If Callis was a witch, she’d have known the Good and Evil swans. That’s how she knew so much about the school, Agatha thought. Her mother must have seen it for herself . . .

“Ten seconds!” Tedros shouted—

Agatha closed her eyes and tried to focus, her temples throbbing.

Swans . . . school . . . Stefan . . .

“You saved me,” Callis had whispered to him.

What had she meant? If Callis and Stefan had a history, maybe the swans involved something that connected her mother and Sophie’s father . . . something that both of them had in common . . . or someone . . .

Agatha’s heart stopped. Her eyes shot open.

She was already running.

“What is it?” Tedros yelled, seeing her shadow dart deeper into the cemetery, towards the house on Graves Hill.

“Here! It’s over here!”

Tedros chased her, squinting at her outline fading into the dark. He looked back and saw the army of shadows smash through the graveyard gates, spears glinting. Tedros dove to the ground behind a domed stone. He peeked over it and saw the guards sweeping torches over the rows of graves. Tedros ducked down. “This is worse than the Woods,” he wheezed, crawling through stones to follow Agatha. “Sooooo much worse—”

Then he saw her, crouched in the final row of headstones, only a short distance from her house. Tedros skidded into dirt beside her. “They’re coming, Agatha!”

“Sophie’s mother. That’s what connected them,” Agatha said, gripping a tablet gravestone knifing out of the ground, engraved with the words “Loving Wife and Mother.” Two smaller dirt-caked graves, one lighter, one darker, flanked it on either side like wings. “Before Sophie, she couldn’t have a child. Two boys, both born dead.”

She ran her hand over the lighter of the two boys’ graves, pulling away the grime. Tedros’ eyes bulged as Agatha’s fingers cleared the headstone, revealing a small black swan carved into the unmarked grave. Tedros tore away the moss from the darker grave, revealing a white swan set in the stone. He and Agatha both turned to the larger grave in the middle, towering between the two swans.

“When she couldn’t have a child, Sophie’s mother went to see mine as a patient. That’s what Sophie told me,” Agatha pressed. “Somehow it’s all connected. Sophie’s mother . . . my mother being a witch . . . the debt she owed Stefan . . . I don’t know how it’s connected, but it has to be—”

Firelight swept over the both of them.

Agatha and Tedros flattened to the ground and swiveled to see the guards five rows back.

“We found the swans—we found the grave—” Tedros panicked, gaping at the bigger headstone. “Where’s the help?”

Agatha shook her head. “We can’t fight the guards without magic, Tedros! We need to make our wish!”

The prince swallowed. “Wish to reopen our story on three, okay? Hands behind our back—” He stopped.

His right fingertip was already glowing gold.