Tedros was about to take a sip . . . then looked up at Agatha. “Want to try?”

Agatha blinked at him. Her prince was the poster boy for chivalry, except when it came to food; he’d practically eaten her out of the house in Gavaldon, stolen last bites from under her too many times to count, and never offered her a single morsel of his own meals. So as he held out his mug, looking so handsome and earnest, Agatha teared up like an idiot—because after all the fights and tension and resentment, it meant that Tedros still loved her.

Taking the warm mug from him, she slurped at the bubbling, rich chocolate and candy-studded cream and a riot of sweetness exploded on her tongue, as if she’d inhaled all of Hansel’s Haven in one bite. “Whoa,” she shivered, going for another sip, but Tedros snatched it back so violently that Agatha burst into cackles.

“Where were you all these years, Merlin?” Tedros finally asked, with a whipped-cream moustache that looked remarkably like his mentor’s.

“Exploring the Woods, my dear boy!” Merlin declared, digging deep in his hat for a round yellow balloon. It magically flitted out of his hands with a mousy squeak and inflated over his head. “They really are Endless, you know. The man-eating hills of Mahadeva, the upside-down kingdom of Borna Coric, the haunted fog of Akgul, the black seas of Ooty, led by an eight-armed queen—” The balloon frantically contorted into the images he was describing, trying to keep up. “I even spent Christmas one year in Altazarra, a kingdom where everything is made entirely out of milk or honey, with rivers of fresh butter cream, castles of Swiss cheese and honeycomb, and roads paved with thick yogurt. Everyone is quite obese, of course, but brilliantly happy, though not as happy as the villagers of Nupur Lala, who have a rare birth condition that leaves them all born without tongues. You’d be surprised how deliriously happy people are when they can’t speak. And yet, no matter where I went, they recognized me from King Arthur’s storybook and treated me as an honored guest, though it meant I often had to do a bit of musty magic to earn supper and a bed (or in the case of Kingdom Kyrgios, a giant peapod). Amazing how tales travel, really, and it never ceased, no matter how far I went, each kingdom just as familiar with the legend of Arthur as the next, inspiring me to journey farther and farther, intoxicated with novelty, celebrity, and most of all inexhaustible beauty . . .”

The balloon popped with a gunshot crack, sputtering back into the hat. Merlin plopped it on his head with a sigh. “Yet as anything else, beauty grows tiring. For all my adoring fans, I began to feel a rot inside, as if finally turning as old on the inside as I was on the outside, as if there was no point to seeking adventures if I had no one to share these adventures with. . . . And yet, just as I told myself that it might indeed be time to die after all, Yuba managed to track me down on a glacier in the middle of the Piranha Lakes. The League of Thirteen had reconvened, he said. And a lad named Tedros was bringing his princess to meet it.”