Did I make a mistake?
He swallowed his doubt. No going back now.
“Let’s get to the test,” Tedros pressured the chaplain, eager to seal this coronation and get his mother and Agatha inside.
“Yes—uh—of course,” the chaplain stammered, his eyes darting to Guinevere and the knight as he fumbled a faded parchment card from his robes. “Uh, hear ye, hear ye. As all prior kings, King Arthur Pendragon conceived this test to prove his successor be worthy of—”
Tedros ripped the card from his hands and read it out loud, his voice booming through the magic star:
“To seal his coronation, the future King of Camelot must pull Excalibur from an ordinary stone, as I once did.”
“Wow. That’s easy,” he blurted, voice echoing.
He hadn’t meant for the crowd to hear that.
“CAN SOMEONE FIND ME A STONE?” Tedros puffed, glancing uselessly around the stage.
Lancelot shifted in his chair, which made the stage creak so loudly the audience’s eyes went to him.
“Preferably one that isn’t made out of wood,” the knight said.
A ruckus echoed behind him and everyone turned to see the red-haired altar boy careen through the fallen scrim onto the stage, having tripped on Guinevere’s shoe. “Sorry! That’s my cue!” he squawked, dragging an iron anvil behind him. “Behold! The stone from which King Arthur once pulled Excali—”
The heavy anvil splintered the wooden platform. The edge of the stage imploded and the anvil plummeted straight through the hole like a cannonball, down to a cliff, where it bounced off the rock and fell into the ocean.
“This is going well,” said Lancelot.
Tedros scorched pink.
His mother’s eyes were glued to her one shoe. Lady Gremlaine wasn’t on the stage anymore. And he couldn’t even look in Agatha’s direction. He’d wanted the coronation to show her what kind of king he’d be. Instead, she was probably as mortified as he was.
“Merlin . . . some help?” he peeped desperately, glancing upwards.
A pigeon pooed, just missing his head.
“Enough,” Tedros boiled, jaw clenching. “To seal the coronation, I have to pull a sword from a stone? Well, the sword’s in one right now!”
He stamped to the back of the stage and the once-curtained-off castle balcony, where Excalibur was still lodged blade-first into the stone archway.
“So if I pull my sword out of this stone, it’s done, right? We can all go home,” he barked at the chaplain.
“Well, I don’t believe your father meant—”
“IS IT DONE OR IS IT NOT,” Tedros bullied.
The chaplain quailed. “Oh, yes . . . I suppose. . . .”
Tedros grabbed the hilt, practically screeching into the star on his shoulder, deafening the crowd: “Then in the name of my father, my kingdom, and my people, I hereby accept my place as Leader, Protector, and King of Camelot!”
He pulled at the sword.
It didn’t move.
“Huh?”
Tedros jerked harder. Still didn’t budge.
He could hear the restless mob shifting.
Putting his foot on the wall, he pried at the blade with all of his strength, his biceps straining against his skin—
Nope. Nothing.
Tedros was sweating now. He pulled right, left, front, back, trying to make the sword slide, but with each pull it seemed to bury harder into the stone. It didn’t make sense. Excalibur wasn’t wedged that deep and the archway’s stone was loamy and weak. Why wasn’t it moving?
People in the crowd were clutching each other, pointing at him open-mouthed. They knew what was happening. They knew after promising to save them as king, he was failing the first test that would make him king, a test that shouldn’t have been a test at all—
“Merlin . . . ,” he pleaded, but the sky was clear overhead, the white star on his shoulder lost and gone.
He couldn’t breathe, his wet grip on the hilt making his pulls shallow and frantic. His crown skewed on his head. His coronation gown ripped at the seams—
Please, he begged, heaving at the sword. Please!
Lancelot ran up. “Just yank the damn thing out!” he said, helping him jostle the hilt—
Tedros shoved him away. “It’s my test—I have to do it—”
But he pushed Lancelot too hard, who knocked backwards straight into the chaplain, upending the old man over the balcony. His priestly gown caught on the railing, leaving him dangling upside down, robes over his head, exposed save for his saggy pantaloons. Gold coins showered out of his pockets onto the crowd, causing a stampede for them as the chaplain howled. The altar boy ran to help his master, only to plunge through the hole in the stage left by the lost anvil.
Paralyzed, Tedros scanned the scene: Lancelot hoisting the chaplain over a balcony; Guinevere lurching to rescue a squealing altar boy hanging off a beam; his kingdom’s people punching each other for a handful of coins . . .
And six monkeys straddling a sword stuck in stone, slathering it with banana pudding, and sliding up and down the blade.
Tedros dropped to his knees.
“IT’S THEM!” a woman bellowed down below, pointing at Lancelot and Guinevere. “THEY’VE CURSED US! THEY’VE CURSED CAMELOT!”
“RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING!” an old man yelled.
“WHY’D YOU THINK ARTHUR WANTED ’EM DEAD!” his wife shouted.
“TRAITORS!” a young boy heckled.
“FINKS!”
From the masses exploded a murderous mob, climbing up the stage’s beams towards Guinevere and Lancelot—
“GET THEM!”
“KILL THEM!”
But the beams couldn’t support their weight and shattered like sticks, sending the remainder of the stage timbering down over the crowd, the candles igniting the wood and pooled wax and detonating the stage like a fireball into the drawbridge. Shrieking villagers fled for their lives just as royal guards came smashing out the balcony windows, armed with swords and spears, led by Lady Gremlaine.
“TRAITORS!” the terrible cries echoed below. “MONSTERS!”
As people hurled things at the balcony, guards grabbed Guinevere and Lancelot and spirited them inside to safety, along with the others.
Only Tedros stayed behind, pulling and pulling at Excalibur, his bleeding hands slick with pudding, his face streaked with tears, before he suddenly felt the arms of men throw him over their shoulders—
“No! I can do it!” he choked, hands flailing for the sword. “I can do it!”
He screamed those words again and again, voice crumbling to rasps as they dragged him into the castle, until all that remained of Camelot’s Great Hope was a sobbing little boy, crown slid down over his eyes, hands stabbing wildly into the dark.
3
SOPHIE
Flah-sé-dah
“So is he king or isn’t he?” Dean Sophie asked, nose buried in the Royal Rot. “According to the Camelot Courier, he is, but according to the Rot, he isn’t. What both agree on, however, is that once Tedros finds a way to pull Excalibur out of that balcony, then it’s settled and he’s king once and for all. But if someone else were to pull Excalibur out before Teddy . . . well, it wouldn’t matter, would it, since only the blood of Arthur can sit upon the throne . . . which means Tedros is king, now and forever, though it sounds like he’s only a ‘half-king’ without respect or support . . . or a sword.”
Draped in a plushy black bathrobe, Sophie leaned back, picking at the curlers in her blond hair as she scanned more articles:
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH CORONATION MONKEYS!
AGATHA: LOYAL PRINCESS . . . OR WITCH WHO CURSED THE CORONATION?
HORRO-NATION FALLOUT: IS LANCELOT PLOTTING TO STEAL THE CROWN?
“Six months later and it’s all anyone still talks about,” Sophie sighed, folding the newspaper and fingering a vial of gold liquid hanging from her necklace. “Poor, poor Teddy.”
“If Teddy’s so poor, why are you sm
iling,” grunted Hort.
Sophie looked out at her shirtless, raven-haired friend and two first-year Neverboys in sleek black uniforms lugging a marble statue of her across newly refurbished Evil Hall. “Are you implying that I’m happy about my two best friends being the laughingstock of Camelot? Are you implying that I take secret delight in whatever strains this humiliation has put upon their relationship?”
“You stalked Tedros for three years, tried to marry a murderous sorcerer to make him jealous, then held the whole Woods hostage when Tedros wouldn’t kiss you,” Hort said, rippled muscles shining as he slid Sophie’s statue through the red-and-gold ballroom. Above him, a few Nevergirls teetered on ladders to hang a chandelier, each crystal shaped like an S. “Plus, you’ve been writing Agatha for months trying to hijack the wedding planning and she won’t write you back and now you secretly want the wedding to bomb,” he added. “So yeah, not really implying. More just saying it.”
Sophie stared at him. “I want to be helpful to Aggie, Hort. She’s far away in a whole new kingdom, preparing for the biggest day of her life, and I want to be there for her. Am I hurt she hasn’t responded? A little, perhaps. But I’m not mad.”
“When you’re hurt, you get mad,” said Hort. “You get so mad that you turn witchy and start wars and people die. Check the history textbook.”
“Oh sweetie, that’s the past,” Sophie groaned, reclining against her glass throne, shaped like a five-pointed crown. “It’s a new year now and I’ve moved on, just like our former classmates who are off in the Woods, pursuing their fairy-tale quests. Look . . .”
She slipped the lid off the vial attached to her necklace and turned the vial upside down, emptying the gold liquid. But instead of falling to the floor, the liquid suspended midair, creating the outline of a large square before it magically filled in with a magnificent three-dimensional map of the Endless Woods. Scattered across kingdoms near and far were dozens of brightly colored figurines, like an army of toy soldiers, each resembling a fourth-year student from the School for Good and Evil and labeled with their name.
“And from the Quest Map, it looks like our friends are doing quite well,” said Sophie. “See, here’s Beatrix in Jaunt Jolie, fighting with Reena and Millicent as her sidekicks. . . . Here’s Ravan in Akgul, plundering the Iron Village with Drax as his henchman and Arachne as his mogrified newt. . . . Here’s Hester, Dot, and Anadil in Kyrgios on some ‘important’ mission they won’t tell me about, though it can’t be that important if they’re never in the same kingdom for more than a day. . . . And here’s Chaddick, off on Avalon Island by himself—mmm, strange; I thought he’d gone to Camelot to be Tedros’ knight. Why would he be in Avalon? Nothing but snow and tundra. No one even lives there. Well, except the Lady of the Lake, but she seals her castle’s gates to everyone except Merlin and Camelot’s king. . . . But it looks like Chaddick’s figure is inside her gates, doesn’t it? Maybe he’s flying over the island on a stymph or something. . . .”
“Blue means they’re winning their quest?” Hort asked.
“And red means they’re losing. That’s why my name is in blue,” preened Sophie, pointing to her figurine by the miniature school towers on the map. “My quest as Dean was to bring Evil into a new age, and clearly I’ve succeeded.”
“Well, my name’s in blue too,” said Hort, spotting his figure obscured by Sophie’s. “My students love me, I work out every night, and I’ve even started getting fan mail. Just the other day I got a note in a girl’s handwriting saying I was her favorite character from your story and that they didn’t make boys like me in Woods Beyond. Must be a Reader from your old town—”
“Or Castor playing a prank,” Sophie sniffed.
The puff went out of Hort’s chest. “Hey, wait a second. Isn’t it weird that every single name on this map is blue? Shouldn’t someone be losing their quest?”
“Ever since Clarissa gave me this map, we’ve been nothing but winners,” Sophie crowed. “So either I’m good luck or we’re a very talented group.”
“Or your map is broken, which would explain why it says Chaddick is inside the Lady of the Lake’s gates when that’s impossible,” said Hort. “Look, even Tedros and Agatha are in blue, which means, according to the Quest Map, they’re doing just fine.”
Sophie peered at him, then at Agatha’s and Tedros’ names in Camelot, just as blue as the others.
“That can’t be right,” she murmured. “How can Tedros be winning? I read Camelot’s papers every day. He’s the town fool! He’s a disgrace!”
She saw Hort smirking at her.
“Poor Teddy,” he said.
Sophie rose from her throne and sashayed past Hort. “Oh please, for all we know, Clarissa hexed his name to make him look good. Fairy godmothers love to cheat.” She swept her hand through the map, dispersing it to liquid and back into the vial on her neck. “And honestly, I can’t worry about a failed king and a princess who isn’t even queen and yet is somehow too busy to write her best friend. I have my school to run: 125 new Nevers who think Tedros and Agatha are old news and have their eyes on me. Plus, I have these pesky Readers we’ve accepted, who don’t have a clue. Why, on the very first day, a girl from Gavaldon caved in an entire classroom. So my hands are quite full, thank you. And even if I could spare a thought for Tedros—or any boy, for that matter—it would be a wasted one. I’m completely happy on my own, unattached and untroubled by the vagaries of love. Flah-sé-dah, that’s my new mantra: a blissful mélange of ‘laissez-faire’ and ‘la-di-da.’ Who needs the stress of love when there’s important work to do? I prefer a modest life now, dedicated to my students.”
“Um, throwing a Dean’s Dance the second week of school with the theme ‘Night of a Thousand Sophies’ where people have to dress up in outfits inspired by your fairy tale doesn’t seem modest to me,” said Hort, his Neverboy helpers murmuring assent as they polished the statue of Sophie in hooded robes, a crown of flowers upon her head. “Nor does taking half the Evil students out of class to decorate for it serve anyone but you,” Hort added, surveying the ballroom filled with Nevergirls in chic leather dresses and high black boots and Neverboys in stylish leather coats and skinny black pants, all hard at work: hanging tapestries of Sophie’s best moments as a student, polishing stained glass windows of Sophie’s face, and scrubbing the marble floor branded with a red S circled by olive leaves and topped with a gold crown.
“And yet here you are, helping them,” Sophie said, simpering at Hort.
“Yeah, so you’ll take me to the dance.”
“A Dean doesn’t need a date to her own dance,” Sophie bristled.
“But maybe she wants one,” said Hort, sweat dripping.
“What I want is for you to put on a shirt,” said Sophie, eyeing his sculpted torso.
“I seem to have lost it,” said Hort.
Sophie arched a brow. “Indeed.”
“Um, Professor?” a voice peeped.
Hort and Sophie turned.
Fifty first years blinked at them. “Someone’s knocking on the door,” a vampiric-looking girl wisped.
A barrage of loud raps echoed through the Hall.
Sophie waited until the knocking stopped. “Really? I don’t hear a thing.”
“By the way, I liked the castle better how it was before, when it was crumbly and dirty,” Hort said, rubbing out a stain on Sophie’s statue with his hand. “Everything’s too clean now. Like we’re trying to hide something.”
“Hogwash. How could anyone possibly prefer the old Evil,” Sophie pooh-poohed, glancing out the window at the renovated towers of Malice, Mischief, and Vice, lit up with red-and-gold paper lanterns. “Evil was so dark before. So morose and unattractive. No wonder we were always the losers. We acted like losers!”
“So Evil’s been around since the dawn of time, waiting for you to save it?” said Hort, stonefaced.
“Darling, if it wasn’t for me, Evil would have kept playing second fiddle to Good, dying in every story for no
other reason than it made a tidier ending for the sweet, pretty Ever to win. But now look at us: new uniforms, new classes, new castle. . . . A new brand of Evil. Which is why I’ve invited the students from Good to join our dance tonight. I want them to see Evil is no longer the ugly stepsister. Evil is young and glamorous and en vogue. Tonight isn’t just a celebration; it’s a flag in the sand. A flag that says: it’s Evil’s time now. And if we happen to bring a few Evers into our ranks along the way . . . well, then, flah-sé-dah.”
She snapped her fingers—a scrawny, brown, rat-faced boy ran in from the wings and handed her a glass of green juice.
“Isn’t that right, Bogden?” Sophie smiled, sipping her juice.
“Flah-sé-dah,” he squeaked, fanning her with a palm frond.
Hort glared at the rat boy. “Why is he here?”
More loud knocks assaulted the Hall.
“Bogden of Woods Beyond?” said Sophie innocently, ignoring the knocks. “Didn’t you have him in class, Professor Hort? You are our school’s teacher of Evil history, are you not? Or do you make it a habit of not paying attention to the students you teach?”
Hort clenched his teeth. “First of all, I’m here to teach history as a last-minute favor to you since no one wanted a job where everybody who takes it ends up dead. Second, I shouldn’t even be here since Lady Lesso assigned me a normal quest like everyone else, which means my little soldier on your magic map should be in Maidenvale, fighting dragons and elves and maybe even getting my own fairy tale. But instead I left my quest to help you—”
“As Dean, I have the right to modify your quest as I see fit,” said Sophie.
“—and third, I know perfectly well who Bogden is,” Hort plowed on, “because he flunked my challenges and every other teacher’s the first week, which means he should have been expelled, since by your new rules, anyone who fails three challenges in a row is sent packing.”
“I know my rules, thank you. I just couldn’t bring myself to fail a fellow Reader,” Sophie sighed. “I too came from humble beginnings. I too craved a life better than Gavaldon’s, where I would have to churn butter and wash clothes and marry an obese man who expected me to obey him and you know . . . cook. It’s why I started accepting applications from Readers. They deserve to live out their fairy tales.”