A Crystal of Time (The School for Good and Evil The Camelot Years #2) - Soman Chainani Page 0,119

these crystals towards her, their surfaces cool and bubbly to the touch. She peered into the small glass droplets, replaying key moments from her own life: as a toddler, chasing her mother across Graves Hill . . . walking with Sophie for the first time through Gavaldon’s square . . . falling from the stymph into the School for Good. . . .

But now she was finding crystals that played moments from Sophie’s life: Sophie as a baby with her mother . . . Sophie singing to animals in Gavaldon . . . Sophie battling Hester in an Evil classroom. . . .

Then, suddenly, Agatha was seeing scenes from Tedros’ life—

And Reaper’s too, she realized, peering into a crystal that showed her cat bullied by his handsome brothers.

“It’s showing all of our pasts,” Agatha said, thrown.

“Because all four of us are inside the ball. The crystal absorbs our collective souls,” said Reaper quickly, studying various crystals before discarding them to the floor. “That’s where Merlin and Dovey were limited in finding answers to why Excalibur rejected Tedros. Inside the ball, they only had access to their own lives. I told them to bring you three in—Tedros at the very least—but Merlin had vast experience at Camelot and Dovey a deep knowledge of the Woods, and they thought they could find what they needed in themselves without putting the prince at risk. They were wrong.” The cat batted more crystals away. “Enough talking. Look for anything that might shed light on why Excalibur favored Rhian over Tedros. Anything that has the slightest connection.”

“You said we only have twenty or thirty minutes. These are our whole lives, Reaper. All four of us,” Agatha argued, still battling the pain in her lungs. “We don’t have time to ransack every moment from our pasts!”

“Um, this isn’t my past,” Sophie sniffed, wielding a crystal that showed her climbing a tree in a ghastly black dress with shiny spikes that made it look like a porcupine hide. “I’ve never worn that dress, I never will wear that dress, and I don’t climb trees.”

“Well, it must have happened at some point . . . ,” Agatha started, then stopped. In her hand was a crystal playing out a moment she’d seen before. A scene of two Tedroses running shirtless through a forest. She’d observed this very same scene back at school, when she was in the library, using the crystal ball to break into Camelot’s dungeons. The ball had glitched to this image . . . an image that made no sense at the time . . .

Because it hadn’t happened yet.

The crystal had first shown it to her days before she and Tedros would live out the scene in real life, two Tedroses escaping the execution after Dovey’s spell.

Which meant . . .

“This wasn’t the past. This was the future,” said Agatha, turning to her friends. “The crystals must show the past and future. Sophie, that’s why you’re seeing that dress.”

“There is no future in which I will wear quills,” Sophie snapped.

“That’s what I would have said about two Tedroses running through a forest,” said Agatha. “But you wearing that dress will happen—”

“Wait a second. Something’s wrong with this one,” Tedros cut in, holding up a new crystal.

Agatha and Sophie peered into it from both sides and watched a scene of a young Tedros, nine or ten years old, chasing after his mother as she scurried through the Woods.

“This is the dress my mother wore when she left Camelot to be with Lancelot. I remember that night so clearly,” said Tedros. “She escaped the castle without saying goodbye. But I never saw her go into the Woods. I never chased her. This is what I wished happened. I wished I’d gone after her like this.” He stared at the crystal, perplexed. “But it isn’t the truth.”

Agatha and Sophie were just as puzzled.

All three turned to Reaper, immersed in scanning scenes and knocking them away.

“Must I remind you: the ball is broken,” the cat said, not looking at them. “A working crystal ball only shows the present. This one has a crack in it and that crack altered its sense of time, mixing up the present with the past and future. But not only that: the crack added the dimension of space, turning the ball into a portal. Now that we’re inside that portal, it’s up to you to sort through the ball’s broken time and determine which scenes happened when.”

“But this scene never happened at all!”