“Because it always involves you!”

“Well, without you, she and I get along just swell,” puffed Tedros.

“When have you two even had a conversation?” said Agatha.

“We were roommates last year—”

“When she was a boy!”

“What does that have to do with anything—”

“A boy you tried to kiss!”

Tedros whirled, beet red. “So? You’re allowed to kiss her and I’m not?”

“Not when she’s a boy!” Agatha barked.

“You kissed her when she was a girl!” roared Tedros—

“I like you two better when you’re quiet,” Princess Uma hissed, glaring from the path.

Tedros mumbled something about “females” and “hypocrites” and stamped ahead, no longer checking back on his princess.

For the next three hours, Uma, Tedros, and Agatha slogged and shivered single file through the Endless Woods, stopping only when Agatha collided with a tree (often) or Tedros needed to pee (even more often). (“What’s wrong with you?!” Agatha growled. “It’s cold!” Tedros yelled.) Agatha tried to ask her teacher about her mother’s past—had Callis been in a storybook? How did she end up in Gavaldon?—but Uma said there’d be time for questions once they made it to League Headquarters.

“League Headquarters?” frowned Tedros. “I thought we were going to school—”

“And who do you think will get you into school?” said Uma. “The School Master has turned the castles into a fortress of Evil. Try and enter alone and you will be dead before you breach the gates. Your mother knew the League of Thirteen is your only hope to get to Sophie alive.” Uma glanced worriedly at the sun. “Besides, you’ll be safe at Headquarters tonight. Won’t last a minute in the Woods after dark on your own.”

“Have you seen any other undead villains? Besides the wolf and giant?” Agatha said, trying to keep their teacher talking.

“Not yet.” Uma looked back at her. “Another reason to be quiet.”

Dawn blossomed to a crisp, windy morning, and the students no longer needed their fingerglows to see. As Agatha and Tedros moved deeper into the Woods, huddled in their cloaks, Agatha noticed an eerie green haze thicken the air, sour smelling and cold. It reminded her of the jellied mildew on her front porch, where Reaper collected his headless birds. Her stomach turned, thinking of her bald little cat, all alone in her house. She wrenched her focus back to the present, to the tree branches passing over her head, spindly and jointed . . . like a skeleton’s hands . . . ticking on her mother’s clock . . .

Agatha’s gut twisted deeper.

“When will it w-w-warm up?” Tedros asked, teeth chattering. “Sun’s acting like it’s half asleep.”

Indeed, Agatha had been waiting for the sun to brighten too, but with each hour, it stayed sickly pale, even as it rose higher in the sky. She began to notice cankered tree trunks and fragile ferns, a skeletal chipmunk quailed in mulch, and the corpses of a few malnourished crows. Agatha fingered a single flowering plum, quivering on a bare tree; it withered under her fingers and rotted to black.