The School Years Complete Collection. Soman Chainani

please, if they like you, they’ll try to mate with me. Animals worship princesses,” said Sophie, sashaying towards the birds—

      The stymphs unleashed a war cry and charged.

      “Helllllp!” Sophie threw the egg to Agatha, but the stymphs still chased Sophie, who ran in circles like a lunatic, five stymphs high stepping behind her in a moronic maypole parade until everyone forgot who was after who and the birds knocked into each other dizzily.

      “See? I outsmarted them,” Sophie beamed.

      A stymph bit her bottom. “Ayyyiiieee!” Sophie ran for the nearest tree. Only she couldn’t climb trees, so she hurled mashed gooseberries at the bird’s eye, but the bird had no eye, so the berries went right through bony socket and plopped to the ground.

      Agatha watched stone-faced.

      “Aggie, it’s coming!”

      The stymph charged for Sophie, only to stop short and find Agatha perched on its back.

      “Get on, you dimwit!” she shouted at Sophie.

      “Without a saddle?” Sophie scoffed. “It’ll leave chafe marks.”

      The stymph lunged for her—Agatha walloped its head and slung Sophie by the waist onto the bird’s spine.

      “Hang on tight!” Agatha yelled as the bird thrashed up to flight, somersaulting over the bay to get the girls off its back. Four more stymphs exploded from blue trees in murderous pursuit; Agatha kicked at the bird’s thighbones, Sophie holding on to her for dear life—“This is the worst plan evveerrr!” Hearing squawks and screams, the fairy and wolf guards squinted into the sky, only to see the intruders vanish into fog.

      “There’s the tower!” Agatha cried, spotting the silver spire through the mist. A wolf’s arrow whizzed between the stymph’s ribs, almost slicing Sophie in half. Fairies stormed out of the fog, shooting golden webs from their mouths, and the stymph dove to avoid them, spinning to elude a new hail of wolf arrows. This time neither girl could hold on and tumbled off its back.

      “Noooo!” screamed Agatha—

      Sophie caught the last bone of the stymph’s tail. Agatha caught the last bit of Sophie’s glass shoe—“We’re going to die!” Sophie howled.

      “Just hold on!” bellowed Agatha.

      “My hands are sweaty!”

      “We’re going to die!”

      The stymph zoomed for the tower wall. But just as it whipped its tail to smash them, Agatha saw a window glint through fog.

      “Now!” screamed Agatha. This time Sophie listened.

      Golden nets shot from every direction and the stymph let out a helpless screech. But as fairies watched it plunge to its death, they looked at each other curiously.

      There were no riders on its back.

      The crash landing through the window left Sophie’s entire right side bruised and Agatha’s wrist gashed. But pain meant they were still alive. Pain meant they still had hope for getting home. With a chorus of groans, they staggered to their feet. Then Sophie saw the worst of the damage.

      “My shoe!” She held up her glass heel, snapped to a serrated stump. “They were one of a kind,” she mourned. Agatha ignored her and limped ahead into the murky gray chamber, barely lit by the window’s dawn glow.

      “Hello?” Agatha called. Echoes died unanswered.

      The girls inched farther into the shadowy room. Stone bookcases cloaked gray brick walls, packed top to bottom with colorful bindings. Sophie dusted off a shelf and read the elegant silver letters on the wooden spines: Rapunzel, The Singing Bone, Thumbelina, The Frog King, Cap O’Rushes, The Six Swans … All the stories the children of Gavaldon used to drink up. She looked over at Agatha, who had made the same discovery across the room. They were standing in a library of every fairy tale ever told.

      Agatha opened up Beauty and the Beast to find it written in the same elegant script as the spine, illustrated with vivid paintings like the ones in the foyers of both schools. Then she opened up The Red Shoes, Donkeyskin, and The Snow Queen and found that they too were written in the same regal hand.

      “Aggie?”

      Agatha followed Sophie’s gaze to the darkest part of the room. Through the shadows, she could make out a white stone table pressed against the wall. There was something looming over it: a long, thin dagger dangling magically in midair.

      Agatha ran her fingers along the cold, smooth surface of the table and thought of all the blank headstones behind her house, waiting for bodies. Sophie’s eyes fixed on the hovering knife, eerily still a few feet above the white slab.

      That’s when she saw it wasn’t a knife at all.

      “It’s a pen,” she said softly.

      It was made of pure steel and shaped like a knitting needle, lethally sharp at both ends. One side of the pen was engraved with a deep, flowing script that ran unbroken from tip to tip.

      Suddenly the pen caught a sliver of sunlight and scattered blinding gold rays in every direction. Agatha turned from the glare. When she turned back, Sophie was climbing onto the table.

      “Sophie, no!”

      Sophie walked towards the pen, eyes wide, body rigid. The world dissipated in a blur of gray around her. All that remained was the shimmering, spindle-sharp pen, strange words reflecting in her glazed eyes. Somewhere inside, she knew what they meant. She reached for the tip.

      “Don’t!” Agatha cried.

      Sophie’s skin kissed ice-cold steel, blood about to pierce through—

      Agatha tackled her and both girls crashed to the table. Sophie broke from her trance and peered at Agatha suspiciously.

      “I’m on a table. With you.”

      “You were about to touch it!” Agatha said.

      “Huh? Why would I touch a—”

      Her eyes drifted up to the pen, which was no longer still. It dangled an inch from their faces, pointing between them with its deadly sharp tip as if weighing who to kill first.

      “Don’t move,” Agatha said between clenched teeth.

      The pen seared hot red.

      “Move!” she cried.

      The pen plunged and both girls rolled off the table, only to see the razor-sharp nib lurch to a stop just before it hit stone. A puff of black smoke and a book suddenly appeared on the table beneath it, bound with cherry-red wood. The pen flipped the cover open to the first blank page and began to write:

      “Once upon a time, there were two girls.”

      The same elegant script as all the others. A brand-new fairy tale.

      Sophie and Agatha gaped from the floor, terrified.

      “Now that’s odd,” said a gentle voice.

      The girls whipped around again. No one there.

      “Students at my school train and toil for four years, venture into the Woods, seek their Nemeses, fight vicious battles … all just for the hope the Storian might tell their story.”

      The girls spun around. No one in the room at all. But then they saw their shadows merge on the wall, into the crooked shadow that kidnapped them. The girls turned slowly.

      “And here it starts one for two first-year, unskilled, untrained, clumsy intruders,” said the School Master.

      He wore silver robes that billowed over his hunched, slender frame, hiding his hands and feet. A rusted crown sat off center on his head of thick,