“We’re back,” Sophie gasped.
Agatha went white as snow.
Back to the one place she’d tried to forget. Back to the one place that could ruin everything.
Ahead, the closed doors to the Good castle lay atop a hill. Golden spiked gates barred the path up the Great Lawn, mirrored words arching over them:
THE SCHOOL FOR GIRL
EDUCATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT
Agatha closed and reopened her bleary eyes, for she had seen wrong.
It still said “GIRL.”
“Huh?”
Sophie stood up beside her. “That’s strange.”
“Well, ‘Good’ and ‘Girl’ aren’t so far apart,” Agatha said. “Maybe one of the nymphs got confused—”
But then she saw what Sophie was looking at. At the halfway point across the bay, Good’s lake slimed into Evil’s moat. Only the moat wasn’t black, like it used to be. It was rusted red, the color of the cesspool in the Woods and guarded by the spiny white crocodiles she had seen eat the female deer—at least twenty of them, lurking in the sludge, black shark teeth glinting.
Slowly Agatha looked up at the School for Evil looming above the moat. Three bloodred towers, jagged with spikes, flanked a smooth silver tower, twice as tall as the others. Atop the four towers, flags crackled in the fog, emblazoned with scarlet snakes.
“There used to be three Evil towers,” Sophie said, squinting. “Not four . . .”
Voices rose across the bay and the two girls ducked into the lilies.
Out of the Woods stormed men in black through Evil’s castle gates.
They were wearing red leather hoods.
“The School Master’s men!” Sophie cried as they faded into the fog.
Agatha whitened. “But that means—”
She whirled back to the bay.
“It’s . . . gone,” breathed Agatha, for the School Master’s sky-high silver tower, once guarding the halfway point between moat and lake, had simply . . . disappeared.
“No, it’s not,” Sophie said, still eyeing the School for Evil.
Now Agatha saw why there were four towers there instead of three.
The School Master’s tower had moved to Evil.
“He’s alive!” Agatha cried, gaping at his silver spire. “But how—”
Sophie pointed. “Look!”
In the tower’s single window, veiled by fog, a shadow stared down at them. All they could see of its face was a gleaming silver mask.
“It’s him!” Sophie hissed. “He’s leading Evil!”
“Agatha! Sophie!”
The girls swiveled from the lilies to see Professor Dovey running from Good castle in her green high-necked gown—
“Come quickly!”
As the two girls hurried behind her through Good’s golden gates, Agatha glanced back at the School Master’s tower and the masked shadow in the window. All they had to do was kill him again, and her mistake would be hidden forever. They’d go home safe, her promise to Stefan kept, and Sophie would never know what she’d wished for. Looking up at that shadow lording over Evil, Agatha waited for her heart to rage with purpose, to propel her into battle . . . but instead her heart did something else.
It fluttered.
The way a princess’s did in storybooks.
When she saw her prince.
5
The Other School
As she and Sophie sprinted behind Professor Dovey into the mirrored corridor, Agatha tried to find her breath. Professor Dovey was a famous fairy godmother. She had to give them answers.
“Who are those red hoods?” Agatha asked—
“How did the School Master survive?” said Sophie—
“Why are the Nevers on his side?” said Agatha—
“Quiet!” Professor Dovey snapped, erasing their footsteps with her magic wand. “We don’t have much time!”
“You don’t seem surprised to see us,” Agatha whispered, but her fairy godmother didn’t respond as she rushed them into Good’s deserted foyer, magically bolting doors behind them.
Only months ago, Sophie had eviscerated the hall in her witch’s revenge on Agatha and Tedros, blasting its stained glass windows, spiral staircases, and marble floors to shards. But now the two friends drew breaths at its redone facade. Where there used to be two pink staircases and two blue, all four stairwells were now the same royal blue as the castle. Lit by high stained glass windows, the staircases spiraled up to the dormitory towers, names tattooed on richly decorated balusters: HONOR, VALOR, PURITY, and CHARITY. Agatha had loathed the prissy princess pink of the PURITY and CHARITY towers, but seeing them turned the same color as the prince towers gave her an unsettled feeling.
Sophie nudged her, and Agatha turned to see her peering curiously at the Legends Obelisk in the center of the foyer, a soaring crystal column blanketed with portrait frames. Inside each of the frames was a painting of a past student, next to a storybook illustration of what the child became upon graduation. But looking up at the gold-framed Evers on top who became princesses and queens, the silver-framed ones in the middle who became helpers and sidekicks, and the bottomrung lot who became cinder sweeps and servants, the two girls noticed something peculiar. . . .
“Where are the boys?” Sophie said, for all their portraits had been removed.
Agatha swung her head to the Honor staircase: the frieze of knights and kings had been replaced with sword-brandishing, chain-mailed princesses. Sophie swiveled to the Valor staircase, once decorated with burly hunters and their trusty hounds—now huntresses in houndskins and decidedly female dogs. Both girls twirled to the lettered murals across the walls that once spelled E-V-E-R . . . and now spelled G-I-R-L.
“It is a School for Girls!” said Agatha, thunderstruck. “What happened to Good?”
“We can’t fight the School Master without boys!” cried Sophie.
“Shhhh!” Professor Dovey hissed, rushing them up the Valor staircase. “No one must know you’re here!”
As the girls chased her elegant silver-haired bun through Valor’s princely blue arches and murals, they gawked at the once virile visions of princes destroying demons and saving helpless princesses, now flaunting different endings: Snow White smashing out of her glass coffin with her fists, Red Riding Hood slitting the wolf’s throat, Sleeping Beauty setting her spindle on fire. . . . The red-blooded princes, hunters, men who rescued them, who saved their lives . . . gone.