“Presenting my mother, Queen Guinevere, and our greatest knight, Sir Lancelot!”

Tedros beamed down at the crowd, believing full-heartedly that since he’d learned to forgive Guinevere and Lancelot, his people would do the same.

But now there was a collective wide-eyed gape as if they’d all stopped breathing, and a cold, deathly silence.

“Come, Mother. Come, Lance,” Tedros prodded, hurrying over to his mother and yanking at her hand—

Gobsmacked, Guinevere stumbled over the fallen scrim, losing a shoe and almost face-planting before Lancelot caught her and glared daggers at Tedros. “What the hell are you doing!”

“Sit down!” Tedros hissed, shoving his one-shoed mother into his throne and Lancelot into Lady Gremlaine’s seat while Lady Gremlaine gawped in horror.

Something in the crowd changed too. Tedros felt it in his gut: the way the once warm, hopeful air had turned wary upon his unveiling of Agatha and now had become menacing and tense. Sweat pooled beneath his crown.

His heart had told him welcoming back his mother and Lancelot was the right thing to do . . . the Good thing. . . .

Did I make a mistake?

He swallowed his doubt. No going back now.

“Let’s get to the test,” Tedros pressured the chaplain, eager to seal this coronation and get his mother and Agatha inside.

“Yes—uh—of course,” the chaplain stammered, his eyes darting to Guinevere and the knight as he fumbled a faded parchment card from his robes. “Uh, hear ye, hear ye. As all prior kings, King Arthur Pendragon conceived this test to prove his successor be worthy of—”

Tedros ripped the card from his hands and read it out loud, his voice booming through the magic star:

“To seal his coronation, the future King of Camelot must pull Excalibur from an ordinary stone, as I once did.”

“Wow. That’s easy,” he blurted, voice echoing.

He hadn’t meant for the crowd to hear that.

“CAN SOMEONE FIND ME A STONE?” Tedros puffed, glancing uselessly around the stage.

Lancelot shifted in his chair, which made the stage creak so loudly the audience’s eyes went to him.

“Preferably one that isn’t made out of wood,” the knight said.

A ruckus echoed behind him and everyone turned to see the red-haired altar boy careen through the fallen scrim onto the stage, having tripped on Guinevere’s shoe. “Sorry! That’s my cue!” he squawked, dragging an iron anvil behind him. “Behold! The stone from which King Arthur once pulled Excali—”

The heavy anvil splintered the wooden platform. The edge of the stage imploded and the anvil plummeted straight through the hole like a cannonball, down to a cliff where it bounced off the rock and fell into the ocean.

“This is going well,” said Lancelot.

Tedros scorched pink.

His mother’s eyes were glued to her one shoe. Lady Gremlaine wasn’t even on the stage anymore. And he couldn’t even look in Agatha’s direction. He’d wanted the coronation to show her what kind of king he’d be. Instead, she was probably as mortified as he was.