“But just as the witch predicted, the souls of Stefan and Vanessa never fused, for there was no love between them. Each soul produced its own child, which meant Vanessa delivered not one baby, but two. This second girl, then, looked nothing like Stefan. Instead, she looked just like her mother.”

Vanessa gasped as Callis held out the baby: raven-haired, with bulging big eyes and a hideous face. Vanessa recoiled in disgust, shoving it back at the witch.

“She ordered Callis to dump the baby in the Woods and leave it there to die. She could never take such an ugly child home to Stefan, she scoffed, before bundling up her beautiful, blond daughter and hurrying off, sure that everything between her and her husband was about to change,” said Sader. “But Callis, who only saw beauty in the girl Vanessa threw away, kept the child for herself. She named her Agatha, which meant ‘Soul of Good.’ Finally, after so many years of loneliness, Callis of Netherwood had found her one true love.”

Callis glanced into a mirror as she studied the child’s big, insect-like eyes. Slowly, Callis magically made her own eyes bigger.

“To ensure no one asked questions as to whether she was the child’s mother, Callis gradually transformed herself over the years, using her Uglification skills to look more and more like Agatha. Soon the villagers began to notice Callis’ child lurking on the hills, a practical duplicate of her. The Elders asked Callis questions, of course, but she gave no answers, and in time, the town simply shunned the young girl just as they shunned her mother.”

Morning streamed through the house’s rickety windows, as black-haired, sallow-skinned, scraggly Callis read storybooks to her black-haired, sallow-skinned, scraggly daughter.

“When new fairy tales appeared in Gavaldon year after year, with Good still winning every story, Callis began to question whether she had it all wrong. Perhaps the School Master hadn’t been Evil at all. She even wondered: had she made a mistake by not taking his ring? As the years went by, she began to wish that her daughter would be taken to the School for Good and Evil so that Agatha could have a future filled with magic, adventure, and love, instead of being trapped in a lonely, ordinary life because of her mother.”

The scene flashed to Stefan in his cottage, sitting at the dining table with Vanessa and young Sophie. He was eying his three-year-old daughter warily, no tenderness in his face.

“Meanwhile, as young Sophie grew, Stefan had an instinctive stiffness towards her. He tried so hard to love her: taking her to Battersby’s for cookies, reading her storybooks at bedtime, smiling when passerbys said his young Sophie looked just like him. . . . But deep down, all Stefan could see in his daughter was Vanessa’s soul.”

Now Stefan was carrying lumber to the mill. He paused on the path, noticing five-year-old Agatha playing alone in the weeds on a nearby hill. She looked up at Stefan and smiled toothily. Stefan smiled back.