“Can I get spaghetti with cheese for dinner?” said Agatha. “Lots of cheese. Tons. Like enough to ruin the dish.”
Chef Silkima and the cooks gaped down at their finished platters of cumin-spiced coconut soup, curried chicken in a green chili sauce, potato tikkis with peas and scallions, black-lentil salad with salmon crumbs, and a five-layer kulfi pistachio cake.
“Spaghetti with . . . cheese?” Chef Silkima croaked.
“To go, please,” said Agatha.
One of the cooks dropped his spoon.
Now, as she sat dangling bare feet into a bathtub of hot water, surrounded by mirrors and peeling gold wallpaper, Agatha twirled creamy-white spaghetti from a porcelain bowl into her mouth, savoring the melted mozzarella.
Everyone had their comfort in times of stress: Sophie had sea-salt facials, juice fasts, yoga poses, and deep-tissue massages; Tedros had dumbbells and climbing ropes and anything to work up a sweat. . . .
Agatha had food.
More precisely: so much food that it induced a warm, velvety coma that dulled her senses and made her unable to think beyond the gurgles of her stomach.
Reaper moseyed into the bathroom and sniffed at a scrap of cheese. He gave Agatha a curdled look, as if he thought she’d outgrown all this, and shuffled away.
Agatha and Tedros had certainly had fights before. Fights that made Agatha doubt whether he loved her or she loved him or whether they even belonged together. But this wasn’t a fight. She was sure Tedros loved her now—or at least as sure as she could be. . . .
Except relationships aren’t just about love, Agatha realized. Relationships are about taking off the mask you wear to make someone like you and letting them see the real you. The one you hid all along. The one you never thought was good enough to find love in the first place.
Tedros had helped her peel off her mask in her years at school. He’d seen her at her most vulnerable and her absolute worst and loved her even more for it.
But now it was Tedros’ turn to do the same and he was acting like most boys do when asked to face their feelings. . . .
They run.
There was another thing that also made this rift different than the others, Agatha thought, spotting the pile of letters on her desk. She could see the latest one, which she’d read so many times, yet left unanswered.
Darling,
I know you’re not reading this. I know you’re not reading any of my letters. You’re in love and have a wedding to plan and have no time for silly old me, but if you do read this, just know that you are in my heart always. And living without you has been far harder than I could ever admit out loud. So let me say it here. I miss you.
Love,
Sophie
P.S. Did you know Hort has been getting love letters from a girl?
Agatha wiped her eyes. Back at school, she’d always had Sophie by her side, the third point in the triangle between her and Tedros.
A hollow loneliness overwhelmed her and for the first time she saw it wasn’t just her old, chivalrous prince she was yearning for, but her bold, beautiful best friend too. A best friend she’d been avoiding, just like Tedros had been avoiding her.
Now she was all alone.
Outside, she heard wind and rain batter the ships in the harbor. Glancing through a small window, she saw none of these ships could sail; they were broken, neglected, and falling apart, like the rest of Camelot. Well, not all the ships: there was one that looked sturdy, with brilliant blue-and-gold finishes and milky white sails. Along the bow, she read the ship’s name . . . IGRAINE.
“Agatha?” Pollux’s voice echoed outside. “Shall we resume our—”
A loud hissing noise interrupted, followed by dog barks and crashing furniture.
Pollux had met Reaper.
Twenty minutes later, Agatha was in the Library, a two-story collection in the Gold Tower that must have once been impressive, but was now a heap of cobwebs, moth-eaten books, and so much dust she could hardly breathe. There were colorful sheets slung over the bookcases and desks, as if someone had started renovating a decade ago and never got around to finishing. Agatha slouched at a desk shrouded in a purple sheet, trying to take notes as Pollux scrawled on a squeaky chalkboard, his face slashed with claw-marks, suggesting he’d lost the battle with her cat.
“You certainly don’t want to be like Princess Kerber, who was so overwrought on her wedding day she ate an entire jar of peanut butter and vomited on her poor groom’s shoes. Conversely, learn from the example of Princess Muguruza, who married a commoner, nearly prompting a revolt, until she revealed her bridal gown, made entirely out of pink pearls she’d dredged from the Savage Sea. No one dared attack a girl who’d braved such treacherous waters and in time, every last dissenter forgave her. . . .”
Agatha glazed over, her head drooping into the purple sheet. She tried to force herself awake, prying her eyes open—
That’s when she saw the pattern stitched on the fabric.
Tiny, silver five-pointed stars in a purple night sky, like they’d been drawn by a child.
It wasn’t a sheet at all.
It was a cape.
Agatha held in a smile, her eyes on Pollux’s back. She put her nose to the purple velvet and inhaled the scent of fresh cocoa, as if someone was brewing it right now. . . .
“Then there was Princess Mahalaxmi, whose father kidnapped her during the ceremony and sold her to a Never warlord in Ravenbow,” Pollux rattled. “Which goes to show all family entanglements should be sorted before the wedding. . . .”
Agatha rose from her chair, careful not to make a sound, and slipped her palms into the cape, vanishing her hands like a magic trick . . . then her arms . . . then her shoulders. . . .
“I don’t hear your pen, Agatha. This is for your own good,” Pollux tutted—
But by the time he turned, all that remained of his student was a single clump, somehow left behind.
The moment Agatha put her face through the cape, she felt herself swaddled in velvet, then plummeting through darkness, pulses of blinding white light streaking by. She closed her eyes and let herself free-fall, her arms raised, her one-shoed feet splayed, her mind untethering from her thoughts, her fears . . . until at last she crashed face-first into something fluffy and soft and tasted sweet cloud in her mouth.
Agatha opened her eyes and craned up to a purple night sky lit by thousands of silvery five-pointed stars, as if the childish pattern on the cape in the Library had come to life in heavenly dimension.
“The Celestium,” Tedros once called it. The place where wizards go to think.
Agatha rose to her knees and saw there was indeed a wizard peering thinkingly at her, sitting cross-legged on the cloud with purple silk robes, a droopy cone hat, horn-rimmed spectacles, and soft-furred violet slippers.