The Last Ever After by Soman Chainani Page B

a wily squirrel, while Tedros collided with them, cursing so barbarically even the grave worms fled.
    Panting fire, his princess led him into the thick of the cemetery. The Elders had taken her family from her. They wouldn’t take her prince too.
    â€œThe grave between the swans,” Tedros called out behind her. “She said help would be waiting there—”
    â€œSwans?” Agatha blurted. “There are no swans in Gavaldon!”
    Tedros looked back down the hill and saw the guards barreling up, carrying torches. “Thirty seconds, Agatha! We have thirty seconds!”
    Agatha scoured stones and plaques and obelisks for evidence of a swan. “I don’t even know what I’m looking for!”
    â€œTwenty seconds!” Tedros voice rang out.
    She couldn’t see her prince anymore. Agatha whirled desperately, trying to steady her mind. The only birds she’d ever seen in Gavaldon were smog-colored ducks and obese pigeons. She’d never even seen a real swan, especially not on Graves Hill—
    Agatha’s heart pattered faster.
    But she had seen swans before, hadn’t she? Swans were the symbols of the School for Good and Evil: one black, one white . . . representing two School Masters in balance . . . one brother Good, one brother Evil . . .
    If Callis was a witch, she’d have known the Good and Evilswans. That’s how she knew so much about the school, Agatha thought. Her mother must have seen it for herself . . .
    â€œTen seconds!” Tedros shouted—
    Agatha closed her eyes and tried to focus, her temples throbbing.
    Swans . . . school . . . Stefan . . .
    â€œYou saved me,” Callis had whispered to him.
    What had she meant? If Callis and Stefan had a history, maybe the swans involved something that connected her mother and Sophie’s father . . . something that both of them had in common . . . or some one . . .
    Agatha’s heart stopped. Her eyes shot open.
    She was already running.
    â€œWhat is it?” Tedros yelled, seeing her shadow dart deeper into the cemetery, towards the house on Graves Hill.
    â€œHere! It’s over here!”
    Tedros chased her, squinting at her outline fading into the dark. He looked back and saw the army of shadows smash through the graveyard gates, spears glinting. Tedros dove to the ground behind a domed stone. He peeked over it and saw the guards sweeping torches over the rows of graves. Tedros ducked down. “This is worse than the Woods,” he wheezed, crawling through stones to follow Agatha. “Sooooo much worse—”
    Then he saw her, crouched in the final row of headstones, only a short distance from her house. Tedros skidded into dirt beside her. “They’re coming, Agatha!”
    â€œSophie’s mother. That’s what connected them,” Agatha said, gripping a tablet gravestone knifing out of the ground,engraved with the words “ Loving Wife and Mother. ” Two smaller dirt-caked graves, one lighter, one darker, flanked it on either side like wings. “Before Sophie, she couldn’t have a child. Two boys, both born dead.”
    She ran her hand over the lighter of the two boys’ graves, pulling away the grime. Tedros’ eyes bulged as Agatha’s fingers cleared the headstone, revealing a small black swan carved into the unmarked grave. Tedros tore away the moss from the darker grave, revealing a white swan set in the stone. He and Agatha both turned to the larger grave in the middle, towering between the two swans.
    â€œWhen she couldn’t have a child, Sophie’s mother went to see mine as a patient. That’s what Sophie told me,” Agatha pressed. “Somehow it’s all connected. Sophie’s mother . . . my mother being a witch . . . the debt she owed Stefan . . . I don’t know how it’s connected, but it has to be—”
    Firelight