled to Tedros and saw him using a stymph corpse as a shield against Rafal, as the School Master closed in. Petrified, Agatha spun and saw Sophie getting farther away—

  Either she went to help Tedros or she went after the ring.

  She looked up to the sun’s glow sinking in the dead-east. There wasn’t much time—

  “Let me free!” Lancelot’s voice ripped through the chaos. “The boy’ll die without me!”

  Agatha’s eyes veered to him, speared to the tree. The knight was caked with blood, his hair ragged and beast-like, his face filled with primal rage.

  “I fight,” he snarled at her. “You go after her.”

  Agatha knew there wasn’t an argument. In a heartbeat, she hurdled over burning bodies and yanked the sword out of the knight’s shoulder.

  Lancelot howled in agony and relief before he stumbled forward and snatched the sword out of her hands.

  “Get her back here,” he panted, squeezing her arm hard.

  “But Tedros . . . what about Ted—”

  “He’ll be here, safe and sound, with Excalibur ready to destroy the ring when you return. I promise you, Agatha: I will keep the boy safe. But we need you to bring Sophie back,” Lancelot pressed. “Don’t fail me and I won’t fail you. Understood?”

  Agatha nodded, breathless.

  He shoved her away and she hurtled after Sophie into the trees. She peeked over her shoulder at Tedros, trying to repel Rafal’s death spells with a broken stymph bone, before she saw Lancelot storming towards them, the gang of old heroes at his back.

  “Do we fight or do we cower!” Lancelot yelled.

  “We fight!” the League roared.

  They followed him into battle as Agatha ran away from it, Good’s last and only hope to survive.

  32

  The Meaning of Evil

  With the light of the black fairies and flaming arrows illuminating her path, Agatha launched after Sophie, who was sprinting eastwards towards the edge of the Stymph Forest. Sophie had a good thirty-yard lead on her, but the farther she ran, the more the lights receded from the Good-Evil war, and soon Sophie was stumbling through the dark in her black-leather catsuit, trying to find her way out of the Woods.

  “Wait!” Agatha shouted, unable to see her anymore. If she lost Sop
hie here, she’d never find her before the sun set. “Sophie—”

  A pink blast of light blazed towards her head and Agatha dove just in time. She looked up to see Sophie racing ahead.

  Where is she going? Agatha thought, holding out her own gold fingerglow like a lantern.

  But then she saw it, through the gaps of skeletal branches overhead . . . the outlines of the two school castles.

  Agatha stopped cold.

  Sophie was Queen of Evil. She could open and close the school gates now, like any of the teachers. Which meant if Sophie crossed before Agatha caught her, she’d slam the gates shut.

  Agatha exploded forward, trying to make up ground, as the two of them broke out of the Woods and into a grove of purple, giant-thorned trees separating the Stymph Forest from the School for Good and Evil. The lethal-sharp thorns stirred languidly, as if woken from a deep sleep, and Agatha knew she only had seconds before they spotted her. Ahead, Sophie was nearing the school gates, but Agatha suddenly couldn’t see her anymore as deadly thorns started stabbing down in front of her like falling stalactites.

  “Sophie!”

  Agatha hurdled and dodged thorns, feeling the ground caving in as more and more thorns smashed holes around her. A thorn sliced from the left and she slid beneath it, only to have one gash her arm from the right; Agatha bit back the pain and fumbled forward, eyes locked on Sophie as the gates magically opened for her and started slatting shut the second she surged through. Agatha skidded towards them, still ten yards away, knowing she wasn’t going to make it. The gate was closing too fast—

  She glanced back and saw another thorn lashing down like a wave, about to impale her against the closing gates—

  Only one play to make.

  With a gasp, Agatha turned towards the thorn. Just as it hit her heart, she skirted its edge and leapt onto its side, like a hapless Tarzan, as the thorn reared up in surprise over the school gates. Agatha clung to the leathery purple thorn stem for dear life, swinging her legs through the air as she glanced down at the knife-edged gate spikes beneath her. The thorn coiled and flapped higher, about to shake her off. This was her last chance—