The School for Good and Evil Free Read

  Epigraph

IN THE FOREST Earliest

A Schoolhouse FOR Practiced AND EVIL

TWO TOWERS Like TWIN HEADS

ONE FOR THE PURE

I FOR THE WICKED

TRY TO ESCAPE Y'all'LL Ever Neglect

THE ONLY WAY OUT IS

THROUGH A FAIRY TALE

Contents

Epigraph

Map

ane - The Princess & The Witch

2 - The Art of Kidnapping

3 - The Neat Mistake

4 - The Three Witches of Room 66

5 - Boys Ruin Everything

6 - Definitely Evil

7 - Grand Loftier Witch Ultimate

viii - Wish Fish

9 - The 100% Talent Bear witness

10 - Bad Grouping

eleven - The Schoolhouse Master's Riddle

12 - Dead Ends

thirteen - Doom Room

14 - The Crypt Keeper'southward Solution

15 - Choose Your Coffin

16 - Cupid Goes Rogue

17 - The Empress's New Clothes

eighteen - The Roach and the Trick

19 - I Have a Prince

20 - Secrets and Lies

21 - Trial past Tale

22 - Nemesis Dreams

23 - Magic in the Mirror

24 - Hope in the Toilet

25 - Symptoms

26 - The Circus of Talents

27 - Promises Unkept

28 - The Witch of Wood Beyond

29 - Beautiful Evil

xxx - Never After

About the Writer

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

one

The Princess & The Witch

Sophie had waited all her life to be kidnapped.

Merely tonight, all the other children of Gavaldon writhed in their beds. If the School Main took them, they'd never return. Never lead a full life. Never see their family again. Tonight these children dreamt of a ruby-red-eyed thief with the torso of a fauna, come to rip them from their sheets and stifle their screams.

Sophie dreamt of princes instead.

She had arrived at a castle ball thrown in her honor, only to find the hall filled with a hundred suitors and no other girls in sight. Here for the offset time were boys who deserved her, she thought as she walked the line. Hair shiny and thick, muscles taut through shirts, skin shine and tan, beautiful and attentive like princes should be. Only just every bit she came to one who seemed better than the rest, with brilliant blue eyes and ghostly white pilus, the 1 who felt like Happily Ever After . . . a hammer broke through the walls of the room and smashed the princes to shards.

Sophie'due south eyes opened to forenoon. The hammer was real. The princes were not.

"Father, if I don't sleep nine hours, my eyes look swollen."

"Everyone'due south prattling on that you're to exist taken this twelvemonth," her father said, nailing a misshapen bar over her bedroom window, now completely obscured by locks, spikes, and screws. "They tell me to shear your hair, muddy upward your face, every bit if I believe all this fairy-tale hogwash. Simply no one'southward getting in here this evening. That's for certain." He pounded a deafening crack equally exclamation.

Sophie rubbed her ears and frowned at her once lovely window, now something y'all'd run across in a witch'southward den. "Locks. Why didn't anyone retrieve of that before?"

"I don't know why they all think it's yous," he said, argent hair slicked with sweat. "If it'south goodness that School Master beau wants, he'll take Gunilda's girl."

Sophie tensed. "Belle?"

"Perfect kid that one is," he said. "Brings her father domicile-cooked lunches at the mill. Gives the leftovers to the poor hag in the square."

Sophie heard the edge in her male parent's voice. She had never once cooked a full meal for him, even after her mother died. Naturally she had good reason (the oil and smoke would clog her pores) simply she knew information technology was a sore point. This didn't mean her father had gone hungry. Instead, she offered him her ain favorite foods: mashed beets, broccoli stew, boiled asparagus, steamed spinach. He hadn't ballooned into a blimp similar Belle'south father, precisely because she hadn't brought him domicile-cooked lamb fricassees and cheese soufflés at the mill. As for the poor hag in the square, that old crone, despite claiming hunger day after twenty-four hours, was fat. And if Belle had annihilation to do with it, then she wasn't adept at all, but the worst kind of evil.

Sophie smiled back at her father. "Like you said, it's all hogwash." She swept out of bed and slammed the bath door.

She studied her face up in the mirror. The rude awakening had taken its toll. Her waist-long hair, the color of spun gold, didn't have its usual sheen. Her jade-green eyes looked faded, her luscious blood-red lips a touch dry. Even the glow of her flossy peach skin had dulled. But still a princess, she thought. Her father couldn't meet she was special, but her mother had. "Yous are as well beautiful for this world, Sophie," she said with her last breaths. Her mother had gone somewhere better and now so would she.

Tonight she would be taken into the woods. This evening she would begin a new life. This evening she would live out her fairy tale.

And now she needed to expect the office.

To begin, she rubbed fish eggs into her skin, which smelled of muddy feet but warded off spots. Then she massaged in pumpkin puree, rinsed with caprine animal'due south milk, and soaked her face in a mask of melon and turtle egg yolk. As she waited for the mask to dry, Sophie flipped through a storybook and sipped on cucumber juice to keep her skin dewy soft. She skipped to her favorite part of the story, where the wicked hag is rolled down a hill in a nail-spiked barrel, until all that remains is her bracelet made of little boys' bones. Gazing at the gruesome bracelet, Sophie felt her thoughts drift to cucumbers. Suppose there were no cucumbers in the wood? Suppose other princesses had depleted the supply? No cucumbers! She'd shrivel, she'd wither, she'd—

Stale melon flakes fell to the page. She turned to the mirror and saw her brow creased in worry. Offset ruined sleep and at present wrinkles. At this rate she'd be a hag past afternoon. She relaxed her face and banished thoughts of vegetables.

Every bit for the rest of Sophie's beauty routine, it could fill up a dozen storybooks (suffice it to say it included goose feathers, pickled potatoes, equus caballus hooves, cream of cashews, and a vial of cow's blood). Two hours of rigorous grooming subsequently, she stepped from the house in a informal pink dress, sparkling glass heels, and hair in an impeccable braid. She had 1 last mean solar day before the School Master's arrival and planned to use each and every minute to remind him why she, and non Belle or Tabitha or Sabrina or whatever other impostor, should exist kidnapped.

Sophie's best friend lived in a cemetery. Given her loathing of things grim, greyness, and poorly lit, one would expect Sophie to host visits at her cottage or detect a new best friend. Just instead, she had climbed to the house atop Graves Hill every 24-hour interval this calendar week, careful to maintain a grin on her face, since that was the indicate of a practiced deed after all.

To get there, she had to walk nearly a mile from the bright lakeside cottages, with greenish eaves and sun-drenched turrets, towards the gloomy edges of the forest. Sounds of hammering echoed through cottage lanes every bit she passed fathers boarding up doors, mothers stuffing scarecrows, boys and girls hunched on porches, noses cached in storybooks. The last sight wasn't unusual, for children in Gavaldon did piffling also read their fairy tales. Simply today Sophie noticed their eyes, wild, frenzied, scouring each page every bit if their lives depended on it. Four years ago, she had seen the same desperation to avert the expletive, but it wasn't her turn then. The Schoolhouse Master took merely those by their twelfth year, those who could no longer disguise as children.

Now her turn had come.

As she slogged up Graves Hil

fifty, picnic handbasket in hand, Sophie felt her thighs burn. Had these climbs thickened her legs? All the princesses in storybooks had the same perfect proportions; thick thighs were as unlikely as a hooked nose or big feet. Feeling anxious, Sophie distracted herself by counting her good deeds from the day before. Commencement, she had fed the lake'southward geese a blend of lentils and leeks (a natural laxative to offset cheese thrown by oafish children). And then she had donated homemade lemonwood confront wash to the boondocks orphanage (for, as she insisted to the befuddled benefactor, "Proper skin care is the greatest deed of all."). Finally she had put up a mirror in the church toilet, and then people could return to the pews looking their all-time. Was this enough? Did these compete with baking homemade pies and feeding homeless hags? Her thoughts shifted nervously to cucumbers. Mayhap she could sneak a private supply into the forest. She still had plenty of time to pack before nightfall. Just weren't cucumbers heavy? Would the school ship footmen? Perhaps she should juice them before she—

"Where you going?"

Sophie turned. Radley smiled at her with buckteeth and anemically cherry-red hair. He lived nowhere well-nigh Graves Hill but made it a habit to stalk her all hours of the twenty-four hour period.

"To come across a friend," said Sophie.

"Why are you friends with the witch?" said Radley.

"She's not a witch."

"She has no friends and she's queer. That makes her a witch."

Sophie refrained from pointing out this made Radley a witch besides. Instead she smiled to remind him she'd already done her skilful deed by enduring his presence.

"The School Main will accept her for Evil School," he said. "Then you'll need a new friend."

"He takes two children," Sophie said, jaw tightening.

"He'll accept Belle for the other one. No ane'due south as good as Belle."

Sophie'southward grinning evaporated.

"Just I'll exist your new friend," said Radley.

"I'yard total on friends at the moment," Sophie snapped.

Radley turned the color of a raspberry. "Oh, right—I only thought—" He fled like a kicked canis familiaris.

Sophie watched his straggly hair recede down the hill. Oh, you lot've really washed it now, she idea. Months of skilful deeds and forced smiles and now she'd ruined it for runty Radley. Why not make his day? Why not simply answer, "I'd be honored to have you as my friend!" and requite the idiot a moment he'd relive for years? She knew it was the prudent thing to do, since the School Master must be judging her as closely as St. Nicholas the night before Christmas. Just she couldn't exercise it. She was cute, Radley was ugly. But a villain would delude him. Surely the School Chief would understand that.

Sophie pulled open the rusted cemetery gates and felt weeds scratch at her legs. Beyond the hilltop, moldy headstones forked haphazardly from dunes of dead leaves. Squeezing betwixt dark tombs and decomposable branches, Sophie kept careful count of the rows. She had never looked at her female parent's grave, fifty-fifty at the funeral, and she wouldn't beginning today. As she passed the sixth row, she glued her eyes to a weeping birch and reminded herself where she'd exist a day from now.

In the middle of the thickest batch of tombs stood ane Graves Hill. The house wasn't boarded upwardly or bolted close similar the cottages by the lake, but that didn't brand information technology any more than inviting. The steps leading upwards to the porch glowed mildew dark-green. Dead birches and vines wormed their way effectually dark woods, and the sharply angled roof, black and thin, loomed like a witch's hat.

Equally she climbed the moaning porch steps, Sophie tried to ignore the smell, a mix of garlic and wet cat, and averted her eyes from the headless birds sprinkled effectually, no doubt the victims of the latter.

She knocked on the door and prepared for a fight.

"Go abroad," came the gruff voice.

"That's no way to speak to your best friend," Sophie cooed.

"You're not my all-time friend."

"Who is, and then?" Sophie asked, wondering if Belle had somehow made her way to Graves Hill.

"None of your business organisation."

Sophie took a deep breath. She didn't want another Radley incident. "We had such a good fourth dimension yesterday, Agatha. I thought we'd do information technology over again."

"You dyed my pilus orange."

"But we stock-still it, didn't we?"

"You always examination your creams and potions on me just to see how they work."

"Isn't that what friends are for?" Sophie said. "To help each other?"

"I'll never be every bit pretty as you lot."

Sophie tried to find something nice to say. She took besides long and heard shoes stomp away.

"That doesn't mean nosotros can't be friends!" Sophie called.

A familiar cat, bald and wrinkled, growled at her across the porch. She whipped back to the door. "I brought biscuits!"

Shoesteps stopped. "Real ones or ones you made?"

Sophie shrank from the slinking cat. "Fluffy and buttery, simply similar you lot love!"

The true cat hissed.

"Agatha, let me in—"

"You'll say I smell."

"You don't aroma."

"And then why'd you say it concluding fourth dimension?"

"Considering yous smelled terminal time! Agatha, the cat's spitting—"

"Maybe information technology smells ulterior motives."

The true cat bared claws.

"Agatha, open the door!"

It pounced at her confront. Sophie screamed. A mitt stabbed between them and swatted the cat downward.

Sophie looked up.

"Reaper ran out of birds," said Agatha.

Her hideous dome of black hair looked like it was coated in oil. Her hulking black wearing apparel, shapeless as a murphy sack, couldn't hide freakishly stake skin and bulging bones. Ladybug eyes bulged from her sunken face.

"I thought we'd go for a walk," Sophie said.

Agatha leaned against the door. "I'm still trying to figure out why you're friends with me."

"Because you're sweet and funny," said Sophie.

"My mother says I'm bitter and grumpy," said Agatha. "So 1 of yous is lying."

She reached into Sophie's basket and pulled back the napkin to reveal dry out, butterless bran biscuits. Agatha gave Sophie a withering stare and retreated into the house.

"Then we tin can't take a walk?" Sophie asked.

Agatha started to close the door but then saw her crestfallen face up. Equally if Sophie had looked forward to their walk as much equally she had.

"A short one." Agatha trudged by her. "But if you say annihilation smug or stuck-up or shallow, I'll have Reaper follow you lot home."

Sophie ran after her. "Only then I tin can't talk!"

After 4 years, the dreaded eleventh nighttime of the eleventh month had arrived. In the tardily-day dominicus, the square had become a hive of preparation for the School Master'southward arrival. The men sharpened swords, set traps, and plotted the night'due south guard, while the women lined up the children and went to work. Handsome ones had their hair lopped off, teeth blackened, and clothes shredded to rags; homely ones were scrubbed, swathed in bright colors, and fitted with veils. Mothers begged the all-time-behaved children to curse or kick their sisters, the worst were bribed to pray in the church, while the remainder in line were led in choruses of the village anthem: "Blessed Are the Ordinary."

Fear swelled into a contagious fog. In a dim aisle, the butcher and blacksmith traded storybooks for clues to salvage their sons. Beneath the crooked clock belfry, 2 sisters listed fairy-tale villain names to hunt for patterns. A group of boys chained their bodies together, a few girls hid on the school roof, and a masked child jumped from bushes to spook his mother, earning a spanking on the spot. Even the homeless hag got into the deed, hopping before a meager burn, croaking, "Burn down the storybooks! Burn down them all!" But no one listened and no books were burned.

Agatha gawped at all this in atheism. "How can a whole town believe in fairy tales?"

"Considering they're real."

Agatha stopped walking. "You can't actually

believe the fable is truthful."

"Of course I do," said Sophie.

"That a School Primary kidnaps ii children, takes them to a schoolhouse where one learns Good, ane learns Evil, and they graduate into fairy tales?"

"Sounds well-nigh right."

"Tell me if yous see an oven."

"Why?"

"I want to put my caput in it. And what, pray tell, do they teach at this school exactly?"

"Well, in the Schoolhouse for Good, they teach boys and girls like me how to become heroes and princesses, how to dominion kingdoms justly, how to find Happily Ever After," Sophie said. "In the School for Evil, they teach y'all how to become wicked witches and humpbacked trolls, how to lay curses and cast evil spells."

"Evil spells?" Agatha cackled. "Who came up with this? A four-year-old?"

"Agatha, the proof's in the storybooks! Y'all can meet the missing children in the drawings! Jack, Rose, Rapunzel—they all got their own tales—"

"I don't meet annihilation, considering I don't read impaired storybooks."

"Then why is at that place a stack past your bed?" Sophie asked.

Agatha scowled. "Look, who'south to say the books are even real? Perchance it'southward the bookseller'due south prank. Maybe information technology's the Elders' way to keep children out of the forest. Whatever the caption, information technology isn't a School Master and it isn't evil spells."

"So who's kidnapping the children?"

"No ane. Every 4 years, ii idiots sneak into the woods, hoping to scare their parents, only to get lost or eaten by wolves, and there you take it, the legend continues."

"That's the stupidest explanation I've ever heard."

"I don't remember I'm the stupid 1 here," Agatha said.

In that location was something about existence called stupid that gear up Sophie's blood aflame.

"Y'all're just scared," she said.

"Right," Agatha laughed. "And why would I be scared?"

"Considering you know y'all're coming with me."

Agatha stopped laughing. And so her gaze moved past Sophie into the square. The villagers were staring at them like the solution to a mystery. Good in pink, Evil in black. The School Master'due south perfect pair.

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