The Last Ever After

by Soman Chainani

  Tedros rubbed his eyes, scarlet fading from his cheeks. “And what about me? What if I needed you?”

  “I couldn’t make the same mistakes with you as I’d made with your father,” said Merlin. “I’d sheltered him from his own weaknesses, and because of it, those weaknesses won. I had to let you write your own story, Tedros . . . to let you grow up on your own, until the day when you truly needed me to survive. If I’d tried to say goodbye, you would have followed me into the Woods. Still, you’ll never know how hard it was to leave you. As much as you may have needed me, I needed you far more.” The wizard’s voice wavered slightly. “I took solace in the fact that I was never truly gone, watching you as an eagle watches from the sky, following every twist and turn of your story. Cringing perhaps, at some of your mistakes, fatheaded as they were. And yet knowing that all these mistakes were yours, beautifully yours, and you came out the better for it . . . the boy I left behind well on his way to becoming an extraordinary man and an extraordinary king.” Merlin smiled. “If only from your choice of princess alone.”

  Tedros and Agatha looked at each other and turned away, blushing, as if unsure whether they were still in a fight.

  “Though you will certainly have interesting children,” Merlin murmured, studying them.

  Agatha’s buttocks clenched.

  Tedros yawned and balled his knees to his chest. “Well, after everything you’ve put me through, the least you can do is make me one, M,” he grumbled, peeking at Merlin. “Double marshmallow and candy cream as usual, please.”

  Merlin cracked a smile. “What’d I tell you? The second I show up they turn back into little boys,” he sighed. Out of his starry cone hat he pulled a tall stone mug of steaming chocolate with two giant fluffy marshmallows and a mountain of rainbow-sprinkled whipped cream and slid it into the prince’s hand.

  Tedros was about to take a sip . . . then looked up at Agatha. “Want to try?”

  Agatha blinked at him. Her prince was the poster boy for chivalry, except when it came to food; he’d practically eaten her out of the house in Gavaldon, stolen last bites from under her too many times to count, and never offered her a single morsel of his own meals. So as he held out his mug, looking so handsome and earnest, Agatha teared up like an idiot—because after all the fights and tension and resentment, it meant that Tedros still loved her.

  Taking the warm mug from him, she slurped at the bubbling, rich chocolate and candy-studded cream and a riot of sweetness exploded on her tongue, as if she’d inhaled all of Hansel’s Haven in one bite. “Whoa,” she shivered, going for another sip, but Tedros snatched it back so violently that Agatha burst into cackles.

  “Where were you all these years, Merlin?” Tedros finally asked, with a whipped-cream moustache that looked remarkably like his mentor’s.

  “Exploring the Woods, my dear boy!” Merlin declared, digging deep in his hat for a round yellow balloon. It magically flitted out of his hands with a mousy squeak and inflated over his head. “They really are Endless, you know. The man-eating hills of Mahadeva, the upside-down kingdom of Borna Coric, the haunted fog of Akgul, the black seas of Ooty, led by an eight-armed queen—” The balloon frantically contorted into the images he was describing, trying to keep up. “I even spent Christmas one year in Altazarra, a kingdom where everything is made entirely out of milk or honey, with rivers of fresh butter cream, castles of Swiss cheese and honeycomb, and roads paved with thick yogurt. Everyone is quite obese, of course, but brilliantly happy, though not as happy as the villagers of Nupur Lala, who have a rare birth condition that leaves them all born without tongues. You’d be surprised how deliriously happy people are when they can’t speak. And yet, no matter where I went, they recognized me from King Arthur’s storybook and treated me as an honored guest, though it meant I often had to do a bit of musty magic to earn supper and a bed (or in the case of Kingdom Kyrgios, a giant peapod). Amazing how tales travel, really, and it never ceased, no matter how far I went, each kingdom just as familiar with the legend of Arthur as the next, inspiring me to journey farther and farther, intoxicated with novelty, celebrity, and most of all inexhaustible beauty . . .”

  The balloon popped with a gunshot crack, sputtering back into the hat. Merlin plopped it on his head with a sigh. “Yet as anything else, beauty grows tiring. For all my adoring fans, I began to feel a rot inside, as if finally turning as old on the inside as I was on the outside, as if there was no point to seeking adventures if I had no one to share these adventures with. . . . And yet, just as I told myself that it might indeed be time to die after all, Yuba managed to track me down on a glacier in the middle of the Piranha Lakes. The League of Thirteen had reconvened, he said. And a lad named Tedros was bringing his princess to meet it.”

  Agatha and Tedros gaped at him, as if still stuck on the honey and cheese.

  “Reconvened?” asked Agatha, her brain catching up. “The League of Thirteen existed before?”

  “Why did it convene in the first place?” Tedros asked.

  “Here come the questions,” Merlin moaned, yanking his hat down over his eyes. “I wish I was a seer. Then I would have an excuse not to answer them. No questions until after dinner. Both of you must be ravenous.”

  “Not for old-people food,” Tedros grouched, eyeing the others finishing up their carrots, gruel, and prune stew.

  “Well, then I’m afraid you can’t have any of this,” Merlin said and began pulling a sumptuous spread out of his hat, with pork ribs, sweet potato mash, creamed corn and bacon cubes, pickled cucumbers, and coconut-curried rice heaped on silver platters which he lay across a white silk picnic blanket which had magically appeared on the cave floor. “After all, given that I, an old person, just made it, I believe it would fall squarely under the term ‘old-people food.’ Come, Agatha.” He drew a plate out of his hat for her and lavished it with pork, cucumbers, and corn.

  Mouth salivating, Agatha was about to start shoveling food, when she saw Tedros’ face, like a beaten puppy’s. She cocked a grin and held out a rib. “Want to try?”

  Tedros beamed and the two of them assaulted the spread in rapturous silence, while Merlin rocked pleasantly in his chair and licked a new lollipop.

  “What I miss most about being young,” Cinderella crabbed, slurping liquefied prunes as she watched them.

  “Fun?” said Peter Pan wistfully.

  “Feasting,” Cinderella grumped.

  “Looks like you’ve done enough feasting for a lifetime,” snorted Pinocchio. He saw the whole table staring at him. “Did I say that out loud?”

  The young prince and princess ate and ate until they were stuffed, topping it off with a hunk of cappuccino mousse cake, before they collapsed against the wall, groaning against each other, letting their puffed bellies rest. Afterward Yuba brought them a pot of hot water and a scrub cloth and Agatha and Tedros took turns behind the curtain washing themselves, once Merlin conjured cottony white pajamas for each of them. As the other League members tucked into their mattresses for an early bedtime, Agatha looked up at Merlin nervously.

  “We have to convince Sophie her happy ending is with Tedros and me. You can help us get into school to see her?”

  “What if she won’t destroy the ring? What if the School Master catches us?” Tedros pushed worriedly. “Merlin, he still has my sword. Father’s sword! I can’t be crowned king without Excalibur—”

  Merlin huddled into the pair of pajama-clad Evers. “Let’s go someplace where we can think.”

  Agatha frowned. “We can’t go into the Woods after dark. Suppose one of those old villains finds us—”

  “Who said anything about the Woods?” said Merlin. He flung open the lining of his cape, revealing a swathe of dark purple silk embroidered with five-pointed stars, like a child’s crude rendition of a night sky. “This, my dear, is where wizards go to think.”

  Agatha had no idea what he was talking about, but then she saw Tedros smiling. “Come on, silly,” he said, and grabbing her by the hand, he
pulled her right into the starry sky stitched on Merlin’s cape. Agatha felt herself smothered by silk and then falling through darkness, comets of light zooming past and blinding her, until she closed her eyes and landed on something so soft and fluffy and warm that she knew she wasn’t in the Woods anymore.

  “Your mother is the reason the League of Thirteen even exists,” Merlin said to Agatha, his bony legs poking out of his purple robes and dangling over the edge of a puffy white cloud.

  Agatha still wasn’t paying attention. Seated cross-legged with Tedros on the same cloud, both of them in angelic white, she scanned a purple night sky lit up by thousands of silvery five-pointed stars, as if the childish pattern on Merlin’s cape had come to life in brilliant, wondrous dimension. “The Celestium,” Tedros had called it once she’d opened her eyes—Merlin’s favorite thought spot, where he’d brought Arthur’s father, then Arthur himself, and eventually Arthur’s son. Dazed, Agatha had peered up into the dark, starlit infinity, feeling her heartbeat slow to a crawl. Unlike the icy chill of the Woods, the air here was toasty and humid, inviting her muscles to relax. The fuzzy cloud beneath her stretched out like a cotton field, sinking her in all the way to the navel. But most marvelous of all was the silence, a big, wide emptiness as endless as the sky around them. Suddenly every rustle of her body was a disturbance, every thought in her mind a nuisance, until she, like Merlin and Tedros, had found a perfect stillness, as if they’d become the silence and the silence had become them.

  Only then had Merlin spoken.

  “Indeed, without Callis the members of the League may never have met each other at all,” he continued now. “During the Great War, when the School Master brothers battled for supremacy, Good against Evil, only one emerged victorious—though no one was sure who, given he wore a mask to conceal his identity. Still, he managed to win the allegiance of both sides by vowing to rise above Good and Evil and protect the balance as long as he was alive.”

  Agatha stifled a yawn and saw Tedros’ lids drooping. Not only were they both exhausted, they knew all of this from Professor Sader’s history classes.

  “I’m sure this is familiar territory,” Merlin said sharply, “but it’s quite crucial for the rest of the story I’m about to tell. After the Great Truce, Good would go on a 200-year streak of victories, obliterating Evil ruthlessly in every new story, which naturally raised the hackles of Nevers around the Woods, who believed the Good brother had won and tilted the Storian to reflect his own soul. I was a young Ever myself during this period, notorious for my unkempt hair, magical talents, and disregard for school assignments in favor of my own research. While the other Evers believed Good had become invincible and thus grew shallower and lazier as a result, I, on the other hand, became deeply suspicious of our winning streak. The Storian, after all, sustains our world through balance. It is the first lesson taught at every Welcoming. The sun rises on the Woods only as long as the pen preserves that balance, correcting any inequity through each new story. Which meant, of course, that for the Storian to make Good win in every new tale . . . it must be correcting for something terribly Evil indeed.”

  He exhaled, looking out at the purple night. “Perhaps everything that followed could have been avoided if the teachers at the School for Good had taken my inquiries seriously, but they too were drunk on victory and we didn’t have a Dean nearly as sharp as Clarissa Dovey at the helm. At the end of third year, I was tracked as a Helper to Arthur’s father and moved to Camelot upon graduation, where I became Grand Vizier and eventually resident tutor to his son. Still, I made it my mission to keep watch over the goings-on at school, in case my suspicions proved correct. For years, I’d give guest lectures in History of Heroism or come for tea and crumpets with old professors or write Arthur for news once he was old enough to be a student himself. But Good’s winning streak continued and there was no sign of any resistance from Evil or untoward behavior by the School Master. Soon, my worries dulled and instead I began to devote my energy to a spell that had become my life’s work—a potion that could briefly turn boys into girls and girls into boys in the hopes to foster experimentation, sensitivity, and peace. A potion I believe both of you know well.”

  Agatha and Tedros murmured sleepily, thinking of the bright purple potion that had caused so much chaos at the School for Boys and Girls.

  “Given the spell was based in gnome biology, Yuba generously offered to test each new version of the potion as I developed it,” said Merlin, his pupils honing in on Agatha. “It was during one of these visits to him that he mentioned the School Master had taken an interest in a new teacher at the school named Callis.”

  “What! My mother was a teacher?” Agatha blurted, jolting from her daze.

  “Professor Callis of Netherwood,” Merlin affirmed.

  “N-N-Netherwood?” Agatha stammered, shell-shocked. “That means she wasn’t from Gavaldon? My mother was from . . . the Woods?”

  “And quite the popular professor of Uglification,” Merlin replied.

  Agatha gawped at him incredulously. Her mother taught Evil kids how to uglify and disguise themselves? The same mother who used to beg her daughter to tell her about the school as if trying to imagine it for herself? Agatha tried to picture her mother trundling through the Evil castle halls in a pointy-shouldered teacher’s gown, leading challenges in Manley’s rancid classroom, uglifying and shape-shifting with her repellent students. . . . Her stomach hollowed. Either this was all a terrible mistake, or she’d lived with a stranger her whole life.

  “When positions open up at school, the Deans are responsible for scouring the Woods and finding qualified professors whose tales are long over or who’ve accepted that the Storian will never choose them for a tale once they sign up for the seclusion of faculty life,” said Merlin. “Imagine the School Master’s surprise, then, when the Storian begins to tell the story of this new Evil teacher: Callis of Netherwood, heart and soul committed to Evil . . . and yet still dreaming of finding her one true love.”

  “Oh, you’ve clearly got it wrong,” Agatha said with relief. “That couldn’t have been my mother. She didn’t care about love in the slightest—”

  Her voice trailed away. Agatha was thinking about the way her mother fumbled the kettle that morning when Agatha had accused her of never having found true love. She suddenly felt that cold feeling again, the one she’d had watching Callis pumping water at the sink . . . that feeling that told her that her mother hadn’t learned about fairy tales from reading storybooks . . .

  But from living through one herself.

  Slowly Agatha looked up at Merlin. “Keep going,” she rasped.

  “Now as Yuba rightly pointed out at the time, the School Master should have thrown Callis out of school immediately,” the wizard resumed. “Teachers are here to shepherd students during their education, not endanger them. And fairy tales often end in so much violence and bloodshed that to have the Storian telling a teacher’s tale within the school’s walls is to invite chaos and death into students’ lives. And yet the School Master didn’t throw Professor Callis out. Not only did she stay at the School for Evil, but Yuba swears he saw Callis’ shadow in the School Master’s window on a number of nights, long after the other teachers had gone to sleep. Yuba tried to press her as to why she was in the School Master’s tower, but Callis denied she’d ever been there. Meanwhile, the teachers were abuzz with theories as to why the School Master would let her remain within school gates, especially given Callis was quite pretty—”

  “Pretty? Teachers have low standards, apparently,” Tedros yawned.

  Agatha fired him a glare and he bit his tongue.

  “But in the end, the teachers reached the same conclusion. With Evil losing miserably in every new story, the School Master must have believed a villain like Callis posed little threat to anyone but herself. After all, the faculty, like the students, were convinced the School Master was Good and would relish the chance to see an Evil teacher perish within school walls,” said Merlin.
“And yet, now my own suspicions were reawakened. Why would a School Master take interest in an Evil teacher dreaming of her one true love? If the School Master was indeed Evil and not Good, could Evil’s true love somehow be a weapon against Good? Could Evil’s true love finally help Evil win? And if so, did the School Master believe that Callis was his?”

  Merlin paused. “On one of my visits, I accosted your mother in the Blue Forest but she refused to answer any of my questions about her relationship with the School Master, even though I could sense her anxiousness about it. I tried to return and press her again, but the School Master had enchanted the gates to repel me, no matter what spell I tried. Clearly he did not want me speaking to Callis and banished me from the school. Now fully convinced the School Master was Evil and using Callis as part of his plot—a plot to fight Good’s love with Evil’s—I recruited Yuba to help me gather some of the most famous heroes in the Woods, including Peter Pan, Cinderella, and others comfortably in retirement, into a League of Twelve, prepared to foil the School Master’s attack once it came. . . . Only that attack never came. Instead, Callis of Netherwood simply vanished one night from the School for Good and Evil without a trace and the Storian abandoned her fairy tale, as if it had lost track of her entirely. Soon the pen began a trifling new story about a girl named Thumbelina, Good’s winning streak continued unabated, and the League of Twelve was disbanded and forgotten, as no one but me still questioned the School Master’s Goodness. . . .” Merlin stared Agatha down. “Until almost forty years later, when the School Master found his Evil Queen after all. Only it wasn’t Callis who wore his ring now . . . but the best friend of Callis’ own daughter.”

  Agatha’s eyes were as big as saucers, her heart rattling against her rib cage. She glanced at Tedros, expecting him to be just as shaken, but he was curled up, asleep on the cloud, a trail of drool on his cheek.