Bunched against the wall of the deserted room, Anadil, Hester, Agatha, and Sophie huddled near each other.
“Will you help us or not?” Sophie said, glaring at Hester.
“Fine,” Hester grouched. “But only because I’d rather not see Agatha die. You, I’d pay to see publicly executed.”
Sophie gasped.
“Look, Sophie’s right. This is our only hope to escape alive,” Agatha said, though still sounding unsure whether a public beheading was worse than going back to the boys’ castle. “Tedros has probably hidden the Storian by now. We need a spell that can let us stay in that school long enough to find it.”
“Invisibility?” offered Anadil.
“Two of us? Way too easy to get caught,” said Sophie, knowing Aric had surely found her trail by now.
“How about crossing the bridge barrier again?” Hester said to Agatha.
“They’ll surely have guards there after last night,” Agatha said—
All at once, the girls noticed Dot at the door, red-faced and glaring. “Irritable Bowel Syndrome?”
“Seemed fitting, given your predilection for hiding in toilets,” said Anadil.
“But you can’t cancel Book Club!” Dot mewled, tearing up. “It’s how I made friends—”
“And we need privacy, so this is your Book Club now, which is appropriate, given we’re your real friends. Now sit down and shut it,” Hester lashed. Dot obeyed, still sniffling.
“There has to be a way to talk to Dovey or Lesso,” Sophie urged, “or even Professor Sheeks—”
“It’s too dangerous,” said Agatha, for she had yet to see any teacher free of the Dean’s minions. “The Dean even suspects what we’re up to, and she’ll trap us here. You heard her. She thinks we can win this Trial!”
“Can’t you just Mogrify?” Dot moaned—
“No,” Sophie and Agatha said at the same time.
Agatha stared at her friend.
“I mean, I know nothing about their school since I’ve never been there, but it’s obvious, right?” Sophie rambled, beading with sweat. “Boys would protect against it.”
Agatha peered harder at her. Sophie could feel her cheeks turning cranberry red. . . .
Agatha turned back to the witches. “See, Sophie gets it. We need something unexpected.”
Sophie exhaled, smiling tightly. One day she’d tell Agatha where she’d been last night. One day when they were back home, stronger and happier than ever.
“Let’s meet here every night until we have a plan,” Hester said, then noticed Dot shaking her head. “If you’re still sulking about your idiotic Book Club—”
“It’s not that,” Dot said, furrowing. “Don’t you think it’s strange that Tedros attacked Agatha?”
Sophie bristled. “He tried to kill her last year—”
“Because you were there last year, ruining things,” Dot shot back. “Tedros loves Agatha! He’d never attack her with magic.” Dot turned a stray fork into bok choy, thinking hard. “Feels like there’s a piece missing.”
Dot looked up and saw Agatha gazing at her.
“Only piece missing is how to sneak into the boys’ school,” Sophie snapped, and steered the conversation back to the plan. “We need to search the library for spells—”
Agatha tried to pay attention, but her eyes kept drifting back to Dot. . . .
“Agatha?” Sophie frowned. “Can you come then?”
Agatha jolted to attention. “Sure—of course—”
All of a sudden, she noticed something on Sophie’s wrist, peeking from under her cloak . . . tiny patterned cuts, thinly scabbed over. Struck by a familiar feeling, Agatha tried to squint closer, but a flurry of noise rose outside and the girls turned—just in time to see the doors fly open and Pollux stumble in, head atop a dead ostrich, scowling with suspicion at a book club that didn’t seem to have any books.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
14
Merlin’s Lost Spell
With Christmastime coming, the butterflies used the night to pull tinsel and starry lights around the tallest pine tree in the Blue Forest, as if a deadly Trial shouldn’t deter from festive traditions.
By dawn, the boys had urinated on it from their windows and set it aflame.
As Lady Lesso awarded ranks, Sophie passed notes with Anadil and Hester about paths into the boys’ school. In the next aisle, Agatha leaned her frozen chair back, squinting at the faint marks on Sophie’s wrist.
It was only noon, but Trial Tryouts were in full swing. Each of the class challenges involved slaying phantom princes that the teachers conjured to be as vile as possible, lunging at the girls with zombified faces and sickening screams. Indeed, the teachers seemed to have lost all reluctance, with even Professor Anemone sanctioning the most vicious deaths. Lives were at stake now, and the teachers fully invested in finding the best possible team.
Sophie and Agatha resolved to act enthused through all of it so the Dean wouldn’t suspect their impending plans to escape. And indeed, Sophie played her part well, dispatching boy phantoms with alarming vengeance, cheering on her fellow classmates, and remaining immune from the frightening witch symptoms that had plagued her days before. Even more, Agatha noticed Sophie back to her jaunty old self now, chummily grabbing her arm between classes, romanticizing their coming return to Gavaldon, and acting as if Agatha’s visit to Tedros had simply never happened.
“Elders won’t hurt us if there’re no more attacks . . . and I’ll just spend time at your house instead of mine. . . . ,” Sophie considered as they’d walked to Lesso’s. “Maybe I’ll even get my own show after all!”
“As long as you don’t put me in it,” Agatha grouched before Sophie’s grin made her crack up.
Given all she’d caused with her wish, Agatha had even more motivation to get out of this school. She racked her brain for ways into Tedros’ tower but always came up empty. Her frustration leaked into Tryouts, where she lashed out at boys like the witch-girl of old, stabbing phantoms through, setting them on fire, watching coldly as they shattered to dust. By the third challenge, all the reasons she’d once hated Tedros came roaring back—his arrogance, his his recklessness, his hotheaded immaturity—
And yet . . . why did Dot’s question still nag at her?
There was no missing piece, Agatha assured herself. Tedros had attacked her. Tedros ruined their fairy tale.
Her soul’s wish for him had been wrong.
And yet . . . Agatha found herself tilting farther back in her chair, Sophie’s hand still too far away to see. She reclined even more, teetering on one chair leg, until Hester’s iced desktop was in front of Sophie’s wrist, magnifying it like a lens. Agatha’s eyes widened, recognizing the faint wounds in her friend’s creamy skin, patterned with deep needle pricks.
Spirick cuts.
Where had Sophie encountered spiricks?
Sophie turned to her, and Agatha’s chair nearly toppled. “Come to the library with me?” Sophie smiled, helping her up. “Ten minutes before fourth session. We can look at spying spells!”
Agatha smiled back and grabbed her bag, shoving spiricks from her mind.
No more doubts. No more distrust, she thought, following her friend upstairs.
She’d learned her lesson with the wart.
Melting black candles lined the walls of Evil Hall, with yellow-green flames the color of snake eyes.
In the center of the room, twelve white coffin beds lay in a row, each with the body of a male teacher from Good or Evil. Tanned, mustached Professor Espada, who taught Swordplay to Everboys; pimpled, bald Professor Manley, who taught Uglification to Neverboys; wizened, doddering Professor Lukas, who taught Chivalry; Castor, who led Henchmen Training, his brother Pollux’s head missing from their two-headed dog body; Beezle, Evil’s red-skinned dwarf, next to a pack of Forest Group leaders—an ogre, a centa
ur, and a sprite among them; even Albemarle, the spectacled woodpecker who’d once tallied Good’s rankings . . . all breathing in synch, their sleeping faces peaceful.
On the floor in front of them, Tristan slouched, surrounded by open spellbooks from the Library of Vice. “We’ve been up all night,” he yawned, pawing his red hair. “The Dean’s magic is too strong.”
“Well, we’ll all be slaves unless we break it,” Tedros mumbled, rifling pages of Sleep No More. “You don’t know what they’re like together, those two girls. They’ll make mincemeat out of us if the boys don’t get behind this Trial and start Tryouts now.” He grabbed another book. “We need our teachers back if we’re to have any chance of winning.”
“How about I go and check on the Storian?” Tristan said quickly. “Just to make sure—”
“Look, it’s a sleeping curse—it has to have a cure—”
“Not unless you have a man-wolf handy,” Tristan snorted, tossing aside Spells for Sleeping Beauties.
Tedros closed his last book a moment later. He saw the dark circles under Tristan’s eyes, obscuring his freckles. “All right,” the prince caved, standing up. “Let’s go back—”
He suddenly noticed the book Tristan had tossed, open to a cobwebbed page. Tedros slid it closer with his foot.
“Hate to tell you,” said Tristan impatiently, “but Sader told us last year. Man-wolves only live in Bloodbrook—”
“Funny.” Tedros looked up, eyes twinkling. “Isn’t that where Hort’s from?”
Sophie flung The Sneak and Spy Handbook onto a heap of discarded books and squinted up at the Library of Virtue’s two-floor gold coliseum, dominated by a sundial clock. “It will take us months to go through all these!”
“They’re all the same spells,” Agatha frowned, sitting at her table and paging through Snoop Spells, Volume 2. “Invisibility, disguise, advanced Mogrifications—nothing they wouldn’t expect. We need to be in the boys’ school long enough to break into Tedros’ tower. Could take us days.”
“Days? With those dirty princes? We’ll die of fumes,” Sophie moaned. She squinted at the leathery tortoise behind the reception desk, asleep on a massive library log. “Is that thing ever awake?”
She turned and saw Agatha frowning at a few butterflies that had fluttered in. “Don’t fret,” Sophie whispered. “We’re the perfect team, remember? Think of how you sneaked into the Trial last year.”
“This is different, Sophie. We need help,” Agatha said quickly. “And as long as the Dean’s listening, we can’t get it.”
With their schedules separating, Sophie headed to Female Talents with Hester and Anadil, while Agatha caught up with Dot in History of Heroines.
“Still nothing?” Dot said, seeing Agatha’s face as she settled next to her in Good Hall’s calcified pews. “Daddy would know what to do, but he’s on the run from Maid Marian. She’s enslaving all the men in Sherwood Forest after she found out Robin has a wandering eye.” Dot sighed. “Coulda told her that myself.”
Kiko’s head poked beside Agatha’s from the pew behind. “Eeee! You finally get to see the best class! Wish you were here the first week. We went inside Cinderella’s story—did you know she just married her prince until he signed his kingdom over to her? Then she had him thrown in the dungeons and ruled herself, pretending their marriage was happy. Turns out boys have been covering up the truth about fairy tales for ages, just to make girls seem weak and stupid. Then we went inside Goldilocks’ story and watched her tame the three bears and turn them to fur coats, and then we went inside Snow White’s when she poisoned those sexist dwarves with apples—”
“Huh?” Agatha said, confounded. “First off, nothing you just said sounds anything like the ‘truth’. Second of all, how do you go inside stories?”
Kiko smiled mischievously. “You’ll see.”
The Dean clacked in through the double doors, heels echoing on stone. “In addition to attacking our team, the boys will no doubt lace the Blue Forest with deadly traps—as will we,” she said, hips swishing up the aisle to the wooden lectern. “But a boy’s mind is perhaps the deadliest trap, girls. When their dignity is on the line, they will resort to desperate tactics, perverse and unimaginable. You must be prepared.”
From inside the lectern, she pulled a massively thick text—A Student’s Revised History of the Woods, by August Sader—and opened to a page in the middle. The Dean’s disembodied voice boomed over the hall, as if coming out of the book:
“‘Chapter 26: The Rise and Fall of King Arthur.’”
In a tiny cloud of mist, a ghostly three-dimensional scene melted into view atop the book page—a silent living diorama of King Arthur in his gold crown and night robe, stalking through the halls of Camelot.
Agatha could hardly see it from the back of the pews. “It’s so small—”
“Wait,” Kiko said behind her.
The Dean raised up the book and, with a gap-toothed grin, blew on the phantom scene. With a fizzling whoosh, the scene shattered into a million glittered shards and crashed over the students like a glass sandstorm. Agatha shielded her eyes and felt her body floating through space, until her feet touched ground. She slowly peeked through her fingers. . . .
Good Hall had disappeared, along with the pews and the rest of the girls. She was standing in a dark wood chamber hall, the air thick and hazy around her, giving the room a vaporous feel, as if it wasn’t quite real. She squinted and saw a bearded, powerfully built gray-haired man in a wolf-fur night robe and gold crown tiptoeing towards her. . . .
Agatha gasped. Kiko was right. She was inside the book’s scene.
Her hand reached through the smoky air towards a wall painted with paisley bronze patterns, and her fingers went straight through like a ghost’s. King Arthur slipped past her, flickering and distorting slightly like a phantom, bare feet pattering across the rose-colored carpet towards the end of the hall. Agatha recognized him from the square jaw and crystal-blue eyes he’d passed on, as well as the gold-hilted sword tucked into his robe. The same sword she’d taken from his son’s hands two nights before.
“Arthur met Guinevere at the School for Good and Evil before he became king,” the Dean’s voice narrated. “From the day they met, he knew she despised him. Still he forced her into marriage, for boys are brutal, ruthless creatures—and none more than Arthur.”
Agatha squinted hard at the phantom king. Was any of this the truth? Or just another of the Dean’s twisted tales?
She watched Arthur approach the last door in the hall, the king careful not to make a sound . . .
“Guinevere had one condition, however: that each night, she and the king sleep in separate chambers,” the Dean continued. “Arthur could not deny the request, for Guinevere behaved the perfect wife and birthed him the wretched son he’d always wanted. Yet still the king couldn’t sleep. Night after night, Arthur tried to see inside his queen’s room, but her door was always locked. Until one night . . .”
Now Agatha saw what the king had. Tonight, the queen’s door was cracked open. Following behind Arthur, Agatha leaned over him and peeked through it. . . .
Just in time to see Guinevere climb out her window, slide down its curtain, and disappear into the night.
“The next morning, the queen was at breakfast, smiling and agreeable as always,” the Dean’s voice said. “Arthur said nothing of what he’d seen.”
The scene vanished around Agatha, instantly replaced by a dusty cave, littered with burbling laboratory vessels, shelves of murky vials and jars, and dozens of half-filled notebooks. Now Arthur was arguing with an ancient, scrawny man, a stark white beard down to his stomach.
“Arthur tried invisibility, trail tracking, Mogrification—everything he’d learned at the School for Good—but still couldn’t find where Guinevere disappeared to each night. His lifelong adviser, Merlin, refused to help, insisting matters of the heart were beyond magic. . . .”
Merlin stormed out of his cave. Arthur pursued him but stopped s
uddenly. He peered closer at one of Merlin’s open notebooks and took it into his hands. . . .
“Then Arthur saw something Merlin had been brewing down in his lair. . . .”
Arthur’s eyes flared wider . . .
“Something so daring, so dangerous he knew it was his only chance. . . .”
Hands trembling, Arthur ripped out the page.
The scene flashed to a hooded figure in a forest, galloping past Agatha on a black horse, camouflaged by the night.
“That night, Arthur had guards seal Guinevere’s windows. Cloaked in a hood, he climbed out from the adjacent room to find a horse waiting. . . .”
The horse came to a stop in a pitch-dark clearing. Agatha watched a thin, shadowed man creep out from behind a far tree and slowly approach the horse’s rider. But shrouded completely in his cloak and hood, King Arthur didn’t dismount. He just waited as the shadowy man grew closer . . . closer . . . each unable to see the other . . . until Agatha finally saw moonlight spill on the shadowed man’s light-brown skin, hooked nose, and knight’s uniform.
“It was Lancelot. The friend Arthur loved so much he called him a brother. The man Guinevere had come to every night.”
Lancelot drew nearer to the horse, the hooded cloak still drawn over the rider’s face. Lancelot hesitated, sensing something wrong . . . but then saw delicate white slippered feet peeking from beneath the rider’s cloak. Agatha stared at these girlish feet, confused, as Lancelot smiled lovingly and moved closer to the horse. Agatha watched as Lancelot reached up . . . gently pulled back the rider’s hood . . . revealing King Arthur’s crystal-blue eyes. . . .
Agatha choked.
His eyes weren’t a man’s anymore.
In a flash, Arthur drew a blade, stabbing Lancelot’s stomach. The horse sprinted away, taking the king back to the castle.
The scene melted to vapors and Agatha was back in Good Hall with the silent, stunned class.
“The spell made King Arthur a girl?” Beatrix cried, aghast. “A boy—became—a girl?”
“Just long enough for the king to see his queen had made a fool of him,” the Dean said. “But by the time Arthur reverted from the spell and returned to Camelot, Guinevere was gone. He sent his men to finish off Lancelot, but the knight too had vanished. Neither he nor the queen was ever seen again.”