A Crystal of Time (The School for Good and Evil The Camelot Years #2) - Soman Chainani Page 0,171

me!

Sophie backed against a wall.

The Snake put his cold lips to her ear.

“Ready for a wedding?”

She belted him in the face and leapt for the sword, her hands finding the hilt—

But the eels were already coming. As they speared into her ears from both sides, her consciousness fading, the last thing she thought of was her best friend, the other half of her soul, the Lion of her heart.

26

AGATHA

A Grave Mistake

Agatha dreamt of her own coffin.

She was trapped inside, water filling it as she pounded and kicked against steel walls, carved with strange symbols, her shouts choked by the liquid coating her face. Tiny black-and-white swans floated past, the size of seahorses, oblivious to her plight. A few seconds more and she was fully underwater, holding her breath and thrashing harder against her coffin . . . but now she felt a deep pain in her ears and then something warm and thick leaking out into the water, turning it red. Blood. Agatha screamed out any air she had left. Around her, swans began to sink like stones. Agatha bashed at the walls, but she was losing consciousness, the coffin’s sides closing in. She clawed at her own tomb, her last breaths leaving, her face reflected in the murderous steel.

Only it wasn’t her reflection.

It was Sophie’s.

Agatha threw herself awake. “Sophie,” she gasped, lunging through 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 Nicola 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 her 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 Nicola in their coop. “Fastest way to Avalon. And we wouldn’t have gotten caught!”

“Skirting the coastline was the safest plan,” Nicola 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 King Rhian and Sophie’s wedding glowing against a star-filled sky. Residues of her dream fluttered in her chest: the black-and-white swans . . . the blood coming out of her ears . . . Sophie’s reflection as her own.