by M. A. Larson
And now a fourth villager’s gift had a stain on the bum that she just couldn’t get out.
“I don’t know why you insist on wearing those scraps,” said her mother. Evie had changed into another of the dresses she’d been given as she scrubbed the dirty one against a coarse stone. “There are plenty of options right here that don’t look nearly so foolish. Spiderwebs, tree bark, lashed ferns . . .”
“I happen to like it,” said Evie.
“Leave her alone, Mother, she’s a pretty princess, remember?”
They were in the main chamber of the family cave, an enormous cathedral of dripping stone set into the side of a mountain. Moss covered the walls. Trickles of water ran down from the mouth and disappeared deeper into the cave. A fire blazed in a natural hearth cut into the wall by years of erosion. Evie’s mother pulled the charred carcass of a goblin off the flames and dropped it to the floor. She nudged a claw into a huge pile of rotting bileberries, pushing dozens of the fruits closer to the main course. Supper.
Evie’s sister tore into the blackened meat and flipped the berries into her mouth. “Come on, girl, or I’ll have it all.”
“Go ahead,” said Evie, eyeing the meal with distaste. Roasted goblin used to be one of her favorites, but she’d lost interest in dragon fare since tasting the delights that came out of the Academy’s kitchens.
“Too sophisticated for a bit of goblin, are we?” growled her sister.
“No!” snapped Evie. “I’m just not hungry.” She tried to ignore the sounds of gnashing teeth and slurping as she scrubbed the stains from her beautiful dress—
“Here, you’ve got to eat something.” Thwap! A bileberry exploded against the fabric, leaving a splash of deep blue juice.
“Why would you do that?” shouted Evie.
“I’m sorry,” her sister said, chuckling. “I just don’t want you going hungry.”
Evie snatched her dress off the stone and stormed through the chamber toward the cave mouth.
“Sister, please! I didn’t mean to hit your dress. Don’t get upset!”
Evie ignored her and stormed out into the night. Above the mountains the sky was clear and awash with stars. Crickets chirped and a cold wind blew. She held up the dress. Even in the dim moonlight she could see the bileberry stain.
“She shouldn’t have done that,” came the gravelly voice of her mother. “It wasn’t kind.”
“No. It wasn’t.”
The dragon stepped forward and lowered her head. “I’m sorry this hasn’t been the easiest summer. I think we’ve all found it to be a bit of a struggle without Father.”
“It’s not Father,” said Evie, a bit too sharply. “I just don’t belong here. I’m not a dragon and I never will be.” She regretted saying it instantly. The words seemed to hang there amidst the sounds of the night.
“I’m sorry to hear you say that. I believe you are a dragon, daughter, even in moments when you don’t wish to be. I believe that it doesn’t matter what you look like, or whether you can breathe fire, or if you’d rather eat ridiculous human food instead of goblin.” She snaked her head forward so that she was in Evie’s peripheral vision. “I believe there’s only one place any of us can truly be a dragon. And that’s here.” A claw settled against Evie’s chest.
Evie fought to hold back her tears. She refused to look at her mother.
“Time is like the sea, daughter. Right now, you and your sister are swimming as hard as you possibly can, but the water is always moving. The tides are always shifting. The water doesn’t care what you want. It moves you both about despite your best efforts. Sometimes it may feel like you’ll never reach each other again, but if you don’t keep swimming, one day you’ll find that the waves have moved you too far apart. And the next thing you know, there’ll be a whole ocean between you. It would break my heart to see that happen. Perhaps even more than losing your father.”
The dragon turned and disappeared back into the cave. Evie wasn’t interested in “swimming toward her sister.” All she wanted was to be back at the Academy with her friends, training for her future.
She heard her horse whicker from the nearby cave where she kept him. It was much smaller than the family cave, but plenty big for the horse. A good shelter from the rain and summer sun. She walked over and stepped inside, running a hand down his shoulder.
“Hi, Boy,” she said. As a lifelong dragon, she wasn’t particularly adept at the concept of naming things. She herself hadn’t even had a name until her human friends gave her one. “Up for a little ride?” She stroked his golden mane, fitting him with the saddle and tack she’d been given by the good people of Waldeck. Then she swung herself up—she’d become quite good at that—and gave his sides a sharp kick. He bobbed his head and snorted, then stepped out into the night. She led him with the reins, though she didn’t really need to. He knew where to go.
They rode straight into the forest for the better part of an hour. Finally, Boy turned down a path worn through the ferns and into a small clearing. A pond sat stagnant in the center, surrounded by boulders and rushes. She dismounted and went to sit on a smooth patch of ground. The crickets were extraordinary here, one steady chirp coming from everywhere at once.
The lily pads covering the water’s surface reminded her of the night she’d spent in the campus bog with Remington, the first human she’d ever met. She’d kissed him the last day of term, not long before departing for Waldeck. That memory had never really left her thoughts since she’d been back at the cave. She wondered what he was doing now. Was he looking up at the same stars? Was he thinking about that moment, too?
She stood and walked to a granite boulder just off the water’s edge. She rolled another stone away to reveal a small hollow filled with her things.
She pulled out the sword first and felt the weight in her hands. She had no idea how to use it properly, but still spent hours swinging it around. The black bark of the surrounding trees was striped with white slashes from where she’d practiced her attacks. She whirled the sword around her body with a whistle, then planted it in the ground. She loved how it made her feel. Strong. Powerful. Dangerous.
As a breeze rustled the leaves, she crouched down and reached deeper into the hole. She pulled out a small stack of parchments, brushing dirt and spiderwebs from the ones on the bottom. On top of the letters was her Pennyroyal Academy compact. She ran a thumb across the metal shell, wiping dirt from the etching of the Academy’s coat of arms. Inside, she had removed the pressed powder. Instead, opposite the mirror that had helped save her life the previous year by revealing a witch’s deception, was a smattering of small coins. She poured some of them into her palm. They were silver and gold, with dragons’ and kings’ heads stamped into them. She didn’t know exactly what they were or how to use them, but they were beautiful nonetheless. Just another gift from the grateful citizens of Waldeck.
She clinked them back into the compact and set it aside. Next in the stack was the only book she’d brought back from the Academy. It was the most recent in a thirty-seven-volume series by Lieutenant Volf, Evie’s instructor in Witch Tactics and the world’s foremost authority on princess history. She’d read the stories inside many times over the past few months, stories of Princess Hannelore and Cinderella and Middlemiss, as well as those of lesser-known women who had contributed to the war against the witches in their own ways. The section on Princess Middlemiss was Evie’s favorite, in part because Middlemiss hadn’t been a particularly good student at the Academy, which gave Evie hope, and in part because she was stationed in a region that wasn’t far from the Dragonlands. Volf wrote that she lived at the One-Shore Sea, where the world ended, swallowed up by an eternity of water. According to the map Evie had been given, it was only a few days’ ride east. That, too, made Middlemiss feel more like a real person and less like a story.
She set the book aside and unfolded the first parchment on the stac
k. It was a letter from Demetra, one of the first friends she’d made at enlistment. Demetra was a highborn girl from the Blackmarsh, arguably the most prestigious kingdom in the east.
Dearest Evie, read the letter, I hope everything is going well with you and your family. Now learn to fly so you can visit! Anisette and I talk about you all the time! She says she’ll have to find a way to sneak back into the Academy if she can’t see you this summer. And then the Fairy Drillsergeant will have to throw her out again and it will be a whole to-do, and frankly, it would be much easier if you’d just come here.
Evie smiled. Every letter in her stack had come from Demetra, nearly one a day. It had confused her at first. She’d been practicing with her sword when a hawk had come screaming down from the sky. She’d covered her face, ready to be slashed by claw and beak, but instead felt a soft tap as a parchment landed on her. Having never received or sent a letter, Evie hadn’t seen a parchment hawk up close before. But now they came regularly, bombing from the sky like predators, then turning into letters and landing as softly as autumn leaves.
Demetra told Evie all about her summer and the trips her family was taking to nearby kingdoms and the things she planned to do when the Academy reopened. Evie wanted to write back, but had no idea how to turn the parchments back into hawks.
She hadn’t heard from Remington, but that wasn’t terribly surprising. His parents were probably using every minute of his summer to prepare him to be king. Her other friend Basil was too busy dealing with his enormous family to write, she supposed. But she was genuinely dismayed to have not received even a single letter from Maggie. She hoped everything was all right in Sevigny.
She let out a deep sigh and looked up at the stars. The summer was only half over. How could she possibly last another two months with her mother and sister? She’d end up getting into a horrible row with one or both of them, and then things would be worse than they already were. Why was time passing so slowly?
I just want to be out there living, she thought. Not stuck here with them.
Boy stepped to the water’s edge and began to drink. And then, like a frog’s tongue catching a fly, Evie’s mind found an idea.
She flipped through her stack of parchments until she found one of a slightly lighter color. It was the map she’d been given back in Waldeck. She pointed to the Dragonlands, there in the top left corner. Then she ran her finger all the way across the map to the Eastern Kingdoms, a grouping of prosperous territories lining the Bay of Bones. There, right along the northern edge of a jagged peninsula, was the Blackmarsh. Demetra’s home. It was a long way, nearly the entire map . . . but why not? What else did she have to do with her time?
“What do you think, Boy?” she said to the horse. “It’s a long journey, but it’s got to be better than sitting round here.”
It didn’t take long for the crazy idea to become a sane reality. She filled Boy’s saddlebags with the letters and the book and the map, finding a secure place for her compact and money as well. Then she sheathed the sword in its scabbard and tied it tight.
Before she left, she reached all the way to the back of the hollow and took out one last thing. It was the dragon scale necklace she’d worn throughout her first year at the Academy. The scale had come from her father, stained with his blood from when he’d saved her life after she’d attempted to fly. Pressed into the inside was a small piece of canvas with the only existing likeness of her human father. He was a stout and red-faced man with a thick beard and laugh lines around his eyes. These were the only vestiges of either of her fathers, and it comforted her to keep them together like this. She hadn’t wanted to wear the bloodstained scale around her mother and sister, so she kept it near the pond with the rest of her things. But with heavy rains and exposure to the elements, the blood had faded and flaked to the point where it was nearly gone. She slipped the scale over her head and tucked it inside her dress, then mounted her horse and rode for home.
As she neared the cave, Evie considered heading south to visit Maggie instead. Knowing their home lives as she did, Evie thought that Maggie could almost certainly use a visit from a friend more than Demetra. But it was something in one of the letters, an offhand comment Demetra had made, that had decided it. She had mentioned that her father, the King of the Blackmarsh, had once known Evie’s human father, King Callahan. The possibility of meeting someone who had known her father proved too much to resist. She would ride east.
When she finally got back to the cave, her mother and sister were gone, most likely off on a hunt. She scratched out a note on a piece of birch bark saying that she wanted to get an early start on her second year, that they shouldn’t worry, and that she loved them and would see them again at the end of term. Then she giddily jumped on Boy’s back and rode down the mountain. Though part of her felt guilty for leaving without saying goodbye, mostly she was just thrilled to be going.
It’s better this way, she told herself as she rode off into the newborn morning. And with that, she headed eastward through the forest to go and find her friends.
IT WAS A RAMSHACKLE PLACE, this inn. The shingled roof didn’t seem to have a single straight line in it. The support beams must have been made from wet noodles to create the sagging curves of those walls. Vines grew across its face, some even covering the windows, where orange firelight gave off a homey glow. There was moss in every crack and crevice, and the stone pathway leading from the road to the door looked like it was made of ancient tortoises. Then there was the painted sign above the window: Riquet with the Tuft. It was a strange name, and it didn’t tell her much about the business, but she’d been watching from the bushes down the lane for nearly an hour, and it was plain that this was a place for travelers. Woodsmen, riders, even the odd family came and went. Every time the door opened, the smell of hot food floated out into the night. Her stomach growled incessantly.
Evie had largely avoided human contact in the three or so weeks she’d been traveling, but couldn’t say why she was being so cautious. Perhaps it was because she knew she’d finally need to use the gold and silver coins in her compact, and had no idea how to go about it. Whatever the reason, it was clear her horse was growing impatient. He whinnied from the tree behind her.
“Quiet, Boy,” she said. “We’ll go. Soon.”
She turned back to the Riquet with the Tuft and heard a peal of laughter from inside, hearty and wheezy. Her stomach fluttered as she tried to persuade herself to step out of the brush.
You’ve just got to go, Evie. It will be less embarrassing to ask for help with the money than to explain why you’re hiding in the bushes.
It had been a long, exhausting journey, but she’d just passed through a range of mountains that made her think she was nearly all the way across her map and to the edge of the Eastern Kingdoms. Boy had performed admirably along the way. He seemed to like putting in long days, even as they kept to the more difficult forest routes to avoid unnecessary encounters with people. He was probably thrilled to be on the move after all those quiet weeks at the cave, and she couldn’t help but feel the same. She was headed back to her friends. Back to the new world she’d found at Pennyroyal Academy, and away from . . .
That was the one exhausting bit. For all the traveling she’d done, for as excited as she was to see her friends, she hadn’t been able to shake the guilt of leaving without a proper goodbye.
She sighed deeply, then took the compact from the pocket of her dress. She bounced it in her hand, heard the coins inside clank against each other.
“Well, I suppose if I’m going to be a human, I’d better get busy being a human.” She returned the compact to her pocket, kissed the dragon scale necklace for luck, and went to untie Boy.
Leading him by his reins, she stepped out onto the grassy lane. The sun was near to setting, and the ferns shimmered green. The air was thick but cool, the first herald of the end of summer. Crickets thrummed from both sides of the road. Eve
rything was descending to darkness, which only made the light from inside the inn seem even more cozy and warm. She walked toward the stone path that led to the front door. Wrapping the reins around a small post, she took Boy’s muzzle in her hands.
“I don’t suppose you’ve any advice on using money, have you?” She gave his nose a stroke, then turned to the door. “I didn’t think so.”
She pulled on the handle and was met with a blast of warm air and the scent of cooking meat. Inside, she found a large common room with a low ceiling and several wobbly tables. Doors branched off to the kitchen, the privy, and other rooms. A staircase in the back led up to the guests’ quarters. Animal heads were mounted around the room, with fur pelts scattered about the floor. Fixtures made of all variety of horns hung from the ceiling, flickering with the stubs of candles.
There were several other people in the room, though they sat alone in the darker corners eating supper or drinking from cups made of elk’s antler. None of them paid Evie much notice, aside from a glance or two.
“Welcome, lass, welcome to the Riquet!” came a booming voice. It had to have been the old man she’d heard laughing. He stepped forward, arms in the air, a wide smile wrinkling his face. “Come! Sit! Your mum and da will be outside, then? Marie, horses!”
“Oh, um, I’m alone. That is, my horse is there, but I’m traveling alone.”
His smile turned to surprise, his creased eyes popping wide. “Alone! Well, by guppers, we’ll have a chat about that, we will! Come, sit. Marie! Food!” The old man was almost perfectly round, with two long, thin arms waving around in front of him, gesturing to an open table. “Over here, lass, over here. Marie! Bring some food! Any bags, my dear?”
“It’s all right, I can manage.”