Agatha’s heart sank. Ever since Merlin had mentioned Tedros needing a queen, she’d felt self-conscious around her prince. . . . Was Tedros having the same doubts?

“Here we are, bang on schedule,” the wizard declared at last, looking fresh and bright as his charges caught up.

Hunched and haggard, Agatha eyed a dead end of rock fifty feet high. “Um, that isn’t a s-s-school,” she stammered, teeth chattering.

But Merlin was already climbing the rock wall, grinning down at Tedros. “Never beaten me, have you, dear boy?”

“You didn’t say ‘Go’!” the prince yelled, bounding after him.

“Always falling behind, then and now,” Merlin tutted, as he glided up the wall, pebbles raining down on Tedros’ head.

“That’s ’cause you always cheat—Hey! No magic! You’re not even touching the rock!”

“Something wrong with your eyes, boy. Must be getting old—”

Agatha watched Tedros straining after Merlin, the prince at once irate and puffing with laughter. She suddenly felt like a small girl again in Gavaldon, watching boys playing ball with their fathers, pelting each other with snow clumps, flicking and nudging each other for no reason at all. What would her father have been like? Would he have been mischievous and batty like Merlin? Would he have been quiet and gentle like August Sader? She’d tried to ask her mother about her father over the years, but she’d concede only that he’d died in a mill accident many years before and she hardly remembered him. . . . Her stomach knotted, thinking of all the lies her mother had told.

Was that story even true?

What if her father wasn’t dead at all?

A pebble smacked her in the chest. Agatha craned to see Tedros almost catch up to Merlin, who shot the prince with a spell that glued his foot to the rock wall, slowing him down. “Age before beauty!” Merlin crowed.

“Go back to honey-cheese land!” Tedros barked.

Agatha waited for her prince to look down and check on her as he pulled over the ridge to the top, but he never did.

“Don’t mind me,” she sighed, and climbed up the wall, using her fingerglow to painstakingly burn crevices that she gripped with frozen fingers, so that by the time she belly flopped over the cliff top, wind-whipped and pooped, her irritation had grown tenfold. “What’s next? Potato sack races and water balloon fights? While you two are chasing each other like frisky baboons, I’m worrying how we’re possibly going to get past an Evil School Master and make his queen destroy his ring, when we don’t even have a plan to get int—”

Agatha stopped.

She slowly rose to her feet and stepped beside Tedros. Together, they gazed silently at two black castles in the distance, towering against the horizon . . . one castle old and crumbling, one castle shiny and new, both ringed with slime-green fog over an eerie green bay.

Merlin smiled ominously at Agatha. “Now that, my dear, is a school.”