“You will?” Sophie blinked.
“You know how badly you want to go home?” said Hester.
“We want you to go home more,” said Anadil.
“Well, at least you believe me,” Sophie frowned, wiping tears.
“Guilty until proven innocent,” Hester said. “It’s the Never way.”
“I wouldn’t tell any of this to an Ever, though. They’ll think you’re mad as a hatter,” said Anadil.
“That’s what I thought, but who lies about breaking so many rules?” Dot said, failing to turn her swan crest to chocolate. “Really, this bird is incorrigible.”
“What’s the School Master like?” Hester asked Sophie.
“He’s old. Very, very old.”
“And you actually saw the Storian?” Anadil asked.
“That strange pen? It wrote about us the whole time.”
“It what?” said the three girls at once.
“But you’re in school!” Hester said.
“What can happen in school that’s worthy of a fairy tale?” said Anadil.
“I’m sure it’s just a mistake, like everything else,” Sophie sniffled. “I just need to solve the riddle, tell the School Master, and poof, I’m out of this cursed place. Simple.”
She saw the girls exchange looks. “Isn’t it?”
“There’s two puzzles here,” Anadil said, eyeing Hester. “The School Master’s riddle.”
Hester turned to Sophie. “And why he wants you to solve it.”
If there was one word Agatha dreaded more than “ball,” it was “dancing.”
“Every Good girl must dance at the Ball,” Pollux said, wobbling on mule legs in the Valor Commons.
Agatha tried not to breathe. The room reeked of leather and cologne with its musky brown couches, bear-head carpet, hide-bound books about hunting and riding, and a moose-head plaque flaunting obscenely large antlers. She missed the School for Evil and its graveyard stench.
Pollux led the girls through the dances for the Evers Ball, none of which Agatha could follow, since he kept falling and mumbling it would “make sense once he got his body back.” After tripping a hoof on the rug, impaling himself on the antlers, and landing buttocks first in the fireplace, Pollux barked they “got the point” and wheeled to a group of fairies wielding willow violins. “Play a volta!”
And so they did, lightning quick, with Agatha flung from partner to partner, waist to waist, spinning faster, faster into a wild blur. Her feet caught fire. Every girl in the room was Sophie. The shoes! They were back! “Sophie! I’m coming!” she yelled—
Next thing she knew, she was on the floor.
“There are appropriate times for fainting,” Pollux scowled. “This is not one.”
“I tripped,” Agatha snapped.
“Suppose you faint during the Ball! Chaos! Carnage!”
“I didn’t faint!”
“Forget a ball! It would be a Midnight Massacre!”
Agatha stared him down. “I. Don’t. Faint.”
When the girls reported to the banks of Halfway Bay for Animal Communication, Professor Dovey was waiting. “Princess Uma has taken ill.”
Girls gave Agatha sour looks, since her Wish Fish debacle was surely responsible. With no one to supervise on such short notice, Professor Dovey gave them the session off. “Top-half students may use the Groom Room. Bottom-half students should use the time to reflect upon their mediocrity!”
While Beatrix and her seven minions sashayed to the Groom Room for manicures, the bottom-half girls scurried to peek in on Swordplay, since the boys sparred shirtless. Meanwhile, Agatha hastened to the Gallery of Good, hoping it would inspire an answer to the riddle.
As her eyes drifted across its sculptures, cases, and stuffed creatures lit by pink-flamed torches, she remembered the School Master’s decree that a witch and princess could never be friends. But why? Something had to come between them. Surely this was the mysterious thing a princess could have and a villain could not. She thought about what it could be until her neck prickled red. But still no answer.
She found herself pulled once more to the corner nook, home to the gauzy paintings of Gavaldon’s Readers. Agatha remembered Professor Dovey speaking to that tight-jawed woman. “Professor Sader,” they called the artist. The same Sader who taught History of Heroism? Wasn’t that class next?
This time, Agatha moved through the paintings slowly. As she did, she noticed the landscape evolved from frame to frame: more stores sprang up in the square, the church changed colors from white to red, two windmills rose behind the lake—until the village began to look just like the one she had left. Even more confused now, she drifted along the paintings until one made her stop.
As children read storybooks on the church steps, the sun spotlit a girl in a purple peacoat and yellow hat with sunflowers. Agatha put her nose to the girl. Alice? It had to be. The baker’s daughter had worn the same ridiculous coat and hat every day of her life until she was kidnapped eight years before. Across the painting, an errant ray of sun spotlit a gaunt boy in black beating a cat with a stick. Rune. Agatha remembered him trying to gouge out Reaper’s eye before her mother thrashed him away with a broomstick. Rune too had been taken that year.
Quickly she shifted to the next painting, where scores of children lined up in front of Mr. Deauville’s, but the sun illuminated only two: bald Bane, biting the girl in front of him, and quiet, handsome Garrick. The two boys taken four years before.
Sweating, Agatha slowly turned to the next painting. As children read high on an emerald hill, two sat below, sunlit on a lake bank. A girl in black flicking matches into the water. A girl in pink packing pouches with cucumbers.
Breathless, Agatha dashed back through the row. In every one, light chose two children: one bright and fair, the other strange and grim. Agatha retreated from the nook and climbed on a stuffed cow’s rump so she could see all the paintings at once, paintings that told her three things about this Professor Sader—
He could move between the real and fairy-tale worlds. He knew why children were brought here from Gavaldon.
And he could help them get home.
As fairies chimed the start of the next class, Agatha barged into the Theater of Tales and squeezed beside Kiko, while Tedros and his boys played handball against the phoenix carved into the front of the stone stage.
“Tristan didn’t even say hi,” Kiko griped. “Maybe he thinks I have warts now that I talked to yo—”
“Where’s Sader?” Agatha said.
“Professor Sader,” said a voice.
She looked up and saw a handsome silver-haired teacher give her a cryptic smile as he ascended the stage in his shamrock-green suit. The man who smiled at her in the foyer and on the Bridge.
Professor Crackpot.
Agatha exhaled. Surely he’d help if he liked her so much.
“As you know, I teach fourth session both here and in Evil and unfortunately cannot be in two places at once. Thus I’ll be alternating weeks between schools,” he said, clasping the lectern. “On weeks where I’m not here, you’ll have former students come to recount their adventures in the Endless Woods. They’ll be responsible for your weekly challenges, so please afford them the same respect you’d give me. Finally, given I am responsible for a vast amount of students and a vast amount of history, I do not hold office hours nor will I answer your questions