One True Queen (School for Good and Evil Book 2)

Chapter 37

Agatha threw herself awake, lunging through the pitch-dark—

She hit her face on a hard wood beam and ricocheted backwards into more wooden beams, arranged in a lattice around her like a cage. A birdcage. For a moment, she thought she was still dreaming. Then she looked through her cage at two other birdcages, hooked to a thick blanket over a camel's rump, each cage filled: Tedros and Guinevere in one, Hort and Beatrix in the other. The camel teetered downhill in the moonlight, kicking up dust around gravestones.

"Sultan of Shazabah gives me gold. Tells me: 'bring camel across Savage Sea to King Rhian,'" said the camel's rider as the birdcages jostled, sending the prisoners tumbling. "Wedding gift for king."

The rider looked back: a balding beaver with yellow-stained teeth.

"Extra wedding gifts now," he said, grinning at his prisoners. "Extra gold for Ajubaju."

That's when Agatha remembered everything.

***

As her cage tossed around, Dovey's bag under her arm, Agatha watched Tedros probe at his cage bars with his fingerglow, only to see his gold spell burn out. Either the cages were cased in magic or the wood was too dense to penetrate.

"Told you we should have gone through the Stymph Forest," Hort groused to Beatrix in their coop. "Fastest way to Avalon. And we wouldn't have gotten caught!"

"Skirting the coastline was the safest plan," Beatrix argued, her voice masked by the camel's grunts as Ajubaju smacked it with a stick. "We were nearly to the Lady of the Lake. If we hadn't passed those docks just as the Shazabah ship came in..."

"Or if Tedros' mother hadn't barreled straight into the beaver," Hort whispered.

"It was dark," Guinevere sighed.

The camel tripped over a headstone, launching the old queen across her cage—

Tedros caught her in his arms. He glowered at Hort. "You're looking for someone to blame. I'm looking for a way out. Difference between a boy and a man."

Hort grumbled, glancing away.

Tedros gripped his bars, trying to snap them, his face red, muscles swollen, battling his cage the way he once battled his father's sword in the stone. He failed now as he did then. Agatha and her prince locked eyes through their cages. Tedros' father had given him a message: Unbury Me. Now they needed to follow that command and dig up the old king. Something is in that grave, Agatha thought. Something that could give them a chance against Rhian even when all seemed lost. But after a full day of sneaking up the coast from Gnomeland, with only a few miles to go, they'd been snared by Ajubaju, a goon for hire, who'd nearly killed Agatha in Avalon once before. Now with the beaver towing them back to Camelot, they were passing through a different gravesite altogether: the Garden of Good and Evil, where Evers and Nevers of the Woods were buried.

A glass coffin with a fair princess resting beside her prince mirrored blurs of gold overhead, and Agatha glanced up to see Lionsmane's announcement of Y/n's coronation glowing against a star-filled sky.

Even seeing it for the millionth time, her stomach filled with dread. What had happened? Had Y/n actually followed through and killed the twins herself? And how did Sophie fit into all of this?

They'd been on the road more than a day since Lionsmane's message had branded in the sky and there'd been no change to it. No sign that it was anything other than the truth. Which meant there was less than a day left until Y/n was crowned queen. Until Y/n had the Storian's powers. Until Rafal's return. Until Agatha, Tedros, and all their friends were dead. And their only hope was in a king's coffin that they were riding farther and farther away from.