Free The Last Ever After by Soman Chainani

darkness. Princess Uma whistled a cheery thank-you and her animal army echoed with singsong growls. Soon their shadows faded and the wolf and giant were gone.
    Agatha whirled to Princess Uma, a teacher at the School for Good who she’d once mocked as helpless and passive and weak, but who had just saved her and Tedros’ lives. “I thought the princes killed you!” Agatha cried. “Hester said Dean Sader left you to die in the Woods. We all thought you were dead—”
    â€œA professor of Animal Communication unable to survive in the Woods?” Princess Uma swished her finger and turned her black robes to pink, a silver swan crest stitched over the heart. “Even your mother had more faith in me and we’ve never met.”
    â€œYou . . . you know my mother?” Agatha asked. Knew , a voice corrected. Agatha battled a fresh wave of nausea. She couldn’t bring herself to say it.
    â€œOnly through her messages to the League,” Uma replied.
    â€œLeague? What League?” Tedros broke in.
    â€œThe League of Thirteen, of course,” said Uma, unhelpfully. “Her last message to us made three things very clear:That we protect your lives. That we get you to Sophie. And that we’d find you right here .”
    Tedros and Agatha followed their teacher’s eyes down to the empty grave that once held Sophie’s mother. . . . Only the headstone was different now. Instead of a tall rectangle, it was a murky oval, with a long crack down the middle, carved with thick black letters.

    â€œVanessa was Sophie’s mother. ‘Butterfly,’ I think the name means,” remembered Tedros, studying the stone. “Sophie told me one night when she was Filip.”
    â€œSophie never told me her mother’s name,” Agatha said, hurt.
    â€œPerhaps 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—”
    â€œUnless you’re not in the same graveyard at all,” Princess Uma said behind them.
    Agatha and Tedros spun to see their teacher shoot a boltof 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.
    â€œWe’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 . . .
    â€œHold on. I’ve been here before,” said Tedros, searching the landscape.
    â€œEach Forest Group makes a trip first year to scavenge meerworms. No doubt Yuba accompanied you,” Princess Uma replied.
    â€œThe Garden of Good and Evil,” said