“I knew it!” Agatha flared. “I’m your Good Deed! Just a pawn in your stupid fantasy!”
Sophie didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Maybe I became your friend to impress the School Master,” she confessed finally. “But there’s more to it now.”
“Because I found you out,” Agatha grumbled.
“Because I like you.”
Agatha turned to her.
“No one understands me here,” Sophie said, looking at her hands. “But you do. You see who I am. That’s why I kept coming back. You’re not my good deed anymore, Agatha.”
Sophie gazed up at her. “You’re my friend.”
Agatha’s neck flushed red.
“What’s wrong?” Sophie frowned.
Agatha hunched into her dress. “It’s just, um . . . I—I’m, uh . . . not used to friends.”
Sophie smiled and took her hand. “Well, now we’ll be friends at our new school.”
Agatha groaned and pulled away. “Say I sink to your intelligence level and pretend to believe all this. Why am I going to villain school? Why has everyone elected me the Mistress of Evil?”
“No one says you’re evil, Agatha,” Sophie sighed. “You’re just different.”
Agatha narrowed her eyes. “Different how?”
“Well, for starters, you only wear black.”
“Because it doesn’t get dirty.”
“You don’t ever leave your house.”
“People don’t look at me there.”
“For the Create-a-Tale Competition, your story ended with Snow White eaten by vultures and Cinderella drowning herself in a tub.”
“I thought it was a better ending.”
“You gave me a dead frog for my birthday!”
“To remind you we all die and end up rotting underground eaten by maggots so we should enjoy our birthdays while we have them. I found it thoughtful.”
“Agatha, you dressed as a bride for Halloween.”
“Weddings are scary.”
Sophie gaped at her.
“Fine. So I’m a little different,” Agatha glared. “So what?”
Sophie hesitated. “Well, it’s just that in fairy tales, different usually turns out, um . . . evil.”
“You’re saying I’m going to turn out a Grand Witch,” said Agatha, hurt.
“I’m saying whatever happens, you’ll have a choice,” Sophie said gently. “Both of us will choose how our fairy tale ends.”
Agatha said nothing for a while. Then she touched Sophie’s hand. “Why is it you want to leave here so badly? That you’d believe in stories you know aren’t true?”
Sophie met Agatha’s big, sincere eyes. For the first time, she let in the tides of doubt.
“Because I can’t live here,” Sophie said, voice catching. “I can’t live an ordinary life.”
“Funny,” said Agatha. “That’s why I like you.”
Sophie smiled. “Because you can’t either?”
“Because you make me feel ordinary,” Agatha said. “And that’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted.”
The tenor-tolled clock sang darkly in the valley, six or seven, for they had lost track of time. And as the echoes faded into the buzz of the distant square, both Sophie and Agatha made a wish. That one day from now, they’d still be in the company of the other.
Wherever that was.
2
The Art of Kidnapping
By the time the sun extinguished, the children were long locked away. Through bedroom shutters, they peeked at torch-armed fathers, sisters, grandmothers lined around the dark forest, daring the School Master to cross their ring of fire.
But while shivering children tightened their window screws, Sophie prepared to undo hers. She wanted this kidnapping to be as convenient as possible. Barricaded in her room, she laid out hairpins, tweezers, nail files and went to work.
The first kidnappings happened two hundred years before. Some years it was two boys taken, some years two girls, sometimes one of each. The ages were just as fickle; one could be sixteen, the other fourteen, or both just turned twelve. But if at first the choices seemed random, soon the pattern became clear. One was always beautiful and good, the child every parent wanted as their own. The other was homely and odd, an outcast from birth. An opposing pair, plucked from youth and spirited away.
Naturally the villagers blamed bears. No one had ever seen a bear in Gavaldon, but this made them more determined to find one. Four years later, when two more children vanished, the villagers admitted they should have been more specific and declared black bears the culprit, bears so black they blended with the night. But when children continued to disappear every four years, the village shifted their attention to burrowing bears, then phantom bears, then bears in disguise . . . until it became clear it wasn’t bears at all.
But while frantic villagers spawned new theories (the Sinkhole Theory, the Flying Cannibal Theory) the children of Gavaldon began to notice something suspicious. As they studied the dozens of Missing posters tacked up in the square, the faces of these lost boys and girls looked oddly familiar. That’s when they opened up their storybooks and found the kidnapped children.
Jack, taken a hundred years before, hadn’t aged a bit. Here he was, painted with the same moppy hair, pinked dimples, and crooked smile that had made him so popular with the girls of Gavaldon. Only now he had a beanstalk in his back garden and a weakness for magic beans. Meanwhile, Angus, the pointy-eared, freckled hooligan who had vanished with Jack that same year, had transformed into a pointy-eared, freckled giant at the top of Jack’s beanstalk. The two boys had found their way into a fairy tale. But when the children presented the Storybook Theory, the adults responded as adults most often do. They patted the children’s heads and returned to sinkholes and cannibals.
But then the children showed them more familiar faces. Taken fifty years before, sweet Anya now sat on moonlit rocks in a painting as the Little Mermaid, while cruel Estra had become the devious sea witch. Philip, the priest’s upright son, had grown into the Cunning Little Tailor, while pompous Gula spooked children as the Witch of the Wood. Scores of children, kidnapped in pairs, had found new lives in a storybook world. One as Good. One as Evil.
The books came from Mr. Deauville’s Storybook Shop, a musty nook between Battersby’s Bakery and the Pickled Pig Pub. The problem, of course, was where old Mr. Deauville got his storybooks.