“Unless there’s something about Lady Gremlaine we don’t know,” Tedros guessed. “What do we know about Grisella Gremlaine? She was a childhood friend of my father’s, then came to work as his steward when he became king. Then my mother fires her after I’m born and she goes to her home in Nottingham until the Mistral Sisters bring her back. . . .”
That name again, Agatha thought.
Grisella.
She’d heard it before. Where?
Grisella.
Grisella.
Grisella.
“Wait,” she gasped.
Agatha bounded up from the blanket and raced out of the room. She could hear Tedros scampering after her and Sophie stumble with a yelp, dishes clattering, before exclaiming, “Oh, no one should eat croissants anyway!” and chasing Agatha too.
“Where are we going!” Sophie yelled.
“Throne Room!” Agatha shouted.
“It’s the other way!” Tedros barked.
Agatha spun on her heel and now Tedros led the group, sprinting around blue-stone columns as red pawprints lit up on the floor under their feet, before they hurtled between two gnome guards, jumped through the waterfall, and landed breathlessly in the familiar blue velvet room.
Dovey’s bag lay limp in a corner. The bag that once held the Dean’s crystal ball.
Agatha ripped it open.
“What are we looking for?” Tedros panted, thrusting his hands into the bag.
Watching him, Agatha had another bout of déjà vu. She’d seen this before . . . in one of the crystals . . . Tedros scrounging through Dovey’s bag in the throne room. At the time she’d thought it was a lie. But it wasn’t. It was the future. What else had she thought was a lie that would bear out to be true?
“Hey, this is my coat,” Tedros said, pulling out his black jacket, spotted with dried blood, which Agatha had used to cushion Dovey’s crystal ball. He opened the coat up and a stack of letters fell out, banded together, onto the velvet floor.
“Grisella,” Agatha said, grabbing them. “That’s the name these letters are addressed to!”
“The letters from Lady Gremlaine to my father?” Tedros blurted, accosting her. “Where did you find them!”
“Never mind that,” Agatha said, spreading the letters on the floor, putting aside the stray card she’d found for the Bank of Putsi. “I read a few of them already. Arthur confesses a lot of his feelings to Lady Gremlaine. Maybe there’s something here . . . something that tells us whether Lady Gremlaine was Rhian and Japeth’s mother!”
“And if so, who the father was,” said Sophie, picking croissant flakes off her shoe.
Tedros and Agatha looked at her.
Alarms exploded through the room: a fusillade of high-pitched meows, like a helium-drunk cat being stung by bees.
All the fireflies in the throne room poured out from between the velvet panels and the tiers of the chandelier, thousands and thousands of them, blanketing the walls from floor to ceiling, the flies jammed together and wings spread in a glowing orange matrix. Instantly, these lit walls morphed into magic screens, surveilling the various areas of Gnomeland. One of these screens was flashing, with grainy footage of the Woods outside the tree stump marking Gnomeland’s entrance, the fireflies on the stump magically beaming back their field of view.
From what Agatha could tell, Beatrix, Reena, and Kiko were in full combat, shooting spells at something. . . .
A scim.
The eel stabbed Reena in the shoulder and gashed Beatrix’s leg, before Kiko smashed it down with a rock. Kiko raised the rock again, but the scim had recovered, shooting out from underneath it, the shining, scaly tip spinning straight for Kiko’s eye.
Agatha screamed futilely—
Beatrix tomahawked the scim with both fists, wrestling the eel to the ground. The eel ripped at her dress, slashing cuts in her hands and arms. Beatrix lost grip, the scim stabbing up for her throat—
Reena impaled it with a sharp branch, leaking goo all over her dress. Kiko stomped on the eel furiously, long after it stopped shrieking, then set it on fire with her fingerglow.
The three girls collapsed, heaving quietly, covered in dirt and blood.
Agatha slackened against the wall, just as drained.
“More will come,” a gruff voice said.
Agatha turned to a firefly wall showing the palace dining room: the Sheriff, Guinevere, and Reaper together in frame, clearly monitoring the same surveillance. They could see Agatha, Sophie, and Tedros like the young trio could see them.
“Japeth will sense a scim is dead,” the Sheriff warned. “We don’t have much time. Gwen, Reaper, and I will man the tunnel above Gnomeland.”
“Meow meow meow. Meeeow!” Reaper hectored at Tedros.
“Learned a bit of Cat under Uma’s mother at school,” said Guinevere. “Whatever mission Reaper gave you . . . he’s telling you to do it fast.”
Screens around the room went dark, fireflies floating back to their stations.
“We need proof Rhian isn’t King Arthur’s son,” Sophie said, eyeing the mound of letters on the floor. “Before Japeth comes and kills us all. We need proof we can escape with and take into the Woods.”
“We need proof even if we can’t escape,” Tedros said soberly. “Proof we can send out to the Woods before we die. The fate of our world is far bigger than the three of us.”
Agatha and Sophie looked at him.
Fireflies gleamed in his hair like a crown.
“Uh . . .” Tedros shifted under the girls’ stares. “Something on my face?”
“Come on,” Agatha said, dragging Sophie to the floor.
The prince joined them as they ransacked King Arthur’s letters for clues . . . something that would prove who the true father was to Lady Gremlaine’s sons . . . something that would prove who Rhian and Japeth really were. . . .
Ten minutes later, Tedros said he found it.
IT WAS IN a letter from Arthur to Lady Gremlaine.
DEAR GRISELLA,
I KNOW YOU’VE GONE TO STAY WITH YOUR SISTER GEMMA IN FOXWOOD; I REMEMBER YOU SAYING SHE RUNS THE SCHOOL FOR BOYS, SO I’VE SENT THIS LETTER THERE, HOPING IT WILL REACH YOU.
PLEASE COME BACK TO CAMELOT, GRISELLA. I KNOW YOU AND GUINEVERE DIDN’T SEE EYE TO EYE WHEN SHE FIRST CAME TO THE CASTLE. I SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED THIS. IT MUST HAVE BEEN DIFFICULT TO BE MY DEAREST FRIEND MOST OF MY LIFE, AND THEN TO SEE ME RETURN FROM SCHOOL WITH BOTH A NEW FRIEND IN LANCELOT AND A SOON-TO-BE WIFE. BUT I STILL VALUE YOUR FRIENDSHIP AS MUCH AS I EVER DID. AND I KNOW, DEEP IN MY HEART, THAT WE CAN MAKE IT ALL WORK. GWEN, YOU, AND ME TOGETHER.
PLEASE COME BACK.
I NEED YOU.
CAMELOT NEEDS YOU.
WITH LOVE,
ARTHUR
P.S. CAUGHT YOUR FRIEND SADER SNEAKING AROUND THE OUTSIDE OF THE CASTLE, TOSSING PEBBLES AT YOUR WINDOW. (CLEARLY WASN’T AWARE YOU WERE GONE.) QUITE CHARMING, DESPITE THE TRESPASSING! I EXTENDED AN INVITATION TO DINE WITH US AS SOON AS YOU RETURN.
“So Sader and Gremlaine were friends. More than friends, since he was prowling around her room at night,” said Tedros, relieved. “Here’s our proof that Rhian is their son.”
Agatha reread it. “This isn’t proof that Rhian is Gremlaine’s son, let alone Sader’s. It’s compelling evidence. But we need more.”
“Agatha, this letter proves August Sader and Lady Gremlaine were sneaking around at Camelot together, and we know from Lady Gremlaine’s own admission that she had a secret child,” the prince argued. “Any reasonable person in the Woods would look at this letter and come to the conclusion Rhian is Sader and Gremlaine’s son.”
“But we’re not dealing with reasonable people, Teddy. We’re dealing with a Woods blindly loyal to Rhian,” said Sophie. “Aggie’s right. The letter’s not enough. Sader and Gremlaine are both dead. They can’t confirm it. And the Woods’ newspapers are under Rhian’s control. None of them will print it, let alone peddle a story that Rhian isn’t King Arthur’s heir. Only newspape
r that might is the Courier and they’re on the run. Not like anyone would believe them anyway.”
Agatha was still gazing at Arthur’s letter. That prickly dread pitched through her stomach again. The one that told her she’d missed something—
Alarms blared once more. Fireflies surged to the walls, lighting them up like screens.
On one of these, Agatha watched as above ground, in the Woods, a thousand scims assaulted the stump outside Gnomeland, while the stump sprayed back an array of magic shields and spells. Beatrix, Reena, and Kiko were nowhere to be seen.
On an adjacent screen, an army of armored gnomes, wielding swords, clubs, and scimitars, climbed up the abandoned Flowerground tunnel and stood on each other’s shoulders to blockade the entrance under the stump. The gnome pyramid filled the vast hollow, a lattice of a thousand tiny bodies, determined to prevent any scims from breaching the stump and penetrating Gnomeland’s metropolis.
Above ground, the eels smashed the stump with more force, coming from all directions, but they still couldn’t find a way in.
“I need to be up there, you meddlin’ bag of bones!” Agatha heard the Sheriff growl from another screen. She turned and spotted him, Reaper, and Guinevere on the dirt floor of the Flowerground hollow, beneath the massive gnome blockade. The Sheriff spat at the cat: “You hear me? I’m a man. I should be first line of defense. Not a buncha gnomes!”
Reaper shook his head, meowing.
“What’d the damned thing say?” the Sheriff snarled at Guinevere.
“Too dangerous,” said Guinevere.
The screens in the throne room went dark.
“Why is the cat keeping the Sheriff from fighting?” Tedros asked, lunging to his feet. “All I know is he can’t stop me. Come on, let’s go!” He dashed for the waterfall and leapt out of the room.
Sophie scurried after him—
Agatha yanked her back. “This isn’t enough, Sophie, and you know it!” she said, holding up Arthur’s letter. “We need Rhian to tell us who his parents are. We need him to confess!”
Sophie paled. “What?”
“Japeth is attacking us, which means Japeth isn’t in the castle,” said Agatha. “We need to go back inside that crystal. The one with Rhian, wounded in his room. He’ll be able to see us like last time. We’ll show him this letter. We’ll make him tell us the truth! All we have to do is magically record it and send it to the entire Kingdom Council!”
“Have you lost your mind!” Sophie hissed. “First of all, Rhian will kill us!”
“He’s mummified in bed—”
“His guards, then!”
“Not if we gag him—”
“Second of all, the crystal hasn’t recharged! You heard Reaper. The connection will only last minutes!”
“We’ll move quickly—”
“And thirdly, if Tedros knew what we were doing, he’d kill us himself!”
“Why do you think I waited until he left?” Agatha said.
Sophie gawked at her.
But Agatha was already hustling out of the room, dragging her best friend behind her.
“IF RHIAN’S TRAPPED in bed, why can’t we just kill him!” Sophie hassled as she followed Agatha into Reaper’s bathroom.
“Because killing Rhian won’t put Tedros back on the throne. We need proof Tedros is the real king,” Agatha declared.
“Rhian confessing Arthur isn’t his dad won’t give us that proof. Nor does it solve the fact Tedros can’t pull Excalibur from the stone. Or the fact people hate him—”
“But it gets Rhian off the throne and gives Tedros a chance to redeem himself,” said Agatha, finding Dovey’s crystal wrapped in towels near the tub, still smelling of lavender. “Maybe once Tedros proves Rhian’s a fraud, Tedros will be able to pull Excalibur. Maybe it was his real coronation test all along.”
“A lot of ‘maybes’ to risk our lives for,” Sophie grumbled.
Agatha turned to her sharply. “Unless you have something better, it’s the best plan we have. The connection won’t last long. I’ll show Rhian the letter, make him admit Arthur isn’t his father, and we jump out before the portal closes.” She snatched one of the vials off Reaper’s vanity, emptied it of cream, and folded Arthur’s letter inside, before sealing it and hiding it in her dress. She slipped into the tub, gripping the crystal ball against her chest, the steamy water making her heart thump faster than it already was. “Just do the spell to record everything he says.”
“Spell? I don’t know a spell to do that!” Sophie flung back. “I figured you knew a spell since this was your rattle-brained idea!”
“You’re a witch!” Agatha retorted. “Supposedly a good one!”
Sophie blushed as if Agatha had questioned her very core. She climbed into the tub, her rug dress absorbing water like a sponge. “Well, there is a mimic spell to parrot back anything someone says, but it’s so elementary, I can barely remember it—”
“Mimic what I’m about to say,” Agatha ordered.
“Oh. Hum.” Sophie bit her lip, before she tapped her thumbs together in a pattern, and her fingertip glowed pink.
Agatha dictated: “I will not waste time in the crystal, I will let Agatha do the talking, and I will leave when Agatha tells me to.”
Sophie opened her mouth and Agatha’s voice came out, but slow motion and an octave too low: “I will not waste time in the crystal, I will let Agatha do the talking, and I will . . .” She squawked like a parrot. “. . . me to.”
Agatha frowned.
“I’ll work out the kinks by the time he confesses,” Sophie clipped, submerging in the bath.
Agatha’s splash unfurled next to her and the two girls held their breaths as Agatha laid the ball on the floor of the basin and gazed into its center. Agatha prepared for the assault—
Blue light pummeled her, but less brutally than the last time, as if the portal didn’t have the same power. Even so, her chest felt packed with concrete and she could see Sophie quailing in the water, beaten by the force. Shielding her eyes from the light, Agatha clasped her friend’s wrist and dove forward, pushing past the spike in pain and slamming her and Sophie’s hands against the ball. A supernova of white light exploded, tearing the girls apart, leaving Agatha falling into a void, her awareness fractured.
Slowly her breaths settled, the glass bubble blurring into view around her.
They were inside now, two soggy heaps.
“Connection’s weak,” Agatha panted, pointing at the dim blue glow casing the walls. She pulled the vial out of her dress and unsealed Arthur’s letter to Lady Gremlaine, clean and dry. “We need to move fast—”
Silver mist whooshed over their heads and the phantom face pressed against the glass: “Clear as crystal, hard as bone, my wisdom is Clarissa’s and Clarissa’s alone . . . But she named you her Second, so I’ll speak to you too. . . .”
“Hurry, Sophie,” Agatha said, kneeling at the phantom’s edge and searching the crystals comprising its mist. “Find the one with Rhian. It was in this corner last time.”
Rubbing her chest, Agatha brushed aside familiar scenes: her and Reaper on Graves Hill, when a cat was just a cat . . . Sophie trying to kill her at the No Ball their first year . . . Sophie in the lacy, ruffled white dress, pacing by the Gnomeland stump, before getting into a royal carriage with that shadowy boy. . . .
Agatha paused, rewatching this last scene that Sophie and Tedros had fought about earlier. The scene so obviously a fake. For one thing, Sophie had already dumped that white dress and was wearing a new one. For another, Sophie was here with Agatha, helping her fight for Tedros. She would never go back to Rhian! Yet here the scene was again, Sophie whisked off in the king’s carriage, repeating on loop as if it were real . . .
Then Agatha spotted it. Out of the corner of her eye.
A glass droplet with Rhian inside.
He was asleep in the king’s bedroom, wrapped in bloodstained bandages, the sky pitch-dark through the windows.
“Sophie, I found
it,” she said, holding up the crystal—
But Sophie was staring into another small crystal, her body stiff, as she watched the scene inside replay over and over.
“What is it?” Agatha asked, the ball darkening around them.
Sophie snapped out of her trance. “Nothing. Junk crystal. That’s the one? The crystal with Rhian?”
“If it’s junk, why did you just slip it in your pocket—” Agatha started.
“So I don’t mix it up with the others! Stop wasting time we don’t have!” Sophie berated, pointing at the crystal in Agatha’s palm. “Hurry! Open it!”
Sophie grabbed on to her friend’s hand as Agatha stilled her breath and peered into the glass—
Blue light poured forth and the two girls leapt inside.
Their feet hit ground in the king’s bedroom, humid and smelling of a thousand flowers, well-wishing bouquets from other kingdoms piled into corners. A slit of blue light hovered vertically behind the two girls, their portal to escape.
King Rhian lay motionless on the bed, his body trapped in plaster, his bruised eyelids closed and gashed lips oozing blood onto the pillow.
Agatha took a step towards him.
His eyes flew open, the blue-green pools locked on the two girls. Before he could scream, Sophie ripped the letter out of Agatha’s hands and jumped onto the bed, covering Rhian’s mouth with her palm, pinning him under the weight of her chest. He writhed beneath her blue-and-red dress, his blood smearing her fingers.
“Listen, darling. Listen to me,” she said, fumbling at the letter in her lap, losing hold of it a few times before thrusting it in front of his face. “I need you to read this. Do you see what it says?”
Agatha saw Rhian startle with shock, his cheeks drain color.
Sophie pulled the letter down. “The situation is clear now, isn’t it?”
Rhian lay stiff as a corpse.
“Good,” said Sophie. “Agatha seems to think King Arthur isn’t your father. This letter is her proof.” She leaned in, her nose almost to the king’s. “So I need you to tell me who your real father is. The truth, this time. I’m going to move my hand and you’re going to tell me. Understood?”
The School for Good and Evil #5: A Crystal of Time Page 35
