The School for Good and Evil #2: A World without Princes by Soman Chainani Read Free Book Online

Scuffling sounds came from beneath her feet.
    Through dead leaves, she saw pupils open and shut in the undergrowth, yellow and green, glinting in one place, reappearing in another. Agatha shrank against the tree, trying not to blink. Little by little, her eyes adjusted, just in time to see eight slinky shadows unfurl from the ground in a circle around her, like coiling trails of smoke—
    Snakes.
    Only they were thicker than snakes, black as ash, with flattened heads and needle-sharp barbs through everyscale. They rose higher, higher around Agatha, angling towards her with long, overlapping hisses, opening their full-fanged jaws wide—
    All at once, they spat.
    Gobs of mucus pinned Agatha to the tree, and she dropped the dagger. She tried to wrench free, but sour film smacked into her mouth and eyes so all she could see was a ring of blurry, spiny silhouettes. They all aimed at different parts of her body, then curled their trunks around her, barbs piercing into her skin. Flailing silently, Agatha saw a last one, bigger than the rest, lower from a branch and loop its cold, black tail around her neck. As its barbs pricked her throat, she gasped for more breath, but the monster’s head was slithering up her face now. It pressed its fat nose against the film over her cheeks, glaring at her with thin, acid-green pupils . . . and started to squeeze. Agatha choked and closed her eyes—
    She felt no hurt, only her soul searching for a memory. . . . She was sitting on a lakeshore, head on someone’s shoulder. Arm in arm, they held each other, sun drenching their skin, breaths quietly matched. Agatha listened to the silence of happiness, Ever After in a single moment. . . . Then sharp, stabbing pain flooded her body and she knew the end had come. Gripping the arm beside her, Agatha gazed into their lake’s reflection, needing to see her happy ending’s face, one last time—
    It wasn’t Sophie’s.
    Light speared the darkness. The snakes recoiled withscreams and skittered back into dead leaves.
    Agatha opened her eyes. Dazed, she looked around for the source of light. Through the veil of goo, she saw it was her fingertip, burning gold for the first time since the wedding. She was at once relieved and sickened. Both times it’d happened thinking of him .
    Magic follows emotion , Yuba had warned. She’d lost control of both.
    This time, however, her finger didn’t dim. Agatha held it up, confused. She focused on her need to get off this tree, and suddenly the glow pulsed brighter, as if waiting for instructions. Agatha’s heart pumped faster. She’d crossed into the fairy-tale world. Her magic was back.
    Bursting with pain and stuck to a tree, Agatha was hardly in shape to remember spells from school. But when her breaths settled, she managed a basic melt jinx, and the mucus rinsed away with the blood, leaving her black dress sticky and soaked. Still, she was alive somehow, and with a wretched groan, Agatha picked up Radley’s dagger and pried off the soggy bark.
    Finger aglow, she swept it like a torch through knotted trees, searching for a path, like Yuba had taught them. Like all the group leaders at the School for Good and Evil, the old gnome had used the Blue Forest, a lush, tranquil training ground meant to mimic the Endless Woods and prepare students for what they’d face. Agatha squeezed between two rotted tree trunks, trying to ignore theburning cuts all over her body. Now the Blue Forest seemed like the School Master’s cruel joke.
    Agatha wrenched between more webbed trees towards a gap in the thicket, hoping it’d be the path. She didn’t dare call Sophie’s name and signal the assassins she was on their trail.
    With each step, Agatha felt a growing sense of doom. She’d been in the Endless Woods twice before, but this time it was different. There was no school to save her. There was no Tedros.
    Her fingerglow pulsed