Agatha tried to hold her gaze, but all she could see was the saint above the altar, hand lunging towards her, like a prince reaching for his princess.
“You’ll see. We’ll come up with a plan, like always,” Sophie said, reapplying pink lipstick between yawns. “But maybe a little beauty nap first . . .”
As she curled up on the pew like a cat, pillow to her stomach, Agatha saw it was her friend’s favorite, stitched with a blond princess and her prince, embraced beneath the words “Ever After.” But Sophie had revised the prince with her sewing kit. Now he had boxy dark hair, goonish bug eyes . . .
And a black dress.
Agatha watched her best friend fall into sleep a few breaths later, free from nightmares for the first time in weeks.
As the chants outside the church grew louder—“Send her back! Send her back!”—Agatha stared at Sophie’s pillow, and her stomach wrenched with that sick feeling.
The same feeling she felt looking at the storybook prince in her kitchen. The same feeling she felt watching a man and wife exchange vows. The same feeling she felt as she held Sophie’s hand, growing stronger, stronger, until her finger had glowed with a secret. A secret so terrible, so unforgivable, that she’d ruined a fairy tale.
For in that single moment, watching the wedding she’d never have, Agatha had wished for something she never thought possible.
She wished for a different ending to her story.
An ending with someone else.
That’s when the arrows came for Sophie.
The arrows that wouldn’t stop, no matter how much she tried to take her wish back.
3
Breadcrumbs
That night they flattened Radley’s house first with a boulder lobbed over the trees, then the crooked clock tower, which tolled broken moans as screaming villagers fled through the square. Soon whole lanes went up in splinters as parents clung to their children in wells and ditches, watching rocks fly across the moon like meteors. When the blitz ended at four in the morning, only half the town remained. The trembling villagers looked out at the theater, illuminated in the distance, the lights on its red curtain rearranged:
SOPHIE OR DIE.
While Sophie slept calmly through all this, Agatha sat trapped in the church, listening to the screams and thumps. Give them Sophie, and her best friend would die. Don’t give them Sophie, and her whole town would die. Shame burnt her throat. Somehow she’d reopened the gates between the worlds. But to who? Who wanted Sophie dead?
There had to be a way to fix this. If she’d reopened the gates, surely she could close them!
First she tried to make her finger glow again, focusing on her anger until her cheeks puffed—anger at the assassins, anger at herself, anger at her stupid, unlit finger that looked even paler than before. Then she tried doing spells anyway to repel the raiders, which went about as well as expected. She tried praying to stained glass saints, wishing on a star, rubbing every lamp in the church for a genie, and when it all failed miserably, she pried Sophie’s pink lipstick from her fist and scratched “TAKE ME INSTEAD” on the dawnlit window. To her surprise, she got an answer.
“NO,” flames spelled across the forest fringe.
For a moment, through trees, Agatha glimpsed a glint of red. Then it was gone.
“WHO ARE YOU?” she wrote.
““GIVE US SOPHIE,” the flames answered.
“SHOW YOURSELF,” she demanded.
“GIVE US SOPHIE.”
“YOU CAN’T HAVE HER,” Agatha scrawled.
A cannonball smashed through Sophie’s statue in reply.
Sophie stirred behind her, mumbling about the connection between poor sleep and pimples. Banging around in the dark, she lit a candle that streaked the hemlock rafters with tawny glow. Then she did a few bumbling yoga moves, nibbled on an almond, rubbed her face with grapefruit seeds, trout scales, and cacao cream, and twirled to Agatha with a sleepy smile. “Morning, darling, what’s our plan?”
But hunched in the windowsill, Agatha just stared out the broken glass, and then Sophie did too, at the leveled town, the homeless masses picking through rubble, and her severed statue head gaping at her from the church steps. Sophie’s smile slowly vanished.
“There’s no plan, is there?”
CRACK!
The oak doors shivered as a hammer bashed away a padlock.
CRACK! CRACK!
“Assassins!” Sophie cried—
Agatha leapt up in horror. “The church is hallowed ground!”
Boards snapped; screws loosened and clinked to the floor.
The girls backed against the altar. “Hide!” Agatha gasped, and Sophie ran around the lectern like a headless chicken—
Something metal slipped into the door.
“A key!” Agatha squeaked. “They have a key!”
She heard the lock catch. Behind her, Sophie fluttered uselessly between curtains.
“Hide now!” cried Agatha—
The doors crashed open, and she spun to its dark threshold. Through weak candlelight, into the church slunk a hunched black shadow.
Agatha’s heart stopped.
No . . .
The crooked shadow glided down the aisle, flickering in flamelight. Agatha dropped to her knees against the altar. Her heart was rattling so hard she couldn’t breathe.
He’s dead! Ripped to pieces by a white swan and thrown to the wind! His black swan feathers rained over a school far, far away! But now the School Master was creeping towards her, very much alive, and Agatha cowered against the lectern with a shriek—
“The situation has become untenable,” said a voice.
Not the School Master’s.
Agatha peeked through fingers at the Elder with the longest beard, standing over her.
“Sophie must be moved to safety,” said the younger Elder behind him, removing his black top hat.
“And she must be moved tonight,” said the youngest at the rear, stroking his meager beard.
“Where?” a voice breathed.
The Elders looked up to see Sophie in the marble frieze over the altar, pressed against a naked saint.
“THAT’S where you hid?” barked Agatha.
“Where will you take me?” Sophie asked the Eldest, trying in vain to extricate herself from the nude statue.
“It’s been arranged,” he said, replacing his hat as he walked towards the door. “We’ll return this evening.”
“But the attacks!” Agatha cried. “How will you stop them?”