Yuba didn’t smile back. “First you lose a teacher because you fail to protect each other in the face of mortal danger. Then you fight so often and loudly that you’ve alerted the entire Woods as to your whereabouts. Now you’re so busy insulting each other that you forget to use a simple glow spell to illuminate your surroundings in the time that a Cave Troll could have bashed both your heads to smithereens. If it wasn’t for a rabbit rescuing you from yourselves, you two nincompoops would be dead before dawn,” he lashed, fingers twitching on his white staff as if he wanted to beat them with it. “A Bad Group is one thing. But you two Evers might just be the Worst Evers . . . Ever.”

Agatha and Tedros looked down, humiliated.

Yuba sighed. “Lucky for you, the League needs you as much as you need it.”

Torches roared to flame, lighting up a squad of strangers behind him in a giant cave headquarters the size of a small house.

“Presenting the honorable League of Thirteen, legendary legion of Good and Enlightenment,” Yuba proclaimed with an imperious smile, clearly expecting the Evers to look impressed, awed, or at least grateful for the glorious platoon that they had come all this way to see.

Agatha and Tedros blanched in horror instead.

Because the League of Thirteen that was their only hope to save Sophie, the League of Thirteen that was their only hope to stay alive . . . were all very, very old.

10

The Missing Thirteenth

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Tedros cracked, as he and Agatha goggled at the saggy, ancient crew.

Agatha counted four men and four women—a geriatric gang of liver spots, turkey necks, hairy ears, foggy eyes, yellowed teeth, beady grins, bony limbs, and heads of sparse, colorless, or poorly dyed hair. Two of the eight were in rickety wheelchairs, three had walking canes, two were hunched and bandy-legged, and one was a morbidly obese woman in a muumuu, slathering on makeup at a mirror.

All of them had silver swan crests over their hearts, like Uma, Yuba, and the White Rabbit, badges of membership to a League her mother had trusted with her daughter’s life.

She sent us here for a reason, thought Agatha desperately. Would they rip off masks, revealing invincible warriors? Would they magically turn young like the School Master? Agatha held her breath, waiting and praying for something to happen . . .

The League blinked back, like fish in an aquarium, waiting for something to happen too.

“Told ya they wouldn’t recognize us,” grumped the fat woman at the mirror.

“Recognize you?” In the reflection, Agatha glimpsed the woman’s pink, hoggish pallor, squinty green eyes, wide jowls, hideously rouged cheeks, and nest of flat curls that she’d tried to dye brown and had turned blue instead. She looked like a doll salvaged from the bottom of a swimming pool. “I’m quite sure I’ve never seen you—or any of you—in my life,” Agatha said, scanning the group. She turned to Tedros, hoping he’d seen something in them she hadn’t, but her prince was red as a fire ant, about to explode.