Pennyroyal Academy

by M. A. Larson

  Something broadsided her with such force that it froze her lungs. She couldn’t breathe, and neither could she see in the sudden blackness. She tumbled end over end inside some hard, rough container until she heard a concussive explosion so loud it drowned out her own screams. She slammed into the side of whatever now held her, then tumbled in sickening swoops. Outside, the crashing booms continued, but these at least were sounds she recognized. Stone against stone. Large chunks of falling mountain. She slammed down once more, and then everything came to a stop. All around her, she heard rocks thud and crunch to the ground. I’ve survived the fall, but I’ll be crushed to death anyway.

  She found a sliver of light and crawled toward it, coughing from the white dust swirling in the air. She wedged her head through the opening. The mountainside looked as though it had collided with the moon. Chunks of what had been a long, flat wall were broken away. Whole trees had been uprooted and tossed aside like dandelions. She forced the rest of her body through the opening, and her heart broke.

  She had been inside the taloned claw of a dragon. He was an eighty-foot drake, one horn sheared off at the tip in a long-ago battle. His scales were a tarnished, faded white that had at one point been green. His body contorted hideously beneath giant chunks of mountain. She could see one wing, mangled and shredded, and a stream of shimmering black blood running from his neck down the sun-bleached stone.

  “FATHER!” she screamed, the call echoing across the countryside, and each time ignored. “FATHER, NO!”

  She grabbed a motionless claw, curved like a scimitar, and lowered herself to his muscular leg.

  “FATHER!”

  She slid down the beast’s bulging shoulder and slammed to the ground in a puff of dust. She found his head, long and reptilian and motionless, and her eyes moistened with grief.

  “Oh, Father, what have I done?”

  She tried to pull away the crumbled stone, but a piece that looked like a pebble next to him was a boulder to her. She fell to her knees, overcome by helplessness, and that was when the damaged wing began to flutter. She thought perhaps it was just the wind, but then it shot up into the sky, the membrane stretching taut like a ship’s sail. The damaged sections of the wing snapped loudly in the wind, but the dragon was clearly alive.

  With the fluttering of small stones falling, then the heavy thud of bigger ones, the dragon unfurled himself from where he had crashed. Black blood stained the rock face and streamed down his neck. He pulled himself free of the debris and rose to his full, terrifying height. Aside from the horrendous gash in his neck, the damaged wing, and other assorted injuries, he seemed to be in fair condition.

  More stones showered down as the great drake’s weathered, saurian head snaked toward her, black smoke wafting from his nostrils. His snout, bigger than the girl’s entire body, nudged her, knocking her backward.

  “I’m sorry, Father,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” And from the remorse on her face, there could be little doubt that she meant it.

  That night, squatting on a water-smoothed shelf of limestone blanketed with moss and tiny orange mushrooms, the girl slept. Next to her, another dragon perched in the same position. This was a hornless female, her scales the bright green of youth. Her neck folded in half, causing a rumbling snore with each breath. She was smaller than the other dragon by half, but still dwarfed the girl next to her.

  A long, rough tail snaked free from the stone shelf. It belonged to the girl’s father, lying on the ground nearby, his body wrapped loosely around the sleepers. He lifted himself as quietly as he could, then lowered his head to nudge the younger dragon. She stirred a bit and straightened up, and her snoring stopped. Then he swiveled to look at the girl. His face contained the primitive coldness of any lower species, a blank expression concerned only with survival, but after considering her for a moment, his eyes softened with affection. An almost human tenderness transformed his face. He rubbed his cheek against her side as gently as a cat’s paw, careful to keep the smoke from her face. She didn’t stir, but her sleepy hand rose up and rested on his lip. He held there, savoring the moment just as any human father would have done, then gently slipped away and left the two to sleep. But when he stalked away to the next chamber, the crash of his footfalls resounded through the cave.

  The girl’s eyes fluttered open. She heard the thundering movement of another dragon with her father in the next chamber. Her mother. Then, she heard the harsh, rasped rumble of voices. After a lifetime of passing flame through their throats, the dragons’ voices sounded scorched and charred.

  “It was a foolish act and nothing more,” said her father.

  The girl crept down from her perch and hopped across the boulders scattered across the cave floor until she reached the entrance to the next chamber, a jagged hole worn through the stone by centuries of dripping water. She peered over the bottom of the hole and saw her father sitting near a massive fire. Her mother, nearly as big and the yellow-green of dying leaves, cleaned his wounds with small blasts of liquid flame. This chamber, the central feature of the family’s cave, was enormous, big enough to stand the two biggest pines in the forest atop each other with room to spare.

  “We can’t go on like this. She’ll kill herself, or one of us,” said her mother.

  The girl’s heart thumped. She knew beyond any doubt they were talking about her.

  “It had to have been an accident,” said her father, recoiling as a blast of fire torched his neck. “Why in the world would she jump?”

  “Because her sister can fly so well. Do you think she doesn’t see how far behind she is?”

  “But she hasn’t even got wings.”

  “Yes,” said her mother. The sudden gravity in her voice sent a chill up the girl’s spine. “And we know why that is, don’t we?”

  Her father growled and turned his head.

  “It doesn’t mean we love her any less. It only means we must face facts and start treating her like what she really is: a human.”

  “What do I know about raising a human?” snapped her father. “How are we supposed to prepare a human for the world?”

  The girl’s lip began to tremble. As the firelight danced across her face, she fell silently to pieces. She hid in the shadows, knees pulled tight to her chest, until her parents had finished their conversation and retired to their own chamber. Then she raced through the cavern and splashed up the slope that led to the surface. A blast of cold air hit her as she approached the cave mouth. Everything was covered in moss, and trickles of water sifted through the rock teeth. She stepped out into the night, the waxing moon bathing everything blue. Wearing only her spiderweb covering, she tracked along the base of the mountain until the stone gave way to forest bracken.

  What is a human? What am I?

  She gasped, and her breath caught in her throat. There, just ahead, was the broken part of the mountain where her father had saved her life. The explosion of boulders and trees. The splashes of black blood sparkling in the moonlight.

  It was my fault. He could have died, and it was all my fault.

  As she approached the crash site, the degree of devastation pierced her heart. This might have been her father’s gravesite, and all because she chose to jump. How could I have been so selfish?

  There, wedged into the stone, beneath a slash of blood, she saw something. She clutched the sharp edge and pulled loose a scale. It was one of her father’s, broken off in the violence of that morning. Blood had dried across one side, shimmering in the light like stars.

  She had crept out of the cave that night not knowing what to do. Now, as she worked dead bileberry weeds through a hole in the scale and lashed it around her neck, she knew she could never go home again.

  They’re better off without me. All of them. I won’t hold my sister back any longer, and I won’t trouble my parents.

  She slipped into the black of the forest, the most difficul
t place for them to track her, and ran straight on for hours. The rain started to fall shortly after she entered the trees, building in intensity as the night wore on. She was determined to get far enough away that her parents would never find her, but the storm soon built to a raging frenzy. Lightning strobed the forest, and rain made climbing near impossible. Everything became a shiny wet blackness, lit up time and again by bolts from the sky. Thunder pounded from the heavens. And still she ran.

  She scrambled down the bank of a dry riverbed that was quickly filling with runoff. She sploshed across, but a wall of floodwater suddenly cascaded through, knocking her down and sweeping her away. She fought the river, but was powerless against the rampaging waters. Finally, hundreds of feet off her original course, she managed to grab hold of a dead branch and pull herself from the rapids.

  She slopped up the far bank and tried to run again, but the intensity of the tempest frightened her. Wind howled through the trees, throwing sprays of rain in all directions. She would scarcely open her eyes before another gust spattered them with water. Lightning and thunder assaulted the forest. And all she had to protect herself was a thin layer of wadded-up spiderwebs.

  She staggered toward a sprawling beech for shelter. Instead, the crackle of splintering wood tore through the air, and a massive branch crashed to the ground behind her. She tumbled into the undergrowth. When she turned back, the branch was lifting off the ground in a rustle of leaves and a groan of wood. It rose high into the black sky above. Lightning flashed, and she finally saw the tree for what it truly was.

  This tree is trying to kill me.

  The lightning blast struck the tree in an explosion of flame, sawing off the branch. It sailed back to the earth, serenaded by a furious roar of thunder. She dove out of the way just before it would have crushed her to death. The way the huge branch landed left a small gap underneath. She wormed through the muck and into this new shelter.

  Oh please oh please oh please, get me out of here!

  A colossal gust of wind blasted the forest. Leaves and detritus swirled through the air, and the girl thought she might be swept away into the night sky. As she clenched her eyes and held on to the broken branch, she heard a slap against the wood just above her head. She looked up and saw something that didn’t belong. Something man-made. A parchment.

  Something on the parchment caused her such astonishment that it drowned out the tempest that had nearly killed her. It was so unusual, so unthinkable, that she couldn’t make sense of it. Perhaps I am already dead.

  It was the Pennyroyal Academy notice, with its picture of the princess in front of the castle, pinned to the branch by the wind.

  She reached up with shaking hand and peeled the notice from the tree. As rain sluiced down her face, she stared at the princess with such confusion that she forgot to breathe.

  She looks like me. She looks exactly like me.

  “A GOBLIN HELPED point me toward Marburg, but I never would have made it without Remington,” said Evie, her voice just above a whisper.

  She paused and waited for a reaction, but found only the soft snoring of the girl in the bunk next to Anisette’s.

  “All the stories my mother and father told while I was growing up were about knights killing dragons. I couldn’t believe it when I found one who actually wanted to help me.”

  Still no one spoke. Her heart began to pound. Why couldn’t I have just kept my mouth shut?

  “You lot are the first humans I’d ever seen,” she said with a nervous quiver. “When Remington brought me to enlist . . . it was as though I’d been dropped into an entirely new world—”

  “I’m sorry, Evie, I’m having a hard time understanding,” said Basil. “When you jumped from the cliff, you were trying to . . . end it all?”

  “What? No! No, I did it to make my father proud,” she said, stumbling slightly over her words. “I suppose a part of me knew I wouldn’t be able to fly, but I couldn’t bear their looks any longer. Sympathetic and worried and . . . My whole life I knew I was the part of the family that didn’t belong, and if I could only fly, then perhaps . . . I guess I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  Basil crossed one leg over the other, still picking his teeth. “Well . . . beats my story.”

  Evie looked to Maggie, to Anisette, to Demetra. All were deep in thought. It was Anisette who spoke first.

  “Right, Eves, are you saying you was raised by dragons?”

  Evie cringed and checked the nearby bunks, but no one was listening. Why did I open my mouth? I knew they wouldn’t believe me.

  “Dragons eat people, yeah? So how come they didn’t eat you?”

  “Curious, isn’t it?” said Basil. “They must have warped her mind somehow—”

  “No, you don’t understand. They’re good to me—were good to me. Better than I deserved.”

  “I’ve heard of wolves raising cats and things before, but dragons? Dragons as a species are mindless, murderous monsters—”

  “Stop it!” said Maggie a bit too loudly. “That’s her family!”

  “Yes, but they’re dragons—”

  “And what does it matter?” She climbed off Anisette’s bunk and sat next to Evie, pulling her into a protective embrace. “They raised her and cared for her, and she loves them.” Evie had started to feel as helpless as she had tumbling through the raging river waters. And Maggie had just become the branch that saved her.

  “Fair point, that,” said Anisette.

  “Your family may be dragons, but they still sound better than mine,” said Demetra.

  Basil chuckled. “Now that I can agree with. Sorry, Evie, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Everyone’s got strangeness in their family,” added Anisette with a shrug. “Yours just had scales as well.”

  “So you don’t think I’m mad?” said Evie.

  “The first thing you need to know about humans?” said Maggie. “We’re all mad.”

  Evie spent that night cocooned tightly in her blanket. If she could only get through one night lying down like the others, perhaps she could break the impulse to perch. But long after the final torch had been snuffed, sleep still didn’t come. She lay awake in the darkness listening to Anisette’s snores and the distant singing of frogs. Memories swam through her mind hour upon hour, and none needed to be prompted by a bitter potion—her father teaching her and her sister to scale a tree . . . her mother guiding her up the rock to the top of the cliff . . . her sister darting a claw into a lake and pulling out a flopping silver fish, bigger than Evie. Her life had been a happy one. Even as she dissected it into its smallest parts, she could find only one complaint from her days in the cave, and that was her own body. No wings. No scales. And a fraction of the size of her sister. Had she only looked like a dragon, all would have been bliss. Instead, she had chosen to leave her father, her mother, her sister, and the only home she had ever known and come to this strange place to learn to fight witches. What were the Fates playing at?

  At some point in those quiet hours, her memories became dreams. And as the first gray light of dawn streamed through the window, a voice from the next bunk pulled her back into consciousness.

  “Eves! You did it! You’re off the perch!”

  She opened her eyes to Anisette’s smiling face, sideways in her vision, as though she were sitting on the wall. As her mind emerged from the swamp of grogginess, she realized she was still lying down. Her right arm was numb, and as she sat up, sharp stings of pain started to attack it.

  “I did it,” she said. “I did it! My head feels odd. Like I was in a deeper sleep than usual or something.”

  “That’s because you had blood in your brain, like you’re meant to. Come on, let’s get ready before the Fairy Drillsergeant turns up.”

  As the weeks began to roll from one to another, the canopy of clouds remained. Some days the cover would be cottony white-gray; others,
great roiling mountains of black in the sky. The air became colder, the rains sharper, and the clouds never broke.

  But beneath them, in the packed dirt and mortared cobble alleys that snaked through Pennyroyal Academy, Evie gradually began to feel more at home. Revealing her secret to her friends had lightened her burden. She found herself better able to focus, and her mind became a dry sponge soaking up knowledge. Lieutenant Volf may have been a brittle old man with rotten breath and a short temper, but he had managed to produce a sea of fascinating work about princesses and witches. She read the next two volumes in his collection in less than a week each, then skipped ahead to one of the later tomes. During an exercise in the dungeons of Thorn Keep, a small fortress behind Pennyroyal Castle, Maggie had told Evie of a modern-day princess called Princess Middlemiss, the only cadet ever to successfully escape these bare stone cells. Evie had become so intrigued by the idea of a princess who was still alive and out there beyond the Dortchen Wild fighting witches that she needed to know more. She read Volf’s book through, then went back to page one and started again, though this time she skipped past the stories of missing children, taken into the forest by moonlight and never heard from again. These kidnappings provoked such heartache and anger inside her that she would read on and then realize she hadn’t absorbed a word of it.

  She enjoyed learning of the exploits of the great princesses of the past, and about the tidal shifts in the world that resulted from the witch-princess wars, but studying a real person who had roamed these buildings only a few short years before somehow made Princess History more real and immediate. According to Volf’s text, Middlemiss had only been an average cadet at the Academy, one of the worst in her class to be commissioned as a Princess of the Shield, yet she had proved to be one of the best in the real world, single-handedly ridding the coastal kingdoms of the One-Shore Sea of witches. If Middlemiss could find a way through the Academy and carve out a place for herself in the world, then perhaps Evie could, too.