Pennyroyal Academy

by M. A. Larson

  So she would never know her blood father. Truth be told, it didn’t bother her, particularly since the dragon would always be her one true father, and, judging by her memories, she had loved and been loved by King Callahan as well. Her blood father felt so abstract in her heart as to be nothing more than a character in a story. True, the story was hers, but he simply wasn’t a major player.

  “It was only you and me until I met King Callahan. I’d received an invitation to a ball at his palace. We fell desperately in love. He, too, had lost a spouse, and when we married, he became your stepfather and I Malora’s stepmother. He may not have been your blood, but that is how he loved you.

  “When he . . . died, I went from Queen Hardcastle to Queen Dowager Hardcastle. As if it weren’t painful enough to have lost him, I lost my name as well. Dowager,” she spat, shaking her head ruefully. “My new title became such a painful reminder of that awful day that I decided to go back to Countess.”

  Evie stole a glance at her mother, who looked off at the sun, eyes glistening. She felt a wellspring of tenderness for this woman, for all the hardships she had endured in only a few years’ time. What would my life be like now had her vision of a happy future come to fruition?

  “And now might I ask a question of you?”

  “Of course,” said Evie.

  Hardcastle smiled, as though ashamed of what was to come. “I don’t quite know how to say it.” She turned to face Evie. “Might you consider . . . staying? Here with me, I mean. Princess Beatrice has agreed to let you reenlist next year—”

  “What?”

  “It’s just that . . . I’ve only just got you back. The Academy might reopen tomorrow, the next day, the day after that . . . and I’ll lose you all over again.”

  Evie turned away, lines of worry etched across her forehead. Clouds had begun to encroach on the sun, like spider’s silk around prey. “You won’t lose me,” was all she could think to say.

  Hardcastle paused, then joined her daughter in watching the sun’s last light. “It’s yours, you know. All of this.” She swept her arm across the wintry paradise below. “I’m just an old Queen Dowager, and I might not be around much longer.”

  “You’re not old.”

  “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable, my darling. I’d just like to taste the life that dragon took from me. The life that was mine by rights—”

  “Dragon?”

  Hardcastle bit back tears. Whatever memory had come to her stung as sharply and deeply as the day it was born. “Wormwood?” she called. “Wormwood!”

  The valet stepped onto the terrace. “Yes, madam.”

  “Fetch the King’s portrait.”

  He bowed and disappeared into the glowing warmth of the house.

  “Your memory, the one that came to you in Princess Beatrice’s office. I’ve had that same memory every day since you rode off for that picnic. It’s become an eternal nightmare.” She took a deep breath and held the balustrade to steady herself. “It was your fifth birthday. The day the King died.”

  Memories swirled through Evie’s head. A flash of that moment in the kitchen, only a short flight of stairs beneath where she now stood. Her joyous giggles as the King swept her into the air.

  “We were all meant to celebrate together, but Malora fell desperately ill. We decided it would be cruel to keep you from your picnic after we’d talked about it for so long . . .”

  Another flash of memory. Evie and her stepfather on a mountain meadow looking out across the basin. An immense waterfall plunged hundreds of feet into an ice-blue lake below. The picnic basket sat open at her feet.

  “When the King’s men went in search of you, they found . . . true horror on that mountaintop . . .”

  And now the memory became real, just as her memory in Beatrice’s office had. She was there, standing in the grass. The wind tousled her hair, carrying the scent of honeysuckle and deathribbon flowers. The waterfall rumbled distantly, a stripe of white down the black mountain face. And the King . . . the King . . .

  She looked up at him, and what she saw in his face chilled her to her bones. Beneath the furs of nobility, beneath the beard and the scars and the rough red skin, the King’s sapphire eyes stared at that waterfall with complete emptiness. He looked lost, vacant—

  And then the trees behind them began to crackle down like dead sticks. A wall of pale green scales burst into the meadow with a piercing roar.

  “GET AWAY!” bellowed the King. His broadsword flashed as he loosed it from its sheath. She ran, diving into a tangle of greenbrier. She covered her ears and clenched her teeth against the horrific sounds of violence. Streams of flame spewed through the grass, leaving thick trails of liquid fire and smoke. The King’s shouts and the crash of steel told her he was still alive. The dragon shrieked in pain as the King landed a blow. Then his body flopped through the undergrowth only yards away from where she hid. He scrambled to his feet, diving away before another fiery burst lit up the meadow.

  Evie was too terrified to move. She could only see flashes of the battle, but had trouble imagining how the King would be able to withstand an assault from a creature that stood as high as the treetops. And yet, his brave shouts kept coming.

  Finally, the dragon screamed so loudly that she clutched her head. When it stopped, she opened her eyes and saw the great beast lurch into the air, the wind of its wings pressing down on her. To her horror, the King dangled from the hilt of his broadsword, the only part that wasn’t buried in the dragon’s shoulder. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even blink as the dragon flew across the valley, carrying her stepfather to what would certainly be his death . . .

  “I thought that dragon had erased half my family that day, and yet . . . here you are . . .”

  Evie stood on the terrace, staring at the final, fading corona of sun as it slipped behind the mountain. Her eyes were wide with shock, and her skin had gone ashen.

  “Where have you been, my dear?”

  One piece of the memory flashed through Evie’s head again and again. It was the only glance she had gotten of the great drake as it crashed out from the trees. His eyes, red with fury . . . his horns, so crooked and battle-scarred . . . the familiar bend in his neck and the divot in his snout . . .

  It was her father.

  Evie’s eyes began to tear. The shock on her face twisted and contorted into betrayal as the ramifications of it all kept pouring in. It was her own father who had orphaned her that day.

  The door clicked open and Wormwood returned. He carried a piece of tattered canvas no bigger than the dragon scale around Evie’s neck.

  “Ah, here he is. Your true father.”

  Evie, devastated, took the ragged portrait. It was the man from her memories, King Callahan. He stood atop a mountain, eyes skyward, jolly and laughing. Her father. Her true father.

  “I’m sorry . . . I don’t feel well . . .” She raced past Wormwood and disappeared inside, leaving Hardcastle alone once again.

  Back in the confines of her bedchamber, she sat at the edge of her bed, gripping the dragon scale as if to choke the life out of it. Tears of anger and betrayal streamed down her face.

  “I am daughter to the King. I am a princess. I never was a bloody dragon.”

  She threw the scale at the wall, and it clacked to the floor. She wrenched loose a rusted iron bar and opened the shutters to let in the frigid air. The moon, shaded by clouds as wispy as an old woman’s hair, soaked the valley blue under the black sawtooth outline of a distant mountain range.

  An animal shriek shot through her mind. Then came that horrible vision of the dragon carrying the King high across the valley, her two fathers bound together in a mortal struggle that only one would survive. Silence settled across the meadow after that, with only a whisper of wind across the grass and the soft crackle of fire. She crept out from the greenbrier, her arms and
face slashed by thorns. The meadow, the bucolic patch of green where she was to celebrate her fifth birthday, was destroyed. Streaks of char and fire. Giant waves of earth plowed up through the grass. Blood, both black and red, marring the green.

  Now, looking back, she could remember standing there staring at the devastation. But even then it felt distant, like a story told around a fire rather than a horrific scene of violence and death. A movement in the trees caught her eye. She was not alone. There was a second dragon, a smaller one, bright green and no bigger than a carriage. The dragon, a female, stepped out from the trees and regarded her. She pawed the earth with a great olive-green talon and gave a purring roar. Evie wasn’t frightened or angry or any of the things she was now. She felt nothing as she stepped toward the beast. The dragon retreated a few steps, then stopped. Finally, sensing the little girl wasn’t a threat, she turned and crashed into the forest. Evie, as though sleepwalking, followed.

  “Sister,” she said, for that was who the juvenile dragon would one day become. As the memory faded into the night, she lifted the small portrait of King Callahan to the moonlight. She studied his rugged features, the proud curve of his back, the mirth in his eyes. “What do I do?” she said in a cracked voice. “Is this where my life is meant to be?” Princess Beatrice had supposed once that the Fates had brought Evie to Pennyroyal Academy to help Forbes, but perhaps it was to lead her back to her true mother. Her true life. Perhaps she was meant to stay at Callahan Manor and help heal the scars that encased her mother like a shell.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw a faint light ripple through the dragon’s blood on the scale. She picked it up in her scarred fingers, and a wave of anguish crashed over her.

  “You stole me . . . You stole me from my life . . . You made everything a lie . . .”

  The great fractures in her life, the strange things that had never quite made sense, began to snap back into place. She had loved her dragon family to the core of her heart, and had always believed they felt the same way. But now everything she knew about them, about herself, was a lie. They had murdered the only human father she had ever known and stolen her from her mother and sister. Forbes had been right all along. Dragons were violent, cruel monsters. She had lived with them all those years not knowing the immense destruction they had wreaked on her life.

  The scale was rough, its scallops jagged and sharp. The streak of blood across its convex side had tiny chips in it, perhaps flaked away in the boiling stew of the witches’ cauldron. It looked dead and gray and far removed from any meaning it had once held. She reared back to throw it—her old life—to the wind.

  I am daughter to the King. I am a princess.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Every second she held the scale, ripped from her dragon father’s body as he saved her life, she broke apart even more. She hated her dragon family but she had loved them once, and she supposed she still loved them now, but she hated them just the same. Her arm fell. All strength left her, and she collapsed to the sill.

  I hate them . . .

  The blood on the scale shimmered once more. She held it to the moon and let the light sparkle across its surface. Then she lowered it to her eye and disappeared into a swirling void . . .

  And a faint image spun out of the nothingness. It was the great clearing in the Dortchen Wild. Pennyroyal Academy stood atop its hill, but it had been devastated by war, an abandoned relic from a time when princesses still had hopes of defeating the wicked witches. Walls had crumbled, fires had charred the fields, and the Queen’s Tower had been sawed in half, leaving only a broken stump. The ruins of the Academy slipped back into blackness. Before long, another image began to form. It was an octagonal tower of granite. A hard rain beat down against its roof. Remington was there, water streaming from his nose and chin. He was on his knees, sword in hand.

  The image flickered wider and she saw another figure. It was a witch, though her face was obscured by the downpour. She floated three feet off the stone, her bony arms extended to the sky. A slow swirl of smoky magic wafted from her heart like the first warning of fire. Suddenly, a ribbon of black snaked toward Remington’s chest. He threw back his head in agony as his doublet burned away and the skin above his heart faded to the dull gray of dead stone . . .

  She tore the scale from her eye. She sat there a moment, trying to catch her breath. Then, with racing heart, she tucked Callahan’s portrait into the scale’s concave side and slipped them both into her knapsack. She sat in the windowsill staring at the night sky until it lightened to a dim yellow. If what she had seen could truly come to pass—and even Volf, despite his skepticism, admitted that dragon’s blood did predict the possible—then Pennyroyal Academy, and the fate of all princesses, was in jeopardy.

  And Remington, the first human she had known since the dragons took her, might end up a forgotten piece of stone in a crumbling tower, frozen until the end of time in a state of pure agony.

  OVER THE NEXT few days, Evie did all she could to avoid Hardcastle and Wormwood. Her mother must have sensed her need to be alone because the days passed quietly, and there was always a hot meal waiting outside her bedchamber door. She would sneak out of the servants’ entrance near the buttery and spend most of the sunlight hours away from the main house, off on one of Hardcastle’s jennets, a brown one with black hooves and mane. If Evie’s life had been a peaceful lake, her conversation with Hardcastle had troubled the waters, clouding what had previously been clear. Those long rides exploring the grounds of Callahan Manor, quiet and blue-skied and bursting with nature’s best offerings, helped keep her mind occupied.

  She expected more memories might emerge as she rode the grounds. None did, though she slowly began to fall in love. Each hill she crested held another stunning secret. Meadows of wildflowers of gold and purple and white. Cascading velvet streams. Unexpected cliff-top vistas of pine and spruce forests so dense they looked like swatches of blue moss carpeting the mountains before the summits turned white with snow. The air itself seemed a thing of beauty, so clean and fresh it held the light better than in other places. On one ride, she discovered a freshwater pool at the base of a cliff, and the crystal mist of its waterfall cast everything in a magical haze. The King lived on all through these beautiful grounds. She could imagine the days they would have passed here had he lived. Had the dragons not stolen her, too. She had only scattered memories of him to cling to, and one in particular she hoped never to remember again, but exploring the land that had been his—theirs—made her feel closer to him.

  And one morning, before she rose and slipped out of the house into his world again, a bell rang. She followed the sound to a side room, where the grimy windows looked out onto the forest. Malora was there, frail and sickly and wrapped in a woolen blanket. Hardcastle stood near a fire, Wormwood behind her. She held a wax-sealed parchment in her hand.

  “Sit, please,” she said. Evie joined Malora on a bench beneath the window. Hardcastle held up the parchment and said, “It’s from the Headmistress.” She peeled the wax free and opened the message. Her features hardened as she read. Once she’d finished, she folded it and looked down at her girls. “Well . . . it seems the missing wand responsible for the breach has been recovered. They will institute more robust checks on fairies’ wands and so on and so forth, but . . .” She paused and gathered herself. “It seems your training will resume in two days’ time.”

  Evie sat expressionless, unsure how to act. After a moment of thick silence, Malora pulled her blanket tight and left without a word.

  “So, my darling daughter, the time for your choice has come. Will you stay or won’t you?”

  Evie had never felt so completely divided before. If she could only utter the words I will, she would live a peaceful life at the Manor, establishing a new relationship with her mother and starting to right the wrongs the dragons had inflicted upon them both. Instead, she said nothing. With each moment that ground by, her decisi
on became clearer. Eventually, her gaze fell to the threadbare rug.

  “I see,” said Hardcastle. She dropped the parchment into the flames, then turned to Wormwood. “Collect the girls’ things and take them away.”

  And Evie didn’t see her mother again, not even as the carriage bounced down the gravel path and began its long descent into the forest.

  Two days later, under a quiet rain, she found herself sitting with her company on the benches of the berfrois above the jousting lists, deep in the part of campus farthest from the princess barracks. And she was staring at the very thing that had brought her back to the Academy.

  “Go on, Remington!” shouted a Thrushbeard knight. The black doublets sat at the far end of the berfrois, lustily cheering him on as he limped down the stairs into mud pocked with thousands of hoofprints.

  Evie wanted to run to him and tell him what she had seen in the dragon’s blood, to implore him never to go near another tower as long as he lived. But beneath her anxiety, something else lurked. When she saw him smile, laughing at the rowdiness of his company-mates, the grim vision dimmed just a bit, and she was taken back to the moments before the wolves attacked. To what might have been when he put his arms around her, closed his eyes, and leaned in . . .

  “Right, Cadet Remington,” said the Fairy Drillsergeant, “and who shall be your opponent?”

  Remington glanced at Captain Ramsbottom, standing at the edge of the mud, rain sluicing off his huge, folded arms, then scanned the Ironbone girls. His eyes passed right over Evie and landed on . . .

  “You. Come join me, won’t you?”

  “Me?” said Basil.

  “I’d rather not fight a girl. Mother would have my head.”

  “You will all fight girls,” said the Fairy Drillsergeant, “and quite a few of you will end up with bruised egos for it. Cadet Basil, if you please . . .”

  Basil reluctantly made his way off the berfrois and joined them in the jousting lists. The Thrushbeard cadets heckled Remington, who took it all with a confident smile.