“What now?” Sophie whispered.
Somewhere a flame ignited, spraying the coop with light.
Willam and Bogden dropped from their goats’ bellies, the boys shaking off cramped hands and legs, while Sophie’s dress released her to the pebbly floor. She stood up and saw the shepherd, hood pulled low, holding a torch.
“There is a reason goats take a shine to me,” spoke a dry, wheezy voice.
The shepherd pulled back the hood.
“Because I am an old goat myself,” Pospisil chuckled.
Sophie’s eyes widened at Camelot’s perilously ancient, red-nosed priest. “But those guards . . . how did you—”
Pospisil waved his arms over the goats. “Well done, my little kiddies! Shall we do a roll call? Bossman! Ajax! Valhalla! The rest of you! Call out your names and be accounted for!”
Sophie held in a groan. Just her luck. The one adult to help and he was a senile crackpot—
Thumps echoed around the room.
Bodies dropping to the floor.
That’s when Sophie realized.
It wasn’t just a few goats hiding passengers.
It was all of them.
“FIRST OF ALL, it’s Bossam, not Bossman,” said a hairy, three-eyed Neverboy.
“I’m Valentina, not Valhalla. And this is Aja,” said a thin-browed Nevergirl.
“Ajax sounds like a gorilla name,” sniffed a waifish Neverboy with flame-red hair.
Sophie glimpsed two old goats giggling in the corner—one the librarian from school, the other name-tagged GOLEM—as if they found their priest friend’s ineptitude with names an inside joke. Sophie did the mental roll call herself: Valentina, Aja, Priyanka, Bossam, Laithan, Bodhi, Devan, Laralisa, Ravan, Vex, Brone, Mona, Willam, Bogden—
“Hort?” Pospisil called. “Where’s Hort?”
Sophie looked around the crowded coop, packed with friends and first years, many that she used to teach.
But no Hort.
“He was our leader,” Laithan worried. “What do we do now? How do we help Tedros?”
All eyes shifted to Sophie.
But she was still watching the door, hoping Hort would walk through.
Her mind went to him in the tree, shot through with arrows—
She steeled her heart. She couldn’t let herself go there. He was alive. Hort was still alive.
“Where did you come from?” Sophie asked her charges. She turned to the priest. “How did you escape the church?”
“Any priest knows not to rely on the good graces of a king,” Pospisil replied. “The church has had secret escape routes since its beginnings. Luckily, Willam paid attention in his altar boy lessons and knew where to find me. Together, with Hort and my old goat friends, we made a plan.”
“As for us, Princess Uma came to school after she escaped Shazabah,” Ravan answered. “She heard from her animal friends that you’d been captured. Teachers can’t interfere in a story, so Manley and Anemone sent us to rescue you—”
“—and we ran into Hort in the Woods,” finished pointy-eared Vex.
“What about the Knights of Eleven?” Sophie pushed.
Valentina waved her off. “Listen, Señora Sophie, the serpiente is on his way to Foxwood to win the third test. Princesa Uma’s animal friends will try to slow him down, but it’s only a matter of time before he gets to Excalibur and then pew, pew, pew!, we’re all dead and buried under the guanabana tree. So you need to lead us, like Hort once did. We are your army, like we were his. Ever and Never. Smart and talented and elegante. Most of us, at least.” She gave Aja a darting frown. “We’ll do anything you ask, Señora Sophie. What can we do to help Tedros win?”
This is where Sophie shined. Taking command. Hatching schemes. And yet, all she could think about was Hort. His eyes closing. His paw letting go.
She shook her head. “Japeth has thousands of men, armies from Good and Evil, plus the King of Foxwood on his side. And the boys who live in the house where the sword is, Cedric and Caleb, both support the Lion . . . Japeth will walk right in . . .” She looked to Pospisil, the embers of his torch popping loudly, lighting him up and his goat friends, but they all seemed at a loss, as if they’d gotten Sophie as far as they could. Sophie appealed to her dress, but it, too, had no answers. “There’s no move for us to make. Not with the whole Woods on his side.”
“This is ridiculous. You’re Sophie, grand high witch queen,” Aja puffed, hands on hips. “You led a school of Nevers in a glam revolution. You won the Circus of Talents and invented the No Ball. You killed Rafal, kissed Tedros as a boy and girl, turned the School Master’s tower into your own personal hotel, and you looked like a boss witch doing all of it. You don’t make excuses. You don’t give up. You always find a way. That’s what makes you Sophie.”
Sophie gazed at Aja, at Valentina, at all the students looking up to her, like she was still their Dean, Evil’s mistress of mischief and manipulation. But she wasn’t any of that now. She was just a girl. A girl who’d finally opened herself to love, real love, right when it was too late. “Tedros is the one who has to pull the sword. And he’s far away,” she said, trying to swallow the lump in her throat. “He and Aggie don’t even know where the sword is . . .”
The embers off the priest’s torch were popping louder, snapping at Sophie’s words. Suddenly, more and more spewed off the flame, as if the entire fire was breaking apart. For a split second, Sophie thought the whole coop might go up in smoke, but then she noticed the embers hanging strangely in the air, as if they had a life of their own, little pearls of amber buzzing and glittering about like . . .
Fireflies.
Instantly, the glowing bugs swarmed into a glowing orange matrix like they once had in Gnomeland. On this magic screen, Sophie glimpsed grainy footage of Tedros and Agatha in a snowfield, riding some kind of humped creature, away from Avalon’s castle. Then Sophie saw Agatha staring at her, eyes flaring, as if she could see her friend in her own fireflies.
“Sophie? Is that you?”
“Aggie!” Sophie gasped. “I found the sword—”
“Chaddick’s house,” Tedros cut in.
“Y-y-yes!” Sophie said, startled. “How did you—”
Tedros thrust his face into close-up. “Meet us at Snow White’s cottage. In Foxwood. Hurry!”
“No! Foxwood’s a death trap!” Sophie said as the screen flickered, the connection severing. “There’s armies! Thousands of men! You can’t go!” But the fireflies had dimmed, her friends gone. “No! I can’t lose you too!” she cried. All the fear and dread she’d been holding back broke through. Grief poured out of her, her face in her hands, her chest heaving. “He’s dead. I know he’s dead . . . I tried to save him . . . I did everything I could . . . But he let me go . . . I told him not to let go . . .” She sobbed so hard, her whole body shook. “They can’t go to Foxwood . . . Please . . . I can’t lose anyone else . . . Not after him . . .” Then slowly her sobs softened. “Only I will lose them, won’t I?” Sophie lifted her head, her cheeks wet. “Letting the Snake win means we all lose. It means everything Hort did to save me was for nothing. That’s what Hort would tell me. To be brave for him. To finish his work.” She sat taller, wiping her eyes. “But how? Aggie and Teddy will be dead the second they come near Foxwood. Unless there’s a way into the kingdom . . . a way to get them in . . .”