The School for Good and Evil #2: A World without Princes by Soman Chainani Page A

wouldn’t end like her mother.
    A world where she and Agatha would be happy forever.
    A world where a boy could never come between them.
    A world without princes.
    And only one prince stood in her way, Sophie gritted.
    A prince that Agatha would surely forget once he was dead.
    â€œIt isn’t Evil, Aggie,” Sophie vowed. “This school is our only hope.”
    Agatha tightened. “Sophie, what are you—”
    â€œHe says he wants me ?” Sophie bellowed to her waiting army. She bared teeth at Tedros’ castle.
    â€œThen let him come for me .”
    The girls let out a raucous cheer and mobbed their new leader.
    â€œDeath to Tedros!”
    â€œDeath to Boys!”
    Agatha drained of color as Sophie flashed her a dark smile and vanished into the swarm.
    One wish, and she’d set a war in motion. A war between two sides fighting for her heart. A war between two people she loved. A war between her best friend and a prince.
    Her soul scorched with guilt, a promise to a father gone up in flames.
    I need help , Agatha prayed, watching Sophie blow kisses to her soldiers.
    Someone who could see through all this. Someone to tell her who was Good this time and who was Evil. As she retreated from the horde, she noticed an odd glint from the corner, hovering near the floor in Sader’s dark nook of paintings. Slowly two tiny yellow eyes floated towards her, like suspended marbles. Two more suddenly glowed next to them, then two more, as hunched shadows pattered from behind a marble column.
    The three black rats glowered at Agatha as if she’d said the magic words. Then they skittered through the back doors to lead her to their master.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
    HarperCollins Publishers
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7
The Witches Brew a Plan
    â€œ S o let me get this straight,” Hester glared, straddling a gilded sink next to Anadil, both in their saggy black Nevers’ tunics. “Tedros wants to kill Sophie. Sophie wants to kill Tedros. And unless you find an ending with one of them now , everyone in this school dies.”
    Agatha nodded weakly, leaning against one of Honor tower’s ivory bathroom stalls, fitted with a sapphire toilet and tub. She never thought she’d be so happy to see two witches in her life. Unlike the rest of the girls, neither of them had changed. Hester’s red-and-black streaked hair was greasier than ever, and the buckhorned red demon tattoo around her neck back to full color after a failed spell had weakened it the year before. Anadil, meanwhile, looked even paler than she did before, if that was possible for an albino with ghostly white skin and hair. Straddling the sink next to Hester, she dangled a live lizard to her three black rats that looked just like the ones slain in last year’s Good-Evil war.

    â€œA prince and a witch, willing to kill each other for you,” she rasped in her scratchy voice. “It if it was me, I’d feel flattered.” She watched the rodents disembowel the lizard and lifted her hooded red eyes. “Thankfully I don’t have feelings.”
    â€œQuestionable. Who replaces dead pets with ones exactly alike?” Hester murmured.
    â€œLook, I’m hungry, dirty, haven’t slept, and an army of boys is trying to kill my best friend,” Agatha said, voice cracking with stress. “I just want us to go home alive.”
    â€œAnd yet you wished for Tedros,” Hester said in her usual sharp snarl. “Which seems to suggest you don’t want to go home at all.”
    Agatha didn’t say anything for a moment. “Look, just tell me what to do so no one gets hurt.”
    â€œAs if we’re fairy godmothers, Ani,” Hester snorted, blowing smoke rings off her glowing red fingertip.
    Anadil graffitied a skull in the sink with her glowing green finger. “Only not as ancient or menial.”
    â€œPlease,”