Pennyroyal Academy

by M. A. Larson

  “For your memoirs, my name is Remington. Of Brentano, in the Western Kingdoms.”

  She licked the yolk from her fingers. He sighed, though the grin never left his face. His attempts to draw her out thus far had all ended this way. She hadn’t helped him clear brush or build the fire or even gather cordgrass for his horse. She just watched him with mild suspicion as he worked.

  “Are there more like you?” she asked.

  “Pardon?” he laughed. She looked to the fire in embarrassment. Her thoughts somehow seemed inferior next to the smooth polish of his words. His voice was deep and refined, and that, too, made her feel uncomfortable. “Are there more like me? Well, according to most girls I’ve met, no.” When she didn’t oblige him with a laugh, he softened his demeanor. “What were you doing out there by yourself anyway? Enchanted forests and barefoot girls don’t have a particularly warm history.”

  She set her plate in the dirt and studied him. Could she trust him? She already had several times. And here she was, alive and filling her belly. Perhaps he had earned the right to be trusted again. She reached into her tangled mass of webs, pulled out a rain-warped parchment, and handed it to him.

  “I’m looking for her.”

  He unfolded the parchment. It was a hand-painted notice depicting a girl in a golden dress standing before a castle in a heroic pose. In ornate script, it read:

  Pennyroyal Academy

  Seeking bold, courageous youths to become tomorrow’s princesses and knights

  Blood restrictions lifted—Come one, come all!

  “These bloody things are everywhere. They really are desperate, aren’t they? It’s not to say you wouldn’t make a fine princess, only that they’ve never recruited this aggressively before.”

  “So you know her?”

  “I . . . suppose you could say that. You’re really quite lucky I came along to rescue you—”

  “Hang on, you rescued me?”

  He fought away a smile, but was only partly successful. “We’ll ride to Marburg together. I’m headed to the Academy myself to train as a knight.”

  She leapt to her feet, snatching the parchment from his hands. “You’re a knight?”

  “No,” he said, looking at his suddenly empty fingers, “which is why I’m enlisting. Look, you’re not terribly gracious, are you?”

  She folded the parchment, scowling at him. He shook his head and took the skillet off the fire. He plated the eggs and prepared to eat, then, with a sigh, offered this serving to her as well. Her mother had told her from her earliest memories to steer clear of knights, just as her father had warned her against witches. Remington insisted he wasn’t a knight—yet—but even the mention of the word made her nervous. She kept a suspicious eye on him as she took the offered eggs and sat back down.

  He stood and stretched, then walked to the tree where his horse was tied and started unclasping something from the saddle. He was tall and lean, with the effortless bearing of an athlete who trusted his body to always do what he asked. And he intends to be a knight, she thought. I should have left him in that cage.

  “I’m quite happy to see someone like you enlisting,” he said. “The world is far too unsettled to be worrying about the color of one’s blood, don’t you think?” He brought back a small bedroll and tossed it to the dirt next to her. “It’s a bit damp, but the fire should sort that out.”

  He collected the empty plates and set them in front of his horse to lick clean, though she had already done a good job of that. Then he took off his doublet and lay down on the other side of the fire, bunching it up beneath his head. “We ride at first light. Try to get some sleep.”

  Surrounded by the steady song of crickets, she looked to the stars, confused and exhausted. Her eyes were raw. All she wanted was sleep. But now she was even less certain whether she should trust him. She glanced into the depthless black of the forest. Perhaps she should continue her journey alone . . .

  “What if she finds us?” she said. She hadn’t meant to actually speak the words, but there they were. Remington propped himself onto an elbow and looked over at her. “I can’t do that again. Her eyes . . . It was like she was looking inside me.”

  His smile was gone. He looked as earnest as he had in the cage. “That was a wood witch. They rarely leave the enchanted forest. Once we crossed that river, we were safe. Relatively speaking.” She looked away, embarrassed by what she had said, but also comforted by his words.

  Within a few minutes, the crackle of the dying fire sent him to sleep and she was alone again. She found a flat sandstone boulder and perched in the dark, thinking. But every thought inevitably led straight back to that cottage. She was safe now, but didn’t feel it. The fear echoed on.

  She slipped the necklace over her head and studied it under the faint light of the rising moon. A coat of dried mud covered its convex side. She licked her thumb and rubbed it away. Underneath, a smear of dried black stained the scale from edge to edge. And something in that stain, a faint shimmer, caught her eye. She tilted the scale to catch the moonlight and it happened again. The stain itself seemed to be moving.

  She lifted the necklace higher to catch the moon’s beams and realized it wasn’t just the illusion of movement. The stain was shimmering in the light like a vein of gold. And as she lowered it to her eye, it began to swirl and pulse, the blackness moving faster and faster until she could see nothing else—

  Suddenly she was plunging through an endless void. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t tell up from down. The disorientation was so intense she began to feel ill.

  Then, at the bottom of the sickening gyre, an image came into focus. It was the shore of a vast sea, pink with low sun. Someone stood there amidst the crashing waves and scavenging birds. It was Remington. And he held her face in his hands.

  “You are the one true Princess of Saudade. I would willingly give my life to see it so.” He gently pulled her closer. She parted her lips . . .

  Her stomach lurched and everything went black again, but the spiral quickly settled into another image. A crumbling tower in the midst of an endless forest, pelted with rain. A woman in a tunic dress of imperial violet was in great distress. Some unseen magic was forcing her to her knees, her eyes clenched in pain. The girl turned to find the source and a monstrous witch loomed behind her, face obscured beneath a cowled cloak. She stood no less than ten feet, and the sight of her filled the girl’s heart with hopelessness and despair. A long, bony arm rose up, and the woman in violet screamed. The girl wanted to go to her, but found she couldn’t move, could only watch as the witch forced the woman’s head to the stone in a bow of forced subjugation.

  The cloaked witch thrust her glaucous arms skyward and the air filled with witches. Hundreds of them, black robes flapping, dispatched to all corners of the land . . .

  The girl tore the scale from her eye. Her breath came fast and shallow, a stark contrast to the boy’s rhythmic snores, the peaceful thrum of the crickets. It took her a moment to realize that what she had seen wasn’t real. Still, the overwhelming feeling of dread lingered. Another wolf’s howl echoed in the distance, reminding her that even though she had escaped the enchanted forest, the bad things of the world lurked everywhere.

  She perched on the stone all through the night, watching the fire fade from orange to red to black. She tried to force her thoughts to her family, to her home, to anything but the monstrous witch and the unseen horrors lurking beneath that hood.

  Finally, the sky grayed to a dim, sleepy blue, and the girl remembered something else from her vision. Not nearly as haunting, but equally as startling. She glanced at Remington, whose arms and legs sprawled everywhere like a giant had tossed him aside. Why on earth would I want to kiss him? A sworn knight, or soon to be.

  “What, no breakfast? No tea? What have you been doing all morning?” She jerked her eyes away. She had been staring at him, and couldn’t say h
ow long, but now he was awake. He sat up, his face slow and sleepy. She looked away again when she found her eyes resting comfortably on his lips.

  Remington made quick work of camp, and they rode hard through the morning. Now that she need not worry about the trees trying to kill her, the forest became monotonous, the ride quite exhausting. She clung to his waist, struggling to fight off the sleep that hadn’t come the night before.

  As the sun rose behind the dim green canopy, the air grew thinner in her lungs. They had been climbing gradually throughout the morning, sometimes up long, slow inclines coated with bracken, other times along steep switchbacks of crumbling basanite or limestone. But nowhere in their journey had the pines cleared enough to give a sense of where they actually were. Finally, after a valiant fight, her eyes fell closed. She drifted for what could have been minutes or hours, never really sleeping, always aware of the crunch of leaves under the horse’s hooves.

  “Ah, there she is. Pretty as I left her,” said Remington. The girl opened her eyes, but couldn’t make sense of what lay before her.

  They were in high forest country that ended abruptly at a sheer drop. Beyond that, the world fell away into a deep valley feathered with millions of pines and furs. A thin, crooked ridge formed a natural bridge to another mountain forest, splitting the valley in two. The horse stepped onto the narrow trail, but the girl didn’t even notice the vertiginous cliffs on either side of her. Because there, at the far end of the ridge, an immense fortress of stone seemed to grow out of the mountain itself. Walls of bone-white limestone, forty feet tall and marred by moss and water stains, encased towering spires where brilliant purple banners danced in the wind. Every surface was topped with battlements as jagged as the ridges of a dragon’s back. Beyond the majestic kingdom, another sea of black-green forest rolled away to the ends of the world.

  “What is that?” she said, her voice dry and feeble.

  “Marburg, jewel of the mountain kingdoms.”

  Eventually, they reached the end of the trail. The horse stopped at a stony ledge that fell thousands of feet to an unseen bottom. Remington waved an arm, signaling someone in the gatehouse. A tremendous crack echoed across the twin valleys and an enormous wooden bridge began to lower across the chasm. Its timbers groaned under their own weight until it slammed to the ground. This is how a mouse must feel in the home of a giant.

  The horse clopped onto the drawbridge. Now there was nothing beneath them but open sky and, after a very long drop, a sudden end. Two massive pine doors began to creak apart, broken shafts of arrows still lodged in them from foregone wars, and a previously unknown part of the world opened up before the girl’s eyes.

  The kingdom, Marburg he had called it, was alive. Ragged-clothed peasants crisscrossed bustling streets. Merchants shouted prices and counteroffers. Mothers chased filthy children who chased even filthier pigs. Woodsmen hauled giant logs. Stoic guardsmen in glinting silver armor stood watch, their spears piercing high into the air. Music poured from unseen windows. And the smells! Burning wood and freshly cut grass and mud and flowers and roasted duck. White plaster structures latticed by dark brown timbers jutted up on either side of the high street, and thatched-roofed cottages squatted down near the mud.

  Everywhere she looked, the girl was keenly aware she was missing a dozen other things.

  “Look at them!” she cried. “They’re just like me!”

  They came upon a circle of peasants happily clapping along to an elderly fiddler’s song. Three small girls danced in the center with carefree smiles and bare feet. Something about the innocent joy in their faces drew her attention more than anything else she had seen thus far. The fiddler kept a bulging eye on the girls as they giggled and spun one another around. Faster and faster he played, luring them into an impossible game, and soon their feet tangled and they ended up in the dirt, tears of laughter in their eyes.

  “Wait,” said the girl, twisting to watch as they rode past. “Couldn’t we stay? Just for a bit?”

  “We’re late. Stay if you like, but you’ll miss your chance to become a princess.”

  She watched the girls as long as she could, until finally they disappeared from view. Their happiness was so pure, it made her wistful, and also a bit melancholy. I was never that carefree.

  Remington reined the horse down an alley past yet another timber-framed cottage, and almost immediately the joyous hustle and bustle of the high street was gone. The sharp pungency of rotting things made her bury her nose in Remington’s doublet as the horse clopped through brackish puddles. The farther down the twisting alley they went, the more clearly she could hear something up ahead. An ominous murmuring sound.

  “What is that?”

  “That, my dear, is about to be the strangest day of your life.” Remington clicked his tongue and the horse cantered up a slight grade in the dirt. Finally, they emerged back into the sunlight.

  Across a vast courtyard of cobbled stone there stood an imposing palace of polished black slate and mortar. Castle Marburg. It loomed nobly over a temporary marquee held aloft by three massive timbers. To the side, a line of carriage coaches waited, each hitched to a team of horses. And the sound the girl heard was the combined voice of hundreds of excited girls milling beneath the marquee.

  She went numb, unconsciously clutching Remington just a bit more tightly. The girls were all of her same age, each wearing an elegant dress of such a variety of colors the girl had never seen. All different, yet somehow essentially the same. They’re just like me, she thought. Only nothing like me at all.

  As Remington’s horse crossed the courtyard, she began to notice that they had been noticed. Faces turned to them with unusual expressions. Delight upon seeing Remington, then befuddlement when their eyes landed on her. The din of voices softened. She heard whispers of his name—“Remington”—circulating through the crowd.

  His mud-spattered boots hit the stone with a soft thud. “Mind your dismount. Fall on your face before these girls and they’ll never let you forget it.” Alone on the horse’s back, she realized that nearly every eye in the courtyard was focused squarely on her, and she began to go pale. She took his callused hand and slid to the ground. “First test, beautifully passed.”

  She tried to hide herself behind him, but after adjusting a strap on his saddle, he swung back atop the horse and left her alone on the cobblestones. Alone in a crowd of hundreds.

  “Right. I’m off to knights’ enlistment.”

  “Wait!” she said. “What do I do?”

  He pointed into the shade beneath the marquee, beyond all the colorful dresses, to several long wooden tables. “You march straight over there and enlist. You’ve as much right to be here as anyone.”

  She looked up at him with eyes full of fear. Take me home! I don’t want to be here anymore! she thought. But no words came.

  “‘Bravely ventured is half won,’ as my father likes to say. The only way to find the girl on your parchment is through that lot.” He nodded to the crowd, not at all surprised by the attention coming his way. “Off,” he said, rearing the horse onto its hind legs with a dramatic whinny. Then he rode away across the courtyard, leaving a ripple of awed gasps in his wake.

  BRAVELY VENTURED is half won.

  As she stepped forward, her head dizzy and her legs weak and trembling, Remington’s words rang hollow. Still, the girl’s bare feet moved ahead, one after the other, into the reluctantly parting crowd.

  “Is she wearing spiderwebs?”

  These girls were draped in linen and lace, silk and tulle. Adorned with straps and belts, crests and symbols of faraway families in faraway lands. Their hair was brushed and plaited and curled, none of it littered with sticks and leaves. They had smooth skin of every shade, clear of the dried mud that covered her body.

  “What do you expect when you open enlistment to girls who aren’t princesses of the blood?”

  As she shu
ffled through the marquee, the girl realized something else that separated her from the rest. Something much more painful. They’ve all got their parents with them.

  “How on earth does she know Remington?”

  She could feel the hot sting of tears forming in her eyes, but refused to let them fall. Just get to the table . . .

  “Hey! Hey! Over here!”

  A girl with curled hair the color of sunset motioned her to one of the queues leading to the enlistment tables. She wore a dark red riding hood over a black cloak, and the kindness of her smile was the most welcome sight the girl had seen since she’d left home.

  “Honestly, you’d think we were witches enlisting instead of lowborn girls,” she said. “You all right?”

  The girl nodded. Now that she had an ally, the others seemed to lose interest in her, and the excitement of enlistment day returned. But as she chanced a look around, something else became clear. The girls on this side of the marquee weren’t wearing silks and furs like the rest; theirs were handmade clothes, patched and repaired and altogether less lustrous. These were the lowborn girls.

  “Next!” shouted a rotund old woman sitting behind a stack of parchments, and the queue inched forward.

  “I mean no offense, but how is it that you came to ride with Remington?” said the red-haired girl with thinly disguised excitement. “He’s half the reason there are so many girls here, all pining to be his one true love—”

  “Leave her be, Magdalena, she’s covered in webs, for goodness’ sake,” said a scowling bald man picking his nose behind them. His fingernails were black and he seemed in a great hurry to be anywhere else.