The School Years Complete Collection. Soman Chainani

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      ophie had waited all her life to be kidnapped.

      But tonight, all the other children of Gavaldon writhed in their beds. If the School Master took them, they’d never return. Never lead a full life. Never see their family again. Tonight these children dreamt of a red-eyed thief with the body of a beast, come to rip them from their sheets and stifle their screams.

      Sophie dreamt of princes instead.

      She had arrived at a castle ball thrown in her honor, only to find the hall filled with a hundred suitors and no other girls in sight. Here for the first time were boys who deserved her, she thought as she walked the line. Hair shiny and thick, muscles taut through shirts, skin smooth and tan, beautiful and attentive like princes should be. But just as she came to one who seemed better than the rest, with brilliant blue eyes and ghostly white hair, the one who felt like Happily Ever After … a hammer broke through the walls of the room and smashed the princes to shards.

      Sophie’s eyes opened to morning. The hammer was real. The princes were not.

      “Father, if I don’t sleep nine hours, my eyes look swollen.”

      “Everyone’s prattling on that you’re to be taken this year,” her father said, nailing a misshapen bar over her bedroom window, now completely obscured by locks, spikes, and screws. “They tell me to shear your hair, muddy up your face, as if I believe all this fairy-tale hogwash. But no one’s getting in here tonight. That’s for sure.” He pounded a deafening crack as exclamation.

      Sophie rubbed her ears and frowned at her once lovely window, now something you’d see in a witch’s den. “Locks. Why didn’t anyone think of that before?”

      “I don’t know why they all think it’s you,” he said, silver hair slicked with sweat. “If it’s goodness that School Master fellow wants, he’ll take Gunilda’s daughter.”

      Sophie tensed. “Belle?”

      “Perfect child that one is,” he said. “Brings her father home-cooked lunches at the mill. Gives the leftovers to the poor hag in the square.”

      Sophie heard the edge in her father’s voice. She had never once cooked a full meal for him, even after her mother died. Naturally she had good reason (the oil and smoke would clog her pores) but she knew it was a sore point. This didn’t mean her father had gone hungry. Instead, she offered him her own favorite foods: mashed beets, broccoli stew, boiled asparagus, steamed spinach. He hadn’t ballooned into a blimp like Belle’s father, precisely because she hadn’t brought him home-cooked lamb fricassees and cheese soufflés at the mill. As for the poor hag in the square, that old crone, despite claiming hunger day after day, was fat. And if Belle had anything to do with it, then she wasn’t good at all, but the worst kind of evil.

      Sophie smiled back at her father. “Like you said, it’s all hogwash.” She swept out of bed and slammed the bathroom door.

      She studied her face in the mirror. The rude awakening had taken its toll. Her waist-long hair, the color of spun gold, didn’t have its usual sheen. Her jade-green eyes looked faded, her luscious red lips a touch dry. Even the glow of her creamy peach skin had dulled. But still a princess, she thought. Her father couldn’t see she was special, but her mother had. “You are too beautiful for this world, Sophie,” she said with her last breaths. Her mother had gone somewhere better and now so would she.

      Tonight she would be taken into the woods. Tonight she would begin a new life. Tonight she would live out her fairy tale.

      And now she needed to look the part.

      To begin, she rubbed fish eggs into her skin, which smelled of dirty feet but warded off spots. Then she massaged in pumpkin puree, rinsed with goat’s milk, and soaked her face in a mask of melon and turtle egg yolk. As she waited for the mask to dry, Sophie flipped through a storybook and sipped on cucumber juice to keep her skin dewy soft. She skipped to her favorite part of the story, where the wicked hag is rolled down a hill in a nail-spiked barrel, until all that remains is her bracelet made of little boys’ bones. Gazing at the gruesome СКАЧАТЬ