Hort gave Sophie a last deadly look before he walked into the wings.

Sophie didn’t move, her heart thundering. First ranks? . . . gym? . . . Captain? Hort?

“Shall we?”

She looked up at Rafal, who was staring blackly at where Hort had just been.

“I don’t want you to miss your first class,” he said, slipping a small scroll of paper into her hand, before he glided up the stairs in front of her.

Sophie lagged behind, still dazed by Hort’s reappearance and the weird looks between him and Rafal—

Then her eyes bulged wide.

“My first what?”

“Class?” Sophie fluttered after the School Master, frantically scanning the parchment. “Advanced Uglification . . . Advanced Henchmen Training—this is a schedule! You said I was a queen! A queen doesn’t go to class—”

“A queen has responsibilities,” said Rafal, calmly stepping off the first-floor landing.

“Oh I’m sorry, did Cinderella go to class for her happy ending? Did Snow White find true love and then go do homework?” Sophie squawked. “A queen’s life should be a cornucopia of servant briefings, bodice fittings, court meetings, caviar tastings, attaché dinners, ball planning, and sea-salt massages by scantily clad boys. Not a return to plebeian students and insipid class—”

Sophie stopped short, noticing her surroundings. The entrance hallway to sea-themed Honor Tower, whose walls and ceiling once mimicked a princely blue tidal wave, now had its surging waters painted the same slime green as the fog tipping the two castles. For a moment, she was confused by the change, until she looked out a porthole window and saw Halfway Bay in the melted sunlight. For the first time in two years, there was no dividing line between the waters, no halves to the bay at all. Its entire body was the same slime green as the painted tides on the walls around her.

“One dip and it’ll rip the flesh right off your bones,” said Rafal, posed against a column. “Good deterrent against anyone who might try to swim into the school or swim . . . out.”

Sophie heard the warning in his voice, for she’d tried to escape through the bay each of the past two years. Clearly Rafal was still testing her new allegiance to him. Where had the crogs gone? she distracted herself, searching for the stymph-eating white crocodiles that once protected the moat. Then she glimpsed a flesh-eaten, disembodied snout floating along the bright green surface. The crogs had lasted about as long as the stymphs.

Sophie followed Rafal across the seashell floor, now artistically smattered with bloody splashes, while an old statue of a smiling, barechested merman, trident on his lap, had been rechiseled with a gnashed scowl, curled fists, and a trident poised to kill. Turning the corner, Sophie took in epic murals along the walls, once visions of Good’s most honorable victories, now flaunting different endings: a wolf biting into Red Riding Hood’s neck . . . a giant atop a beanstalk snapping Jack like a twig . . . Snow White and her dwarves facedown in blood . . . Captain Hook plunging his hook into Peter Pan’s heart . . .