Agatha stroked his silky hair, mopping up the sweat on his temples with her fingertips, and let him sniffle into her nightgown.

She’d never seen him cry. Not like this, so scared and defeated.

But as she held him, his breaths settled, his body surrendering to her touch, and he glanced up at her with the faintest of smiles. . . .

Then his smile vanished.

Someone was watching them. A tall, turbaned woman looming in the doorway, her gleaming teeth gnashed tight.

And just like that, Tedros was gone as quick as he came.

Splinters of August sun streamed through the window onto the chandelier, refracting light into Agatha’s eyes.

Blinking groggily, she could see missing crystals in the chandelier, which was covered in cobwebs like an old gravestone.

She hugged her pillow to her chest. It still smelled like him. Reaper slithered up from the foot of the bed, sniffing at the pillow, poised to slash it to shreds, before Agatha shot him a look. Her cat slunk back to the foot of the bed. He’s improving at least, Agatha thought; the first night in the castle, he’d peed in Tedros’ shoe.

Voices echoed in her wing. She wouldn’t be alone much longer.

Agatha sat up in her baggy black nightgown, peering at her room. It was three times the size of her old house in Gavaldon, with dusty gem-crusted mirrors, a sagging settee, and a two-hundred-year-old desk of ivory and bone. Clutching her pillow like a life raft, she soaked in the quiet coming off the cracked marble tiles dyed robin-egg blue and the matching walls inlaid with mottled gold flowers. The queen’s chamber was like everything at Camelot: royal from afar, tarnished up close. This applied to her too—she was living in the queen’s quarters but she wasn’t even queen yet.

The wedding was still two months away.

A wedding that was making her uneasier each day.

Once upon a time, Agatha had imagined she’d live happily ever after with Sophie in Gavaldon. The two of them would be proud owners of a cottage in town, where they’d have tea and toast each morning, then jaunt off to Mr. Deauville’s Storybook Shop, now the A&S Bookshop, since she and Sophie would take it over once the old man died. After work, she’d help pick herbs and flowers that Sophie would use to make her beauty creams, before they’d visit Agatha’s mother on Graves Hill for dinners of lamb-brain stew and lizard quiche (steamed prunes and cucumbers for Sophie, of course). How ordinary their life would be together. How happy. Friendship was all they needed.

Agatha squeezed the pillow harder. How things change.

Now her mother was dead, Sophie was Dean of Evil at a magical school, and Agatha was marrying King Arthur’s son.

No one was more excited about the wedding than Sophie, who’d sent letter after letter from her faraway castle with sketches of dresses and cakes and china that she insisted Agatha use for her big day. (“Dear Aggie, I haven’t heard back from you about the chiffon veil swatches I sent. Or the proposed canapés. Really, darling, if you don’t want my help just tell me. . . .”)