Soman Chainani - The Last Ever After

The pen didn’t move.

The book stayed open.

Sophie’s heart stalled. “What happened?”

She followed Rafal’s eyes to the red-amber sun, which had darkened another shade. His face steeled to a deadly mask. “It seems our happy ending isn’t the one the pen doubts.”

ou don’t know the first thing about me,” Tedros spat, and clubbed his princess in the face with a musty pillow.

Agatha coughed and bashed him with a pillow right back, knocking him against her black bed frame, as feathers burst all over him. Reaper leapt onto Tedros’ face, trying to eat them. “I know too much about you is the problem,” Agatha snarled and grabbed at the poorly set bandage under her prince’s blue collar. Tedros shoved her away—Agatha tackled him back, before Tedros snatched Reaper and threw the cat at her head. Agatha ducked and Reaper sailed into the bathroom, flailing bald, wrinkled paws, before landing headfirst in the toilet. “If you knew me, you’d know I do things myself,” Tedros huffed, tightening his shirt laces.

“You threw my cat at me?” Agatha yelled, launching to her feet. “Because I’m trying to save you from gangrene?”

“That cat is Satan,” Tedros hissed, watching Reaper try to climb out of the toilet bowl and slide back down. “And if you knew me, you’d know I hate cats.”

“No doubt you like dogs—wet-mouthed, simple, and now that I think about it, a lot like you.”

Tedros glowered at her. “Getting personal over a bandage, are we?”

“Three weeks and the wound isn’t healing, Tedros,” Agatha pressed, scooping Reaper up and toweling him off with her sleeve. “It’ll fester if I don’t treat it—”

“Maybe they do it differently in graveyards, but where I come from, a bandage does the trick.”

“A bandage that looks like it was made by a two-year-old?” Agatha mocked.

“You try getting stabbed with your own sword as you’re vanishing,” said Tedros. “You’re lucky I’m even alive—one more second and he’d have run me through—”

“One more second and I’d have remembered what an ape you are and left you behind.”

“As if you could find a boy in this rat trap town better than me.”

“At this point, I’d trade you for a little space and quiet—”

“I’d trade you for a decent meal and a warm bath!” Tedros boomed.

Agatha glared at him, Reaper shivering in her arms. Finally Tedros exhaled, looking ashamed. He stripped off his shirt, spread out his arms, and sat on the bed. “Have at it, princess.”

For the next ten minutes, neither spoke as Agatha rinsed the four-inch gash across her prince’s chest with rose oil, witch hazel, and a dash of white peony from her mother’s cart of herbal potions. Thinking about how Tedros earned the wound, a hairbreadth from his heart, made Agatha’s stomach chill, and she forced her focus back to her task. She didn’t need to think about it—not when the screaming nightmares did the job of reminding her well enough. The School Master turning young … grinning at Tedros, bound to a tree … eyes flashing red as he stabbed … How Tedros didn’t have nightmares about their last moments at school, Agatha couldn’t grasp, but maybe that was the difference between a prince and a Reader. To a boy from the Woods, every day that didn’t end in death was a good one.

Agatha sprinkled boiled turmeric on his wound and Tedros clenched with low moans. “Told you it wasn’t healing,” she murmured.

Tedros gave her a lion’s growl and turned away. “Your mother hates me. That’s why she’s never home.”

“She’s busy looking for patients,” said Agatha, rubbing the yellow powder in. “Have to eat, don’t we?”

“Then why does she leave her medicine cart here?”

Agatha’s hand paused on Tedros’ chest. She’d been asking herself the same question about her mother’s long disappearances. Agatha rubbed harder and her prince winced. “Look, for the last time, she doesn’t hate you.”

“We’ve been trapped in this house for three weeks, Agatha. I eat all her food, am crap at cleaning, tend to clog the toilet, and she keeps seeing us fighting. If she doesn’t hate me, she will soon.”

“She just thinks you’re a complication to an already complicated situation.”

“Agatha, there is an entire town out there that will kill us on sight. There’s nothing complicated about it,” Tedros argued, sitting up on his knees. “Listen, I’ll be sixteen in a month. That means I take over Camelot as king from my father’s council. Sure, the kingdom’s broke, half the people are gone, and the place is in shambles, but we’ll change all that! That’s where we belong, Agatha. Why can’t we go back—”

“You know why, Tedros.”

“Right. Because you don’t want to leave your mother forever. Because I don’t have a family anymore and you do,” he said, looking away.

Agatha’s neck rashed red. “Tedros—”

“You don’t need to explain,” her prince said quietly. “If my father was still alive, I’d never leave him either.”

Agatha moved closer to him. He still didn’t look at her. “Tedros, if your kingdom needs you … you should go back,” she forced herself to say.

Her prince sighed. “I’d never leave you, Agatha.” He pulled at a thread in his dirty socks. “Couldn’t even if I wanted to. Only way back into the Woods is to make the wish together.”

Agatha went rigid. He’d thought about leaving her behind? She swallowed hard and grasped his arm. “I can’t go back, Tedros. Terrible things happen to us in the Woods,” she rasped anxiously. “We were lucky to escape—”

“You call this ‘lucky’?” He finally looked at her. “How long can we stay trapped in this house, Agatha? How long can we be prisoners?”

Agatha tensed. She knew he deserved answers, but she still didn’t have them. “It doesn’t matter where your Ever After is, does it? It just matters who you’re with,” she said, trying to sound hopeful. “Surely a teacher said that once.”

Tedros didn’t smile. Agatha lurched up and ripped a strip from a clean towel hanging on the bedpost. Tedros flopped back onto the bed, arms splayed cactus-style, and lapsed into silence, as Agatha bound his wound tight with the cloth.

“Sometimes I miss Filip,” he said softly.

Agatha looked at him, startled. Tedros turned pink and picked at his nails. “It’s stupid, given all he did to us—or she … or whatever. I should hate him—her, I mean. But boys get each other in a way girls can’t. Even if he wasn’t really a boy.” Tedros saw Agatha’s face. “Forget it.”

“You really think I don’t know you?” Agatha asked, hurt.

Tedros held his breath a moment, as if contemplating whether to be honest or to lie. “It’s just … those first two years, we were chasing the idea of being together, rather than actually being together. I got to know Filip better than I ever got to know you: staying up past curfew together, stealing lamb chops from the Supper Hall, or even just sitting on a rooftop and talking—you know, about our families or what we’re afraid of or what kind of pie we like. Doesn’t matter how it all turned out, really … He was my first real friend.” Tedros couldn’t look at Agatha. “You and I never even got to be friends. Don’t even have nicknames for each other. With you, it was always stolen moments and faith that love would somehow be enough. And now, here we are, three weeks cooped up in a house, no time alone or room to go for a walk or a hunt or a swim, and then sleeping, eating, breathing with the other person hovering around like a keeper, and still we feel like strangers. I’ve never felt so old.” He glimpsed Agatha’s face. “Oh come on, surely you feel it too. We’re like fusty married saps. Every tiny thing that bothers you about me must be magnified a thousand times.”