gone.”
She threw open the door to Room 66 to find Sophie sobbing on her bed.
“Um, snake’s crying,” Anadil said.
“Are you okay, love?” Dot asked, suddenly sorry for the girl she was supposed to kill.
Blubbering, Sophie poured out everything that happened in the School Master’s tower.
“. . . But now there’s a riddle and I don’t know the answer and Tedros thinks I’m a witch because I keep winning challenges and no one understands the reason I keep winning is that I’m good at everything!”
Hester was ready to strangle her right there. Then her face changed.
“This riddle. If you answer it . . . you go home?”
Sophie nodded.
“And we never have to see you again?” said Anadil.
Sophie nodded.
“We’ll solve it,” her roommates pounced.
“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,
