Sophie should have been thinking about the Snake.
The Snake that had Arthur’s blood. The Snake that had terrorized the Woods. The Snake that had killed their friend and would kill them next.
And yet, she couldn’t stop thinking about hydrangeas.
“The whole castle’s crawling with them,” she whispered to Agatha, nodding at the thousands of pom-pom-shaped flowers in pink, purple, and yellow blanketing every inch of Castle Jolie. “I loathe hydrangeas, Aggie. They look like human brains. Just being around them makes me faint—”
“Shhh!” Agatha snapped, then kept on whispering to Nicola.
Sophie stewed as the chain gang pulled her along, deeper into the royal castle, the young pirate named Thiago with the tattoos around his eyes leading them on foot. The other pirates had remained outside the castle on their horses, sneering down at the crew as they shambled through the open doors like dead men walking to the gallows. Sophie watched the boys deliver each kid a demeaning kick in the bum—Hester, Anadil, Dot, Hort, Bogden, Willam. . . . But when it came Sophie’s turn, sunburnt Wesley simply smirked and gave her a frightening little hisssss.
Which made it all the more foolish that with the Snake moments away, Sophie was offended by flowers. But it wasn’t really the hydrangeas that were bothering her, though she did hate everything about this castle: its birthday-cake colors, its cloying, candy-cane scent, its treacly portraits of the royal children frolicking with dogs, and its endless loop of music, playing Jaunt Jolie’s annoyingly catchy anthem through flowered walls (“Tipple Top, Joy and Jaunt / Come and Be Jolie!”). No, the real reason Sophie was annoyed was because she’d just saved everyone’s noses in the pavilion with her brave performance and no one seemed to care—especially Agatha and Nicola, who kept whispering to each other like Flopsy and Mopsy.
Sophie couldn’t fault Agatha for having another friend. Aggie was perfectly free to consort with whoever she pleased, including a first-year Reader with a bad attitude.
So why, then, did Sophie feel so upset?
She’d been so distracted by her reunion with Agatha and all the action of their new quest that she hadn’t noticed a creeping emptiness returning—the same emptiness that had made her impatient with her students at school, increasingly bored with her Dean’s duties, and eager to comb Camelot’s tabloids for sordid rumors about its new king.
And yet, Sophie hadn’t been able to put a finger on why she felt this way.
She was happy being Dean, wasn’t she? That was the Ever After she’d worked so hard to find and at the end of this quest she’d go right back to it, just like Agatha would go back to a wedding and a crown. Yet unlike Agatha, Sophie would have no one by her side . . . well, at least not the way that Agatha had Tedros.
But that was fine with her. Truly. She might flirt with delectable Everboys at parties and ogle a few of her own sultry Neverboys during school assemblies, but she’d learned her lesson with Tedros and Rafal. No boy could ever really understand her. She was too strong and empowered and . . . complicated. Boys always wanted her to change and she didn’t want to change. Not when she’d finally figured herself out. She’d be far better off staying out of that swamp for a long, long time.
No, the only person Sophie needed was Agatha. Agatha understood her. Agatha balanced her. Agatha didn’t expect her to change. Which is why Sophie had been so happy these past few days with her best friend back in her life. But seeing Agatha confide in this Nicola girl the way Agatha had once confided in her made Sophie realize how fragile this happiness was.
It was ironic, really. Agatha would have been happy living in Gavaldon forever with Sophie. But it was Sophie who had been determined to leave and find her own life.
Now it was Agatha who had her own life.
A life that didn’t depend on Sophie anymore.
She heard Nicola whisper her name and Sophie promptly goosed Agatha with her knee: “Are you two talking about me?”
Agatha scowled. “We’re talking about our plan to fight the Snake!”
“So now I’m not good enough to help you plan?”
“I’ll tell you the plan if you’re quiet,” Nicola said.
“See how she talks to me?” Sophie mewled to Agatha.
“Because you’re acting like a mopstick,” Agatha scolded.
“You ungrateful Brutus. Not one word about how clever I was out there defusing those vile men, not one word of appreciation—”
“Sorry, we’ve been busy planning how not to die—”
“I remember when instead of gossiping about me with first years, it was me and you who made plans!”
“You are the plan, you idiot!”
“What?” Sophie blurted loudly.
The chain yanked to a halt. Slowly the two girls looked up to see Thiago glaring daggers at them from the head of the line.
Dark silence fell over the hall, punctured by gay sounds of singing: “Tipple Top, Joy and Jaunt—”
The pirate stabbed his sword into a flowered wall and the music squawked and petered out. He gave the girls a last glower of warning and the death march resumed.
Agatha and Nicola stared Sophie down.
Sophie reddened. If she was indeed the team’s plan to fight the Snake, now she’d have to do it without knowing what the plan was.
Steeling herself, she followed the line into the Royal Keep, the king and queen’s private residence, as evidenced by the preponderance of children’s bedrooms, cozy sitting rooms, and opulent bathrooms. Sophie peeked in, unnerved by an unmade bed, an open wine bottle in one of the sitting rooms, a wooden toothbrush askew by the sink. Signs of life but no one living there.
At the front of the line, Hester coughed in surprise, snagging the chain.
Sophie followed her eyes, as did everyone else—
The library was coming into view, a two-floor yellow-and-pink rotunda cased in glass. Inside the library, three giant steel cages hung from the high ceiling, each packed to the brim with maids, guards, stewards, and members of the royal family. Two shirtless teen pirates, one thin and dark, the other hoggish with pig-colored skin, were perched on the railing of the second floor. They took turns kicking the cages as hard as they could and watched them swing back and forth, tossing all the people inside like marbles while they screamed and cried, though Sophie couldn’t hear any of it through the thick glass.
The pirates looked bored.