A World Without Princes. Soman Chainani

      By the next morning, when the Elders took to the square to calm rioting villagers, Stefan had already made it to the church.

      “It’s the only way the Elders and I can protect you,” he told his daughter, bearing a hammer and padlocks.

      Agatha wouldn’t leave, so he locked her in too.

      “I thought our story was over!” Sophie cried, listening to a mob of villagers outside chanting, “Send her back! Send her back!” She slumped in her seat. “Why don’t they want you? Why am I always the villain? And why am I always locked in?”

      Next to her, Agatha gazed at a marble saint in a frieze above the altar, lunging for an angel. He stretched his strong arm, torqued his chest, as if he’d follow the angel wherever it went …

      “Aggie?”

      Agatha broke from her trance and turned. “You do have a way of making enemies.”

      “I tried to be Good!” Sophie said. “I tried to be just like you!”

      Agatha felt that sick feeling again. The one she’d been trying to keep down.

      “Aggie, do something!” Sophie grabbed her arm. “You always fix things!”

      “Maybe I’m not as Good as you think,” Agatha murmured, and pulled away, pretending to polish her clump. In the silence, she could feel Sophie watching her.

      “Aggie.”

      “Yeah.”

      “Why did your finger glow?”

      Agatha’s muscles clenched. “What?”

      “I saw it,” said Sophie softly. “At the wedding.”

      Agatha threw her a glance. “Probably a trick of light. Magic doesn’t work here.”

      “Right.”

      Agatha held her breath. She could feel Sophie thinking.

      “But the teachers never relocked our fingers, did they?” her friend said. “And magic follows emotion. That’s what they told us.”

      Agatha shifted. “So?”

      “You didn’t look happy at the wedding,” Sophie said. “Are you sure something didn’t make you upset? Upset enough to do magic?”

      Agatha met her eyes. Sophie searched her face, seeing right through her.

      “I know you, Agatha.”

      Agatha gripped the pew.

      “I know why you were sad.”

      “Sophie, I didn’t mean it!” Agatha blurted—

      “You were upset with my father,” said Sophie. “For all he put me through.”

      Agatha goggled at her. She recovered and nodded. “Right. Uh-huh. You got me.”

      “At first I thought you’d done the spell to stop his wedding. But that doesn’t make any sense now, does it?” Sophie said with a snort. “That would mean you sent the arrows for me.”

      Agatha croaked a laugh, trying not to look at her.

      “Just a trick of light,” Sophie sighed. “Like you said.”

      They sat in silence and listened to the chants.

      “Don’t worry about my father. He and I’ll be fine,” Sophie said. “The witch won’t come back, Aggie. Not as long as we’re friends.”

      Her voice was more naked than Agatha had ever heard it. Agatha looked up, surprised.

      “You make me happy, Agatha,” said Sophie. “It just took me too long to see it.”

      Agatha tried to hold her gaze, but all she could see was the saint above the altar, hand lunging towards her, like a prince reaching for his princess.

      “You’ll see. We’ll come up with a plan, like always,” Sophie said, reapplying pink lipstick between yawns. “But maybe a little beauty nap first …”

      As she curled up on the pew like a cat, pillow to her stomach, Agatha saw it was her friend’s favorite, stitched with a blond princess and her prince, embraced beneath the words “Ever After.” But Sophie had revised the prince with her sewing kit. Now he had boxy dark hair, goonish bug eyes … and a black dress.

      Agatha watched her best friend fall into sleep a few breaths later, free from nightmares for the first time in weeks.

      As the chants outside the church grew louder—“Send her back! Send her back!”—Agatha stared at Sophie’s pillow, and her stomach wrenched with that sick feeling.

      The same feeling she felt looking at the storybook prince in her kitchen. The same feeling she felt watching a man and wife exchange vows. The same feeling she felt as she held Sophie’s hand, growing stronger, stronger, until her finger had glowed with a secret. A secret so terrible, so unforgivable, that she’d ruined a fairy tale.

      For in that single moment, watching the wedding she’d never have, Agatha had wished for something she never thought possible.

      She wished for a different ending to her story.

      An ending with someone else.

      That’s when the arrows came for Sophie.

      The arrows that wouldn’t stop, no matter how much she tried to take her wish back.

      That night they flattened Radley’s house first, with a boulder lobbed over the trees, then the crooked clock tower, which tolled broken moans as screaming villagers fled through the square. Soon whole lanes went up in splinters as parents clung to their children in wells and ditches, watching rocks fly across the moon like meteors. When the blitz ended at four in the morning, only half the town remained. The trembling villagers looked out at the theater, illuminated in the distance, the lights on its red curtain rearranged:

      SOPHIE OR DIE.