A Crystal of Time (The School for Good and Evil The Camelot Years #2) - Soman Chainani Page 0,147

and tears, as dawn threatened the dark.

Something cut against her thigh. Inside her pocket.

The crystal.

The one that made her leave her friends and escape here in the first place.

The one that showed her a way to fight back.

A thick rumble echoed in the forest—

Sophie turned.

Seeds of flames flickered through the trees, gliding in her direction.

Sophie’s eyes knifed to green glass.

Follow the crystal, she thought.

Follow the script.

The Sheriff would be avenged.

Payback was coming.

For Japeth and his brother.

Quickly, Sophie pulled the Sheriff’s body into the trees, away from the haze of sunrise bleeding onto the forest floor.

She paced by the stump, her eyes darting around the Woods.

No sign of Kiko, Beatrix, Reena.

No sign of Reaper or the gnomes.

She needed to contact Agatha . . . to ask her a question she needed answered . . .

But how?

Something Kiko said floated back to her: “Those fireflies on the stump watch everything . . .”

The rumbling grew closer . . . the torches brighter. . . .

A blue-and-gold carriage approached, carved with Camelot’s crest, bathing Sophie in flamelight as the driver slowed the horses.

Through the window, Sophie spotted a boy inside the carriage, his face shadowed.

The door opened.

Using her pink glow to light her steps, Sophie climbed in next to the boy and shut the door.

He turned towards Sophie, his square jaw and thin eyes sculpted in silhouette.

“Rhian saw your message,” said Kei.

He held up a familiar piece of parchment.

The letter from Arthur to Lady Gremlaine.

“Dear Grisella, I know you’ve gone to stay with your sister Gemma . . .”

The letter Sophie had shoved in Rhian’s face as he fought her in his bed.

The letter that had made the king’s eyes go wide, his bloody hands limp against hers.

But it wasn’t the letter that had done it.

It was the words Sophie had painted over the letter, out of Agatha’s sight.

The words she’d secretly scrawled with Rhian’s blood.

She’d lied to Agatha, pretending to go along with her plan.

She’d betrayed her friends and the forces of Good.

But only Sophie had seen the crystal now hidden in her pocket.

Only she had witnessed how this tale really ended.

Soon the Lion and the Snake would be dead.

Sophie looked up at Kei. “He knows I’m on his side, doesn’t he? The king?”

The captain didn’t answer. He faced forward as the driver whipped the horses and the carriage veered on its wheel, back towards Camelot.

23

AGATHA

Cat in a Museum

Agatha stood at the center of the earth, her body coated with sweat, an endless pit of blue lava swelling beneath her like a luminescent sea.

Slowly, a glowing green vine lowered the Sheriff’s body towards the lava.

Behind Agatha, hundreds of gnomes gathered on Lands End, a grassy slab suspended by vines, dominated by a golden obelisk, carved with the names of gnomes come and gone. Beneath the levitating field of grass, an ocean of fluorescing lava roiled, where the dead had been cremated. The audience of gnomes held their hats and bowed heads as the lava welcomed its first ever human, molten waves storming and splashing over the Sheriff’s body, before devouring it in a hiss of smoke.

Agatha didn’t shed any tears. The Sheriff was dead by the time she, Tedros, Reaper, and Guinevere had made it past the enchanted sack the Sheriff had left as a trap. They’d tried to gather the fireflies from the stump and extract everything they’d seen, but the scims had decimated nearly all of them, corrupting the footage. But they’d watched enough to know that Japeth had killed the Sheriff in cold blood and stripped him of his ring. The one ring that could stand between Rhian and infinite power.

Agatha’s soul raged like the inferno below.

Japeth killed Chaddick.

Japeth killed Millicent.

Japeth killed Lancelot, Dovey, the Sheriff.

All this time, she’d been obsessed with a lying king and his throne.

Meanwhile, his brother was murdering her friends without mercy.

Tedros and Guinevere flanked her, their eyes reflecting bright lava and dark thoughts.

“Your Highness?” a voice said.

They all turned.

Subby, the king’s page boy, stepped forward. “Someone stole my rickshaw,” he puled, gnomes watching. “Took it right from the palace!”

“Meow, meow,” Reaper exhaled, with no patience for this.

“I thought it was a bhoot!” Subby insisted. “But it was a human bhoot!”

“Meow! Meow!” the cat assailed—

“A human who was up there!” Subby blurted. “Up there when the Sheriff died!”

Reaper’s face changed.

“I found this near his body,” his page explained.

Subby held up something, catching the light of the graveyard.

All the gnomes let out a startled oooooh.

Tedros turned on his princess with a glare.

So did Reaper.

Agatha gritted her