“Indeed,” said Alpa, slouched against the bars, biting her blackened nails. “To an endeavor far beyond the comprehension of your puny pea brain.”
Tedros grabbed her by the throat through the bars, his fingers pressing into her larynx. “Tell me or I’ll kill you.”
“Touchy touchy,” Alpa wheezed.
“Even that ugly knight behaved better,” sneered Bethna, sidling beside her.
“Go ahead. Kill all of us,” said Omeida, flanking Alpa’s other side. “But it would be a very poor decision. Things are just beginning, little boy.”
“At the Four Point, the real story begins,” said Alpa.
“Four Point?” Tedros said urgently. “What about the Four Point—”
“You’ll need us when he comes,” said Bethna.
“Who? Your White Knight?” Tedros mocked. “In six months, no one has tried to rescue you. No loyal spies have tried to kill me. No one has made a peep over your arrest. So tell me, Sisters Freaks, who is coming that will make me need you?”
The sisters leaned in, grinning. “The Snake,” they hissed.
It hit Tedros like a blow to the chest. He let go of Alpa’s throat, fumbling for words: “Y-y-you know who he is—”
“Your father did too,” Alpa offered.
“That’s why he gave you your test,” said Bethna.
“A test you failed,” Omeida cracked.
They hewed together, like a three-headed serpent.
“War is coming, little boy,” Alpa crowed.
“War between the Lion and the Snake,” said Bethna.
“The winner will be the one true king,” Omeida added.
They jammed their faces between bars: “The one with Arthur’s blood.”
Tedros felt nauseous, his heart sucked into his throat. It was what the Lady of the Lake had told Sophie. The same two words.
“I don’t believe you,” he said, faking calm. “No one has Arthur’s blood besides me.”
“The Snake does,” Alpa corrected.
“You’re lying,” Tedros attacked.
Bethna yawned. “Only a half-wit confuses lying with the withholding of information.”
“Tell me, then,” Tedros pressured. “Tell me who the Snake is.”
“Tell you where the money is. Tell you who the Snake is. Tell tell tell tell,” Alpa mimicked.
“Besides, it’s obvious,” Bethna taunted.
“Staring at you right in the face,” said Alpa.
“Only you don’t want to see it,” said Omeida.
“Should we spoonfeed the poor boy?” Bethna simpered to her sisters.
“Only if he feeds us better food,” Alpa proposed, picking up a brass cup of murky water off a rusty tray in the corner of the cell. She shunted the tray towards Tedros under the cell door. It had a bowl of gruel crawling with ants.
“Done,” said Tedros.
“Ham and mashed potatoes?” said Alpa, wide-eyed.
“Done.”
“Chicken livers and wine?” said Bethna, hopefully.
“Done.”
“Caviar and rampion salad?” said Omeida, breathless.
“Done, done, done. You have my word,” Tedros hurried, his face glowing red. “Tell me who the Snake is. Now.”
“Tell him, Alpa,” Bethna sighed.
Alpa sipped her water, eyes on Tedros. Then she stalked towards him, step by step. “Should have just asked your mousy old mum. She knows everything no matter how dumb she plays,” she crooned, glaring hard. “But a deal is a deal, little boy. You want to know who has Arthur’s blood? Then listen closely. . . .”
She slipped her face through the cell bars, her nose almost touching his. “The Snake’s name is . . .”
She splashed her dirty water in his face. “Ring a king a bees will sting so dance a timba tumba!”
Her sisters screeched laughter.
“Fools,” Tedros spat, wiping his face. “You’re as crackbrained as you were when you were raving on your stoops for coins. Let’s see how you do with no food for a week!” He kicked the tray back under the bars, sending bowl and gruel flying and the women cowering. Vibrating with anger, Tedros turned for the stairs. “No one in this world has my father’s blood but me. You hear me? No one! No uncle or brother or sister—”
“Or son?”
Tedros stopped dead in his tracks. He whirled back towards the cell, staring into its dark, empty silence.
“What did you say?” he breathed.
He lit up the cell with his glow, but the sisters had flattened against opposing walls with catlike smiles.
“What did you say!” he shouted.
“Bush banana poo the panda!” sang Alpa.
The three Mistrals danced like hags around a cauldron. “Bush banana poo the panda!”
Tedros slammed the bars, yanking at the door, trying to get inside. “WHAT DID YOU SAY!”
But the three sisters just hopped and sniggered as Tedros ripped at their door the way he had his father’s sword until at last he showed his teeth through the bars—
“I’m going to kill the Snake,” he vowed. “And then I’m going to kill you.”
He raged down the hall and up the stairs. Breathing fire, Tedros threw his weight against the stone door—
It didn’t move.
“Kei!”
He wasn’t waiting to build an army. He wasn’t waiting for summits or wizards to be a king. He wasn’t waiting for anything anymore. He’d ride to the Four Point right now and find this Snake.
Blood pumping, Tedros pummeled the door, drowning out the cackles from the dungeons below.
Tonight the Lion would roar.
17
SOPHIE
The Map Room
Sophie should have been thinking about the Snake.
The Snake that had Arthur’s blood. The Snake that had terrorized the Woods. The Snake that had killed their friend and would kill them next.
And yet, she couldn’t stop thinking about hydrangeas.
“The whole castle’s crawling with them,” she whispered to Agatha, nodding at the thousands of pom-pom-shaped flowers in pink, purple, and yellow blanketing every inch of Castle Jolie. “I loathe hydrangeas, Aggie. They look like human brains. Just being around them makes me faint—”
“Shhh!” Agatha snapped, then kept on whispering to Nicola.
Sophie stewed as the chain gang pulled her along, deeper into the royal castle, the young pirate named Thiago with the tattoos around his eyes leading them on foot. The other pirates had remained outside the castle on their horses, sneering down at the crew as they shambled through the open doors like dead men walking to the gallows. Sophie watched the boys deliver each kid a demeaning kick in the bum—Hester, Anadil, Dot, Hort, Bogden, Willam. . . . But when it came Sophie’s turn, sunburnt Wesley simply smirked and gave her a frightening little hisssss.
Which made it all the more foolish that with the Snake moments away, Sophie was offended by flowers. But it wasn’t really the hydrangeas that were bothering her, though she did hate everything about this castle: its birthday-cake colors, its cloying, candy-cane scent, its treacly portraits of the royal children frolicking with dogs, and its endless loop of music, playing Jaunt Jolie’s annoyingly catchy anthem through flowered walls (“Tipple Top, Joy and Jaunt / Come and Be Jolie!”). No, the real reason Sophie was annoyed was because she’d just saved everyone’s noses in the pavilion with her brave performance and no one seemed to care—especially Agatha and Nicola, who kept whispering to each other like Flopsy and Mopsy.
Sophie couldn’t fault Agatha for having another friend. Aggie was perfectly free to consort with whoever she pleased, including a first-year Reader with a bad attitude.
So why, then, did Sophie feel so upset?
She’d been so distracted by her reunion with Agatha and all the action of their new quest that she hadn’t noticed a creeping emptiness returning—the same emptiness that had made her impatient with her students at school, increasingly bored with her
Dean’s duties, and eager to comb Camelot’s tabloids for sordid rumors about its new king.
And yet, Sophie hadn’t been able to put a finger on why she felt this way.
She was happy being Dean, wasn’t she? That was the Ever After she’d worked so hard to find and at the end of this quest she’d go right back to it, just like Agatha would go back to a wedding and a crown. Yet unlike Agatha, Sophie would have no one by her side . . . well, at least not the way that Agatha had Tedros.
But that was fine with her. Truly. She might flirt with delectable Everboys at parties and ogle a few of her own sultry Neverboys during school assemblies, but she’d learned her lesson with Tedros and Rafal. No boy could ever really understand her. She was too strong and empowered and . . . complicated. Boys always wanted her to change and she didn’t want to change. Not when she’d finally figured herself out. She’d be far better off staying out of that swamp for a long, long time.
No, the only person Sophie needed was Agatha. Agatha understood her. Agatha balanced her. Agatha didn’t expect her to change. Which is why Sophie had been so happy these past few days with her best friend back in her life. But seeing Agatha confide in this Nicola girl the way Agatha had once confided in her made Sophie realize how fragile this happiness was.
It was ironic, really. Agatha would have been happy living in Gavaldon forever with Sophie. But it was Sophie who had been determined to leave and find her own life.
Now it was Agatha who had her own life.
A life that didn’t depend on Sophie anymore.
She heard Nicola whisper her name and Sophie promptly goosed Agatha with her knee: “Are you two talking about me?”
Agatha scowled. “We’re talking about our plan to fight the Snake!”
“So now I’m not good enough to help you plan?”
“I’ll tell you the plan if you’re quiet,” Nicola said.
“See how she talks to me?” Sophie mewled to Agatha.
“Because you’re acting like a mopstick,” Agatha scolded.
“You ungrateful Brutus. Not one word about how clever I was out there defusing those vile men, not one word of appreciation—”
“Sorry, we’ve been busy planning how not to die—”
“I remember when instead of gossiping about me with first years, it was me and you who made plans!”
“You are the plan, you idiot!”
“What?” Sophie blurted loudly.
The chain yanked to a halt. Slowly the two girls looked up to see Thiago glaring daggers at them from the head of the line.
Dark silence fell over the hall, punctured by gay sounds of singing: “Tipple Top, Joy and Jaunt—”
The pirate stabbed his sword into a flowered wall and the music squawked and petered out. He gave the girls a last glower of warning and the death march resumed.
Agatha and Nicola stared Sophie down.
Sophie reddened. If she was indeed the team’s plan to fight the Snake, now she’d have to do it without knowing what the plan was.
Steeling herself, she followed the line into the Royal Keep, the king and queen’s private residence, as evidenced by the preponderance of children’s bedrooms, cozy sitting rooms, and opulent bathrooms. Sophie peeked in, unnerved by an unmade bed, an open wine bottle in one of the sitting rooms, a wooden toothbrush askew by the sink. Signs of life but no one living there.
At the front of the line, Hester coughed in surprise, snagging the chain.
Sophie followed her eyes, as did everyone else—
The library was coming into view, a two-floor yellow-and-pink rotunda cased in glass. Inside the library, three giant steel cages hung from the high ceiling, each packed to the brim with maids, guards, stewards, and members of the royal family. Two shirtless teen pirates, one thin and dark, the other hoggish with pig-colored skin, were perched on the railing of the second floor. They took turns kicking the cages as hard as they could and watched them swing back and forth, tossing all the people inside like marbles while they screamed and cried, though Sophie couldn’t hear any of it through the thick glass.
The pirates looked bored.
As one of them punted a cage, Sophie saw the King of Jaunt Jolie tumbling inside it, his royal robes slashed and stained, his crown-points speared with rotted fruit, as he tried to grip onto two bawling boys—the same little boys Sophie had seen playing with the dog in the foyer painting. (The dog was cowering beneath a woman’s blue gown in another cage, anticipating the next kick.)
The line pulled Sophie forward and the library started to recede from view. Through the glass she met the eyes of the king, who spotted her as his cage stopped swinging. His eyes watered as he clasped his hands, appealing to her for help, his tear-stained boys tucked at his sides. Sophie could only gawk back like a tourist in a sadistic museum being pulled to the next display.
This man’s wife has been killed for satchels of gold, she thought, sickly. Were these his boys? Sophie felt her own eyes grow wet. His now-motherless boys? Sophie thought of Honora’s two young sons, just like these, who her father, Stefan, loved so much—
Agatha elbowed her and Sophie saw her best friend nodding subtly at the next cage about to be kicked. The one with the dog cowering beneath the woman in the blue gown. Only now Sophie got a good look at the woman’s petrified face and gasped. It was the same face they’d seen on that poster in the pavilion.
The one stamped EXECUTED.
The Queen of Jaunt Jolie was alive?
Astonished, Sophie and Agatha watched the queen try valiantly to reach through her cage bars and touch her children and husband as their cage swung past—
The chain jerked Sophie and Agatha forward and the library was out of sight.
Dragged ahead, Sophie thought back to the Lady of the Lake, who’d looked just as tortured as the Queen of Jaunt Jolie. The Snake could have killed the sorceress in Avalon, but instead he’d drained her magic and left her feckless and afraid. He could have killed this queen too, but instead he peddled news of her death. And he could have left Avalon without a trace, but instead he’d left that map in Chaddick’s hands to taunt them. . . .
He’s always one step ahead. Like Evelyn Sader and Rafal used to be, Sophie thought. And this one plays games too. Just like them.
An unsettling thought crossed her mind. But why? If he has Arthur’s blood . . . if he thinks he can pull Excalibur . . . why play games?
Sophie held her breath. Was it really Camelot’s crown the Snake was after? Or was he after something else? Something . . . more?
The line halted in front of her and Sophie broke from her trance to see golden double doors at the end of the hall.
They opened magically, revealing a room Sophie couldn’t quite make out from this far back in line.
Suddenly her cuffs split open. So did Agatha’s, and the piece of chain between them levitated into the air, turning black and shiny like an eel before it flew off into the room, vanishing from view.
“You two,” Thiago said, pointing a grubby fingernail at them. “Come here.”
Sophie and Agatha clasped each other’s hands.
The tattooed pirate gestured ahead with his sword, directing the two girls through the gold doors. Holding hands tighter, Sophie and Agatha stepped out of line and entered the room. They looked back at the pirate and the rest of their friends still chained in the hall, gaping through the doorway.
“He’s waiting,” Thiago said darkly.
Agatha swiveled to Nicola, eyes wide—
The door slammed shut, leaving Sophie and Agatha inside alone.
Neither girl moved.
“All that planning with your new friend . . . ,” said Sophie softly. “And here we are. You and me. Like always.”
Agatha didn’t answer.
They peered around warily, expecting a trap.
“No one’s here,” Agatha said, letting Sophie’s hand go.
The first thing Sophie noticed about the room is that it was enormous—as vast and high as one of the
ballrooms in the School for Good and Evil, lined with tall pillars. There were no doors, no windows, and no furniture, except for a long black stone table at the rear of the room.
The second thing Sophie noticed was that the room was green. Whereas most of Jaunt Jolie featured Easter-egg hues, here the carpet, pillars, and walls were a deep, luminous emerald, textured with shiny, snakelike scales. The torches on the walls crackled with green flames. Sophie knew this color well: it was the color of her own eyes as well as the color of Rafal’s old school that had sought to turn her Good classmates Evil. But here it felt out of place, as if they’d passed through a portal into another realm.
There was something that wasn’t green, though, Sophie realized, looking upwards.
Six parchment maps floated in rows above the center of the room, each as big as a flag.
“It’s a Map Room,” said Agatha, moving towards them.
“A what?” said Sophie.
“Tedros showed me Camelot’s on our first night in the castle. It was where his father used to meet with his Round Table. It had floating maps of neighboring kingdoms just like this. Tedros couldn’t wait to hold meetings there with his knights . . . but he never got the chance.”
Sophie saw sadness in her friend’s eyes, but there was no time for that now. “Do you recognize any of the maps, at least? I don’t see labels on them,” she said, gripping one by its corner and holding it while it tried to sail off like a balloon. “This one looks like Avalon. See, here’s the sea around the kingdom and the big gates and the lake—”
Her throat closed up. “Aggie.”
The map had a three-dimensional toy figurine positioned on top of the lake. The same exact figurine they’d seen on her and Professor Dovey’s enchanted maps.
The figurine was labeled CHADDICK, his name crossed out.
Stomach fluttering, Sophie let go of the map and rushed to catch hold of the next. More figurines inched across black, rocky terrain: RAVAN . . . ARACHNE . . . DRAX . . . . Agatha grabbed on to a map with clear-colored mountains: KIKO . . . GISELLE . . . HIRO . . . Another with purple hills had VEX . . . BRONE . . . MONA . . .
“They’re our Quest Maps,” said Sophie, instinctively touching the gold vial on her neck to make sure it was still there.