Tedros took a deep breath.
“When I was a boy standing up here with my dad, Good and Evil seemed so black and white,” he said, his voice steadying. “But of all the things I learned at school, one lesson proved the most important: no one knows what is good or bad until after the story is written. No one knows if a happy ending will last or if a happy ending is happy at all. The only thing we have is the moment we are in and what we choose to do with it.
“And so here we are at this moment. A moment where riding into Camelot doesn’t feel the same as it used to when I was a boy. We aren’t the shining kingdom by which all others are measured anymore. The streets are dirty, the people are hungry, and I can feel a rot at our core. Even the king’s chamber smells a bit moldy.
“Part of it is neglect, of course,” Tedros went on, “and those responsible have been removed from power and punished. But that won’t fix our problems. Even if we could bring back my father, King Arthur couldn’t make things the way they were. The Woods have been changed forever by an Evil School Master. And though he is dead now, the line between Good and Evil has blurred. Enemies disguise as friends and friends as enemies. Look at our own Camelot, decayed from the inside.”
The masses were rapt as they listened, their bodies like trees in a windless forest.
“I may be young. I may be untested. But I trust my instincts,” Tedros declared, confidence growing. “Instincts that helped me find my way back to you even when I had Evil’s sword at my heart and an axe at my neck. Instincts that helped me choose the greatest of all princesses, soon to be your queen.”
Everyone followed his eyes to the royal gallery, where the nobles stepped back, revealing Agatha in the sun’s spotlight.
Tedros smiled, expecting applause.
He didn’t get it.
The crowd took in her pallid, ghostly face, buggy brown eyes, and witchy black helmet of hair and then seemed to look around her, as if she was a standin for the great princess Tedros was speaking of, as if they couldn’t believe that this was the Agatha whose fairy tale had grown so famous throughout the Endless Woods. . . . But then they saw the diadem on her head—the same tiara Arthur once bestowed upon his own wife—and their postures stiffened, a soft murmur building.
“Together, Agatha and I have faced down terrible villains and found our happy ending,” said Tedros. “But after a fairy tale comes real life. This is no longer my and Agatha’s story, written by the Storian. This is the story of our kingdom, which we must all write together. A history and future you are now a part of, even those who doubted my father, even those who doubt me. Today we turn the page.”
He took a deep breath. “And to prove that this is indeed the beginning of a new Camelot, my first act as your king is to present two members of my royal court. Two people who know our kingdom better than anyone and will protect it with love and courage.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw Lady Gremlaine leap out of her seat—
In a flash, Tedros tomahawked Excalibur across the stage, slashing open the scrim over the castle balcony, before the sword planted blade-first in the balcony’s archway.
“Presenting my mother, Queen Guinevere, and our greatest knight, Sir Lancelot!”
Tedros beamed down at the crowd, believing full-heartedly that since he’d learned to forgive Guinevere and Lancelot, his people would do the same.
But now there was a collective wide-eyed gape as if they’d all stopped breathing, and a cold, deathly silence.
“Come, Mother. Come Lance,” Tedros prodded, hurrying over to his mother and yanking at her hand—
Gobsmacked, Guinevere stumbled over the fallen scrim, losing a shoe and almost face-planting before Lancelot caught her and glared daggers at Tedros. “What the hell are you doing!”
“Sit down!” Tedros hissed, shoving his one-shoed mother into his throne and Lancelot into Lady Gremlaine’s seat, while Lady Gremlaine gawped in horror.
Something in the crowd changed too. Tedros felt it in his gut: the way the once warm, hopeful air had turned wary upon his unveiling of Agatha and now had become menacing and tense. Sweat pooled beneath his crown.
His heart had told him welcoming back his mother and Lancelot was the right thing to do . . . the Good thing . . .
Did I make a mistake?
He swallowed his doubt. No going back now.
“Let’s get to the test,” Tedros pressured the chaplain, eager to seal this coronation and get his mother and Agatha inside.
“Yes—uh—of course,” the chaplain stammered, his eyes darting to Guinevere and the knight as he fumbled a faded parchment card from his robes. “Uh, hear ye, hear ye. As all prior kings, King Arthur Pendragon conceived this test to prove his successor be worthy of—”
Tedros ripped the card from his hands and read it out loud, his voice booming through the magic star:
“To seal his coronation, the future King of Camelot must pull Excalibur from an ordinary stone, as I once did.”
“Wow. That’s easy,” he blurted, voice echoing.
He hadn’t meant for the crowd to hear that.
“CAN SOMEONE FIND ME A STONE?” Tedros puffed, glancing uselessly around the stage.
Lancelot shifted in his chair, which made the stage creak so loudly the audience’s eyes went to him.
“Preferably one that isn’t made out of wood,” the knight said.
A ruckus echoed behind him and everyone turned to see the red-haired altar boy careen through the fallen scrim onto the stage, having tripped on Guinevere’s shoe. “Sorry! That’s my cue!” he squawked, dragging an iron anvil behind him. “Behold! The stone from which King Arthur once pulled Excali—”
The heavy anvil splintered the wooden platform. The edge of the stage imploded and the anvil plummeted straight through the hole like a cannonball, down to a cliff, where it bounced off the rock and fell into the ocean.
“This is going well,” said Lancelot.
Tedros scorched pink.
His mother’s eyes were glued to her one shoe. Lady Gremlaine wasn’t on the stage anymore. And he couldn’t even look in Agatha’s direction. He’d wanted the coronation to show her what kind of king he’d be. Instead, she was probably as mortified as he was.
“Merlin . . . some help?” he peeped desperately, glancing upwards.
A pigeon pooed, just missing his head.
“Enough,” Tedros boiled, jaw clenching. “To seal the coronation, I have to pull a sword from a stone? Well, the sword’s in one right now!”
He stamped to the back of the stage and the once-curtained-off castle balcony, where Excalibur was still lodged blade-first into the stone archway.
“So if I pull my sword out of this stone, it’s done, right? We can all go home,” he barked at the chaplain.
“Well, I don’t believe your father meant—”
“IS IT DONE OR IS IT NOT,” Tedros bullied.