Tedros exhaled. “Only I have no idea how. Which is why we’re inside a Snake, looking for something to help us.” He walked taller, his voice steeling. “But we will win somehow. I promised you that from the beginning. You are the queen, Agatha. My queen. We’re unbreakable in a way Arthur and Guinevere never were. Which means we’re not going to die from this. We’re going to come out stronger.”
He waited for her to say something. When she didn’t, he looked back at her, silhouetted in their twin gold glows, his princess quiet and thoughtful, her head bowed. She clasped his hand, letting him lead her. Soon, their glows faded, neither able to sustain them. But the green light paved the way, throbbing bigger, brighter ahead, like an emerald in a mine.
“Your wishes,” Agatha remembered. “What did you ask the genie for?”
“Powers,” said Tedros vaguely, still feeling the genie’s magic pulsing in his blood.
“Powers that can help us?” Agatha probed.
Tedros didn’t answer. Because he didn’t know the answer. The genie’s powers wouldn’t last much longer. Would they work against the Snake when the time came? Tedros still had doubts about the Knights’ plan. Which is why he needed to find something here fast . . . something else to use against Japeth . . .
“Suppose he can see us?” said Agatha, eyeing the glow ahead. “Suppose he knows we’re in his secrets?”
“We’re safe here,” Tedros reminded. “It isn’t real.”
“I thought the same thing when I went into Rhian’s blood,” she pointed out. “Japeth saw us, remember? Almost killed me and Sophie.”
The blood crystal, Tedros thought. It was inside Rhian’s blood that Agatha had learned that Rhian and Japeth were Arthur’s sons with Evelyn Sader.
And yet . . .
“What about Japeth’s blood?” Tedros mulled. “To get into the Celestium, he had to have wizard’s blood. There’s no other way in.”
“But how could Japeth have wizard’s blood?” Agatha asked. “Rhian’s blood said he and Japeth are Arthur and Evelyn’s sons. Neither parent is a wizard or sorcerer. There must be another explanation.”
“Like what?”
“How could Rhian pull Excalibur the first time? Why did the Lady of the Lake kiss Japeth, thinking he was the king? Why did Rhian have a fingerglow and not his brother? Why did I see Evelyn Sader in the pearl? There’s so many questions without explanations, Tedros. As if we not only have the story wrong, but don’t even know the story at all—”
Tedros stalled, Agatha bumping into him.
“What is it?” his princess said. Then she stiffened. “There’s . . . two?”
Two green balls of light, as big as globes, each a distance from the other.
Which meant the tunnel had to have gotten wider while they were walking.
A lot wider.
Slowly, the prince and princess shined their glows.
Tedros’ blood ran cold.
They weren’t lights.
They were eyes.
A colossal black snake glared right at them, as big as a whale, floating over a pit of dead scims that extended infinitely in every direction, like the darkest of nights.
Agatha recoiled, expecting it to attack—
But the snake didn’t move.
It was at once alive and dead, green eyes glowing, its mouth wide open around knife-sharp teeth, but otherwise lifeless in midair, as if frozen in time.
There was nothing else in sight.
Nowhere else to go.
This was where the mirror had led them.
Which meant they had only one choice.
Tedros took a deep breath.
“No, don’t!” Agatha choked.
But her prince was already climbing into its mouth.
IT WAS SURPRISINGLY cool inside, the air crisp and dry, the passage ink-black. Tedros tried to light his fingerglow, but it didn’t work this time. Neither did Agatha’s apparently; he heard her dress rip as she stumbled over the snake’s bottom teeth, his princess mumbling un-princess-like words, before she found Tedros in the dark.
“Magic must not work in here,” he said.
“Maybe because we are inside a snake’s mouth. Why are we inside a snake’s mouth!”
Tedros squinted ahead. “To find that.”
Deep inside the snake, the prince spotted something blocking their path.
A door.
He led her closer, the door growing sharper in its details, smooth and luminescent, as if under a spotlight. But it was only when they came within a few feet of it and spotted the lion pattern on the moldings, the distinctive orange-gold of the knob, that Tedros and his princess both realized something.
“White Tower,” said Agatha, glancing at her prince. “Isn’t this what the doors look like?”
Exactly like this, Tedros thought. The White Tower, where Tedros rarely ventured in his time at Camelot’s castle, whether during his father’s reign or his own. There was no reason to: it was mainly staff quarters and storage. But there was one room in the White Tower that Tedros knew well. A room that kept pulling him back, like a ghost out of a grave. A room where all the darkness in this story had been born. And as Tedros turned the knob, moving deeper into the Snake’s secrets, he was quite sure this was the room he was about to enter . . .
He opened the door.
Immediately he smelled the familiar thick, unwashed scent.
The Guest Room.
That strange suite his father had built soon after he became king. It was a room for visiting friends, his father would tell him as a child, but Arthur never used it for guests as far as Tedros knew. Arthur hadn’t even let maids in this room (hence the smell), nor his wife or son. Indeed, only Arthur had the key to it. And Lady Gremlaine, Tedros remembered. She’d had a key too, since her private quarters adjoined this one. In later years, Tedros’ father would lock himself in here during his drunken hazes, but it never explained why he’d built the room in the first place. Tedros himself had only been inside a few times since his father died, and each time, it gave him a dark, seedy feeling.
Except the room was different now, Tedros realized.
The brown-and-orange rug was bright and fairly new, the leather sofa fresh and unstained, the beige walls unblemished. There was even a brass flowerpot in the corner, with blooming seedlings—
“Tedros?” Agatha rasped.
He followed her eyes to the bed in the corner.
Someone was sleeping on it.
A young man with gold curls, rosy cheeks, and a coat of light, patchy stubble. For a moment, Tedros thought he was looking at himself . . . then saw the man was taller, ganglier, and at least a few years older . . .
The prince’s eyes flared. “Dad?”
He moved past Agatha, thrusting a hand out for the young Arthur, but it went straight through, as if Tedros was a phantom. King Arthur remained asleep.
Tedros could see Agatha’s fists tighten, her throat bobbing, and only then did he understand.
“This is it, isn’t it?” Tedros said, tensing. “The scene you saw in Rhian’s blood.”
Voices rose from next door.
Lady Gremlaine’s room.
“That’s them,” said Agatha. “Lady Gremlaine and Evelyn Sader. They’re about to come in.”
And indeed, now Tedros could hear Gremlaine’s voice on the other side of the wall—