The Last Ever After. Soman Chainani

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      “Vanessa was Sophie’s mother. ‘Butterfly,’ I think the name means,” remembered Tedros, studying the stone. “Sophie told me one night when she was Filip.”

      “Sophie never told me her mother’s name,” Agatha said, hurt.

      “Perhaps because you never asked,” said Tedros. His face changed. “Wait a second. Her name wasn’t on the grave before. And look, it doesn’t say ‘Loving Wife and Mother’ like it used to.” He squinted at the shadows of crooked slabs around them. “We’re in the same graveyard, in the exact same spot. Doesn’t make any sense. A gravestone can’t just change—”

      “Unless you’re not in the same graveyard at all,” Princess Uma said behind them.

      Agatha and Tedros spun to see their teacher shoot a bolt of white glow into the sky. From every direction, thousands of fireflies whizzed to it like a signal, swarming over the Evers’ heads and detonating neon-green wings into a giant light cloud, illuminating a sprawling landscape in every direction. Prince and princess gazed out at a vast cemetery, with thousands and thousands of gravestones sloping over steep, barren hills. For a moment, Agatha thought Graves Hill had magically grown bigger. But it was what lay beyond the cemetery that made Agatha feel faint—a dark, endless gnarl of black trees, rearing high into the night like a primeval monster.

      They weren’t on Graves Hill.

      They weren’t in Gavaldon at all.

      “We’re in the Woods,” Agatha rasped.

      She was suddenly aware of the sea of dead bodies under her feet. In an instant, the images she’d been damming up broke through with a vengeance—guards, spears, her mother falling … Agatha buckled, about to retch—

      Tedros’ hand touched her arm. “I’m right here.”

      His voice brought her back to the moment. Agatha swallowed the acid taste in her mouth and uncurled to stand, clutching her prince by the shirt laces. She steadied her legs, trying to see a graveyard in front of her, just a graveyard and nothing more …

      “Hold on. I’ve been here before,” said Tedros, searching the landscape.

      “Each Forest Group makes a trip first year to scavenge meerworms. No doubt Yuba accompanied you,” Princess Uma replied.

      “The Garden of Good and Evil,” said Tedros. “That’s what he called it. Every Ever or Never whose name makes it into a storybook is buried here.”

      Under the firefly cloud, he scanned thousands of coffins down one side of the hills, teeming with glittering gem-crusted memorials for pairs of Evers, united in life and now in death. “That’s Ever Embankment, where the greatest heroes are,” he said. “Except Dad, of course.”

      Agatha looked at her prince, waiting for him to go on, but he turned back to her. “We must have come out the other side of Vanessa’s grave. One end is Gavaldon, the other end the Woods. It’s the only explanation. But how would your mother have known the grave was a portal?”

      Agatha thought of the black and white swans on the two graves flanking Sophie’s mother’s. “Even if she did know somehow, why would Sophie’s mother’s grave connect the two worlds?”

      “You’re asking the wrong questions, students.”

      Agatha and Tedros looked up at Princess Uma, studying them intently.

      “You should be asking why her grave is empty.”

      Uma circled her finger at the sky and the firefly cloud swept over their heads, illuminating the slope Agatha and Tedros were standing on. A bank of cracked and moldy headstones glowed in the alien green light, jutting from ragged black mounds.

      “Necro Ridge,” said Tedros. “It’s where the worst villains are buried.”

      “Sophie’s mother was a Never?” Agatha asked, disoriented.

      “Not according to our findings. The League of Thirteen has no evidence of a Vanessa of Woods Beyond attending the School for Good and Evil, being mentioned in a fairy tale, or having her body buried here at all,” said Uma, pocketing gooey gray meerworms off a tomb. “And yet, she has a grave amongst our most famous Nevers.”

      “You keep talking about this League,” Tedros rankled. “I’ve never heard of them—”

      “As you shouldn’t,” said Uma, even more unhelpfully than before. “Listen to me, Agatha. There are no words to ease the pain you’re in right now. But your mother died before she could give the League the answers we needed. Think back. Do you have any idea why Vanessa’s name is carved into a headstone on Necro Ridge? And where her body might be?”

      “I don’t see why we should help a League we know nothing about,” Tedros grouched.

      But Agatha’s head was still swimming. Her own mother, Callis, had moved between the two worlds as a witch without anyone in Gavaldon knowing, including her own daughter. And yet, her mother fit all the traits of a Never—unmarried, mysterious, reclusive … If anything, Agatha should have seen the clues. But Sophie’s mother? Sophie had spoken only rapturously of her mother, doting on her wicked, unfaithful husband until her dying day. There was no hint of her being anything other than a radiant, loving caretaker and wife. So how could her name be on a villain’s tomb? Agatha shook her head, at a dead end … until her eyes suddenly flared wide.

      “The Crypt Keeper will know!”

      Quickly she scoured the horizon for the blue-skinned, dreadlocked giant she’d learned about at school, responsible for digging and filling graves. “Hort said he buries everybody himself. Never lets anyone interfere. That’s why Hort’s dad’s been waiting for a coffin all these years. So the Crypt Keeper has to know why Sophie’s mother has a headstone here …” But the hills were deserted, except for a few hovering vultures nearby. She turned to Uma. “Where is h—”

      Agatha stopped cold, seeing Uma’s expression.

      Slowly Agatha turned back to the vultures.

      Lying on the ground beneath them was a massive, blue-skinned body crumpled in a spray of dirt. His bones were broken and his throat split open, the blood staining his neck long dried out. Agatha could see the whites of his wide-open eyes, as if the shock of dying paled to the shock of what killed him.

      Agatha felt Tedros squeeze her hand with his sweaty palm, telling her she hadn’t seen the worst of it. Dread growing, she tracked his gaze past the dead Crypt Keeper and across the 200 graves on Necro Ridge, marking the resting place of famous fairy-tale villains. But now Agatha saw why there were so many mounds of dirt, blacking out the grass. Every single one of the famous villains’ tombs had been dug up, the insides of all of them …

      “Empty,” said Agatha. “The villains’ graves are empty.”

      Legs shaky, СКАЧАТЬ