“I’ll never go home with you!” screamed Sophie.
“Oooh! Ooh! Marry me, Tedros!” hissed Agatha.
“At least I will get married!”
The fight escalated to a ludicrous climax, with Sophie beating Agatha with a blue squash, Agatha sitting on Sophie’s head, and the class gleefully making bets as to who was who—
“Go rot in Gavaldon alone!” Sophie screamed.
“Better alone than with a phony!” Agatha shouted.
“Get out of my life!”
“You came into mine!”
Hobbling, Tedros leapt between them—
“Enough!”
It was the wrong moment. Both goblins turned on the prince with slime-drenching, earsplitting roars and kicked him so hard he sailed over Groups 2, 6, and 10 and landed in a heap of boar dung.
The girls’ green hides shrank, their scales softened to skin, their bodies melted into their human clothes. … Slowly Sophie and Agatha turned to find the entire group goggling at them.
“Good ending,” said Hort.
“Hold your verdict,” Yuba said. “For when Good acts Evil and Evil acts incompetent, and rules are broken right and left until even I can’t figure out what’s what … well, there’s only one ending indeed.”
Two pairs of iron shoes magically grew on the girls’ feet.
“Yeek. These are hideous,” Sophie frowned.
Then the shoes grew hot, blazing hot.
“Fire! Feet on fire!” yelped Agatha, hopping up and down.
“Make it stop!” Sophie cried, dancing with pain.
In the distance, the wolves howled the end of class.
“Class dismissed,” Yuba said, and waddled off.
“What about us!” screamed Agatha, yanking at her burning soles—
“Unfortunately fairy-tale punishments have a mind of their own,” the gnome called back. “They’ll end when the lesson has been learned.”
The class followed him back towards the school gates, leaving Sophie and Agatha to dance in the cursed shoes. Tedros limped past the punished girls, covered in slime and dung. He gave them equally disgusted scowls.
“Now I see why you two are friends.”
As the prince trudged into blue thicket, the girls glimpsed Beatrix sidle up to him. “I knew they were both Evil,” she said as they vanished behind the oaks.
“This—is—your—fault!” Sophie wheezed to Agatha, dancing in agony.
“Please—let it—stop,” Agatha spluttered—
But the shoes showed no mercy. Minute by minute, they grew hotter and hotter, until the two girls couldn’t even scream. Even the animals couldn’t watch such suffering and stayed away.
Afternoon turned to evening and then to night, and still they danced like madwomen, whirling and sweating in pain and despair. Burn ripped through their bones, fire became their blood, and soon they wished that this suffering would end, at any cost. Death knew when he was called. But just as the two girls surrendered to his cruel hands, sabers of sunlight shattered the darkness, speared their feet—and the shoes went cold.
The girls collapsed in tormented heaps.
“Ready to go home?” Agatha panted.
Sophie looked up, ghost white.
“Thought you’d never ask.”
“And you’re sure he’s up there?” Sophie said.
“I saw him.”
“He has to help us! I can’t go back to that place!”
“Look, we just beg him for mercy until he sends us home.”
“Because that’ll work,” Sophie snorted. “Leave him to me.”
For the last hour, the two girls had mulled every possible way to escape. Agatha thought they should sneak into the Woods and find their way back to Gavaldon. But Sophie pointed out that even if they did get past the gate snakes and any other booby traps, they’d just end up lost. (“They’re called the Endless Woods for a reason.”) Instead, she proposed they hunt for enchanted broomsticks or magic carpets or something else in the school closets that might fly them over the forest.
“And what direction would we fly in?” Agatha asked.
The two girls discarded other options—leaving a trail of bread crumbs (that never worked); seeking a kindly hunter or dwarf (Agatha didn’t trust strangers); wishing for a fairy godmother (Sophie didn’t trust fat women)—until there was only one left.
But now, peering up at the School Master’s fortress, they lost all hope.
“We’ll never get up there,” Sophie sighed.
Agatha heard a squawk in the distance.
“Hold that thought.”
A short while later, they were back in the Blue Forest, caked in sludge, eyeing a nest of big black eggs from behind a periwinkle bush. In front of the nest, five skeletal stymphs slept on indigo grass, littered with the blood and limbs of a half-eaten goat.
Sophie scowled. “I’m back where I started, covered in smelly ooze and who knows how many flesh-eating maggots and—what are you doing!”
“As soon as they attack, we jump on.”
“As soon as they what?”
But Agatha was already tiptoeing to the eggs.
“The shoes burnt your brain!” Sophie hissed.
As Agatha inched towards the nest, she caught a closer look at the sleeping stymphs’ jagged teeth, gnarled talons, and spiked tails that shred flesh from bone. Suddenly doubting her plan, Agatha backed up, only to trip on a branch and fall on a goat leg with a loud crack. The stymphs opened their eyes. Her heart stopped.
Unless a villain wakes them up.
The pink dress wouldn’t fool them.
Agatha glowered at the waking fiends. She couldn’t give up now! Not when she had Sophie willing to go home! She lunged for the nest, snatched an egg, sprang up for the blitz—
“Can’t watch, can’t watch—” Sophie mewled, squinting through fingers for spewing limbs and blood.
But the vicious birds were nuzzling Agatha, like puppies seeking milk.
“Ooh, that tickles!” she squealed. Sophie folded her arms.
Clumping back, Agatha handed the egg to her. “Your turn.”
“Oh, please, if they like you, they’ll try to mate with me. Animals worship princesses,” said Sophie, sashaying towards the birds—
The stymphs unleashed