After losing Hook’s body, they’d hurried along the trail like a spooked cabal, tracking Merlin’s light crumbs to bubble-like caves that resembled the ones in the Blue Forest. There they’d camped until morning, each in their own den, with the two boys taking turns on lookout. By sunrise they were on the trail again, plowing through miles of the Frostplains’ blue-iced tundra. Hiding under their cloaks, they braved relentless blizzards of snow and hail until at last they glimpsed something through the monotony of white.

It was a small, peninsular kingdom, built upon a bluff of rock, with pearl-white towers veiled by mist off stormy gray seas. The crash of waves echoed with violent booms, the entire kingdom shuddering down to giant iron doors, swinging open against the rock.

Crack! Crack!

Warily the three teenagers passed through the open doors, but there was no one there to greet them. Indeed, there seemed to be no one in the kingdom at all, only the magnificent white towers with no windows or entrances, arranged in a circle above a series of descending marble staircases. Squinting over the railing, they saw a vast lake at the bottom of the stairs, gray-watered and eerily still, leading into the tempestuous ocean.

“Did we hit a dead end?” Sophie asked.

Then she saw Tedros’ face, blissful and calm.

“It’s Avalon,” he said.

“You’ve been here before?” Hort asked.

Tedros shook his head. “My father drew pictures of it in his will,” he said softly, as he gazed down at the lake. “Said he wanted to be buried in ‘Avalon’s safe house.’ Merlin brought us to my father’s resting place.”

“This is the safe house?” Sophie murmured as they went down a long staircase, trying to be sensitive to what Tedros was feeling. “It’s just . . . it’s freezing, the doors were wide open, and the towers had no way insi—”

She stopped at the sight of Agatha, sitting in dead grass at the edge of the lake, her back to them. To see Agatha by herself on the shore gave Sophie an unsettled feeling, as if the scene was incomplete . . . as if Agatha shouldn’t be ending her story all alone.

Agatha turned at their footsteps. She smiled serenely, as if relieved her best friends were safe after the long journey.

Sophie’s heart relaxed and she sidled closer to the prince. There was no reason to be unsettled. Agatha could be happy alone in a way that she never could.

“There you two are,” yawned a voice and Sophie turned to see Merlin lumbering up from a nap against a rock. “Took you long enough. Oh and look, our bodyguard too,” he said as Hort came off the stairs.

“The safe house is in those waters, isn’t it,” asked Tedros, stepping to the edge of the shore. “That’s where my father is buried.”

He tossed a pebble into the water and watched it sink.

Sophie frowned. “How can a safe house be in a—”