Chapter Text
1: Each must have ambition.
The first time that Clarissa Dovey meets Lady-no first name-Lesso, she lets herself be baited for the first time in nearly twenty years.
Clarissa had been hot-headed, once. A blessed child, grown up under the care of two loving mothers, ladies-in-waiting for minor nobility in Foxwood; she’d grown up not knowing to fear anything. Not pain, nor the disrespect of her peers. She’d risen to every challenge, noble in that way if not quite picture-perfect in everything else.
These days Clarissa is Dean of Good, and has been for five years now (a teacher for fifteen), and knows well enough that a lack of fear does not justify an act of rebellion. The Evil attack, the Good defend. She is content to remain passive, to let Evil make its taunts and its threats, secure in the knowledge that they will win anyway. That Good deserves to win, to rule well and fairly and with a kind hand.
Lesso changes that. She sets the change in motion from the instant she strolls into Good’s halls uninvited, languid but striking, the day before the Welcoming. There are no Evers to scramble out of her way, but Clarissa hears August’s light, floating laugh from down the hall before either of them make their way to her door.
When they do reach her, she spells the door to swing open before either of them can knock. August inclines his head, amused, before he retreats into the background. This leaves Clarissa to stare up at Lesso, and Lesso to stare her down.
Clarissa has heard of her before, of course. She’d be loath not to, given that Lesso is supposed to be her reflection and her counterpart. She knows that Lesso is cruel, and fearsome even to her fellow Nevers, and certainly not as lazy or as weak as her predecessor was. But they’ve never properly met; Lesso only arrived two days ago, and Good and Evil tend to avoid each other even at the faculty level.
Lesso cuts an imposing figure, she has to admit. Dark hair pulled tight into a braid, skin so pale and bloodless that even the warm light of Clarissa’s office can’t seem to bring colour to it. Her face is sharp and angular; her amethyst eyes like glittering flint. And she is utterly, menacingly silent.
In the end, Clarissa is the one to cut her losses. “What business does the Dean of Evil have with me?” she questions archly.
“Perhaps I wanted to see who I’d have to defeat,” Lesso says, her voice surprisingly sweet. It cuts quite the contrast with the way she glares down at Clarissa. “I have to say, I’m quite disappointed.”
“And did you think I would care?” Clarissa asks. Evil has not held a candle to Good, in all the years she's been here. In all the years before. It’s the truth, plain and simple. Evil can keep its disappointment; Good can keep its victory. There’s no need to engage with someone destined to lose.
But Lesso smiles, wide and eerie. “Oh,” she says. “You will. When you lose.”
“I would like to see you try,” Clarissa says, more heated than she means to be.
Lesso goes on smiling, sharp and deadly, and lets herself out without further comment. Clarissa finds herself… unsettled, after that. Something silent and strange seething under her skin.
For the first time in twenty years, Evil has a Dean who truly believes they can win.
And Clarissa, despite herself, believes it too.
That’s what unsettles her.
Lesso is a threat, she thinks, to all she holds dear, all she has held dear and cherished and fought for these long years. Lesso proclaims, though not to her, that Evil will soon take its rightful place— where that might be, she never specifies. Lesso is whip-smart and knife-sharp and all too aware of it.
Lesso fights.
They cannot even see each other without Lesso crossing the hallway, or Clarissa striding down the field, to confront each other over some incident or another. Lesso seems to take some sordid pleasure in it, whether she’s berating Clarissa over another of Good’s (numerous, in her opinion) failures, or staunchly defending Evil when Clarissa demands she stop the Nevers’ misdemeanours. And Clarissa— she doesn’t like it, exactly, but it’s interesting in a way she hadn’t known to miss before. Even if it’s utterly infuriating.
“I see what you refuse to,” Lesso drawls, once. “I see the cesspit that Good has become. Lazy. Unambitious. Useless in every way.”
“And I see that Evil is still hopeless as ever,” Clarissa says, despite herself. “You think you can change it?”
Lesso’s eyes glitter, moonlight on ice. “I know I can change it.”
“Full of yourself, aren’t we,” Clarissa mutters unkindly.
“Quite done, little dove?” Lesso says sweetly.
“Two hundred years,” Clarissa reminds her. “And you think it’ll be you?”
“And you think Good as it is now deserves to win?”
A stalemate; as usual. This is a battle neither of them will ever claim victory over. Lesso doesn’t let her frown show, because she knows her smiles frighten Clarissa more. Clarissa doesn’t bother to hide the darkness in her gaze. They part ways at the Halfway Bridge, for now.
It becomes quite well-known in both Schools, this little paradox that the Deans bring out in each other. Clarissa Dovey is a shining paragon of virtue and an exemplar of Good through and through, but she reserves a small space in her heart for a remarkably bitter vitriol, all directed towards her fellow Dean. And Lady Lesso is always dour, always angry, never quite happy at anything, but she delights in tormenting the Dean of Good; it’s the only time anyone will ever see her smile.
August smiles and shakes his head, when students whisper jokingly over it in his— for now— joint classes, Evers and Nevers almost mingling, the same quiet comments reflecting and echoing on both sides. Callis laughs at it for the few months she calls Lesso her Dean, never quite sounding like she means it; sounding a little pleased, and a little wistful, in fact.
And soon their names become inseparable from the other. You can never bring up one Dean without the conversation inevitably drifting to her counterpart. They are remarkably similar, when it comes down to it. Just chasing the same thing: victory, victory, victory, the chance to win. The chance to fight for it.
No war is a war without two sides. They’ll never escape each other, really. Clarissa sighs: if I must put up with her, that vicious thing; Lesso sneers: foolish, weak-willed woman, she’s lucky I don’t kill her in her sleep. But it quickly becomes apparent that each is better for the other. That this fight is, somehow, working for them. As much as they are working for it.
It’s not that they like each other. But they dislike each other in a comfortable sort of way. They each know exactly what to expect, exactly what is necessary. Exactly what they stand for, in this long and bitter game.
2: Each must know the other.
Their relationship does not remain stagnant, certainly. It is defined by its ever-changing nature, the endless new issues they find to snipe at each other over, whether it’s Ever uniform standards or Never hygiene standards, the merits of a fairytale or the merits of a favourite dish. It is defined by the constant ebbing and flowing of emotion, the way they leap to reopen fresh conversational wounds and discard old, scarred threads in their fundamental inability to share the same view.
They argue so frequently and for such extended periods of time that they seem to understand each other better for it, though neither quite appreciates that they do. Clarissa, by now, can anticipate Lesso’s cruelty and her cynicism; Lesso can dismiss Clarissa’s impassioned kindness and sincerity before it ever comes to light; and each utterly denounces the other. As they do, as they always do. Not stagnant, but stable. Not stagnant, but definite, but known.
Like all good things, this does not last.
With Callis’ departure, only a few months into Lesso’s tenure, the School Master seems to amuse himself with other occupations (they pretend they don’t know about what he wanted from Callis, foolish Callis, brave Callis). There’s a woman who finds her way to his side eventually; not a student, not a teacher either. But she was Clarissa’s classmate, and more than that she is August Sader’s estranged half-sister— well. Not quite so estranged anymore, it seems. Who else could have let her back in?
The History professor declines to answer anyone’s questions, as he always does, but Clarissa often catches him looking to the School Master’s tower with sightless, solemn eyes, and Lesso is the one to watch him trap blue butterflies without lifting a finger to stop him. He never kills them, though Lesso usually tells him he should.
The students don’t know about Evelyn Sader. She is very good at hiding; Clarissa remembers that from their time in School, remembers Evie’s snakeskin and her sly face, blending into the crowd and openly despising it in equal measure. People were always looking at August. They never bothered to take a second glance at her. It became her weapon, in due time.
But the Deans know, and so too does the rest of the faculty, disapproving as many of them are. August stays silent, uncommitted, and doesn’t comment when she disappears in a few short months. Callis, all over again.
But Callis had her fairy tale end. Evelyn Sader does not.
Five, six years later, August Sader’s face lines with age overnight; and Evelyn Sader returns to the School for Evil, as its new Professor of History.
“Prematurely ageing, are we?” Clarissa hisses, under her breath, to August over breakfast.
August doesn’t respond. He goes on eating his breakfast, hands moving slowly, like it pains him to move. Ageing ten years in one night is nothing easy to get through.
“You did something,” Clarissa says softly.
Not a question. This, August can answer. “I did what I had to,” he says, and doesn’t elaborate any further.
But every day Clarissa understands less and less his motivations. Especially when Evelyn sets her butterflies onto the Good students, airing their grievances, their jealousies, their greatest fears— bringing Good to war with itself.
“You have to stop her,” Clarissa begs August. “This cannot continue. A teacher cannot interfere in a student’s fairy tale.”
“I have done what I must,” August snaps. He hasn’t talked to his sister the entire time she’s been here. Clarissa is not optimistic that he’ll start on her behalf.
The only other person to go to, depressingly, is Lesso. And that’s even less help. As expected.
“You forget, Clarissa,” Lesso says, dark and dangerous. “Your loss is my victory. And at the end of the day, what I want is to win.”
“You are a cruel, vicious thing,” Clarissa laughs, with a cool edge to it. She is not usually so cold with Lesso; their arguments are usually fire, blazing heat. “They are children. Has Evil sunk so low that it must now use our children’s lives in vain?”
That nearly stops Lesso. Of all the things. She at least agrees to speak to Evelyn, though by the unkind glint in her eyes, she doesn’t quite mean it.
Clarissa isn’t privy to the discussion that follows. But what she does know is that Lesso emerges with her face cold as ice and her support firmly behind Clarissa; and that Evelyn emerges looking like she’s won all the same.
The next day August is summoned away by the School Master, and when he returns, Evelyn is evicted with great fanfare. In the aftermath of it all, students scattering back to their Schools, Clarissa turns to Lesso. Meaning to thank her.
And then August approaches them, solemn and silent. “A word, Lesso,” he says, “in private?”
Lesso bares her teeth at him, knowing full well he can’t see it. She never liked him much, and with Evelyn’s appearance, liked him even less. Still, it’s not wise to cross a Seer. Much less the School Master’s favoured Seer. So she follows, leaving Clarissa to look after them, a little lost.
Lesso does not return; August does, and he bears a bruise darkening on his cheek for his troubles.
“What happened?” Clarissa demands. “Did she curse you? Hit you?” She lights her fingerglow to press it to his bruised skin; but it bounces off like it’s nothing.
“The bearer of bad news must suffer,” August says, blank and absent, like he doesn’t even feel the pain. “And now a word with you, Clarissa. You should go after her. I think, of anyone, you are in the best position to.”
He walks on, past her, in the direction of the School Master’s tower. He doesn't respond to her calls after him. Clarissa sighs to herself, and goes off to find Lesso, because not listening to the Seer is usually not a good idea.
The Nevers give her wary looks as she navigates their school. It’s normally Lesso who walks freely in Evil and Good alike; to see the other Dean, the Good Dean, on the side of order, do so must be strange. But they don’t stop her, and neither do their faculty.
Lesso’s office door is locked. Clarissa stands outside, considering her options, before the choice is made for her: the door swings open, and some invisible force throws her into the room.
Clarissa, she quickly realises, has never seen Lesso angry. The other Dean is furiously pacing the room, heels clicking dangerously on the floor. The air is so thick with menace Clarissa thinks she might choke on it; she can barely move, held in place by the glowing force of Lesso’s rage. She can barely speak. She is wholly, completely, at Lesso’s mercy.
And Lesso, right now, does not seem merciful.
“You have no idea,” Lesso seethes, finally, eyes wild and burning. “What I gave up for you. What I gave up for you and your precious School. You owe me. You will never stop owing me.”
Clarissa struggles to keep her head up, lifted in some semblance of dignity. “What—” she gasps. “I didn’t, I didn’t know, I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
And now she sees the tears that shine in the corner of Lesso’s eyes, easily mistaken for their frantic glow, their cold flint. “Lesso,” she says. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re angry about. I’m sorry.”
“Do you know what you took from me, Clarissa Dovey?” Lesso snarls. “My son. You took the only thing I ever had that was Good.”
Son?
All of a sudden the tension snaps, and Clarissa finds the air rushing back to her lungs as she leans against the frosted wall of Lesso’s office.
“And you call yourself a fairy godmother,” Lesso says, low and bitter. There are little teardrop-shaped shards of ice littered on her desk. They are slowly melting away, leaving nothing but water, drip-drip-dripping onto the floor.
“I’m sorry,” Clarissa says. She still doesn’t quite know what she’s apologising for. But she knows, somehow, that she has made a horrifying mistake.
The story comes out in bits and pieces, over days and weeks, in Lesso’s anger and in her sorrow, in her grief. Clarissa hadn’t known her to ever show that sort of weakness before. The man with the terrifying eyes, the son Lesso left in the Woods to escape to the School for Evil, the threats that Evelyn Sader made and followed through on; the School Master’s dispassionate ruling, delivered through August, that her access to the Woods was revoked.
It is a secret that Lesso has told no one. There is no one else, she says, who would care to understand. No one who has ever had reason to know. No one but Clarissa, her bleeding-heart counterpart, a reflection and an enemy and a constant above all else.
“I wonder,” Lesso says, once, “what I do not yet know about you.” She shrugs, narrowly, when Clarissa turns to her. “Know thine enemy, and all that.” Her heart isn’t in it, these days. Clarissa almost misses when Lesso was cruel to her. At least she knew where they stood.
“Are we enemies?” Clarissa asks.
“What else can we be?” Lesso questions in return. “A princess and a witch? Friends?”
“Not a princess,” Clarissa reminds.
“Oh, don’t pretend,” Lesso snorts. “You told me yourself that you were meant to be a Leader. Only you failed to kill that witch. Only you chose this, didn’t you? Isn’t that more Good than anything else this School has ever produced? Isn’t that who you are?”
“I believe,” Clarissa says, “that it’s not who we are. It’s what we do.”
“And this is what we do,” Lesso murmurs. For once, she doesn’t sound confrontational. “And this is what you choose.”
She sounds, wonderingly, like she understands.
It’s not the same, after that. They could never go back to how they were before; back when they were still just the rival Deans of Good and Evil, locked in an endless battle, each intent on snatching victory over the other. They could never go back to being enemies. And that frightens Clarissa, this unknown territory, this odd space of partnership where Good and Evil have been told all their lives not to venture.
But she thinks— hopes— that this fragile understanding between them, given time, could become something precious in itself. Something that is not angry, not vicious, but for once in this lifetime of war they’re destined for: something kind, kind, kind.
3: Each must learn to lose.
Good wins again, that year, in the Circus and the Trial and in the newest fairytale of the Storian besides. While Lesso takes it with a refined grace, it is easy to see the simmering resentment behind her ice-carved expression.
“How would you like it?” she asks Clarissa. “To lose. To keep losing.”
“I imagine I would not be very happy, either,” Clarissa says.
“You’ve changed,” Lesso says, darkly amused, “learned some empathy, haven’t you? From when we first met.”
When we first met is, by now, a somewhat distant memory. Clarissa winces to think of it; of the constant fights and the constant struggle for victory and the constant exhaustion. It is tiring to have to keep fighting. She sometimes wishes they did not have to, at all. But the Woods are the Woods, and so they continue.
“As Good does,” she opts to reply, the safest option. Lesso’s eyebrows lift, but she holds the sharper edges of her tongue. There are some battles you don’t have to win.
“It might not be very Good, to empathise with the likes of me,” is all that she warns. But this is one argument that will never go away, Clarissa’s optimism against Lesso’s wariness in this fine balance they’ve struck, and Clarissa doesn’t bother to push back.
The students go home. Some of the faculty do as well. Manley, who has a fine home in Bloodbrook; Espada and Lukas, who both hail from Ginnymill; Castor and Pollux to god knows where. Emma stays, and so does August, but they both make themselves scarce over the break, busying themselves with their own projects. So the Schools are supervised by Clarissa and Lesso, and the shadow of the School Master in his tower; for all that they barely ever see him, Clarissa has the creeping feeling that he’s watching. Waiting. For what, she doesn’t know.
The halls seem much wider with the students gone. It’s lonely, more than Clarissa cares to admit, and given that Lesso is the only teacher left in the School for Evil she imagines it must be even worse. Though Lesso seems quite alright with it; in her words, “Evil is made to be alone.” The blank tone it’s delivered in doesn’t quite match up.
So Clarissa amuses herself by finding excuses to bother Lesso, coax her out of the dark corridors of Evil and into the bright, open halls of Good. Emma is terrified of her, and August pointedly avoids her, the hazy outline of a bruise still lingering on his jawline long after it should have healed; but Lesso follows anyway.
Some days they argue, hammering out the finer points of their expertise. Lesso is finely skilled in magic, familiar with the technical aspects of it, while Clarissa is a firm believer in emotion and its power. Some days they discuss plans for the future of the School: who to admit, who to turn away in the coming years. Which descendants they’ll have to look out for, and what to do with the Readers who’ll arrive.
(Lesso is uncomplimentary, to say the least. Long years ago, Callis had mentioned offhandedly that Lesso was top of her class, that year in Evil; of course the Reader did it, and not one of us. Of course she believes. You can’t grow up Evil and still believe.)
Today, Clarissa retrieves her chess set and smiles up at Lesso, wide and disarming. “Perhaps you’ll do me the honour,” she says expectantly. “No one in the School for Good plays.”
“No one,” Lesso echoes. “I find that hard to believe.” She doesn’t look particularly impressed. Then again, she never quite does.
“It’s true,” Clarissa says lightly. “Lukas and Espada are traditionalists, you know, they think it’s a man’s game. Kim is too concerned with her animals to care about anything else, it’s high time we replace her if you ask me; Emma is a dear but she doesn’t have the head for chess, and August can’t play, so. It’s just you.”
“You really are insufferably bored,” Lesso says. But she doesn't protest the game, and she chooses the white pieces after some deliberation. White begins first, she explains, and Evil never gives up its advantage.
“And I am not a cliché,” she finishes.
“No, indeed,” Clarissa agrees.
They play. Clarissa wins; Lesso is clever, and strategic, and ruthless to be sure, but she’s clearly unfamiliar with the game. Clarissa, on the other hand, had enchanted her chess set to play itself in her first year as a Professor, and has been playing dutifully ever since. She finds it often makes better company than her fellow faculty.
“I hadn’t realised you despised your colleagues so,” Lesso laughs, after Clarissa makes this comment. “Not very Good of you, is it?”
Lesso does this often, Clarissa thinks. Defines Clarissa, and herself, by the lines of Good and Evil; the principles enshrined by their two Schools. And by the way they cross these lines. More and more, Clarissa is beginning to think—
But one does not become the Dean of Good without believing in it, so she keeps her thoughts to herself. “I get along with some of them,” she insists instead. “Those who deserve it. Emma is a dear, and August has been my friend for a long time, now, and Lukas and Espada avoid me, not the other way around. You cannot possibly expect me to tolerate the likes of Pollux. And don’t tell me you don’t despise your colleagues?”
“I am predisposed to despise others,” Lesso reminds her. “And I despise my colleagues because they often very much deserve it, thank you very much. Manley has wanted my position for years, Sheeks grows hopeless herself, and I know very well where Sader’s allegiances lie.” Her mouth twists, bitter, for a split-second, before her expression smooths over.
“Castor, at least, can be amusing,” she offers, after a slight hesitation. “And I find our Beast very competent.”
“Of course you would find the Beast least despicable,” Clarissa grumbles. “I still think it’s cruel. To subject students to that.”
“At least my students are not weak and lazy and complacent,” Lesso bites back. She would defend her principles to the last breath, Clarissa thinks, not without a hint of fondness. “I would advise you to try the same. Maybe then Good would be an enemy worth fighting.”
“Must we be enemies? Must our children be?” Clarissa asks softly. It is not the first time she is asking, and it will not be the last.
“What else would you have us be, Clarissa?” Lesso says tiredly. “You are fighting a losing battle.”
“Then I suppose I will take my losses,” Clarissa declares. These days Lesso doesn’t fight back; she sits, quietly, and watches. Her amethyst eyes are points of light in the shadow of dusk, glinting like jewels. Unreadable.
They play chess a few more scattered times, over the break. Then once a month, over the years. Sometimes it’s in Clarissa’s office, with Lesso plucking sugarplums off the desk to sour with her fingerglow before she deigns to taste them. Sometimes Clarissa ventures to Evil and to Lesso’s office, bringing her chess set with her. It’s never quite as cold as it should be, even when they play over Lesso’s ice-carved desk.
Lesso is a quick learner, and she wins her first game a few months into their first year like this. When she takes Clarissa’s king in odd ceremony, icy fingers brushing Clarissa’s knuckles, she smiles: there’s a hint of genuine delight in the curve of her lips. “I do hope you don’t mind your loss,” she says idly.
“Losing to you is no great shame, my dear,” Clarissa says. If there’s a degree too much warmth in the way she says it— a little too much affection seeping into her voice, into the soft endearment that slips out— well, it doesn’t matter. None of this matters.
4: Each must be the other’s equal.
Clarissa likes to think she has truly met her equal, in Lesso; certainly she would not trade this understanding of theirs for anything, anyone else. Certainly she has never known nor cared for anyone else in such great measure. And certainly no one else has ever believed in Evil so much as she has believed in Good.
What does it mean, to be an equal?
This is what Lesso says, sounding for all the world like she means it: “It means to be as strong as the other,” it means to be as victorious as the other. But of course victory requires that there be two sides. Good and Evil. A battle, a conversation, a dance. An exchange. And intermittently: a moment where one of them has the upper hand.
This is why Lesso scorns the two newest Readers so (she’s lying; she’s taken a shine to both of them). Sophie and Agatha do not want to win over each other. Even when they seem so destined to be enemies.
They just want to go home.
“Perhaps you only think so because we cannot leave. Because you have convinced yourself you cannot leave,” Clarissa points out.
“You’re right, I would rather die than go back to that village,” Lesso says calmly, “and I doubt you would be content with going back to Foxwood and living out your days. In any case, Clarissa, would you really give this up? Isn’t the battle half of what drives you, on its own?”
“I suppose,” Clarissa relents. This battle of wits, of wills. This opponent of hers, who Clarissa cannot imagine living without, as infuriating as she can get.
Lesso’s smile is faint. But it comes easier than it would have, long years ago. And it is not sharp, not jagged, but at least somewhat real.
Though, in all fairness, there is no one who could recognise that hint of genuine delight other than Clarissa. Lesso keeps her appearances, to everyone else; that Clarissa knows is of no concern to her.
This, too, is a part of being equals: the intimacy, the closeness. The distance between them is never really so far. They are something like shadows of each other, for how naturally their actions mirror the other’s. Lesso nurtures her newest champion, stokes the Evil that no one thought could live in dainty Sophie, murmurs sugar-sweet about Nemesis Dreams; Clarissa takes on her fairy godmother mantle yet again, coaxes a smile out of Agatha, helps her believe in herself enough for everyone else to believe, too.
They are working against each other, yes. They were always working against each other. But by now they each know exactly what to expect. It is a well-known path they take now, though nothing about these two Readers is well-known at all. It is a familiar argument, understanding, game. It is the same in everything but the story that unfolds before them.
All the same. Clarissa cannot help but feel that the two of them— and the rest of the Schools, the rest of the Woods— are getting involved in something far greater than anyone can understand.
It is Lesso who she says this to. It is Lesso, tempered by time and weariness, who inclines her head to agree as they half-heartedly play chess over Lesso’s ice-carved desk.
“I have always sought Evil’s victory,” Lesso acknowledges. “You know this. Just as you seek Good’s. But what Sophie is doing… what she will do… it is not something any student should be capable of. It makes me wonder.” She doesn’t elaborate. Her eyes are dark, distant.
“We could do something,” Clarissa says, knowing full well they will not. “Those children—”
“—are our students, and you know that we cannot interfere in students’ fairy tales,” Lesso says quietly. “This story was never ours, Clarissa, don’t you see? This was never something in our control. All we can do is play our roles.”
“If these are our roles,” Clarissa tells her, suddenly compelled to dangerous honesty, “then I am glad it was the both of us, my dear.” Because she is not sure what comes next. Because she is not sure if equals have a part in that future.
Lesso does not look up from the chessboard. “Yes,” she says softly, “these are our roles, indeed.” She moves her pawn turned queen a few spaces forward, and both of them consider the board.
“Checkmate,” Clarissa says, on Lesso’s behalf. “I suppose I should offer my congratulations?”
“Congratulate me when all this is over,” Lesso says. “I’ll hold you to it, Clarissa.” It is a promise, in Lesso’s own flawed way, that there will be something more after this. That there will be a day when this story is over.
But it never really is over, is it?
The story defies all conventions. Clarissa and Lesso are frozen in helpless sleep for most of the end, petrified by the School Master— Clarissa seethes to think of it but there is no time for that. Not here, not now. Instead she picks up her skirts and runs for the open fields, where students clash in open battle—
Lesso meets her at the twin entrances to their Schools. Without thinking Clarissa slips their hands together, holds fast, tries to reassure herself that yes, this is real. This can only be real. Lesso does not protest; she is frozen, staring at the scene before them.
August, her beloved friend, already dissipating into golden dust, leaving only the imprint of his tearful smile. And the two Readers knelt in the middle of it all, looking for all the world like two souls in one body; two hearts in one.
Sophie is dead. The idea hits Clarissa only moments after she sees it; sees Agatha, holding Sophie’s body, sees Tedros hanging back. It has only just begun to settle in, insidious, when Agatha does what is even more unthinkable—
A princess and a witch, friends.
Agatha kisses Sophie back to life, and the two girls are spirited away. But it’s not over. It is never really over.
Clarissa and Lesso, acting in tandem, do their best to set things right. They herd students and professors alike back to their Schools; prepare to assess the damage done. Only the Woods themselves seem to have turned against them, because the balance shifts anew, and suddenly nothing is the same.
This is how Clarissa and Lesso find themselves relentlessly attempting to unlock Clarissa’s office door, only to fail each time. Lesso is not easily bested, but even she is beginning to look strained by the time Clarissa lowers her fingerglow in exhausted concession.
“What does this mean?” she says, frustration clear in her voice. “The division I can understand, given how that story ended. Girls and Boys. I may not like it, but I understand. But who else would take your place?”
“Someone has already taken yours,” Clarissa murmurs. “I doubt I will be allowed to keep mine. We stand together or not at all.”
“Sentiment,” Lesso points out. She blows smoke off her finger. “Well. I am not giving up just yet.” And Clarissa cannot just let her go alone, can she? So she readies her fingerglow—
The door swings open, eerily smooth. Clarissa looks up, sharply, at the same time Lesso takes a horrified step back, the blood draining from her face.
“No,” she whispers; and in these ten years Clarissa has not heard her so scared. So vulnerable. So broken.
And in these ten years Clarissa has not been so angry. “You,” she spits. There is no one else she wants to hurt so much as—
Evelyn Sader smiles idly up at them. “Me,” she confirms. “My brother was so kind as to find you a replacement. You’re welcome, by the way. On his behalf.”
She dusts off her skirt as she gets up. “To work, hm?” She bares her teeth at Clarissa as she brushes past. She doesn’t even look at Lesso.
Clarissa does, and Lesso looks away. Clarissa slips her arm into Lesso’s and leads her along, because this is the role they must play, and she cannot see any other way out. Lesso would, because Lesso is cunning and clever and capable in ways that Clarissa never has been; but Lesso’s eyes gleam with tears, left unshed for a decade and counting, and Clarissa does not want to ask anything more of her.
Later. Later they plan. For now, Clarissa has a School to run, because she’ll be damned if she lets Evelyn Sader hurt anyone else.
Later they huddle together in August’s office, the one place Evelyn refuses to touch. Lesso has pulled herself together, by then; her eyes are clear and cold, which is not altogether reassuring, but it is more like Lesso. More like who Lesso believes herself to be.
“This cannot be allowed to go on,” she says quietly, and her voice is filled with a controlled, bitter fury.
“But what can we do?” Clarissa questions, easily playing the opposite role, the devil’s advocate. “There is no meaning in Good and Evil now. For all we know this is our new normal. For all we know there is no going back.”
“We define Good and Evil,” Lesso says, “all Good comes from Evil, and all Evil from Good. We grew to know each other because of Evelyn Sader’s Evil, all those years ago. It may not seem so kind to you. But you are one of the few Good things I have ever been allowed to have.
“But more than that. You are Good because I am Evil. And I am Evil because you are Good. You define me, just as I define you. Do you think sides truly matter, in this? Do you have so little faith in me?” Lesso’s voice grows soft instead of sharp, in a surprising move of vulnerability. Clarissa’s heart wrenches in her chest, so tenderly it might break. “Do you have so little faith in us?”
“Never,” Clarissa promises.
“Then there is always something we can do,” Lesso says.
She is being gentler, Clarissa thinks, than she usually is. Lesso does not like being gentle. She does it to placate Clarissa, or herself, and only in times of desperate need. And Clarissa does not feel like she needs to be placated.
“Are you alright?” she asks. “Really. Lesso.”
“Do I have a choice?” Lesso says, more honest than either of them like.
Clarissa reaches to clasp her hand over August’s desk. Lesso is always cold, and Clarissa tends to run warm. This, too, is part of the understanding between them.
“With me,” she says, “yes.”
Lesso does not look at her, even now. But her fingers curl into Clarissa’s, and for a brief moment she lets herself look tired. “You’ve made me weak,” she says wryly.
“And you’ve made me vicious,” Clarissa returns.
“And we make each other,” Lesso murmurs, “Good from Evil, and Evil from Good.”
And if they have to do this; at least they do it together. At least they are not alone. But when, in all these years, have they ever left each other alone?
This is what Clarissa thinks of, when she thinks of an equal: she thinks of an unobtrusive question, an equally quiet response in turn. A dialogue, of sorts, between two souls. She thinks of the ways you remake yourself in the reflection— the image— of someone else, a slow and subtle influence, one that is and will always be welcomed. She thinks of all the things you do not have to acknowledge. Of the security of knowing, implicitly, that the other is by your side.
She thinks of Lesso.
(Another question: what does it mean, to lose an equal?)
(What do you define yourself by, then?)
5: Each will save the other.
Once upon a time: there was a girl named Leonora.
She was clever, but not particularly strong. Not particularly brave. She was strange, and as a result, many people were unkind to her. It made her unkind as well, though she was clever enough that few people ever knew.
Leonora passed away quietly in her sleep, the month before her fifteenth birthday. She was never seen in little Gavaldon again, not in the streets, and not in the stories. She was easily forgotten. She was easily lost.
Or at least that is the sanitised version of the story. The way Lesso prefers to think of it, she killed Leonora the day she entered the School for Evil; character assassination, of a sort. She killed all the parts of herself that were weak, that were scared, that knew how to feel pain. Leonora is dead by her hand and she prefers it that way.
Lesso had known her limits. She had been eager to test them. Had been fixated on the idea of pain, to the point of obsession: on the idea of knowing pain so intimately that nothing could ever hurt her again.
Leonora could never have survived it, really.
The more human aspects of it, of her, had gone first: friendship, connection, relationships. Then the more practical: learning to fall properly, to fight properly. To not hunger and not thirst and not sleep. Then, finally, the esoteric and the unknown: how to take a blow and have it heal right away. How to walk through fire without flinching once.
How to tolerate the cold. Leonora hated the cold. Lesso’s classroom is icy and frost creeps up her office walls and the winter wind is always howling inside her. You become what you hate most. You learn to love what you hate most.
To Lesso, the cold is her strength. It means: survival. It means: the ability to hurt. It means: no one else can ever hurt her like this.
She was always looking to protect herself.
She was foolish to think that would ever be enough.
No one could ever keep her in a prison of ice; it would only be surrounding her with her greatest weapon. But here— now— it was never going to be her.
The Good professors, on Rafal’s order, are to be imprisoned in the Brig of Betrayers. It is the Evil faculty who are given the thankless task of imprisoning them. And under Rafal’s cold eye— Lesso cannot see any other way out.
So she does what she must.
Clarissa doesn’t fight; she is the last one left, of all of them, and her expression is one of gentle resignation as she looks up at Lesso. One of forgiveness. Lesso thinks, painfully, that she may not deserve to be forgiven.
But she does not hesitate. She cannot afford to hesitate. It is only when Clarissa is encased in her glacial grave, face cold and pale and lifeless, that Lesso allows herself to step back into her body; step back into her mind. To let the horror creep in, the slow and steady realisation of what she has done. What she must do.
“I was wondering if you would have the spine to do it,” Rafal observes, voice light. “You do have a dangerous track record, don’t you, Lady Lesso?”
“Needs must,” Lesso says, lifting her voice to be just as airy. “Master.”
Rafal laughs. It is not a pleasant sound. They both know who has the upper hand.
As long as you control someone’s fear, you control them, as well.
And for many long years now, there has been one thing Lesso is afraid of.
Her equal. Her counterpart. The one Good thing she has left. The loss of Clarissa Dovey is unthinkable.
But Lesso is not so easily controlled, has never been so easily controlled. And if Rafal has Clarissa; then the only thing to do is to save her, isn’t it?
It is Clarissa, Lesso thinks bitterly, who is supposed to do the saving. It is Clarissa who is the fairy godmother, Clarissa whose nature has always been to help and to guide and to protect. Lesso is a witch; it is in her nature to be cruel. She was not made to be a saviour, not made to be a saint.
But she will have to be. She’s all that’s left.
And no one is going to save Clarissa but her.
So she pretends and she plans. She lets Aric try to kill her; she couldn’t stop him, either way. Let it be her penance, she thinks, and tries to ignore Clarissa’s voice in her head, disapproving: it was never your fault, my dear. She knows. She knows. Clarissa can tell her herself, once she is freed.
She finds her way to Merlin, or he finds his way to her. Together, the two of them teach Evers and Nevers alike how to fight for Good; how to aim, how to fire, how to shoot to kill. It is almost like being with Clarissa again. It is nothing like being with Clarissa again. For all she and Merlin are united in this common goal, there is always something lingering, in the spaces where they meet. Something absent. Something soft, and sad.
“I did not think you one to betray Evil so easily,” Merlin comments, as the students murmur among themselves, practising with the bows he conjured and the flaming arrows Lesso enchanted.
“Do you really think this is easy for me?” Lesso says, blank.
“No,” Merlin agrees, “but nevertheless. You joined us more willingly than one might have thought.”
Lesso closes her eyes. For a moment, instead of the flash of fire and steel, she sees something more peaceful. A remnant of better days in this office, of chess matches and tea and gentle laughter; a friend. A promise.
“Evil is nothing,” she says, “without Good to define it. I do not fight for Rafal’s foolish vision, of a world ruled by Evil and Evil alone. I fight for my own.”
The room has grown very quiet. “And what might that vision be, Lady Lesso?” Merlin asks, eyes twinkling like stars.
Lesso lifts her eyes to the students watching her, watching them. Her and Clarissa’s students both. Their future. Their vision.
“A world where both Good and Evil thrive,” she says. “A world where both can fight and fall and fight again. I have sought the true meaning of Evil for a long time now. And it is not just to be Good’s enemy— it is to be Good’s counterpart, its shadow, its equal. That is my vision. That is what we fight for.”
Into the silence, someone lets out a long, low whistle. The room bursts into adoring chatter, and instead of raising her voice to stop it, Lesso turns away. Perhaps she really has grown weak. Or perhaps the hope— the unity— she sees is not such a bad thing.
“Thank you, my dear,” Merlin says approvingly. “Well-said, indeed.”
“I am not your dear,” Lesso warns.
“Lady Lesso, then,” Merlin says, voice much graver. “We will see it done. This, I promise.”
“Your promises mean nothing to me,” Lesso says softly. Here and now, there is only one promise that matters. Congratulate me when all this is over. With me, yes. You are not alone.
Clarissa’s work is yet undone. There is so much left to do. So much left to fight for.
Until then: she plays her part.
The judgement day arrives soon enough. The sun melting over the horizon, the students readying themselves for war, Lesso turns against the Evil professors. Castor and Pollux don’t even realise, at first. Sheeks looks half-surprised. Manley doesn’t look surprised at all, the bastard. None of them protest too strongly as she locks them in their rooms. None of them liked Rafal much, anyway.
Aric—
She can’t quite bring herself to look at Aric, as she drags him down to the Brig. He was her Good thing, once.
He will not be again.
Lesso drops him unceremoniously at the foot of Anemone’s ice tomb; he begins to stir, but he’s bound so strongly he would never escape on his own. She ignores him, searching, searching—
“There you are,” she murmurs. Clarissa looks to all the world like she’s asleep. Dreaming of better days. Careful, gentle, Lesso begins to carve away the ice around her face. Clarissa’s eyes flutter open; almost like a princess in her coffin of ice, if Lesso still believed in fairy tales. It is not a romantic reunion by any means. But it is something Lesso could believe in. Something she could have faith in. If only for a moment.
“Thank you, my dear,” Clarissa breathes, as colour drains back into her face. Her fingerglow flickers from beneath the ice, muffled and weak. Lesso presses a cold hand to hers, a layer of ice separating them, and wants so viciously that the ice splinters under her fingerglow— it melts harmlessly away, and Clarissa catches Lesso’s hand in hers for an instant, before she begins to work on freeing herself.
Of course Clarissa would save herself in the end. Lesso thinks this with no little fondness as the Dean of Good clambers out of her prison; her dress soaked, her face pale, but her smile luminous as ever.
“We make each other,” Lesso tells her, more sincere than she usually is, even between the two of them. “To save you is to save myself.”
“I’ll be sure to return the favour,” Clarissa says. Her gaze drifts to Aric, shivering and pleading incoherently on the floor, then back to Lesso, eyebrows furrowing. “Although—”
“Mother, please,” Aric begs through his gag.
Lesso makes her choice. She makes it again, and again, and again. She will always be choosing.
This is the thing she cannot save.
“We know that love isn’t always enough for a happy ending,” she says, and it almost feels like she believes it.
Then— Aric’s childlike wail, Clarissa’s flight, Sophie’s rage. Lesso does not think Sophie will be convinced nor denied. She is too lonely, too desperate, to trust anything or anyone outside of the boy-king she chose to place her faith in. But she tries. If there is one thing Clarissa has taught her, in all these years fighting their losing battle, it is that there is always a chance.
In this world, in this story, it does not work.
“You’ve never been more alone,” she tells Sophie, voice tender, and expects the spell that comes flying at her. It is easy enough to deflect, to send Sophie falling into the Brig. The two children she cares for most; imprisoned by her own hand. Lesso would feel guilty if she were any more Good.
But she is Evil; she always has been Evil; and her role has always been to do that which Good cannot, will not.
Once she’s walked far enough she doesn’t even hear the screams.
(Clarissa lives; this is what matters. Clarissa lives, she lives, and so too does Good. Clarissa lives and so too does everything Lesso knows herself by. Equal and opposite. The shadow, the light. This is what she fights for. This is what she fights for.)
Interlude:
For a long while, there is war.
On some levels, there has always been war. Good and Evil are sworn enemies after all. They have always been fighting. They never really stopped.
But this is a different story; this is a war of total and utter destruction; this is a war of survival. And if Evil wins— if New Evil wins— there will be no more war, ever again.
How can they live without war? How will Clarissa learn to live without it?
She has never killed before. She thinks, distantly, that she may have to learn today.
Certainly Lesso is trying her due best to protect her. Evil attacks and Good defends, only this time, this first time, they are on the same side. Clarissa hangs back, covers Lesso’s blind spots, her fingerglow blazing gold; Lesso strikes out, vicious and unpredictable to anyone but Clarissa, wielding knives, swords, magic in quick succession. They know each other intimately. Carefully. It is the first time they have ever been able to put it to use.
Is war so bad, Clarissa wonders, somewhere in the back of her mind, if we are together?
But the thought alone is unfaithful to who they are, who they’ve been, it is an unfathomable betrayal; and in any case Clarissa has no time to think. Try as Lesso might, it is never quite enough.
“Watch yourself, Clarissa!” Lesso snaps, deflecting a stray spell flying at her head. “Are you so old— are you so weakened— Clarissa!”
Reaching. Always reaching.
The tide of war sweeps Lesso away; the last remnant of her is Clarissa’s name in her voice, echoing in the air. She is somewhere in the midst of this carnage. Clarissa has to find her. She has to—
A flash of violet eyes. The wrong shade. Clarissa spins and comes face to face with Aric, wielding a jagged knife. Her fingerglow sputters as she raises it at him.
After all this time, it is not in her nature to fight. Or maybe it is Aric’s eyes that give her pause; that give her doubt. Something in them, something familiar, something lost.
She almost resents it.
Aric smiles, cruel, and charges.
Everything after that is a blur. She remembers a brief flash of darkness, a flash of cold steel at her throat; then waking to see Aric on the ground and Lesso’s hands around his neck, faltering, slipping away—
She remembers, like a distant dream, grasping desperately for a weapon. Lunging for Aric, driving the splintered bone into his back.
She has never killed anyone before.
She can’t bring herself to regret it.
The sound Aric makes is horrifying; Lesso’s tiny, terrified exhale even more so, somehow. In his death, they look almost alike.
“Clarissa,” Lesso rasps, painfully. Then, more urgent: “Clarissa.”
“I know, I know,” Clarissa says, soothes, “please just hold on. For me.” She lifts Aric’s body to lay him on the ground; his skin is already cold, draining of warmth. Lesso glances at him once, in dead-eyed horror, and wrenches her eyes away like it’s painful to.
“Clarissa,” she repeats, faint. Clarissa presses a gentle hand to Lesso’s side. Blood is already pooling into the soil. Lesso’s once-purple dress is staining red. For a moment Clarissa’s vision swims with darkness, with death.
“You can’t do anything for me now,” Lesso says, voice low and pained. It sounds almost forgiving. Almost pitying. The worst part, of course, is that she’s right. Clarissa shakes her head in mute denial.
“Being stubborn? On my deathbed?” Lesso exhales. “Must you be my enemy, even now? Must we go like this? Must we— no. Just. Stay, Clarissa?”
“When have I—” Clarissa is crying. When did she start crying? Lesso raises a shaky hand to her face. Presses maybe a little too viciously at the tears dripping down her face. Her nails dig a crescent scar beneath Clarissa’s eye; the pain is sharp. Please keep hurting me, Clarissa thinks distantly, if it means you’ll still be there. When have we ever failed to hurt each other? When have we not been at war?
“Clarissa,” Lesso murmurs. The shade of pain gentles her voice. Or haunts it. Either way it sounds alien, sounds unnatural. “Just… stay.”
“When have I not stayed?” Clarissa demands viciously, and gathers Lesso’s hands in hers. Still cold. So cold. Her own hands are shaking; but Lesso’s grip holds firm, holds strong— holds weak.
The war rages on around them, and Lesso lies, half-waking, half-delirious, head in Clarissa’s lap. It is like nothing can touch them, anymore.
And then the war is over.
Clarissa doesn’t see how it ends. She doesn’t quite care to know. But Lesso struggles to sit up as Sophie collapses to the ground, knelt at Lesso’s side. Her face is desolate. Clarissa, distantly, thinks she can understand.
It does not quite seem real. The way Lesso speaks, so calm, to Sophie, even as the words catch bloody in her throat. The way she steels herself to demand that Sophie believe she is loved, she is loved, so much that Clarissa’s heart nearly breaks. The way she continues to clasp Clarissa’s hand, long after she lets Sophie’s fall.
“You are loved,” Lesso says, weakly, and her eyes drift from Sophie to Clarissa to the sky, briefly unfocused.
“Lesso,” Clarissa says. “Please.”
“Leonora.”
Lesso forces it out like the name scars her throat. She looks up at Clarissa, and her face softens. It is not supposed to be like this. It is not supposed to end like this.
At the end of the day, it is not about Good or Evil, not about what they stand for. It is about Lesso, Leonora, dying slowly in Clarissa’s arms. All the time that amounted to this and this alone. All the promises that they were never going to keep.
“My name is Leonora,” Lesso repeats. One final promise. One final piece of faith.
And then she’s gone.