scott street

1: AGATHA

Recently, Agatha had come to realise that home and Gavaldon weren't quite the same thing.

Oh, at School they had been; the same sort of unreachable, horribly nostalgic and homesick destination. There was no Graves Hill without Gavaldon.

But now, she could confess that she may have fucked it up a bit.

Conflating them, that was.

It wasn't so much that she regretted it, she told herself firmly, ducking under the marquee flap. It was just that she'd been slightly... blinded. Perhaps she'd generalised. A tad.

Home was horsing around with Sophie in the forest, trying to pry Reaper's mouth open to work out what small animal had met its demise this time, consulting on her mother's 'soups' and hanging backwards off her bed to read fairy tales, or ghost stories, or whatever else she'd gotten from Deauville's.

Home was not... whatever the hell this was.

"Only slightly late, darling." Sophie whirled from the head table.

Agatha folded her arms, scanning the two-dozen upturned faces sat below the raised platform. They looked back at her, not exactly hostile, but simply... uninterested. They weren't really here for her. She was accepted, but on Sophie's merit, and the grudging admission that she was somewhat responsible for the death of the School Master.

"We must have told them everything by now." Agatha said sullenly.

Gavaldon, elated by breaking of the curse on their village, and fascinated by the revelation of somewhere beyond, had made an unfathomable fuss over the two of them ever since they'd arrived back. The tales Sophie spun of their time at the School were, to them, better than any fairytale, and they were rapt to every little detail. The village held dinners, talks, dance and book signings, and they were the guests of honour at every single one. They painted murals, composed odes, and put up signs. It was a braying circus, and Agatha despised it. Sophie merrily stoked the flames of their celebrity, Agatha spat on them– but it made no difference either way. Interest in them was self-fuelling.

Not that anyone in Gavaldon had actually tried to leave, to explore this incredible, exciting, brand new world that they'd only heard about... even though they could have done.

Agatha tried to avoid thinking about that last day at School (at any rate, she'd been so stressed that big patches of it were just a blur), but she had gotten the general gist of Dovey's gabbling; something something, the School Master... warding Woods Beyond for his own purposes... his death... breaking down of the barrier... reunification of the Reader world with the Endless Woods... just need someone good enough at magic... wish granting... you could certainly do it, dear... come back, if you want...

But it was there Agatha had panicked and stopped listening, and there her grasp of the situation ended. Put simply; the School Master's death had damaged the barrier around Gavaldon to the extent that a skilled enough wish-granter, magician, or sorcerer could get people in and out. Dovey had sent Agatha a letter with detailed instructions as to how to do it, but Agatha hadn't so much as even thought to try it. Certainly she didn't have any reason to. No one in Gavaldon had asked.

(Unfortunately, Dovey didn't stop sending Agatha letters. She'd clearly worked out how to manifest them into Deauville's, and quite frequently Agatha was summoned to come and collect another envelope that smelled aggressively of rose perfume. They were what could kindly be called peppy; the first one had sung a hymn in praise of Goodness when she opened it, and the next had burst into a shower of glitter that had gone in her eyes. The one after that had turned into an origami crane and flown away the second Agatha had finished reading it. Unfortunately, it clearly didn't know the terrain of Gavaldon too well, because it had flown smack into a weathervane, and Agatha had needed to go and rescue it. It was now sitting on top of her wardrobe, unimpressed.)