Elders.
They’d kill her.
Agatha spun, waving her torch in front of her, as both sides converged. Sophie, where are you—
“Kill him!” she heard a man’s voice cry from the mob.
Agatha swiveled in shock. She knew his voice.
“Kill the assassin!” the man screamed again as his mob ran towards her.
Panicked, Agatha stuttered forward, swinging the torch at the trees. Something heavy whizzed past her ear, another past her ribs—
A sparkle flared ahead and she froze her flame on it.
The empty honeycream pouch lay at the forest edge, snakeskin scales glinting.
A hard, cold blow smashed her back. Agatha buckled to her knees and saw a jagged rock on the ground beside her. She turned to see more men aiming stones at her head, less than fifty feet away from the east. Rushing in from the west, the Elders held up their torches, about to glimpse her face—
Agatha hurled her torch in the lake, plunging her into pitch darkness.
With confused cries, the men whisked torches wildly to find the assassin. They saw a shadow sprint past them for the trees. Like lions to a kill, they charged in a grunting, vengeful mob, chasing faster, faster, one breaking from the pack, and just as the man who screamed for blood caught the assassin by the neck, the shadow whirled to face him—
Stefan gasped in shock, long enough for Agatha to press her lips to his ear.
“I promise.”
Then she was gone into the labyrinth, like a white rose into a grave.
4
Red Hoods Ride
Agatha heard the men’s shouts recede with the light of their torches. Kneeling against a wet, crumbly tree trunk in darkness, she folded her shivering arms into her black dress.
A few distant hoots and skitters muffled to silence. Agatha didn’t move, her spine throbbing where the rock hit her. All this time she had focused on rescuing her best friend and going back. Back to what? Murderous Elders? More assassin attacks? A village that wanted Sophie gone?
She thought of innocent women burned publicly in a square, not so long ago, and her stomach turned over. How can we ever go home? Their future in Gavaldon was just as dark as the Woods around her now. To go home, she couldn’t just rescue Sophie. She had to defeat these assassins—whoever they were—and stop their attacks once and for all.
But she had no idea how to even begin looking for her friend. For hundreds of years, the villagers had stormed into the forest, seeking its lost children—only to come out the other side, right where they started. Like all the missing children, she and Sophie had seen what lay beyond the forest: a dangerous world of Good and Evil that had no end. They had been the lucky ones to return, sealing the gates between reality and fantasy forever . . . or so she’d thought. One wish, and the gates had reopened.
Wherever Sophie was, she was in terrible danger.
Rising from a crouch, Agatha stepped into the Endless Woods, clumps crunching on dead leaves. Inching forward, she probed blindly with her hands, feeling splintered bark, cobwebbed branches. . . . Her head smacked into a tree and a shadow flung out, spewed something wet at her face, and vanished with a hiss. In response came a chorus of grunts and groans, all through the woods, like a sleeping enemy called to arms. Dazed, Agatha scraped the goo off her face and pulled Radley’s dagger from her pocket. Scuffling sounds came from beneath her feet.
Through dead leaves, she saw pupils open and shut in the undergrowth, yellow and green, glinting in one place, reappearing in another. Agatha shrank against the tree, trying not to blink. Little by little, her eyes adjusted, just in time to see eight slinky shadows unfurl from the ground in a circle around her, like coiling trails of smoke—
Snakes.
Only they were thicker than snakes, black as ash, with flattened heads and needle-sharp barbs through every scale. They rose higher, higher around Agatha, angling towards her with long, overlapping hisses, opening their full-fanged jaws wide—
All at once, they spat.
Gobs of mucus pinned Agatha to the tree, and she dropped the dagger. She tried to wrench free, but sour film smacked into her mouth and eyes so all she could see was a ring of blurry, spiny silhouettes. They all aimed at different parts of her body, then curled their trunks around her, barbs piercing into her skin. Flailing silently, Agatha saw a last one, bigger than the rest, lower from a branch and loop its cold, black tail around her neck. As its barbs pricked her throat, she gasped for more breath, but the monster’s head was slithering up her face now. It pressed its fat nose against the film over her cheeks, glaring at her with thin, acid-green pupils . . . and started to squeeze. Agatha choked and closed her eyes—
She felt no hurt, only her soul searching for a memory. . . . She was sitting on a lakeshore, head on someone’s shoulder. Arm in arm, they held each other, sun drenching their skin, breaths quietly matched. Agatha listened to the silence of happiness, Ever After in a single moment. . . . Then sharp, stabbing pain flooded her body and she knew the end had come. Gripping the arm beside her, Agatha gazed into their lake’s reflection, needing to see her happy ending’s face, one last time—
It wasn’t Sophie’s.
Light speared the darkness. The snakes recoiled with screams and skittered back into dead leaves.
Agatha opened her eyes. Dazed, she looked around for the source of light. Through the veil of goo, she saw it was her fingertip, burning gold for the first time since the wedding. She was at once relieved and sickened. Both times it’d happened thinking of him.
Magic follows emotion, Yuba had warned. She’d lost control of both.
This time, however, her finger didn’t dim. Agatha held it up, confused. She focused on her need to get off this tree, and suddenly the glow pulsed brighter, as if waiting for instructions. Agatha’s heart pumped faster. She’d crossed into the fairy-tale world. Her magic was back.
Bursting with pain and stuck to a tree, Agatha was hardly in shape to remember spells from school. But when her breaths settled, she managed a basic melt jinx, and the mucus rinsed away with the blood, leaving her black dress sticky and soaked. Still, she was alive somehow, and with a wretched groan, Agatha picked up Radley’s dagger and pried off the soggy bark.
Finger aglow, she swept it like a torch through knotted trees, searching for a path, like Yuba had taught them. Like all the group leaders at the School for Good and Evil, the old gnome had used the Blue Forest, a lush, tranquil training ground meant to mimic the Endless Woods and prepare students for what they’d face. Agatha squeezed between two rotted tree trunks, trying to ignore the burning cuts all over her body. Now the Blue Forest seemed like the School Master’s cruel joke.