scott street

9: SOPHIE

"Didn't fancy it?" Sophie asked Agatha one evening, sitting down next to her in the Clearing and watching Beatrix and Tarquin go to the ground in a screaming heap, brief casualties of the Evers' rugby game.

"I will never put myself in a situation where I have to try and tackle Chaddick," said Agatha grumpily, practising some kind of Beautification glove language from a worksheet she'd laid out in the grass. Sophie had to admit, Evers had a few good ideas, and knowing how to flirt with things like gloves, fans and parasols, was one of them... "He's practically indestructible."

"Mm," said Sophie, admittedly seeing logic in that as an increasing number of Evers dangled from Chaddick's legs and waist like party streamers, doing absolutely nothing to slow him down. She scanned Agatha's worksheet... "That one means I hate you, darling, you're looking a row too far down."

Agatha groaned and leant further over the worksheet. She'd been distracted ever since the coronation revelation, apparently because Good had entirely imploded at the concept of their first real-life ball. Unsurprising, surely, but apparently it was a level of hysteria that surpassed even the panic over last year's Snow Ball...

Sophie glanced over at Tedros, jogging around after the rest of the team, repeatedly blowing the whistle and shouting at people. He'd been forbidden from contact sports in the run-up to the coronation– apparently it was for his own safety, but he claimed it was because they didn't want him to chip a tooth before the portrait. Either way, it was making him a miserly referee.

Agatha was certainly right about Chaddick, though, since he was currently making battering-ram progress through the other team–

"Do you know what the Once and Future King sect is?" Agatha asked Sophie miserably. Sophie opened her mouth to say no–

"Oh," Hester snorted. "Is it to do with that?"

They both turned to her.

"You know?" said Agatha.

"Yeah. Most do." Hester spat her gum at a sparrow, and only just missed.

"...well?" said Sophie.

"Bunch of religious nutters who think Arthur being dead is just a temporary setback," said Hester, mashing her gum into the dirt with her boot. "They think he's going to spring back to life in a time of great peril for Camelot, save the kingdom, and then reign forevermore as an immortal Once and Future King."

"Why?" said Agatha, always quick to start unspooling the logic of something.

"Dunno," said Hester. "Who cares?"

But Dot, a bit better versed in politics than Hester, cut in;

"Probably because when Arthur died, they took his body straight to Avalon, and most people didn't see it go. The funeral didn't have a casket, either. So some people hoped it was a big conspiracy and he wasn't actually dead, and it's just mutated into a religious nightmare over the last eight years. Daddy says it's because his death was a big shock and he was still pretty young, so people were in denial." she shrugged. "They're wrong, of course, because Camelot as a whole is nowhere near clever enough to pull off a conspiracy that large, and Tedros totally would have slipped up and told someone by now..."

"How do they factor Tedros into it?" demanded Agatha.

"They don't," grinned Hester. "They don't give a shit about Tedros, which I commend enthusiastically, even if it's the only thing I like about them..."

"They think he's an interim steward at best, if not a downright usurper." said Dot. "The coronation is an attempt to remind people that his son is their King now, and they need to just suck it up. There is no conspiracy. Arthur's dead."