Agatha had no idea what he was talking about, but then she saw Tedros smiling. “Come on, silly,” he said, and grabbing her by the hand, he pulled her right into the starry sky stitched on Merlin’s cape. Agatha felt herself smothered by silk and then falling through darkness, comets of light zooming past and blinding her, until she closed her eyes and landed on something so soft and fluffy and warm that she knew she wasn’t in the Woods anymore.

“Your mother is the reason the League of Thirteen even exists,” Merlin said to Agatha, his bony legs poking out of his purple robes and dangling over the edge of a puffy white cloud.

Agatha still wasn’t paying attention. Seated cross-legged with Tedros on the same cloud, both of them in angelic white, she scanned a purple night sky lit up by thousands of silvery five-pointed stars, as if the childish pattern on Merlin’s cape had come to life in brilliant, wondrous dimension. “The Celestium,” Tedros had called it once she’d opened her eyes—Merlin’s favorite thought spot, where he’d brought Arthur’s father, then Arthur himself, and eventually Arthur’s son. Dazed, Agatha had peered up into the dark, starlit infinity, feeling her heartbeat slow to a crawl. Unlike the icy chill of the Woods, the air here was toasty and humid, inviting her muscles to relax. The fuzzy cloud beneath her stretched out like a cotton field, sinking her in all the way to the navel. But most marvelous of all was the silence, a big, wide emptiness as endless as the sky around them. Suddenly every rustle of her body was a disturbance, every thought in her mind a nuisance, until she, like Merlin and Tedros, had found a perfect stillness, as if they’d become the silence and the silence had become them.

Only then had Merlin spoken.

“Indeed, without Callis the members of the League may never have met each other at all,” he continued now. “During the Great War, when the School Master brothers battled for supremacy, Good against Evil, only one emerged victorious—though no one was sure who, given he wore a mask to conceal his identity. Still, he managed to win the allegiance of both sides by vowing to rise above Good and Evil and protect the balance as long as he was alive.”

Agatha stifled a yawn and saw Tedros’ lids drooping. Not only were they both exhausted, they knew all of this from Professor Sader’s history classes.

“I’m sure this is familiar territory,” Merlin said sharply, “but it’s quite crucial for the rest of the story I’m about to tell. After the Great Truce, Good would go on a 200-year streak of victories, obliterating Evil ruthlessly in every new story, which naturally raised the hackles of Nevers around the Woods, who believed the Good brother had won and tilted the Storian to reflect his own soul. I was a young Ever myself during this period, notorious for my unkempt hair, magical talents, and disregard for school assignments in favor of my own research. While the other Evers believed Good had become invincible and thus grew shallower and lazier as a result, I, on the other hand, became deeply suspicious of our winning streak. The Storian, after all, sustains our world through balance. It is the first lesson taught at every Welcoming. The sun rises on the Woods only as long as the pen preserves that balance, correcting any inequity through each new story. Which meant, of course, that for the Storian to make Good win in every new tale . . . it must be correcting for something terribly Evil indeed.”