“Aggie, what is it?” Sophie asked, glancing between them.
But the Storian had finished its second painting now, a magnificent rendering of the twin-sailed Igraine sinking back under Halfway Bay, with Agatha at the stern, commanding the ship onwards. The pen wrote beneath: Soon, a team of students from the School for Good and Evil set out to find the Snake, led by two best friends, Sophie and Agatha, along with a crew of three witches, an altar boy named Willam, and a first-year Never named Bogden.
The Storian halted.
“What about me!” Hort protested.
But no one was paying the slightest attention, because Professor Dovey was rounding up the girls towards the window: “Come; there’s provisions in the kitchen and weapons in the Armory—”
“Boobeshwar!” Sophie yelped at her startled mongoose: “Start packing my suitcase. . . .”
“Wait a second,” Hort piped up.
“You’ll need food and water for a week before you can reload in the Ever Lands,” Dovey was saying.
“Enough clothes for two months, Boobeshwar!” Sophie hollered over her. “I’ll send Bogden to fetch the luggage—”
“I SAID WAIT A SECOND!” Hort bellowed.
Six pairs of eyes went to him.
“Look,” he said.
They followed his gaze to the long, white table.
The Storian was writing again.
There was one more member of their crew, however. Someone they hadn’t expected.
Someone who they’d need on their dangerous quest.
Hort raised his fist. “See! See! I told you! It saved the best for—”
Someone named Nicola.
“Nicola?” Agatha said, mystified.
Everyone stared at the page.
“Who in tarnation is Nicola!” Hort barked.
But only Dovey and Sophie seemed to know, for they both eyed each other with strange looks, before Sophie slowly turned to Agatha.
“Well, darling, it seems we’ve found the missing Ever for your team.”
10
NICOLA
The Perks of Being a Reader
Sophie might be a Dean, but that didn’t mean Nicola had respect for the girl or would join her ranks of fawning students.
For one thing, she’d met Sophie back when they lived in Gavaldon, but Sophie was acting as if she’d never seen Nicola in her life. For another, Nicola had read The Tale of Sophie and Agatha and thought Sophie was a class-A brat. And then on Nicola’s first day, Sophie had blamed her for caving in a classroom when it wasn’t her fault at all!
For these reasons (and more), she’d been giving Sophie hostile looks ever since she got to school two weeks ago and Sophie had been giving them right back.
So imagine Nicola’s surprise when it was Sophie herself who barged into her room tonight and dragged her onto this boat, helped by Hester, Dot, and Anadil, three witches she’d only seen in a storybook.
No one told her why. They’d just acted like she was their prisoner and gave her thirty seconds to pack before they flung her aboard and dumped her in the worst room. She didn’t even know who else was on the crew, since no one had bothered to come check on her once they’d set sail.
It hurt her feelings, to be honest. Hester was one of her favorite characters in The Tale of Sophie and Agatha and being treated like a stray dog by your favorite characters is worse than never meeting them at all. Even Dot, who seemed so jolly and sweet on the page, hadn’t managed a proper “hello.”
I should have known, she thought. Girls like me are always left out of fairy tales.
Nicola steeled herself. Well, if this crew couldn’t show her the most basic manners, then she wasn’t going to make an effort either. Instead, she would handle them the way she’d handled rude customers at Pa’s pub in Gavaldon: with grace, dignity, and pity for their poor souls.
Thunder blasted outside and a slash of lightning lit up her window.
Nicola unpacked her toothbrush, soap, and comb in her tiny bathroom. The boat had been swerving and lurching through this storm for the past hour.
Whoever was steering had no idea what they were doing.
“Man the sails!” Agatha cried, soaked to the bone as she gripped the captain’s wheel—
Nicola snuck closer to the galley door so she could peer through the crack and survey the whole deck.
Lightning ripped through a sail and the Igraine lurched off-course, rain flooding over the rails. The storm had exploded only a few hours after they left, caging them into whirling winds they couldn’t escape. Hester and the witches were siphoning water off the deck using their fingerglows—
“Lady of the Lake controls these waters! Should be giving us easy passage!” Hester was shouting at Anadil and Dot.
Meanwhile, Nicola’s classmate Bogden was clutching a red-haired boy as he puked overboard; Sophie was crawling on all fours up the deck; and another boy was batting down the hatches, which kept coming loose—
Hort! Nicola gasped, recognizing him. Her whole body went hot. . . .
Wind slammed against the boat, spinning it like a pinwheel, knocking Sophie into a railing. The broken sail flapped over her, lashing against the mast. A huge shard of wood snapped under the rogue sail and came shearing down, about to spear the deck—
Instantly, Dot turned the shard to chocolate chips, which scattered into the rain. Hester’s demon flew off her neck and hoisted up the heavy sail; Anadil’s three rats secured its ropes (all the while catching chocolate in their mouths).
“What did I . . . say . . . about . . . boats!” Sophie mewled, makeup smeared, soggy hair caught around her neck like a noose. Blown side to side, she scooted on her stomach up the steps to the captain’s level—
“The wind is sending us everywhere but Avalon,” Agatha growled, wrangling the wheel. “We should be there by now!”
“You said the ship listens to you!” Sophie squawked behind her.
“The ship, not the weather! The faster I tell it to go, the more the wind hits us!”
Sophie lunged off the top step and grabbed hold of Agatha’s ankle. “Isn’t it a magic ship? Make it fly or turn invisible!”
“What good is being invisible in a storm! Or flying higher into it!” Agatha said, squinting into the rain. “We must be fifty miles off-course!”
There were clearer skies to the east, which would give them a chance to regroup. She just needed to steer the boat out of this wind-cage—
“SAIL EAST!” she shouted at the wheel.
The Igraine bounded eastwards but bashed into headwinds, making it swing back and forth like one of those sickening pirate-ship rides at the Gavaldon Fair. Sophie lost grip of Agatha’s shoe and went rolling down the stairs.
“AGATHA!” she shrieked, hanging off the staircase banister.
Hort ran to save her, but tripped and plunged down a hatch. Bogden was now retching alongside the red-haired boy, while the witches tumbled across the deck like marbles. As the ship bobbed, water surged over the rail. The Igraine started to sink—