“Off you go! Teams of two!” the gnome said. “Whichever team eats the most meerworms wins the challenge!” His eyes flicked to Sophie. “Perhaps our black sheep can find redemption.”
“Black sheep can’t find anything without her girlfriend,” Tedros murmured.
Sophie moped miserably as he paired up with Beatrix.
“Come on,” Dot said, pulling Sophie to the ground. “We can beat them.”
Suddenly motivated, Sophie started searching the ground with Dot, careful to stay close to the fire. “What do meerworms look like?”
“Like worms,” said Dot.
Sophie was deliberating a retort when she noticed a figure in the distance, silhouetted atop a hill. It was a massive giant, with a long black beard, thick dreadlocks, and midnight-blue skin. He wore only a small brown loincloth as he dug a row of graves.
“Does it all himself, the Crypt Keeper,” Dot said to Sophie. “That’s why there’s such a backlog.”
Sophie followed her eyes to a two-mile line of bodies and coffins behind the Crypt Keeper, waiting for burial. Immediately she could see the difference between the Nevers’ dark stone coffins and the Evers’ coffins made of glass and gold. But there were also some bodies without caskets, just lying untended on the hillslope beneath circling vultures.
“Why doesn’t he have help?” she said, nauseous.
“’Cause no one can interfere with the Crypt Keeper’s system,” Hort said softly. “Two years my dad’s waited.” His voice cracked. “Killed by Peter Pan himself, my dad. Deserves a proper grave.”
Now the whole group was watching the Crypt Keeper dig his graves, before pulling a big book from his mass of hair and studying one of its pages. Then the giant picked up a gold coffin with a handsome prince inside and heaved it into the empty plot. He moved down the line of waiting bodies, picked up a crystal coffin with a beautiful princess, and laid it beside the prince’s coffin in the same grave.
“Anastasia and Jacob. Died of starvation while on honeymoon. Avoidable deaths had they paid attention in class,” Yuba snapped.
Grumbling, the students went back to meerworm hunting, but Sophie kept her eye on the Crypt Keeper, who studied his book again before picking up a coffinless ogre and plunking him in the next plot. Back to the book, and then he rested a resplendent queen’s silver tomb beside a matching king’s.
Sophie’s eyes drifted around the graveyard and saw the same pattern on every hill and valley. Evers buried together with twin headstones—boy and girl, man and wife, prince and princess, together in life and in death. Nevers buried all alone.
Ever After. Paradise together.
Nevermore. Paradise alone.
Sophie froze. She knew the answer to the School Master’s riddle.
“Perhaps we should search Necro Ridge,” Yuba sighed. “Come, students—”
“Cover for me,” Sophie whispered to Dot.
Dot swiveled. “Where are you—wait! We’re a—”
But Sophie was scampering through distant gravestones towards the Flowerground entrance.
“Team,” Dot sulked.
A short while later, in the Blue Forest, five stymphs looked up from their billy goat to see Sophie brandishing an egg.
“Let’s try this again, shall we?”
It was there all along, Agatha thought as she gazed at the walls. The weapon that made Good invincible against Evil. The thing a villain could never have but a princess couldn’t do without. The task that would send her and Sophie home.
If Sophie is alive.
Agatha felt another wave of powerless dread. She couldn’t just sit here while Sophie was being tortured—
Screams pealed outside. She spun to see Sophie hurled through her window by a bucking stymph.
“Love,” Sophie panted.
“You’re alive! Your hair,” Agatha gasped—
“Love is what a villain can never have but a heroine can’t live without.”
“But what did they—are you—”
“Am I right or not?”
Agatha saw Sophie had no intention of talking about the Doom Room.
“Almost.” She pointed to the paintings on the wall with visions of heroes and heroines, lips pressed in climactic embrace.
“True love’s kiss,” Sophie breathed.
“If your true love kisses you, then you can’t be a villain,” Agatha said.
“And if you can’t find love, then you can’t be a princess,” said Sophie.
“And we go home.” Agatha swallowed. “My half is taken care of. Yours isn’t so simple.”
“Oh, please. I can make any one of those disgusting Neverboys fall in love with me. Just give me five minutes, an empty broom closet, and—”
“There’s only one, Sophie,” Agatha said, voice fraying. “For every Ever, there’s only one true love.”
Sophie met her eyes. She collapsed onto the bed.
“Tedros.”
Agatha nodded sickly. The road home led through the one person who could ruin everything.
“Tedros has to … kiss me?” Sophie said, staring into space.
“And he can’t be tricked, forced, or duped into it. He has to mean it.”
“But how? He thinks I’m a villain! He hates me! Aggie, he’s a king’s son. He’s beautiful, he’s perfect and look at me—” She grabbed her shorn hair and flaccid robes. “I’m—I’m—”
“Still a princess.”
Sophie looked at her. “And the only way we’ll get home,” said Agatha, forcing a smile. “So we have to make this kiss happen.”
“We?” said Sophie.
“We,” rasped Agatha.
Sophie hugged her tight.
“We’re going home, Aggie.”
But in her arms, Agatha sensed something else. Something that told her the Doom Room had taken more from her friend than just her hair. Agatha squelched her doubts and clasped Sophie tighter.
“One kiss and it will all be over,” she whispered.
As they embraced in one tower, in another the School Master watched the Storian finish a magnificent painting of the two girls in each other’s arms. The pen added a last flourish of words beneath it, closing the chapter.
“But no kiss comes without its price.”
As he scaled climbing ropes made of braided blond hair, he cursed the fact he would spend Christmas at a Ball. Why did everything