Pennyroyal Academy

by M. A. Larson

  A loud crackle tore through the air. She dove to the side as a swinging branch caught her leg, spinning her through the undergrowth. The bark tore her dress and opened bloody scrapes along her calf. She scrambled to her feet and raced to the tree’s trunk, where its branches couldn’t reach.

  What have I done?

  She wiped the bleariness from her eyes and surveyed the gloom of the forest. All around her, in every direction, was a perfect sameness. Spidery tree limbs and treacherous bracken and walls of forest and gullies and stones. She looked to the sky for guidance, but even the bits that showed through the canopy had faded to dusk. She was well and truly lost in a forest the Fairy Drillsergeant had described as the single most dangerous in all the land.

  “Oh no . . . no no no no no no no . . .” Her breath came in white plumes where it hadn’t only moments before.

  A twig snapped in the distance. She searched the empty spaces between trees, but found only gathering darkness. She slid to a knee and hunched against the trunk, trying to make herself as small as possible. Her heart hammered inside her chest.

  If she finds you don’t look in her eyes don’t let her see your fear or you’re dead you’re dead you’re dead . . .

  She knew it was a witch, and that everything she had been training for had deserted her. She was still the same frightened girl she had been in that cottage, shivering beneath the candy crank machine.

  A cold, desolate cackle crept out from the dark, and Evie’s last flicker of hope was snuffed. There, hobbling down a gentle slope, a shrouded figure lurched in the murky green. Evie was frozen, unable even to blink.

  Something moved in her peripheral vision, and her eyes darted left. There, another figure, as formless and hunched as the other, trudged from the trees. This one, too, cackled with menace.

  “Lost your way, young one?” said the first creature. It was the voice of a kindly old lady. A kindly old lady with blood under her fingernails.

  “My word,” said the second. “It’s a Pennyroyal girl.”

  The witches were close enough now that even in the gloom she could make out the pale yellow orbs of their eyes.

  “Fates be praised,” came a third voice. Evie wheeled, eyes darting from one hag to the next. “Calivigne shall reward us proper for this.”

  The three witches staggered ever closer, and each step gave Evie the acute panic of drowning. Everything—the forest, the witches, even her own hands—now seemed to be stretching away, as though she was falling down a well. She could smell the pungent mustiness of wet earth, could see the scabbed cracks in the witches’ lips.

  And then she saw nothing.

  • • •

  From the darkness, a face appeared, no more than a dim halo of light. She couldn’t discern the features, but the figure seemed to be young. A woman.

  Mother, she thought. Mother, is it you?

  “Awake now . . .” came a soft voice, and the face disappeared into the blackness.

  “Awake . . .” It sounded small and distant, as though it were coming from inside a cave. Evie fought through the void to find it, to understand what it was saying.

  “Awake, little one . . .” The voice became clearer. She had almost found her way out.

  “That’s it . . .”

  She could smell fire, then, and taste something on her lips. She swallowed, and found a grainy substance on her tongue, bitter like an olive but with a hint of meaty iron.

  “Awake . . .”

  Slivers of light blinded her. She squinted to allow her eyes time to adjust. Tears tickled the skin near her temples, and she knew she was lying down. A wooden spoon split her lips, filling her mouth with another scoop of the putrid, curdled substance. She spit it out and forced her eyes open. One of the hags loomed over her, holding the spoon. The other two tended a steaming cauldron near a crackling fire.

  Evie tried to sit, but she was bound to a bed with a rope as harsh as corroded metal. She writhed against her restraints, but to no avail.

  “Yes, yes! Feel the fear in your veins!” croaked one near the fire. “It will only add to the value of that lovely heart.”

  Evie stopped struggling, but her muscles remained as tight as the ropes. All three witches leered at her with hungry smiles. They looked like corpses, interred and buried, that had risen again. Their skin, waxy and drooping in parts, was so attenuated across their skull bones that it looked like the slightest touch might tear it apart. White hair wisped from their heads and chins, and their wide mustard eyes were shot through with blood vessels.

  “Our Sister should arrive momentarily,” said the witch with the spoon. “It would be quite nice if you were properly terrified—”

  A soft rapping at the door interrupted her. The witches threw up their hands and danced around with excitement.

  “She’s here! She’s here!” they sang.

  One crossed to the door, but didn’t open it just yet. “Now remember what we discussed, girls. We have a price in mind . . .”

  “. . . and we intend to get it,” finished the other two.

  Dozens of thoughts flickered through Evie’s mind. She tried to focus on one thing—escape—but it was only a word, quickly shunted away by visions of what waited behind that door. She spit again, trying to clear the vile taste from her mouth.

  The door creaked open and the cottage fell silent, save for the pop and hiss of the fire as the witches’ stew bubbled onto the coals.

  “Good evening, Sister,” said the witch at the door. She staggered back, clearing a path. The other two huddled together. Evie thought they looked frightened, and if they were frightened, what did that mean for her?

  Cold night air poured into the cottage, followed by the most frightening thing Evie had ever seen.

  A witch floated inside, her feet dragging limply across the floor beams. Her skin had the lumpy, slimy texture of sludge on a stagnant pond. Her jaw hung free in a wide smile, and her bright yellow eyes were trapped in a permanent stare because she had no eyelids to close. The instant she crossed the threshold, those eyes fixed onto Evie, who recoiled as though she had been bitten. The witch had only just entered the cottage, but already she had gone inside Evie’s eyes, probing toward her heart, searching for courage.

  “Welcome to our humble home, Sister. We trust your journey wasn’t too difficult?” said the witch near the door.

  The Sister ignored her and floated to the bed, her decaying tree-bark slippers scraping slowly across the floor. The stench of mold and rot filled Evie’s nose, and the whole world started to blacken at the fringes of her vision. The witch noticed and hurried over with her spoon, forcing more of the bitter potion into her mouth. It shocked Evie back to consciousness. Tears streamed down her temples and into her hair. She had the same panicked feeling as when she had jumped from the cliff . . . a cold certainty that she was about to die.

  “Our dear Sister,” said the hag with the spoon. “You can see she’s a Pennyroyal girl. Quite valuable, indeed.”

  The Sister’s eyes bored into Evie, her mouth hanging wide.

  “She’s obviously yours to keep, m’lady, as we three are loyal to none but Calivigne.”

  The longer Evie’s eyes remained locked on the Sister’s, the more complexity she could see. Beyond the cold hate there was an unexpected depth of anguish, as though this witch was bound to roam the land seeing everything, every act of evil, without ever being able to close her eyes. And all that wickedness, despair, and madness now beamed straight from the Sister’s eyes into Evie’s heart. She had never felt so utterly meaningless in her life.

  “If it please you, we should like to discuss a price, m’lady,” said the witch, causing the other two to clench each other even more tightly. “Of course, we mean no insult to a witch as eminent as yourself. We are but three humble sisters struggling to make our lives in the dark forest.”

  Evie’s
strength began to drain. The ropes slackened, and her head sank back to the straw-stuffed pillow.

  “Do you know,” spoke the Sister in a low whisper, “how a witch is made?”

  Don’t listen! screamed Evie inside her head. Look away! Somewhere inside of her, a small spark of fight still remained.

  “She is born from a cauldron,” she continued in a strange, unplaceable accent, “the product of her ingredients. First, the heart of a dragon. Older dragons make the best witches, for they have seen the worst of life. The fury in a dragon’s heart is unmatched.”

  “We have a fine selection of dragons’ hearts as well, if you’d—”

  “The second ingredient we require is a righteous heart,” said the Sister. Evie realized that her jaw was barely moving, as though the words were being formed somewhere else, somewhere deep inside of her. “Innocent children, good men and women. All are acceptable, but most desired is the heart of a princess. It beats strongly with virtue, goodness, and innocence.”

  Tears streamed from Evie’s eyes. She managed one last struggle with the ropes, but it was so feeble the witches didn’t even notice.

  “To create a truly cruel witch, one must find a virtuous heart bathed in fear. As yours is now. One dragon’s heart of fury, one virtuous heart awash in terror. This is the recipe for the most wicked witches in all the land.”

  “And all we ask for this girl’s heart is placement in a kingdom,” said the witch with the spoon. The other two cowered as though the Sister might strike them dead at any moment. “Forgive me, m’lady, but our bones are too weary for this forest life.”

  The Sister’s eyes remained on Evie’s, which had started to flutter closed, like a butterfly slowly dying.

  “Your price is fair—”

  “We should also like an audience with Calivigne,” continued the witch. Her eyes went wide and her shoulders crumpled. She realized she might have overstepped. “Simply to show her our potions . . . to see if we might be of use . . .”

  “You shall not receive an audience with Calivigne,” said the Sister. Her arm rose, skeletal fingers clacking as the joints snapped open. She slid a bony finger under the dragon scale necklace. “But I shall reward your loyalty with this.”

  With an abrupt flick of her wrist, she tore the necklace free.

  “No . . .” muttered Evie, barely mustering the energy to speak.

  “Oh, thank you, m’lady, thank you!” said the overjoyed witch. “Look, girls, dragon’s blood and all!”

  With a casual toss, and to the delight of her sisters, she lobbed the scale toward the cauldron.

  “No!” said Evie. Her eyes shot open. A dying spark erupted into a flame. “No! No! No! No!”

  The scale arced through the air, sinking into the boiling stew with a puff of rancid brown smoke. Evie held her breath and let the flame inside her build into a fire. Her mind was clear. Her eyes were open. Her fear was gone.

  “NO NO NO NO NO!”

  She pulled on the bindings with all her strength, then let herself go slack. She clenched again, feeling a kind of power she had never known course through her muscles. As the last ridge of the scale disappeared into the cauldron, something exploded inside of her.

  “NO!”

  A brilliant flash of electric light detonated in front of her chest. The bonds that had held so tightly ripped away like spiderwebs, and she was free. And then, like lightning, the white flash was gone.

  She leapt off the bed and threw her shoulder into the witch nearest the cauldron, knocking her into the flames. The old crone shrieked as the fire sizzled her gauzy skin into a fine green mist. Evie plunged her hand into the boiling sludge of the cauldron. The pain was so intense it registered only as a bolt of shock in her brain. She couldn’t feel her hand, but knew she had a grip on the scale. She ripped it from the stew and fled out the open door.

  She tore through the black forest. True, shocking pain began to settle around her hand like a thousand tiny insects eating her flesh. She clutched the dragon scale in her other hand, the one that could still feel. Her foot found a goblin’s hole and she went sprawling face-first through the rotting black leaves beneath the undergrowth.

  She spit out a mouthful of muck and looked for a route of escape. But instead she found something else. Something that brought back the old familiar fear, that hopeless, helpless terror of witches that she just could not escape.

  It was the sickly, pale glow of two yellow eyes. She flipped onto her back and found two more sets of witches’ eyes.

  “Leave me be!” she cried. Something grabbed hold of her leg, though nothing was there. The Sister began to pull her back through the bracken with some ancient, unknown spell.

  “No! Please, stop!” She tried to kick free of the witch’s magic, to roll and scrape and scream and struggle, but it was no use. The Sister dragged her closer and closer, using a black magic that only compassion and courage could defeat. And Evie was in no state to summon either.

  Suddenly, she had the strangest sensation that she wasn’t moving anymore. A moment later there was an explosion, a concussive crash that rumbled the entire forest, as something elemental slammed to the ground only yards away.

  Evie screamed and covered her head with her good arm. She was free, the witch’s spell having somehow been broken. She scrambled away in a blind panic until she slammed into something big and solid and rough with scales.

  “Sister?”

  Evie’s dragon sister contorted her face in serpentine rage and unleashed an unholy roar into the trees.

  “Begone, wretched beast!” shouted one of the witches as the roar’s echo faded into the night.

  “We’ll kill you and take your heart just for the fun!” called the other.

  The dragon spewed a blast of flame into the trees, the smell so acrid it singed Evie’s eyes. She heard the witches’ shrieks of pain and terror, and couldn’t imagine the fireball exploding around them. The thought of that—of those hideous witches that had been so close to killing her, fearing for their own lives—emboldened her. And then, through a mystery of the human mind, the faces of the three little girls of Marburg came to her again.

  “Away with you, witches! Do you hear me? Away with you!” She took a step forward into the black, and something moved with her. There, yards ahead, an invisible shield seemed to mirror her every step. She couldn’t be certain if it was real or just a product of her exhausted mind.

  “I am not afraid of you!” she shouted, and with this, she knew the thing was real. A weapon born inside her that she had never known existed.

  “Dragons and princesses have no alliance!” shrieked a voice so awful Evie knew it could only be the Sister’s. “Calivigne shall hear of this!”

  There was a flurry of movement, like bat wings flapping, and then silence. Evie stood in the dark for several moments, waiting for some sound to tell her the witches had truly gone. Finally, her dragon sister stomped forward and lowered her great head.

  “Come, before the trees awake.”

  BEYOND THE GREEN RIPPLE of ferns, beyond the stand of bristlecone pines that marked the forest mouth, the towering shoulders of a mountain range loomed in the near distance. The peaks wore hoods of snow, and the trees were outlined in white nearly halfway down the valley.

  Evie studied this swooping landscape of blacks and greens and whites as though she had never seen it before. But, of course, this was the same view she had woken to every morning of her life. She was home again, in the old familiar cave. Something about it seemed strange, though. It’s the sky, she thought. I haven’t seen a sky of blue in months.

  She turned her head, wincing at a sharp ache that ringed her neck. Ignoring the pain, she saw that she was sitting on a mossy ledge. This had always been one of her favorite places to fall asleep as a girl. Here she would listen to her father tell stories of the great dragons of the past while the stars rol
led slowly by. Her mind began to emerge from sleep, and the details of how she got back to the cave returned. Her sister had come out of the night to save her. She must have wrenched her neck running headlong into the dragon’s leg during her scramble from . . .

  Oh yes . . . the witches. It was the second time she had narrowly evaded death at their hands. But this time she had escaped by entirely different means.

  She glanced down at her hand, the one that had rescued the dragon scale from the cauldron, and found it wrapped in a huge, gray verbascum leaf. She peeled the wet layers away until the chill of mountain air bit her sensitive skin. With great care, she stretched her fingers, then balled them into a fist. The skin felt tight, the muscles stiff, but only the dull echo of her horrific burns remained. This was her sister’s work, she knew. Dragons were born with fire inside them, and as pups they learned to treat all manner of burns.

  She uncurled her fingers once more. The sensation was dulled, as though her hand belonged to someone else. The skin was unnaturally smooth scar tissue, mottled with streaks of brown and red. It was worth it, she thought, to rescue . . .

  Her other hand shot to her neck, and a moment of panic died away as quickly as it had come. The scale hung there, right where it belonged. She ran a thumb across its rough ridges and felt an immense sense of gratitude. If all she had to show for her encounter with the witches were some scars on her hand, then she would count herself lucky.

  “You’ve been asleep two days,” came the dry rumble of her sister’s voice.

  She wheeled and saw the great lizard curled in a trough of cool stone. “Sister!”

  “It was all I could do to keep you on your perch,” she said, pulling her huge green body from the rock. She lowered her head. Evie ran her good hand down the dirt-crusted scales of her sister’s cheek.

  “How did you ever find me out there? They were going to kill me.”

  “Something drew me. I never venture that far from home, but . . . I don’t know, really. It was as though I could feel Father.” She hooked Evie’s scale with one of her talons. “I think it was this.”