A Crystal of Time (The School for Good and Evil The Camelot Years #2) - Soman Chainani Page 0,135

we have to do is prove it before magic eels kill us,” Sophie chimed.

Reaper tried to say something, but strained meows came out instead, Uma’s spell at an end.

Agatha cuddled her cat to her side. “But why would Excalibur pull from the stone for a son of Sader and Gremlaine? It still doesn’t make sense . . .”

“Unless there’s something about Lady Gremlaine we don’t know,” Tedros guessed. “What do we know about Grisella Gremlaine? She was a childhood friend of my father’s, then came to work as his steward when he became king. Then my mother fires her after I’m born and she goes to her home in Nottingham until the Mistral Sisters bring her back. . . .”

That name again, Agatha thought.

Grisella.

She’d heard it before. Where?

Grisella.

Grisella.

Grisella.

“Wait,” she gasped.

Agatha bounded up from the blanket and raced out of the room. She could hear Tedros scampering after her and Sophie stumble with a yelp, dishes clattering, before exclaiming, “Oh, no one should eat croissants anyway!” and chasing Agatha too.

“Where are we going!” Sophie yelled.

“Throne Room!” Agatha shouted.

“It’s the other way!” Tedros barked.

Agatha spun on her heel and now Tedros led the group, sprinting around blue-stone columns as red pawprints lit up on the floor under their feet, before they hurtled between two gnome guards, jumped through the waterfall, and landed breathlessly in the familiar blue velvet room.

Dovey’s bag lay limp in a corner. The bag that once held the Dean’s crystal ball.

Agatha ripped it open.

“What are we looking for?” Tedros panted, thrusting his hands into the bag.

Watching him, Agatha had another bout of déjà vu. She’d seen this before . . . in one of the crystals . . . Tedros scrounging through Dovey’s bag in the throne room. At the time she’d thought it was a lie. But it wasn’t. It was the future. What else had she thought was a lie that would bear out to be true?

“Hey, this is my coat,” Tedros said, pulling out his black jacket, spotted with dried blood, which Agatha had used to cushion Dovey’s crystal ball. He opened the coat up and a stack of letters fell out, banded together, onto the velvet floor.

“Grisella,” Agatha said, grabbing them. “That’s the name these letters are addressed to!”

“The letters from Lady Gremlaine to my father?” Tedros blurted, accosting her. “Where did you find them!”

“Never mind that,” Agatha said, spreading the letters on the floor, putting aside the stray card she’d found for the Bank of Putsi. “I read a few of them already. Arthur confesses a lot of his feelings to Lady Gremlaine. Maybe there’s something here . . . something that tells us whether Lady Gremlaine was Rhian and Japeth’s mother!”

“And if so, who the father was,” said Sophie, picking croissant flakes off her shoe.

Tedros and Agatha looked at her.

Alarms exploded through the room: a fusillade of high-pitched meows, like a helium-drunk cat being stung by bees.

All the fireflies in the throne room poured out from between the velvet panels and the tiers of the chandelier, thousands and thousands of them, blanketing the walls from floor to ceiling, the flies jammed together and wings spread in a glowing orange matrix. Instantly, these lit walls morphed into magic screens, surveilling the various areas of Gnomeland. One of these screens was flashing, with grainy footage of the Woods outside the tree stump marking Gnomeland’s entrance, the fireflies on the stump magically beaming back their field of view.

From what Agatha could tell, Beatrix, Reena, and Kiko were in full combat, shooting spells at something. . . .

A scim.

The eel stabbed Reena in the shoulder and gashed Beatrix’s leg, before Kiko smashed it down with a rock. Kiko raised the rock again, but the scim had recovered, shooting out from underneath it, the shining, scaly tip spinning straight for Kiko’s eye.

Agatha screamed futilely—

Beatrix tomahawked the scim with both fists, wrestling the eel to the ground. The eel ripped at her dress, slashing cuts in her hands and arms. Beatrix lost grip, the scim stabbing up for her throat—

Reena impaled it with a sharp branch, leaking goo all over her dress. Kiko stomped on the eel furiously, long after it stopped shrieking, then set it on fire with her fingerglow.

The three girls collapsed, heaving quietly, covered in dirt and blood.

Agatha slackened against the wall, just as drained.

“More will come,” a gruff voice said.

Agatha turned to a firefly wall showing the palace dining room: the Sheriff, Guinevere, and Reaper together in frame, clearly monitoring the same surveillance. They could