Never After (School for Good and Evil x Reader)

Chapter 29

As I followed the Dean through the blue breezeway from Honor Tower to Valor Tower, girls kept popping up in our path, saluting me like I was a ship captain.

"Death to the prince!" a pimply girl squeaked.

"Long live Y/n, Sophie, and Agatha!" chimed an elfish Evergirl.

I forced a fraught smile as I tried to keep up with Dean Sader through the glass tunnel over the lake. As we walked, I followed the Dean's gaze to the distant princes clamoring outside the school gates, testing Lady Lesso's shield with rocks and sticks.

"This isn't fair," I said.

"How so?" the Dean asked, raising a perfectly penciled eyebrow.

"Everyone's blaming Agatha for choosing me over Tedros. But when she left the ball to come to the School Master's Tower, she didn't know what was going to happen. She didn't know that would have been the last time she saw him."

"But a choice was still made."

I shook my head. "This is ridiculous. If this is anyone's fault, it's mine. And even then, it really isn't! I wasn't the one to lean in. The School Master practically pounced on me—"

"And yet you didn't pull away."

I narrowed my eyes. "You don't know what you're talking about. You weren't even there."

The Dean only hummed and continued walking.

Her words bounced around inside my head. And yet you didn't pull away.

She was right.

I didn't.

As we continued on our way, I surveyed the Boy's school across the moat, gaze honing in on the School Master's tower.

"We can't fight them," I said softly. "We need to stop this war before it happens."

"Darling, it's already begun," the Dean cooed. "Across that moat is the boy who wants to steal your only sister, and you're afraid of a fight?"

"I'm not afraid," I said sharply. "He's my friend, for God's sake."

"And yet he wishes for your death."

I said nothing and slowly looked up at the Dean, grinning outside the entrance to Valor Tower.

"Perhaps you don't yet know what it is you're fighting for."

The doors magically opened, and I inhaled.

The walls on both sides of the crowded stairwell, stretching all the way up the five floors, were painted with colossal, stylized stencil murals of my, Sophie, and Agatha's smiling faces, haloed with wreaths of stars, above the glittering blue headline: HOPE FOR A BETTER WORLD.

Instead of the musky leather, cologne smells, and animal skins of the old Valor Tower, now there were lush hanging gardens draped over the blue glass stairwell and marble columns, with azure-colored roses that showered the mob of students with petals as they headed to class, before lower-hanging vines swept them up. As I followed the Dean up the stairs, girls immediately moved to the left in single file, clearing a path and greeting us with warm smiles as we passed. Through the spiral banister, I saw a pack of blue butterflies zooming from floor to floor, rearranging into pictures to amuse the descending girls—a stymph, a nymph, a swan. . . . The Dean gave them a look, and with squeaky meeps! they zipped back into her dress.

She turned off onto the third floor and I followed into a hall flurrying with activity. Against the walls, Evergirls and Nevergirls huddled side by side, watching a ghostly scene unfold atop the pages of A Student's Revised History of the Woods to finish an assignment. Above their heads, murals of an idyllic school of girls presiding over enslaved boys, stretched down the long dormitory walls.