by M. A. Larson
Evie’s eyes dropped to the floor and her shoulders slumped. She knew without having to look up that every cadet in the company was staring at her. In all her life, she had never felt like such a crushing failure. Perhaps it would be best for her dismissal to come now, before she embarrassed herself any further . . .
“Well, come on! Move!” shouted the Fairy Drillsergeant, clapping her tiny hands. “All of you, get on with it!” The barracks sprang back to life. She turned to Evie and said in a soft voice, “Get it together, Cadet, or this will be a very short year.”
Less than an hour later, Evie found herself knee-deep in the mud, struggling to see through the sweat pouring down her face. Alongside three others, she had been tasked with pushing a carriage without wheels up a steep, slippery hill.
“PUSH, YOU MILKSOPS, PUSH!”
Teeth grinding, Evie peered around the wooden frame. About ten feet above, the mud leveled off and became grass. The hillside behind them looked like a battlefield, the mud churned and slashed through from the progress they had already made. Their company-mates waited at the bottom, shouting encouragement.
“Let’s go, ladies!” called the Fairy Drillsergeant. “I’ve only got one year to get you in shape! No time for idling!”
Evie let out a cry as she pushed against the metal footplate so hard that her fingers went white. The undercarriage dug into her shoulder, but she knew that adjusting her position was impossible. The whole thing would fall.
“Heave!” shouted a spindly girl on the other side called Cadet Nadele.
One of them slipped and the carriage lurched downward. Evie yelped as the thick wooden frame pressed into her shoulder, but she somehow maintained position.
“Hold! Hold!” shouted another girl, whose name Evie couldn’t remember.
But the slight displacement had altered the carriage’s momentum. Now the team found themselves struggling, not up the hill, but to avoid going back down. Evie’s feet plowed trenches in the mud. She centered all her weight into her toes to try to find purchase.
“It’s going!” she called. “It’s—”
One of her legs suddenly slipped out. She dropped awkwardly, one leg pointing up the hill, the other down. Screams came from everywhere as the carriage pitched toward her. She threw her body to the side and her face plunged into the mud. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t see, either, but she could hear the frantic shouts of her company-mates. She spit sloppy grit from her mouth and pulled glops of it from her eyes. There, at the bottom of the hill, the carriage sat atop a huge curl of black mud.
“Bloody hell, is that really your best?”
Evie’s three teammates pulled themselves free from the mud, and all were looking at her.
“I asked you a question, Cadet!”
“I’m sorry, Fairy Drillsergeant, my foot—”
“Your foot is not my concern! My concern is that carriage at the bottom of my hill!”
“Yes, Fairy Drillsergeant, I’m sorry—”
“You certainly are! Back in line!” She floated away, shaking her head in disgust. “You four, you’re next!”
Evie slumped down the hill. A brisk wind chilled the mud leeching through her dress. The girls who had yet to take a turn—their uniforms bright and brilliant blue—cheered for the current team. She, meanwhile, wiped herself as clean as she could, trying her best to ignore the glares of the three girls she had failed.
She retreated to the back of the crowd and found some space near the boy, Basil. Maggie and Anisette were still in front, both cheering loudly. It was crushing. Not to see them so excited, but that she couldn’t find it in herself to be a part of it, too.
She looked out over the Dortchen Wild and thought about her home. Life was simpler there. And that simple life was still happening, right at this moment, without her. Somewhere out there, beyond the forest sea, her father was probably fishing in the river, her mother tidying up in case friends stopped by. But even daydreaming of home provided little comfort, because her next thought was of her sister, and how much she would love to take part in this training exercise. She had always been stronger and more confident than Evie.
On the hill, Demetra’s team had made good progress. The carriage bobbed toward the summit, steadily, and had already reached the spot where Evie’s team failed. Malora had a similar grip to Evie’s—using her shoulder for power and the footplate for balance. Even splotched with mud, she carried herself with grace and elegance. Evie could quite easily imagine her helping a family of commoners whose wagon had slipped into a ravine. She certainly looked the part of the princess. Perhaps Evie had misjudged her. Perhaps her hostility only served to mask something deeper. I may not be around to see it, but maybe, with time, she’ll actually become friends with Maggie and the others—
“Over there, you lummox!” shouted Malora, an insult directed at Demetra. The Fairy Drillsergeant made no move to intervene. She either hadn’t heard or had decided to let it pass. Then, to Evie’s astonishment, Demetra shifted her hold on the rear axletree. She was actually listening to Malora’s barked order. A surge of anger lanced through Evie’s stomach. Why didn’t Demetra stand up for herself? How could no one have questioned Malora’s insult?
“I must know,” said Basil, “is that a real dragon scale?” Evie glanced over at him with annoyance. “The blood’s real, too, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, agitated. She had never really looked at him before. His chin faded away to nothing, and his nest of brown hair seemed entirely too big for his head. Still, there was something sweet in his eyes.
“I knew it,” he said with an awkward smile. “My brother says there’s magic in it, dragon’s blood. Says it can show you visions. Visions of what’s possible.”
She tried to ignore him and focus on the exercise. Demetra and her team had nearly reached the top, and Ironbone Company’s cheers had grown louder. No more about bloody visions, she thought.
“He says that anything you see in dragon’s blood is possible, but only if you make the right choices. D’you suppose I might have a go? Not now, obviously, but . . .”
She walked away, dropping the scale through the neck of her dress.
“Right. Some other time, then,” he called.
Could that be true? Could the things she had seen that night by the fire actually be possible? What decisions would she need to make to stop that horrifying witch from sending her minions into the night? And what of the princess forced to her knees?
An exultant cheer went up as the carriage crested the hill and the girls pushing it collapsed. Demetra sat up, mud sluicing from her dress, and beamed down at her friends. She looks like a princess as well. Evie was happy for her, of course, but Basil had shifted her thoughts away from the hill. She looked beyond Demetra, beyond the trees that fringed the top of the hill. Her eyes focused instead on the low ceiling of clouds covering the sky from horizon to horizon. Fingers of black swirled through the dull gray, dark and darker rivulets stretching across the entire sky.
One eye remained on those clouds as she and her friends crossed through campus for their first classroom lecture, something called Witch Tactics with Lieutenant Volf. To Evie’s frustration, Maggie, Demetra, and Anisette had welcomed Basil into their group. So it was the five of them, sapphire uniforms marred by mud and, in Anisette’s case, blood, hurrying across a bailey of packed dirt and gravel toward the Wolfseye Keep, a massive structure with glassy, obsidian walls. While the others bantered about their first successful drill at the Academy, Evie just couldn’t wrest her focus from the skies.
“One round of field training and I can’t feel my arms,” said Demetra.
“Come to me da’s shop, hey? We’ll show you what real work feels like,” said Anisette.
“Or,” said Basil with a sheepish grin, “she could send a servant round to do it for her.”
Anisette laughed with surprise.
“That’s quite good, Bas,” she said, punching him in the arm.
Evie caught a glimpse of something across the courtyard. She stopped walking while the others continued on. There, partially obscured behind a copse of bloodapple trees, stood Remington. He laughed easily with his companions, and wore the black Thrushbeard doublet like he had been born to it. His smile contained such surety, as though he always knew a secret no one else did. A memory flickered through her mind. His eyes closing . . . his lips lowering to hers . . .
And then a hand fell lightly on his arm. It was sleeved in white, dotted with mud. Malora bent forward, eyes closed in laughter, leaning against him for support. He said something else, and they both laughed even harder.
“Come on, Eves!” called Demetra.
With a frown, she followed her friends into Wolfseye Keep. Through cold passageways and claustrophobic tubes of spiral stairs, Remington remained on her mind. And she was still thinking about him later as she sat behind a carved wooden desk in Lieutenant Volf’s classroom. The air was hot and dry, thanks to a small, glowing hearth next to her desk. Out the window, the Queen’s Tower shimmered, its spire enveloped by clouds.
“Happiness and joy are as intolerable to the witch as anguish and misery are to the princess,” said the old man, his white hair fanning off in all directions. This was Lieutenant Volf, the foremost authority on princess lore and history in all the land. He was slight of frame, with a sharp chin that seemed to pull his mouth into a permanent frown. His voice was mostly breath, and labored breath at that. “Calivigne and her Council of Sisters have only one goal in mind: the extinction of happiness. This is not a choice she has made. This is simply who she is.
“It is most important that you understand this concept,” he said, brittle joints crackling like firewood as he shuffled around a desk so ancient it looked like it had been cut from the world’s first tree. “The witch hates you because she must.”
He strode slowly across the front of the room, arms folded behind him. Evie noticed Maggie scrawling notes on her parchment. Nearly everyone else was doing the same. She looked down at her own and frowned. The words witch tactics were written across the top and nothing more.
“Many years ago, I had a cadet called Rose-Red who could never appreciate that fact.” A silent charge shot through the room. Even Basil, whose head had been moving steadily toward his desk, now looked up with wide eyes. Another name I’m meant to know.
“Now, to defeat a witch, one must first understand her.” Far more than the mention of Rose-Red, this statement captured Evie’s attention. Through all her agonizing about the Academy—whether to stay or go, whether she would ever prove worthy to serve with these girls, whether she could somehow stand before a witch without crumbling into a quivering mess—somehow it had never occurred to her that she might learn the techniques to fight back. She hadn’t even considered that a witch might actually be defeated.
“This institution was founded, in part, to help girls like you understand the monsters that roam our world. It is my hope that I shall dispel many falsehoods that have no doubt been forced upon you since birth. To the detriment of humanity, fairies have somehow become the keepers of stories. They are notorious dullards, with memories like houseflies.” The class tittered nervously. Unlike Beatrice, Volf made no attempt to keep his personal feelings hidden. “This is why you hear such nonsense as singing axes and dancing mules and other mindless rubbish in our princess stories.”
He stopped, leaning on Malora’s desk with a desiccated hand. She scowled at it as he patted his forehead with a handkerchief, composed himself, and resumed his slog around the classroom.
“In the pre-princess era, witches roamed the land with impunity. Children disappearing into the night, never to be heard from again, was simply a fact of life. The people were powerless against this dark magic, and life was quite . . . horrendous for those who survived. Princess Pennyroyal, the first of the great princesses, discovered the power that courage and compassion can have over the black heart of a witch—incidentally, you must read her story, which you’ll find in the third of my thirty-seven-volume series on princess history . . .” He stopped, lost in his thoughts, then shook his head, a memory gone. “But I digress. As I said, Princess Pennyroyal then founded this Academy, where she began training others in the art of courage and compassion. This led to a period known as the Long Sunrise, when witches were banished deep into the forest, no longer free to terrorize the people. And this is how princesses first became the Great Shield to the world.
“It also provided the first recorded instance of witches using organized tactics against princesses. As they were driven from towns and villages, they quite brilliantly began bewitching the forests behind them, filling them with living magic to make it more difficult for a princess to follow. This, of course, is where we get our modern-day enchanted forests.”
Quills worked feverishly around the classroom, but Evie just sat and listened and let this incredible history bloom inside her head. In only a few minutes’ time, this man had vividly painted an entirely new universe that she had never known existed. Her world up until now had been limited to a small patch of forest, with occasional trips across the mountains. But to think that epic battles had been fought, new techniques had been discovered, heroes and villains had been forged and vanquished . . . It was thrilling.
“From there, we enter the Years of the Missing Sun, when Pennyroyal Academy expanded its scope and began training knights to battle the other great menace of the day: the dragon.” Evie wrote the word menace on her parchment, then scowled at it. “And then the Classical Princess Era, where a sort of stasis emerged. Princesses and witches developed strategies and counterstrategies to battle one another. Princesses honed courage and compassion, witches fear and confusion.
“And these,” he stopped at the front of the class, slowly turning to face them, “are the building blocks of all witch tactics. Fear and confusion. You,” he said, looking down his nose at Anisette. “Name for me a witch tactic, if you please.”
“Urm,” she said with a shrug, “stepmother, maybe? Wicked stepmother?”
“Indeed, indeed. The wicked witch thrives on deception, and a grief-stricken patriarch is her perfect quarry. Marriage allows her entry into a family, a castle . . . perhaps even an entire kingdom.
“I should note that this technique is still widely used. And that is because we have never been able to crack it. The witch, you see, has no heart. So her intrusion into the affairs of the heart often creates a sort of blind spot. Tell me, do any of you know, in the absence of a heart, where a witch’s dark power resides?” Only Maggie’s hand went up, and Volf ignored it. “In her eyes. Has any of you ever looked into the eyes of a witch?”
Evie’s fingernails began to dig into the palms of her hands. She would certainly not volunteer her experience, a moment of utter cowardice that she had survived thanks to a boy in a cage and a mountain of luck.
“Quite right, because had you looked into a witch’s eyes you would most likely be made of stone now, wouldn’t you?” He chuckled as he started up Evie’s aisle, though his laugh sounded like a dying man’s cough. “The witch has a whole host of evil magic inside her, of all different stripes. One allows her to disguise the horrific depravity in her eyes. She makes good use of this in the wicked stepmother technique.”
His feet shuffled to a stop in front of Evie’s desk. He removed a pair of spectacles from his pocket, unfolded an ivory handle, and held them to his eyes.
“You there, name a fairy tale that features a wicked stepmother.”
Evie’s face went hot and red as the moments clicked by. She heard Kelbra snickering behind her.
“Any will do, Cadet, any at all.”
She glanced at Maggie, who gave her a look of encouragement, but she might as well have tried to encourage water from a desert.
“Are you bloody serious?” said Malora.
<
br /> WHAM! Cadets jumped as Anisette’s fist slammed against her oaken desk. She glared at Malora, who looked back with a challenging smile.
“Ladies, please. In this classroom, you will remain silent unless otherwise instructed.” Volf turned back to Evie, peering through his spectacles as though she were some sort of rare bird. “Cadet, am I to understand you’re unfamiliar with the story of the young girl whose wicked stepmother wouldn’t allow her to attend the ball?”
Evie’s eyes bored into a swirl of wood grain on her desktop. She wished she could disappear inside of it.
“My dear, if you are unfamiliar with Cinderella, perhaps it’s time to reconsider your future here at the Academy.”
He didn’t send her away, and the class continued on for what seemed an eternity, but Evie didn’t add one more word to her parchment.
Later that night, after pushing food around her plate all through supper, then trudging back to the barracks across dew-soaked Hansel’s Green, she sat on the edge of her bunk and stared at the floor, at a single red stone mortared amidst all the gray. Around her, cadets prepared themselves for sleep, cracking their necks and stretching their sore muscles before collapsing into their bunks with exhaustion. Her friends had orbited her all night, but at a distance, as though they wanted to comfort her but didn’t know what to say. And now, as torches began to go dark, Maggie crept over.
“All right, Eves?”
She nodded, but didn’t look up. Maggie gave her shoulder a light squeeze, then went back to her bunk. When every torch except her own had been extinguished, she raised her pewter snuffer and held it over the flame. It flickered and dimmed as she starved it of air, then went black. She sat back down on the edge of her bunk and stared into the darkness.