Chapter Text
Once upon a time, there were two sisters named Sophie and Agatha. This story starts in a village beyond the Woods. Where the other was fair and blonde the other was dark and ugly.
Said the mother of the girls, after an arduous labor, “This one is not to my liking.”
The doctor, a fair woman herself, looked at the mother holding the babies, and knew which one the mother was discussing. “The younger girl could be something special. Perhaps you will love her as much as you do your older one.”
The mother mused, staring at the younger baby. The older one had already been named Sophie. “What to name her?”
The doctor, as she finished checking over the mother, named the younger daughter Agatha. And so her name was, and the mother went to the family house with two babies in her arms.
The mother was a cruel woman, favoring Sophie over Agatha. Agatha had sought solace in the doctor, Callis, who had delivered her. They ate together, lived most of their lives together. When Agatha’s mother died, truly there was little grief on Agatha’s part. Simply, she never knew her mother the way Sophie did.
The village was close-minded, set in their ways. Every four years, children were kidnapped by an unseen shadow in the middle of the night, usually when they were past the age of twelve but under sixteen, and taken to some far off place never to be seen again. Sophie and Agatha had turned fourteen some months before. Four years beforehand, they had scoured the storybooks and cowered, but it wasn’t their turn then. The girls had grown up now: Sophie was a beautiful young woman, the spitting image of her mother; and Agatha was an awkward looking, lanky girl, with good shining in her heart.
Sophie and Agatha’s father, Stefan, was hammering planks over the window as Sophie slept, dreaming of Happily Ever After. Stefan had awoken her at seven o’clock in the morning, disrupting her beauty sleep.
Sophie blinked and told him good morning, then went to the bathroom to get ready. She washed her face with fish eggs, massaged in pumpkin puree, rinsed with goat milk, and made a mask of melon and turtle egg yolk. She then grabbed a book, The Goose Girl, and her favorite drink (cucumber juice) and read it while the mask dried. It was her very favorite, and she adored the end where the evil witch was rolled in a barrel of nails until she left only a bracelet of bones. Sophie gazed at the bracelet and her thought turned to her favorite food: cucumbers.
Sophie began to fret over whether The Woods would have a supply of cucumbers. Her thoughts sped up and before she knew it, she had wrinkled her brow and her mask had flaked off onto the page. Ruined sleep and ruined mask—at this rate, she’d look like that witch, too!
So she went and washed it off, continued her skin care routine (involving goose feathers, pickled potatoes, horse hooves, cream of cashews, and a vial of cow’s blood), braided her hair just so, and put on her favorite pink dress and glass heels. Then she grabbed a basket full of biscuits made the way she liked, and she went to retrieve Agatha from 1 Graves Hill.
The girl tried to calm herself: She wanted to show why she was the best choice to be picked by the School Master every minute until sundown. And as Sophie made her way through the village and to Graves Hill, she took in the sounds of hammering (from fathers boarding up windows), the stuffing of scarecrows (by mothers), and the frantic whispering of children scouring storybooks (looking to see if there was a pattern in victims). The children of Gavaldon devoured the storybooks regularly, but every four years, they peered over the books with a fine-toothed comb, cowering from the shadow that took two children. Sophie focused ahead and began to fret over her appearance. Could she be Good if she had thick thighs? And she distracted herself with a reminder of her good deeds yesterday: she fed Gavaldon’s geese a blend of lentils and leeks (natural laxatives to offset the cheese and bread thrown by the other children); donated lemonwood face wash to the orphanage, because proper skin care is the best deed of all; and put up a mirror in the church bathroom so one could return to the pews looking their best. Would that be enough, though? Could it compete with baking homemade pies and feeding homeless hags? And again her thoughts turned to cucumbers.
Then she was interrupted by a village boy who began to ask her where she was going, and endured his questions about her sister being a “witch.” The boy told her that another girl in the village, Belle, would go to the Good school; and he said that when Agatha would be taken to the Evil school, he could take her place as Sophie’s friend. And she snapped that she didn’t need anymore friends, and the boy fled.
Sophie sighed. Couldn’t she have been nicer? Beamed at him and said that they could indeed be friends—make his day, or full year, even? But Sophie shook her blonde head and soothed herself: She was good, and to lead the boy on would be the worst of Evil. And she continued on to meet Agatha, stepping through long fronds of grass.
As if this wasn’t enough, Sophie then had to walk beside her mother’s grave. As she glued her eyes to the birch, she reminded herself of what her mother said: “You can do great things, Sophie.”
Then she came to the run down house, carefully trekked over the mildewed steps, and knocked.
Her dear sister yanked the door open and sourly asked what Sophie was doing on her doorstep. Sophie said she simply wanted to clean the house with Agatha, as part of their chores. And the sisters went back and forth for a minute until Callis’ hairless cat threatened to lunge at Sophie. Agatha picked the cat up and scratched the creature, calming him down enough to let him slink away.
Sophie wheedled Agatha for another minute or two before the younger girl sighed and agreed to clean with Sophie. “But,” she warned her sister, “don’t say anything ill-mannered,” and trudged out of the cemetery. And the older girl rushed forward to follow Agatha out of the cemetery and to the outside world.
As the sisters walked, they took in the sight of men sharpening spears and knives, mothers bribing their misbehaved children to pray in church and their well behaved children to spit at their siblings, and one child scared his siblings with a mask. Agatha wondered how a whole village could work itself up like this.
“It’s because the fairy tales are real,” said Sophie with some disbelief.
“You can’t believe that the legend is true,” dismissed Agatha, folding her arms. “Two children will be picked by some figure and be carted off to a school where they learn how to be a prince or a princess, a witch or a warlock?”
Sophie affirmed this, and Agatha was still not convinced.
“The proof is in the storybooks, you know,” said the older girl, linking her arm with Agatha and tugging her sister forward. “Jack and Rose and Rapunzel—”
“I wouldn’t know,” said the younger girl. “I don't read them.”
Sophie denounced that as nonsense, pointing out the stack of books beside Agatha’s bed, and watched as Agatha's neck began to flush.
“Who is to say that it’s real?” asked Agatha. “Whatever the explanation, I doubt that it’s some man—who we don’t even know if he exists—taking children out of their beds.”
“And what’s your explanation?”
“Two children sneak into the woods to scare their parents and end up getting eaten by wolves, and thus the legend persists!”
“That’s a stupid explanation,” said Sophie critically.
“I don’t think I’m the stupid one here,” Agatha sniped.
The older sister began to flush, and she said, “You’re coming with me, you know.”
And the younger girl stopped her diatribe cold and looked out at the village. All the villagers were looking at her, and she knew what they saw: The ideal candidates for the School. Sophie soaked up their gazes, and Agatha wished to go back to normal.
But wishes are not easily granted in Gavaldon. The younger girl untangled herself from her sister and fled to the lake.
Sophie shook herself out of her reverie and momentary feeling of superiority to Belle and followed Agatha. The older girl sighed as Agatha flicked match after match onto the lake’s shores.
“It doesn’t mean anything, you know,” said Sophie, sitting down next to her younger sister.
“What? That the village thinks I’m odd?” Agatha asked morosely, flicking the third one and watching it burn out.
“Who would choose this silly place over a fairy tale?”
“Who wouldn’t?” asked Agatha. “I know you want to live up to what Mom wanted for you, but is there anything so wrong with being ordinary?”
“It’s not being ordinary. I want much more than this provincial life. I can’t think of anything better than you and I living out our extraordinary lives together, away from this place.”
Agatha snorted. “So you can be a princess and I can be a witch? Don’t be ridiculous.”
And the girls sat there for an hour before trekking home. There was no work at the mill that day, but Stefan still let the girls clean the house top to bottom (more Agatha than Sophie), and he came home to (Agatha’s) cooked zucchini and squash with chicken and pasta.
And as their father kissed them goodbye, Stefan wished both of his girls would be safe. The girls wished to still be together somewhere… wherever that place may be.
Agatha turned in at eight o’clock, figuring that she was going to need as much sleep as possible. She tossed and she turned and she couldn’t sleep no matter what she did—counting sheep, counted backwards by sevens, tried to put her thoughts out of mind, but to no avail. At last she found fretful, shallow sleep. Singing softly to herself, Sophie entered the room at nine-thirty and began undoing Stefan’s handiwork, and a few minutes after ten, she pried the last lock off the window and peered through the shutters to see the ring of parents, sisters, and brothers standing at the village edges, armed with torches, axes, knives, and spears. She could see her father and the town baker Honora talking, and she began to stew.
Sophie thought of her mother: Her perfect, beautiful, flawless mother, cold in the ground—and her father moving in on Honora, her mother’s best friend. She had no idea what he could have seen in the woman.
If it was her two boys who were going to be taken, Stefan would be deathly serious. True, he had been a dutiful father, but she resented how he had clearly wanted sons. Sophie promised herself that she would be a worthy princess, show him what he was missing out on as he spurned her.
It had been five years since her mother died, and Sophie would be out of his way. The Elders required the blessing of herself and Agatha for Stefan to remarry. Agatha had given it willingly, given Honora and Callis’ friendship, but Sophie changed the subject every time.
Sophie noticed she was wrinkling her brow again and she sighed. She turned and began getting ready for bed. She washed her face again, and set out gingerbread hearts on the windowsill. (These she had made with sugar and butter to show that she was going to be pliant.) She packed her bags, singing about wedding bells, and put on a nightdress (singing about how everybody loves a princess in pink), and finally tucked herself into bed.
Agatha dreamed of her childhood with Callis: her poetry (“It’s a Miserable Life” and “Please Stop Believing” were her best), her drawings of Reaper that frightened mice more than the real cat, and her gruesome fairy tale retellings.
Then she dreamt of this morning, where Callis had sighed and told her that she was meant for much more than this town and told Agatha of her own ambitions. But Sophie had knocked and that was the end of that conversation.
Sophie stayed awake for another hour, until it was five minutes to midnight—and there was no sign of any School Master.
And the door burst open: It was Stefan, covered in sweat, white as a sheet, still holding his torch.
“I saw something—” he gasped, “I had to make sure you were okay.”
The girls raised their heads. Agatha blinked sleepily. “Wha—”
But that was the end of Agatha’s fatigue. She had spotted a shadow stepping behind Stefan.
“Behind you!” she cried out—
Stefan swiveled, but the torch went out. Agatha heard a thump.
That was it for her. She grabbed for her dressing gown and found a match in one of its pockets. She lit it and saw that Stefan was unconscious on the floor, and Sophie was nowhere to be found.
She heard gasps outside. Agatha pulled the gown and her clumps on, yanked the window open, and vaulted out. She called for help for her father and chased the sound of the gasps: It was Sophie being dragged along the ground.
The girl was smiling as villagers failed to apprehend her captor, but Agatha was persistent: She chased the shadow, doggedly dodging traps on the villagers.
“Farewell, Gavaldon,” the girl cried out, and then saw how close Agatha was. And she gasped—
Agatha was then on top of her sister. The fires in the village extinguished, and thorns locked the villagers away from the girls like a gate.
Agatha looked back and saw this, and her heart dropped. She tried to loosen the grip on Sophie but to no avail. Sophie was spitting like an angry cat, upset as she was thinking Agatha was trying to ruin her chances at Good. The shadow left the girls in a tree.
“We are going home—” Agatha insisted, and the branch coiled down and flung the girls upwards. They landed at the top of the tree, spotting a large nest with a large egg on it. The egg hatched, covering the girls in neon green sticky slime, and the bird screeched and grabbed the girls in its claws.
The bird took flight. Agatha lit match after match, revealing it was really a bird made of bone.
The bird took them headfirst into a lightning storm, where the girls evaded trees, rain, mud, timber, beehives, vipers, and cobras. It plunged downward; the girls covered their faces, bracing for pain—
And met only sunlight and the uplands around two castles: one sparkling, bearing pink and blue turrets, and the other black and surrounded by fog. It was the fabled School, real as themselves.
The sisters locked eyes with each other. Agatha was terrified, and Sophie was elated.
“It’s real,” beamed Sophie as they soared over the School for Good. “I’m a princess—”
And the bird dropped Agatha.
Sophie cried out, cursing the bird, thumping its bony ribcage… and as she soared over the black void of the School for Evil, the bird released her too.