A cold breeze? In an airless hall?

She looked up. High over her head there was a hollow air shaft, boxed out of the ceiling.

Moments later, Agatha’s bare toes clung to the banister like a balance beam, her clumps tucked into the waist of her breeches, as she reached for the sides of the vent, trying not to make a sound. She unfurled her fingers as far as they’d go, but they were still two inches short. Leaning on her tiptoes, she stretched her hands higher, higher, feeling her shoulders strain out of their sockets, and clawed her finger pads into the mildew coating the vent. Hoisting herself up with desperate strength, Agatha had almost jammed her head and neck through, when she felt one of her clumps sliding out of her shorts. Gasping, she swung one-armed from the vent like a monkey, lunging to catch it, only to see her shoe fall through the gap in the staircase and crash far below with an ear-splitting boom.

Crap.

Instantly, she propelled herself back into the vent, nearly breaking her elbows, and crawled as fast as she could through the cramped stone shaft, hearing the trolls’ stunned voices and footsteps racing towards the stairs.

Soon she didn’t hear them anymore, only the swirling air in the vent churning past her. The light from the staircase dwindled and she was in pitch-dark, with no clue where she was headed, until she began to hear a growing clamor and glimpsed wintry gray light spraying into the vent from a grating ahead. The buzz grew louder as Agatha drew closer, knees skinning along stone, before she flattened her belly against the grates and peered down through the slats.

Her mouth fell open.

Lady Lesso’s old frozen classroom was teeming with famous villains, stitched up and undead—at least 40 of them, hunched at desks, jammed under chairs, stuffed into corners, practically sitting on laps, so that there wasn’t an inch of frosted floor untaken. She recognized many of these crusty, stitched-up Nevers, either from storybooks she’d read in Gavaldon, their gravestones on Necro Ridge, or the portraits downstairs. There was runty Rumpelstiltskin, the frog-faced Witch of the Wood, bloodshot Bluebeard, wizened old Baba Yaga, and even Jack’s oafish Giant, looking bruised and battered from his encounter with Princess Uma’s army.

No wonder we didn’t see more of them in the Woods, Agatha thought. The villains had all been at their old school.

But doing what?

At the front of the classroom was a slender, ferocious-looking woman in a tattered silver gown, with a full face of makeup, a coiled bun of white hair, and skin stitched up like the rest.

“A month since the School Master brought us back to school and what do we have to show for it? Five old stories turned Evil. FIVE! We’ll never make it to Woods Beyond with five stories. You heard the School Master. Every story changed brings us one step closer to the Reader World.”

Agatha’s heart stopped. Reader World? Woods Beyond? Was she talking about . . . Gavaldon?