Of Enemies and Endings by Shelby Bach Page A

missing anyone.”
    I glanced around the room. We were all here.
    Half of my students had gathered in rows in front of me, facing the witch and dragon dummies along the wall; they were young Characters, too small to be good sword fighters. The other half included some high school Characters who had goofed off instead of paying attention during their first year of weapons classes, adult Characters who had attended EAS before the Director made classes mandatory, and parents who had never been Characters but had kids who were.
    In other words, the most inexperienced fighters. The most unlikely ones.
    But their unlikeliness was an advantage. Our enemies would underestimate them. During a battle, my students would be placed as a final line of defense at some key point on the field. We were training them to hold off a bigger and stronger force until offensive squads could come—like Chase’s sword fighters or the archers training outside.
    Two students stood in the front, as close as they could get to me without actually standing on my toes. They were ridiculously excited to see me, considering I’d seen them the afternoon before.
    â€œRory, you were in a fight this morning, weren’t you?” cried Kelly. I was glad to see her so eager. She’d been a little subdued since she’d gotten her second Tale. “The Feather Bird” was gruesome, but she and Puss had put Priya and her grandmother back together again. “What was it this time? Dragons?”
    â€œNo way. She would smell more like sulfur,” said Priya, right beside her. “I’d say . . . ice griffins! No, trolls!”
    They loved to guess what I’d been fighting. I didn’t understand where they got their guts. They were going into sixth grade. When I was their age, I would have never been brave enough to ask random questions of someone going into ninth grade.
    â€œWitches,” I said, a little bit surprised that they had to ask. I mean, Ben’s grade had just carried unconscious green-skinned prisoners through the courtyard.
    That got everyone’s attention.
    â€œWitches!” Kelly and Priya said together.
    â€œHas anybody fought witches yet?” Priya asked Kelly.
    â€œAladdin,” replied Kelly. “But he got captured. Jack had to go rescue him.”
    Their excitement made me want to warn them exactly how deadly witches could be, but it made me want to change the subject, too. They would learn about the dangers soon enough. “We’re all here,” I told Hansel.
    Amy had taken a spot in the far back, on the opposite side from where I was standing.
    â€œThat’s enough,” said Hansel, and our students fell silent. He scared them nearly as much as he’d freaked me out when I was younger. “It’s time for class. Are you ready, Priya?”
    Priya stepped up, her jaw set. She tossed her long dark hair back. She had definitely gotten cockier since her Tale. “Ready for anything you can throw at me.”
    She reminded me of Chase when she said stuff like that. She’d never been able to handle what I’d sprung on her. It had started during my very first class. She had seen me come in with Hansel and refused to learn from anyone she could defeat by kicking them in the shins.
    But she hadn’t beaten me in the Snow Queen’s prisons. I’d just been trying to restrain her. Hansel could have told her that the Director had ordered him to send anyone who refused classes to a dungeon cell, to give them a taste of what the Snow Queen had in store for them if they were captured.
    But he hadn’t. He’d just looked at me, waiting to see how I’d deal with it.
    So I’d said that if she could beat one of the dummies, then she could leave class.
    She took me up on it. The evil Fey dummy disarmed her in less than a second. Since that embarrassing defeat, she’d worked hard in class. She was now one of the best students.
    Okay,