by M. A. Larson
SHELVES OF DUSTY old books lined the walls. Even more sat in precarious stacks atop a strained oak desk, littered with parchments and quills and wax sticks and other paraphernalia belonging to the most powerful woman at Pennyroyal Academy. Or the second most powerful, if the Queen really was hidden up there in the clouds that swallowed her tower.
“Cinderella,” said Princess Beatrice, staring out a panoramic window at the south end of campus. Down the hill and across the plain sprouted the black-green edge of the Dortchen Wild, with endless forest beyond that. All of it beneath a cloak of sagging silver clouds. She turned to scrutinize Evie, who sat in a chair on the other side of the desk, then looked back out the window.
Evie had awoken that morning perched on the side of her bunk, which she supposed was an improvement over the footboard. Anisette shook her awake moments before the Fairy Drillsergeant burst in with blustery shouts to get up and get moving. At least she had been spared another round of that abuse. But before she could leave the barracks with the rest of her company, Princess Hazelbranch stopped her. And when she saw Lieutenant Volf waiting outside, his spine hunched and crooked, she knew her time at the Academy was most likely finished.
He had escorted her here, to the office of the Headmistress, then retreated near the door, where still he stood. Princess Liverwort was there as well, lurking in the dim shadows near the end of one of the bookcases. Everyone kept silent, waiting for the one voice that mattered, that of the imposing woman in gold standing at the window.
“Have you ever been to the sea, Cadet?”
“I . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Of course you don’t.” A triumphant shout sounded from somewhere deep in campus. “There is a stunning piece of technology you’ll find there, at the more modern harbors, called a mast crane. By its own particular magic, it can lift things ordinary men cannot. Spokes, cranks, flywheels . . . Somehow this collection of parts works in concert to create the most majestic sailing ships the world has ever seen.” She turned to face Evie, her eyes somehow cold and fiery at once. “Each piece of the machine must operate as intended or the whole thing grinds to a halt. I look out over my Academy and everything is, indeed, operating as intended. Yet here in my office sits a piece that just doesn’t fit.”
Evie flinched to hear someone of such authority confirm her fear. I know I don’t fit, but you didn’t need to say it.
“I understood from the beginning that the Queen’s new enlistment policy might lead to some bumps in the road. But how . . . ?” She came around the desk and loomed over Evie. “How is it possible to have drawn so many years of breath and never heard of Cinderella? It’s like not being able to name the rain or sky!”
“Let us not forget that memory curse, Headmistress,” wheezed Volf.
“Oh, spare me, Lieutenant. Girls with cursed memories forget their ages or families, not the name of our most beloved princess.” She took a deep breath, then sat on the edge of her desk, knocking over a small pot of ink. “Blast!” Liverwort moved to clean it up, but Beatrice held up a hand and froze her. “Reports have come in from the Infirmary regarding another curious incident involving you, Cadet Eleven.”
“It’s Evie, ma’am. Cadet Evie.”
“Good, well, at least you’ll take something with you from your time here. Tell me, what happened in the Infirmary?”
“I . . . I don’t really know. I was looking at all the statues and animals and things, and—”
“Show some respect. Them’s people with curses,” snarled Liverwort.
“Yes, of course, I’m sorry. But I wasn’t really doing anything at all, when this pig started following me. It wouldn’t leave me alone. It started screaming and thrashing about and . . . I don’t know what happened, but suddenly it was a boy.”
“And it is your contention that you’d never seen Prince Forbes before that instance.”
“Never.”
“Mmm . . .” She moved some sealing wax sticks out of the path of the slow-moving ink. “Although your role in curing a cadet of such respected pedigree was indeed helpful, your astonishing ignorance is not. Perhaps we might consider that curing Prince Forbes was the reason the Fates brought you to us.”
“But . . . that can’t be right . . .”
Beatrice stood and swept around her desk, where she picked up a quill and fished through the clutter for a specific parchment. Liverwort took the opportunity to begin sopping up the ink. She found the parchment Beatrice was searching for and handed it to her. How can someone as poised and impressive as Princess Beatrice have such a mess for an office? thought Evie.
“Cadet, my task this year has been made infinitely more complex by the fact that I must now sift the Warrior Princess from the rest of the silt. You, if you’ll forgive my frankness, are silt. Therefore, I see little reason for you to continue on here at the Academy.”
“That would’ve been my advice, too, Mum,” said Liverwort.
Beatrice scrawled her signature across the bottom of the parchment, then looked up as though surprised to see Evie still sitting there. “You have been discharged. You may go.”
“No!” shouted Evie, surprising even herself as she sprang to her feet. Any thought of caution was viciously drowned in adrenaline. “You can’t send me away!”
“You little whelp!” snarled Liverwort, creeping forward. Beatrice again raised a hand to stop her. Liverwort glared at Evie, but retreated to her position near the bookcase.
“I understand how difficult this must be,” said Beatrice. “You’ve traveled a great distance to come here and are no doubt intoxicated by what you have so far seen. But once you’re home again, you’ll find that—”
“I don’t care if I’m a bloody Warrior Princess or not, but I can say for certain that I’m not here just to help some poxy prince!” Her green eyes flashed with righteous anger. “I didn’t know what a princess was until I came here, that’s true. I didn’t know until you said it the other night. And had I understood it meant fighting witches, I never would have come in the first place. But if you’re telling me the only reason the Fates brought me here was to turn that pig into a prince, then you’ll stop me from ever knowing the real reason.” She hadn’t expected any of this to come out, but she couldn’t bear the thought of her own future being tied to someone she had only just met, someone who had been walking on four legs only hours earlier.
Beatrice dropped her quill into an ink-stained cup with a clink. Her lips were pursed, her eyes sharp. Evie couldn’t tell if she was deep in thought or fighting the urge to leap across the desk with strangling fingers.
“Please, Headmistress,” she continued, softening her tone. “I know I don’t know much, but I do know compassion. And I’ve—” She choked on her words, but forced herself to spit them out. “I’ve seen a witch. I looked into her eyes and I know that fear, and I don’t ever want anyone to feel it again.” The three little girls from Marburg flashed through her mind, dancing with such innocence and joy. If protecting them from the horrors she had felt in that cottage meant staying here to face her greatest fear, then the price was fair.
Beatrice turned in her chair and looked out the window at the slithering clouds. “To have never even heard of Cinderella . . .” She trailed off with a cluck of her tongue, the thought too absurd to finish. She looked to Lieutenant Volf, who kept his eyes fixed on the crossed wooden beams of the ceiling, unwilling to take a stand.
“I take my stewardship of this institution very seriously. I understand well the burden of greatness I must require from each and every cadet who passes through my doors. When the Queen decided to accept commoners, I agreed without question. But I also made a promise to the great princesses who had come before that I would not make special allowances for anyone, despite our desperate situation with the witches. And yet here I am, in the very first week of term, doing just that.”
Liverwort gasped.
“You may stay, Cadet.”
“Thank you, Headmis—”
“Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps there is a bigger reason the Fates brought you to us. But if I’m right, and your purpose has already been served, then we shan’t be seeing much more of each other, I’m afraid.” She held the parchment over a candle until it began to blacken, and a small stripe of flame climbed across her signature. “Having little experience with the lowly of birth, I am quite curious to see what lies inside of you, buried beneath untold layers of curses.”
Evie nearly ran down a second-year instructor, a young woman with dark features called Princess Moonshadow, as she raced through campus toward the Infirmary. After apologies and angry looks, she continued on, and so did her smile. Yes, she would be allowed to stay, and she was thrilled about that. But the thing that had so energized her on leaving Beatrice’s office was that she had found a way to stand up for herself. I may yet be sent away, but at least it will be because I’m not good enough, and not because I was too scared to try.
She sprinted around the great bowed wall of Skymeadow Mews, which echoed with the cries of the Academy’s hawks. At the far end, a gust of wind hit her with the must of centuries of bird droppings, but even this didn’t dampen her spirits. Nothing could bring her back to the earth . . . until she reached the Infirmary and saw another of Princess Wertzheim’s bitter red potions waiting for her.
“Must I drink another? Nothing happened last time.”
“Three times in four this treatment works for restoring missing memories. But it can sometimes take many, many doses, I’m afraid.”
Evie fingered the vial, then shut her eyes and downed it in one gulp. “It tastes like blood,” she said, wiping her mouth.
“Oh, come now,” said Wertzheim, “there’s very little blood in there—”
The mournful wail of a horn echoed through campus. Everyone fell silent, save for the ducks and one barking dog. Wertzheim shot up, clapping her hands in sharp staccato.
“Everyone on your feet! I want absolute silence when they arrive. You, move those geese away.”
Evie rose in confusion. Nurses scrambled about, clearing a path through the cadets and animals near the stone archway framing the doors. The horn bellowed again. She glanced around, but everyone else seemed as confused and shaken as she was. Then, across the room, her eyes met Prince Forbes’s. He had been staring at her from his place with the cursed knight cadets. Uniformed in black and with two days to readjust to life as a human, he appeared rugged and hard, a youthful composite of all the portraits of knights hanging in the castle’s rotunda. Patches of dirt marred his humorless features. A long scratch of dried blood ran down his arm. She quickly looked away. Why was he staring at her like that? After the embarrassment he had caused her the other day, she would have been perfectly happy to never see him again.
The doors groaned open, and a blast of wind scattered some parchments. The nurses stood still and tall, and the cadets followed their example. A handful of princesses entered, girls only a few years older than Evie. They were battered and bloodied, their tunic dresses torn and stained. Two of them carried another on a handmade canvas stretcher. Her eyes were closed, a hand draped over the side flopping with each step. Each of these princesses had a haunted look on her face, and Evie knew it could only have been put there by a witch.
“This way, princesses,” said Wertzheim, her voice just above a whisper. “Come through.”
The princesses trudged across the room toward an archway in the back, the private chambers Forbes had been ushered into after his transformation. Evie studied their faces as they passed. The weariness and loss sent a shiver through her, yet there was something else there, too. Something behind the horrors they had seen.
Goodness. It was the first and only word that came to mind. These were quite simply not ordinary girls; they were princesses, and they possessed a grace and nobility that shone through any physical wounds.
They disappeared beneath the archway with several members of staff. Slowly, the remaining nurses coaxed the cadets back to their treatments, and normality returned to the Infirmary. Evie dropped to her chair, despite having already drunk her potion. The eyes of those princesses lingered in her mind, as did the fire that so clearly burned behind them. For those few brief moments, she thought she could actually see the courage, the compassion, the kindness, and the discipline that the Academy taught.
She was so consumed by her thoughts that she hadn’t noticed the corners of her vision beginning to darken. She stared at the lattice of cobblestones at her feet and thought of those burning eyes. And then she saw less and less, and then blackness . . .
“Cadet?” The word wobbled through her mind, and she realized she couldn’t breathe. “Princess Wertzheim, over here!”
The whole world fell silent, save for the insistent whistle of wind. From the blackness, a dim light appeared—sunlight—and then a figure. It was a little girl. She had deep green eyes and wore a simple gray dress beneath a woolen mantle embroidered with butterflies. The girl stood on a small mountain meadow of wispy grass and bright blue wildflowers. At the cusp of the meadow, where the earth spilled over a cliff like a waterfall of green, the world fell away into a stomach-clenching valley of tree and rock. In the near distance the mountains roared back up again. Huge, thick cones of trees covered the wall of stone like the fur of some great, green elemental beast. But the girl took little notice of the vastness of her surroundings. She was focused on a small pie with several bites already missing. A trickle of brown gravy ran down her tiny fingers as she happily crunched into the crust for another mouthful . . .
“Cadet! Cadet, you must open your eyes!”
Evie blinked back to consciousness. She was lying on her back on the cold stone floor, and all she could see was princesses looking down at her with sympathy.
“She’s back,” said Princess Wertzheim. “Easy, girls, help her up.”
Evie felt her limp body lift from the floor as they set her in the chair. Someone handed her a glass of water and helped her drink. “I saw something,” she said. “I think it was me . . .”
“Ah, good,” said Wertzheim with relief. “We weren’t certain if it was a memory or some sort of head trauma from when you hit the floor. It’s quite rare for a treatment to work this quickly.”
Now a throbbing pain started to announce itself on the side of her head. She touched it and winced, her fingers bloodied. One of the nurses pulled back her hair and began to dress the wound.
“You’re all right, dear, you just collapsed. Now, tell me what you saw.”
“A girl . . . It was me, I suppose. I was eating some sort of savory pie.”
“Good, good. What else?” She reached past Evie for a clean parchment and quill, and started scribbling notes.
“That’s it, really. Then I heard a voice and . . .” She set the water on the table. Her muscles felt weak, her skin clammy.
“Yes, well, I might have let you remember a bit longer, but as I said, we couldn’t take a chance that it might be a head injury.”
“So . . . that was a memory?”
“Oh, indeed. And we’ll sort through as many as we can until we find out who you really are.”
Rather than racing off to join her company in the Dining Hall, Evie lingered for a bit in a quiet part of the Infirmary, her mind swimming with questions. The memory had been so short, so inconsequential, yet it forced her to rethink her entire life. She tried to go back to her earliest memory, no matter how small or hazy the fragment, and all she could recall was a waterfall, and standing knee-deep in a frigid lake. Her father and sister—or was it her mother and sister?—sent waves of spray through the air as they wrestled in the deeper parts. And even this she could only remember by how she felt at the time: shivering and happy and small. This new memory, so clear and complete, had been dredged up from hidden depths of her mind, a sunken ship jarred
loose from the bottom of the sea.
Eventually, after one of the nurses hurried her along, she drifted out into the gloom of the day. She walked slowly in the direction of the Dining Hall, still trying to puzzle through what had just happened.
“Hoy, Princess!” called Prince Forbes as he trotted toward her. “Why don’t I join you? We are both headed to dinner, are we not?” His voice was as definitive as a wolf’s growl, and there was an intensity to him that made her nervous.
“Oh, uh, of course,” she said.
“I wanted to thank you for freeing me of my pigskin bonds the other day. It’s good to finally be walking on my hind legs again.”
She smiled politely, but kept her eyes on the stone path.
“I tried to grip my sword last night and my fingers were so weak I nearly hacked off my foot. I suppose it’ll take some time to be completely back on form—”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know you. And you don’t know me.”
Boots clomped on stone as a knight cadet hurried past, wearing the pine-green doublet of Winterspire Company. “Move your hooves, Forbes, it’s kidney pie today.”
Forbes didn’t walk any faster. “They all like to have a go,” he said. “Apparently I’m one of the few ex-pigs at the Academy, if you can believe it.”
They crossed a small bridge, more ornamental than functional, over a tiny drip of water known amongst the cadets as Thumbling Brook. The orange glow of the Dining Hall’s torches appeared in the distance. They ordinarily wouldn’t have been burning in the daylight hours, but the overcast skies made it necessary.
“We do know each other, actually. We met many years ago, in a manner of speaking, and I was made a pig for the pleasure.”
“That’s not possible—”
“There’s a portrait in my father’s castle. A portrait of you.”
She looked away with a grimace. “You’re wrong. I don’t know how else to say it.”
He raised his eyebrows and looked at her with distaste. “Look, I understand you’ve got problems of your own. Healthy people don’t tend to spend much time in the Infirmary. But do you honestly believe it’s coincidence that my curse was broken when I saw you?”