The School for Good and Evil #5: A Crystal of Time

by Soman Chainani

  Up in the tree, Sophie’s dress melted back to white lace, gently unlocking her from the bark as if the dress was suddenly her friend. In a flash, she was sliding down branches, diving onto the ground, falling onto the Sheriff’s body—

  His eyes were still open, blood foaming from his mouth.

  “Tell . . . Dot . . .”

  “Shhh! I’ll get the gnomes! I’ll get help!” Sophie said, spinning for the stump—

  The Sheriff seized her hand. “Tell Dot . . . me and her mother . . .” He choked out blood. “It was . . . love.”

  His heart stopped.

  Slowly his eyes closed.

  His hand let go of Sophie’s, the skin ice-cold.

  “No . . . ,” Sophie whispered. She sobbed over the Sheriff, soaked with his blood. She would have saved him. She would have stopped this. She was the Witch of Woods Beyond. She would have torn out Japeth’s heart and fed it to his eels. She’d have given her life to protect that ring, to protect the Woods and her friends. If only she’d been given the chance.

  Enraged, she ripped at the white dress, shredding its layers and flinging them into the wind, but the dress instantly repaired and erased the Sheriff’s blood, its magic sealing her in tighter, like a suit of armor.

  Sophie hunched there, wet with sweat and tears, as dawn threatened the dark.

  Something cut against her thigh. Inside her pocket.

  The crystal.

  The one that made her leave her friends and escape here in the first place.

  The one that showed her a way to fight back.

  A thick rumble echoed in the forest—

  Sophie turned.

  Seeds of flames flickered through the trees, gliding in her direction.

  Sophie’s eyes knifed to green glass.

  Follow the crystal, she thought.

  Follow the script.

  The Sheriff would be avenged.

  Payback was coming.

  For Japeth and his brother.

  Quickly, Sophie pulled the Sheriff’s body into the trees, away from the haze of sunrise bleeding onto the forest floor.

  She paced by the stump, her eyes darting around the Woods.

  No sign of Kiko, Beatrix, Reena.

  No sign of Reaper or the gnomes.

  She needed to contact Agatha . . . to ask her a question she needed answered . . .

  But how?

  Something Kiko said floated back to her: “Those fireflies on the stump watch everything . . .”

  The rumbling grew closer . . . the torches brighter. . . .

  A blue-and-gold carriage approached, carved with Camelot’s crest, bathing Sophie in flamelight as the driver slowed the horses.

  Through the window, Sophie spotted a boy inside the carriage, his face shadowed.

  The door opened.

  Using her pink glow to light her steps, Sophie climbed in next to the boy and shut the door.

  He turned towards Sophie, his square jaw and thin eyes sculpted in silhouette.

  “Rhian saw your message,” said Kei.

  He held up a familiar piece of parchment.

  The letter from Arthur to Lady Gremlaine.

  “Dear Grisella, I know you’ve gone to stay with your sister Gemma . . .”

  The letter Sophie had shoved in Rhian’s face as he fought her in his bed.

  The letter that had made the king’s eyes go wide, his bloody hands limp against hers.

  But it wasn’t the letter that had done it.

  It was the words Sophie had painted over the letter, out of Agatha’s sight.

  The words she’d secretly scrawled with Rhian’s blood.

  She’d lied to Agatha, pretending to go along with her plan.

  She’d betrayed her friends and the forces of Good.

  But only Sophie had seen the crystal now hidden in her pocket.

  Only she had witnessed how this tale really ended.

  Soon the Lion and the Snake would be dead.

  Sophie looked up at Kei. “He knows I’m on his side, doesn’t he? The king?”

  The captain didn’t answer. He faced forward as the driver whipped the horses and the carriage veered on its wheel, back towards Camelot.

  23

  AGATHA

  Cat in a Museum

  Agatha stood at the center of the earth, her body coated with sweat, an endless pit of blue lava swelling beneath her like a luminescent sea.

  Slowly, a glowing green vine lowered the Sheriff’s body towards the lava.

  Behind Agatha, hundreds of gnomes gathered on Lands End, a grassy slab suspended by vines, dominated by a golden obelisk, carved with the names of gnomes come and gone. Beneath the levitating field of grass, an ocean of fluorescing lava roiled, where the dead had been cremated. The audience of gnomes held their hats and bowed heads as the lava welcomed its first ever human, molten waves storming and splashing over the Sheriff’s body, before devouring it in a hiss of smoke.

  Agatha didn’t shed any tears. The Sheriff was dead by the time she, Tedros, Reaper, and Guinevere had made it past the enchanted sack the Sheriff had left as a trap. They’d tried to gather the fireflies from the stump and extract everything they’d seen, but the scims had decimated nearly all of them, corrupting the footage. But they’d watched enough to know that Japeth had killed the Sheriff in cold blood and stripped him of his ring. The one ring that could stand between Rhian and infinite power.

  Agatha’s soul raged like the inferno below.

  Japeth killed Chaddick.

  Japeth killed Millicent.

  Japeth killed Lancelot, Dovey, the Sheriff.

  All this time, she’d been obsessed with a lying king and his throne.

  Meanwhile, his brother was murdering her friends without mercy.

  Tedros and Guinevere flanked her, their eyes reflecting bright lava and dark thoughts.

  “Your Highness?” a voice said.

  They all turned.

  Subby, the king’s page boy, stepped forward. “Someone stole my rickshaw,” he puled, gnomes watching. “Took it right from the palace!”

  “Meow, meow,” Reaper exhaled, with no patience for this.

  “I thought it was a bhoot!” Subby insisted. “But it was a human bhoot!”

  “Meow! Meow!” the cat assailed—

  “A human who was up there!” Subby blurted. “Up there when the Sheriff died!”

  Reaper’s face changed.

  “I found this near his body,” his page explained.

  Subby held up something, catching the light of the graveyard.

  All the gnomes let out a startled oooooh.

  Tedros turned on his princess with a glare.

  So did Reaper.

  Agatha gritted her teeth.

  Even from here, she could smell it.

  The snakeskin in Subby’s hands.

  Stinking of dirt and mulch . . .

  And lavender.

  A TOOTHLESS GRANDMA gnome sat cross-legged on the floor, tapping her fingers across the bellies of a hundred dead fireflies like they were piano keys.

  “Stop there,” said Agatha.

  Grandma Gnome stopped her tapping, pausing the distorted footage playing out on a glowing wall in the throne room.

  Tedros, Guinevere, Agatha, and Reaper all leaned in, studying the scene on the wall.

  “Any way to fill it in a bit more?” Agatha asked the old gnome.

  The toothless grandma fussed with the dead fireflies, repairing broken carcasses and wings with her fingertip, which seemed to fill in the corrupted frame. “A birdie doo doo on you,” Granny Gnome warbled as she worked. “A birdie doo doo on you . . . A birdie doo doo—”

  “Can you work any faster?” Tedros said, exasperated.

  The grandma gave him a fetid look, punctuated by a fart. Then she went back to fussing and singing, exactly as before.

  Tedros appealed to Reaper.

  The cat mumbled as if to say, “Try ruling a kingdom full of them.”

  “Look! That’s her!
” Agatha exclaimed, studying the filled-in frame of Kiko bum-rushing the Snake, derailed by a blast of pink light to her chest. Agatha pointed at the disembodied glow. “It’s Sophie’s spell. She must have been hiding nearby.”

  “There’s your proof, then. Your supposed best friend attacked Kiko to stop her from fighting the Snake,” Tedros seethed. “Your supposed best friend was helping Dovey’s and the Sheriff’s murderer.”

  “Or she was trying to save Kiko from being killed,” said Agatha reflexively.

  “Still defending her! Still defending that witch!” Tedros spat, angrier than she’d ever seen him. “I never thought you could be so stupid!”

  Agatha fought with Tedros often. Her prince was well aware that she was as tough as he was and he loved her for it. But this time, Agatha had no ground to stand on. Sophie had deserted her friends and crawled back to the enemy. Not only that, but now Agatha recalled the way Sophie pinned Rhian to the bed when they went into the crystal . . . the rushed way she’d confronted him . . . as if trying to play out a different script than the one she and Agatha had agreed on. . . .

  “I did what had to be done,” Sophie had defended after. “I did what was right.”

  She botched the plan on purpose, Agatha realized.

  But why?

  That crystal, she thought.

  The one she’d caught Sophie staring at and sneaking into her pocket.

  Sophie had seen something inside of it.

  Something that made her want to go back to Camelot.

  “Hmm . . . if this is Sophie’s spell, then this must be Sophie,” Guinevere deduced, pointing to a wrinkle of glow in the corner of the frame. “The stump’s fireflies picked up the presence of the snakeskin. Is there any way to track this spot of light through the rest of the footage?”

  Granny Gnome strummed her fingers across firefly bellies once more, scanning through images and dexterously filling in scenes, following the blip of glow as it scaled a tree, where it remained until the end of the Snake and Sheriff’s battle, when Sophie doffed the snakeskin and dragged the Sheriff into the darkness, before climbing into the royal carriage with a shadowed boy. Agatha watched as Sophie used her pink glow to light her steps into the carriage and close the door, before the footage froze on a final frame: the carriage driving off, dust kicking up from its wheels.

  Tedros was about to combust. “So Sophie watches the entire fight from the safety of a tree, then cries over the Sheriff’s body like a bad actress, then dumps him in the bushes and returns to the castle to be with those two monsters. If I get back my throne—when I get back my throne—that devil minx will lose her head with them.”

  He’s right, Agatha thought, still at a loss. Everything Tedros was saying about Sophie was indisputable fact.

  But why couldn’t she accept it, then?

  Why was her heart still defending her best friend?

  Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Guinevere chewing on her lip, just as conflicted.

  “What is it?” Tedros growled.

  “When Sophie was at the castle, she played Rhian’s side so convincingly that I believed she’d betrayed you,” said Guinevere. “But even under Rhian’s thumb, she found a way to show me her loyalty. She found a way to tell me the truth. Suppose we’re missing something?”

  “Well, that was when she thought I was the real king,” Tedros retorted. “But now that she thinks—” He clammed up.

  Guinevere frowned. “What do you mean ‘when’? What’s changed?”

  Reaper, too, looked suspicious.

  Agatha and Tedros shared a harsh glance. Her prince still seemed in denial about what his princess had seen in the blood crystal. And now the thought of him sharing the possibility with his mother that he might not be the true heir . . . that her husband had been hexed to father someone else’s sons . . . that Excalibur had been correct to spurn him. . . .

  Tedros turned back to Guinevere. “N-n-nothing. Nothing’s changed.”

  “But why would you say Sophie doesn’t think you’re the real king—”

  As Tedros deflected, Agatha found herself pondering something Guinevere said.

  “She found a way to show me her loyalty.”

  “She found a way to tell me the truth.”

  Agatha’s eyes floated back to the final frame, paused on the wall.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me, Tedros,” Guinevere strong-armed.

  “Mother, I promise you—”

  “Don’t promise, if it’s a lie.”

  Tedros swallowed.

  His mother and Reaper stared him down.

  Tedros began to sweat. “Uh . . . the name Evelyn Sader doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?”

  Guinevere’s eyes flickered. “Evelyn Sader?”

  “August Sader’s sister?” Tedros said quickly. “Took over as Dean our second year at school? You and Dad wouldn’t have known her. I’m just making sure—”

  “Wait,” said Agatha, cutting off mother and son.

  She gestured towards the screen and the cloud of dust, stirred up by the carriage. “Can we zoom in on this?”

  The old gnome brushed her fingers across the heap of dead fireflies, back and forth, widening the image on the wall until Agatha held up her hand.

  “Right there,” she said.

  Amongst the dust, something didn’t fit.

  A small cloud of mist.

  Pink mist.

  “Go closer,” Agatha ordered.

  The gnome obeyed, honing in on the pink dust with increasing detail, clearer, clearer—

  “Stop,” said Agatha.

  Tedros held his breath, peering at the wall.

  Reaper and Guinevere had gone quiet too.

  Agatha ran her fingers over the frozen frame . . . over the smoky pink words that Sophie had cast as she’d lit her steps into the carriage . . . an unmistakable message she’d left for her friends to find . . .

  Behind the words, in extreme close-up, Sophie was glaring through the carriage’s window, right at the screen, right at Agatha, her emerald eyes shining like stars in the dark.

  “What does it mean?” Tedros asked, mystified.

  Agatha gazed at the message, her own eyes reflecting Sophie’s.

  She turned to her prince. “It means your Devil Minx left us some homework.”

  AGATHA FACED TEDROS, Guinevere, and her cat as they sat on the velvet floor of the throne room, snacking from bowls of yogurt-covered almonds, caramel-soaked figs, and sweet potato chips. She hadn’t the faintest clue what time it was, with several hours gone since Sophie escaped.

  “Here’s what we know,” Agatha started. “Sophie is still on our side—”

  “We don’t know that,” Tedros argued, mouth full of nuts.

  “King Teapea, there’s a stranger trying to enter the palace,” a gnome guard announced from the door. “A highly suspicious stranger.”

  Reaper flashed a perturbed look and followed the guard out.

  Agatha still hadn’t gotten used to her cat having kingly duties, but she had bigger things to worry about. She leveled a stare at Tedros. “We know Sophie’s on our side because she left that message.”

  “Agatha’s right, Tedros,” Guinevere confirmed. “Sophie’s playing a dangerous game. Just like she did when she pushed me to save you from losing your head.”

  Her son scowled. “So she went back to Rhian and his monster brother . . . for me? Sophie, the saint? Sophie, the selfless? Wonder why she wasn’t in the School for Good. Oh, I remember. She was too busy trying to kill us all.”

  “Sophie is unpredictable,” Agatha conceded. “And we don’t know why she went back or what she’s up to. But we know she’s trying to help us. That’s why she gave us that question. It’s the mission she wants us to focus on while she focuses on hers.”

  “You got all that from a dusty riddle? Wish you could read my mind the way you read hers,” Tedros groused, grabbing a fistful of chips. “That message doesn’t mean anything. ‘Why d
id the Lady kiss him’? Who’s ‘the Lady’? Who’s ‘him’?”

  “The Lady of the Lake and the Snake,” Agatha replied calmly. “Sophie wants us to figure out why the Lady kissed Japeth.”

  “The kiss that stripped the nymph of her powers. Merlin told Tedros and me about it when he came to Camelot,” Guinevere remembered. “It was after the Snake killed Chaddick. The Lady of the Lake kissed him, thinking he was the true king.”

  “And thinking the Snake would make her his queen,” Agatha added.

  “But if that’s true, why would she kiss Japeth instead of Rhian?” Tedros puffed. “Rhian is the heir. Not his brother.”

  “Exactly. Hence Sophie’s question,” Agatha pounced. “And it’s the same question I had for the Lady when I went back to Avalon. She’d told Sophie and me that Japeth had King Arthur’s blood. But not just that. She’d claimed Japeth had the blood of Arthur’s eldest son. Only we know that’s untrue, because Rhian was the one to free Excalibur from the stone. Which means Rhian is the eldest son, not Japeth. I told the Lady she’d made a mistake. She hadn’t kissed the real king. But she insisted that I was wrong. That whoever she’d kissed had the heir’s blood and whoever she’d kissed was the one who pulled Excalibur. Which means something is still wrong here. Magically wrong. And now Sophie is asking us to find out why.”

  “But we already know the answer. Rhian and Japeth don’t have Arthur’s blood!” Guinevere snapped, losing patience. “Either one of them. They’re liars. They’re frauds. They found black magic that helped Rhian pull Excalibur and it’s that same magic that made the Lady kiss his brother. That’s the only explanation. Because they’re not Arthur’s sons! So it doesn’t matter who the Lady kissed! It’s all a big bluff! My son is the heir! My son is the king!”

  Agatha and Tedros went mum.

  Guinevere glanced between them, her face drawing in. “What’s happened?” Her eyes clouded. “Does this have anything to do with that Sader woman?”

  “It has everything to do with that Sader woman,” said a weaselly voice behind them.

  They turned to see two gnome guards and Reaper usher in a shock-blond boy Agatha didn’t recognize—