Not card faces, Sophie realized. Actual faces. For each of the cards had a prisoner painted on it: Dot . . . Bogden . . . Nicola . . . the King of Bloodbrook . . .
“Each of you takes a turn picking a card,” the Snake said to Sophie and Agatha. “Whoever you pick, their door drops.”
The crowd drew a breath, cocking towards the horizon like panicked chickens. Surely Tedros would stop this. Surely he would slay this villain the way King Arthur had slain many before. . . .
“Why are you doing this?” Agatha rasped.
The Snake’s eyes glittered like gems. “Ask my father.”
He held out the deck. “Pick.”
Sophie looked at Agatha, paralyzed.
Agatha slackened, her cheeks bright red.
Then she picked the first card, the back of it painted with the Snake’s crest.
Her hands shook as she turned the card over.
The face on it was Kiko’s.
The door under Kiko’s feet dropped open but Agatha was already diving, snagging her friend by the legs and pulling her back onto the platform so she couldn’t fall through.
It happened so fast that the crowd didn’t make a sound.
Agatha stayed on her knees, hugging Kiko’s calves with all of her strength, as Kiko hung from the noose at an angle. If Agatha let her go, her friend would drop and break her neck. Which meant both of them were trapped in their position.
“Don’t leave me,” Sophie heard Kiko whimper.
“I won’t,” Agatha assured.
“Bad things happen when you leave me,” Kiko said. “Bad things happen to all of us.”
“Your turn,” a voice said.
Sophie looked up to see the Snake glaring at her.
He held out the deck of cards.
There was a flatness in his eyes, a ruthless insistence on the rules of the game as if he knew precisely how it would end.
“Pick,” he said.
Sophie did.
The card was Nicola’s.
Across the platform, Nicola’s trapdoor opened.
In a flash, Sophie sprinted across the stage and tackled the first year just before she fell through, shoving her to the side of the opening and holding her by the ankles.
Sophie looked up and saw Nicola goggling at her. Agatha too.
“Guess we’re friends now,” Sophie said to Nicola.
With no sign of Tedros, the crowd revolted, battering the walls with renewed force—
Suddenly, thirty young pirates broke through the crowd, seizing the hardest protestors from behind, swords to their necks. The rest of the mob went quiet with fear.
“It seems we have a dilemma . . . ,” the Snake continued, watching the two girls in opposite corners, clutching their friends. “Because someone has to pick next.”
Neither girl budged.
The terrified crowd glanced between them and the Snake.
“Ah, I see,” the Snake said. “It seems you’re both a bit tied up. Well, then.”
He held out the deck in his open palm.
“I’ll pick.”
He turned the first card over.
Hort.
Sophie and Agatha whirled to each other. Either one of them had to let go of their friend or Hort would hang.
“Go!” Nicola said to Sophie.
“No! Stay!” Hort cried.
Tears fogged Sophie’s eyes. She couldn’t watch Hort die—
His trapdoor opened. The noose around his neck yanked tight.
Sophie and Nicola screamed—
Instantly, the rest of the prisoners in the row kicked their legs out, using the chain cuffed across them to swing like a five-headed dragon: Hester, Anadil, Willam, Bogden, and finally Dot, who thrust her legs and caught Hort’s backside with her shins before he fell through the door. With every ounce of strength, she held him up by the tailbone, their bodies planked at right angles, like trapeze performers midflight.
Sophie buckled in relief, briefly losing grip of Nicola but catching her just in time.
Hort was dripping sweat, rope burns around his neck.
“Thanks, Dot,” he croaked.
“Don’t thank me, thank Uncle Miyazaki,” Dot panted, smiling over at Nicola. She looked back at Hort. “Though I’ll take a date too if you’re offering.”
Hort coughed.
The Snake watched all of this, his body still, his green mask obscuring any reaction, except for his winnowing blue eyes.
“So much for the rules of the game,” he said.
With a flourish, he flung the cards into the air, dozens of painted faces glinting in green glow as they fluttered to the stage.
Sophie locked eyes with Agatha, their hearts stopped.
Every trapdoor started to magically open, all the prisoners about to drop through.
The crowd reeled, preparing for mass carnage—
Suddenly fire-tipped arrows bombed down from the sky, just missing the Snake and igniting the wooden platform.
The Snake swiveled, taken by surprise, the gallows doors still half-open.
In the distance, the mob parted a path as two figures in buckskin tunics blazed through, astride a red-spotted deer: a blond shooting arrows from a bow as someone behind, dark-skinned with long brown hair, lit arrows on fire with her purple fingerglow. They were being chased by at least fifty bellowing pirates with swords and spears, trying to catch up with the sprinting deer. Sophie recognized the riders at once—
“Beatrix and Reena,” Sophie marveled.
And the deer was . . .
“Millicent,” Agatha realized.
More of Beatrix’s arrows rained over the wall, aimed at the Snake—
He split into a thousand squealing scims, dispersing like leeches to elude them.
Reenergized, the crowd came to Beatrix’s and Reena’s defense, rushing headlong at the pirates, while onstage flames from the missed arrows started to spread.
Agatha whirled to Sophie. “Fire kills the scims! Just like fire killed Rafal’s zombies!”
She grabbed one of Beatrix’s missed arrows and lit Kiko’s noose, searing away the shrieking eel and setting her classmate free.
Kiko blubbered: “I thought I was going to die and then I would see my beautiful Tristan up there in heaven and I would say—”
“Kiko!” Agatha said, glaring at all the prisoners still hanging.
“Good point,” said Kiko.
Like a rabbit, Kiko dashed across the blazing stage, grabbing arrows out of the wood and lighting the scaly nooses on fire along with the chains between prisoners, starting with Nicola’s.
“I have no idea who you are, but Sophie doesn’t help anyone unless they’re important,” Kiko cheeped, before burning through Nicola’s cuffs, which let Sophie drop the first year to the stage, grab one of Kiko’s arrows, and start helping the others in the row, while Agatha took the second and third rows.
“Hurry, Sophie!” Agatha cried, as she freed the young princes of Jaunt Jolie. “The fire is spreading!”
Sophie ran to Hort first. But out of the side of her eye, she glimpsed Beatrix and Reena outside the iced walls, cornered by the pair of young pirates they’d seen kicking cages in Castle Jolie. The boys had stripped the Evergirls of their bows and arrows and were aiming the arrows back at their heads. Beatrix and Reena leapt off Millicent and hewed together, confronting the pirates with lit fingers. . . .
“Man-wolf. Now,” Sophie ordered Hort as she freed him.
“Aye-aye, Captain,” Hort said, lighting his fingerglow and bursting out of his breeches a mighty, hairy beast, before scaling the Camelot flagpole in a single bound and bellyflopping onto the pirates with a howl.
As Kiko, Nicola, and the other freed prisoners helped burn away more nooses, Sophie felt Agatha seize her from behind.
“Whole stage will collapse!” Agatha said, covering her mouth from the smoke. “We have to get everyone out of here!”
Sophie squinted up at the high walls that sealed them into the Four Point,
while the war against the pirates raged beyond them. “But how can we get them over that?”
“Leave it to me,” Hester grunted, prying between the girls, fingerglow lit. The tattooed demon on her neck engorged with blood, turning redder, redder, until it tore out of its chains and flew off her skin, swelling to three-dimensional life. Mumbling hissy gibberish, it began snatching prisoners from the stage, three at a time, starting with kings and queens, and ferrying them over the walls and to the ground beyond, where throngs of citizens shielded them and spirited them back towards their kingdoms.
“Move faster, Hester!” Agatha cried as the witch directed the demon with her glow from inside the Four Point. “Stage is burning up!”
“And I’m on the stage so believe me when I say I’m moving as fast as I can!” Hester berated.
Eyes watering from the smoke, Sophie weaved around the fires, intending to free Mona and Brone next—
But now she saw Hort’s man-wolf slammed up against the glass wall in front of her by tattooed Thiago, who’d pinned the tip of his pirate blade against Hort’s hairy belly.
“Knew I’d seen yer grubby lil’ face before,” Thiago seethed. “Scourie’s son. Bragged ye’d be the first man-wolf pirate at Hook’s Parley years ago. Took a blood oath to help us fight the Lost Boys. Instead ye turn round and kill Hook’s captain like yer Pan’s stooge. Ye killed my father.” He dug his blade into Hort’s stomach, drawing drops of blood. “Shoulda bragged ye’d be the first fink.”
“I did what any true man would have, unlike your lot,” Hort growled in pain. “You kill for money. You follow a leader with no soul. You’re the real Lost Boys.”
Thiago cut him deeper. “Bleats a pirate who killed one of ’is own.”
“What I killed wasn’t your father,” Hort insisted.
“Tell yerself all the lies ye want,” Thiago snarled. “But this I know fer sure. The thing I’m about to kill is you.”
He gripped the sword hilt to run Hort through, but Hort grabbed the blade by the tip and muscled it away from his stomach, the steel slicing into his hand. Before Thiago could react, Hort slapped him across the head as hard as he could with his big, hairy palm. The pirate wheeled wildly, swinging his sword and biting it into Hort’s bicep, spattering the frozen wall with blood and obscuring Sophie’s view.
Spinning around, Sophie saw Hester’s demon had rescued nearly all the prisoners from the stage, with only her, Agatha, Hester, Anadil, and Dot left. On the battlefield, Willam, Bogden, Beatrix, Reena, and Nicola were fighting pirates with weapons flung at them by fleeing citizens—
Hester’s demon swooped to rescue Sophie, his beady eyes flashing: “Lookie missie witchie fishie!”
“No, take the witches!” Sophie said, ducking his grab. “You three! Go help Hort!”
The witches gaped at Sophie, then at Agatha, as if they didn’t trust Sophie could possibly be deferring her own rescue.
“Go!” Agatha cried.
Immediately the three witches hooked on to the demon’s claws and flew up and over the walls. As he streaked down, Hester’s demon attacked Thiago, blasting red firebolts from the demon’s mouth, while Anadil’s rats grew twenty feet tall and crashed into the fray, rampaging through pirates as the three witches rode on the rats’ backs, shooting stun spells right and left.
Onstage, Sophie and Agatha were the only two left behind, pushed to the edge by the fires.
“Aggie, we don’t have time for the demon to come back,” Sophie said. “It’s spreading too fast!”
“Maybe this’ll work,” said Agatha, thrusting her glowing fingertip into the air. Heavy rain started falling over the Four Point, dousing the blaze. It was one of Agatha’s trusty spells from her first year at school—
Then, all of a sudden, the fires seemed to grow stronger in the rain . . . the orange flames turning a glowing emerald green. . . .
Agatha’s eyes bulged. “What in the—”
But now there was something falling towards them, straight out of the sky: a deer bounding over the wall, hooftip glowing red, and landing on the stage, which half crumbled like a giant sinkhole, before the deer recovered, lurching for the two girls.
“Come on! Get on my back!” Millicent said.
Sophie and Agatha leapt onto her, just as the gallows imploded in the green flames. Millicent sprinted for the walls, her legs tensing with power, about to magically propel over the barrier—
Something slammed into Sophie and Agatha like harpoons, bashing them off the deer’s back and pinning them into opposing walls.
Scims.
They glued down the girls’ wrists and legs and spread them against the inside of the glass, like mice caught in a trap.
Petrified, Sophie swung her head towards Agatha, the two of them struggling against the scaly black eels.
At the center of the stage, the Snake reformed again, rising out of the green bonfire like a phoenix.
Millicent charged for him, hurdling over the holes in the stage.
The Snake calmly peeled one of the scims off his chest, which rolled up in his palm like a tiny tube. Instantly it turned to shiny black steel, razor sharp at both ends.
Millicent leapt, hooves aimed at his chest, poised to crush him—
The Snake hurled the scim at her, spearing the deer in the heart. She fell down dead and burnt up in the green flames.
Outside the walls, the students saw Millicent fall and stopped fighting, paralyzed in horror. The pirates seized them at once, knives and swords to their throats. With a pirate’s dagger to her own neck, Hester stalled her demon, as did Anadil her rats, afraid to cost any more friends their lives. Hort gnashed his teeth, feeling Thiago’s sword point on his spine, poised to slice him open. Nicola, Bogden, Dot, and Willam were all trapped by pirates, along with the rest of the questing Evers and Nevers.
Onstage, the Snake was circled in green flames like a ringmaster. His eyes shifted between Sophie and Agatha, pressed against the glass on either side of him, as if he was deciding which girl to handle first.
Instead, he pulled two scims off his body, one in each hand, letting them morph into steel black blades.
Slowly he raised both arms, extended outwards, each blade aimed at a girl’s heart.
This was how I died, Sophie thought. Rafal had killed her with a shot to the heart before Agatha had woken her with true love’s kiss.
But this time there would be no kiss.
Because her true love was about to die with her.
The Snake gripped the blades and coiled to throw—
A roar exploded through the land.
So full and deep it shook the earth.
The Snake stilled, the green flames cooling around him.
Sophie and Agatha gaped at each other.
Again came the roar, this time louder than before, shattering the iced wall between the two girls. Jagged shards rained over the Snake, who turned away, shielding himself.
As he looked back up, so did Sophie, craning her head to see through the wall.
Someone was coming towards the stage.
Galloping through the crowd on a white horse, his body tall and muscular, in a dark blue jacket with a brilliant gold pattern, dark blue riding pants, and gold-lined boots.
He was wearing a mask.
A mask of gold that glimmered in the moonlight and shrouded his face.
The mask of a Lion.
As his horse accelerated towards the stage, the lion-masked figure rose, feet sturdy in the stirrups, and climbed to stand on the horse’s back, the reins in his hands. Then he lowered into a crouch, balanced on the horse’s hide as if surfing a wave, and just as the horse started to buck him off, he jumped from the animal, sailing through the air like a ball from a cannon, through the busted ice wall, and onto the gallows stage. As he stood to full height, he thrust out his finger like a wand, lighting the tip up with hot gold glow and illuminating the stage.
Sophie saw Agatha’s eyes widen.
Only one person they knew had
that glow.
A glow that matched his true love’s.
Tedros.
The crowd exploded with cheers.
The Lion had come.
Across the stage, Sophie saw Agatha stop resisting her scims. All this time, Agatha had tried to fight Tedros’ battles on his behalf, but now he’d come to wrest back control of his quest from his princess. Sophie could see Agatha sigh with exhaustion and relief, as if at last, her fairy tale with Tedros was back on track, their Ever After salvaged from the ashes. Slowly Agatha looked up and met the Lion’s aqua-blue eyes. Camelot’s princess smiled, even though she was squashed against a wall like a fly in a spider’s web . . . even though there was a deadly villain still on the stage. . . .
Sophie knew that smile.
It was the smile of love.
The Lion and the Snake faced off on a charred heap of ruins, all that remained of the stage. They circled each other inside a ring of dying green flames.
“This is Camelot’s land,” said the Lion in his low, strapping voice.
“To which I have a rightful claim,” the Snake returned, chilly and sure.
His opponent peered through his lion mask. “And what gives you that right?”
“My birth,” said the Snake, casting shadows in the green light. “I am the true heir to Camelot’s throne. I am King Arthur’s eldest son.”
This last word snapped over the quiet crowd like a whip-crack.
Sophie’s stomach dropped.
Son.
Son?
She locked eyes with Agatha, both of them stupefied.
Even the pirates looked stunned, still clutching their prisoners.
But the Lion held his ground. “There is no son but Tedros of Camelot. The one true king.”
“And yet Excalibur remains in a stone,” the Snake said. “Until I free it, that is, and prove the throne is mine.”
“You will never touch Excalibur as long as I’m alive,” the Lion vowed.
The Snake’s eyes sparkled. “So it is written. So it is done.”
He tore scims off his body, which turned to steel in his hands, before hurling them at the Lion’s chest. The Lion deflected them with gold rays from his finger, then scooped up a handful of jagged ice from the shattered walls and whizzed it at the Snake. The shards shot into his flank, shearing away scims and embedding in youthful, snow-white skin beneath that started oozing blood. The Snake stumbled back, surprised, and crashed through a hole in the stage.
Quests for Glory Page 26