by M. A. Larson
• • •
Beneath an enormous statue of a princess and a knight atop the courtyard fountain, one coach after another full of cadets and staff circled through, then rumbled into the forest. Evie watched them go, but she resisted boarding one herself.
She, Maggie, Demetra, and Basil stood together, laughing and joking and speculating about their final year. There would be no mystery about which company they would join or who their House Princess might be. The first class had only one princess company—Crown Company—with elegant silver tunic dress uniforms. And the woman in charge was Princess Rampion, one of the most respected princesses on campus. Evie had seen her many times and had always found her warm, kind, and overwhelmingly intimidating. Rampion was as distinguished as a princess could be, a serious-minded warrior who thrived on creating Princesses of the Shield.
Finally, when the sun had begun its slow descent toward the horizon, casting a halo of light through Demetra’s golden hair, she let out a sigh. “We can’t stay any longer, I’m afraid. Camilla will leave without us if we’re too late.”
“Oh, Camilla’s there?” said Maggie. Camilla was Demetra’s older sister, a commissioned Princess of the Shield, and someone whom Maggie idolized. Unlike Demetra, who could be impulsive and flighty, Camilla had already established a reputation as a skilled, pragmatic Princess of the Shield. Both girls, however, shared a natural magnetism that made them quite popular with their peers.
“She’s waiting for Basil and me in Waldeck so we can all ride back together. But patience is not her strong suit.”
After saying their goodbyes, Evie and Maggie stood and watched their friends board the coach. Once it was full, two men in plated armor with giant swords hanging heavily around their waists climbed aboard. The sight of them gave the happiness of the day an unwelcome hint of unease. The Vertreiben had been scattered to the wind, and their leader, Princess Javotte, had been killed, but the staff was still concerned enough to provide armed guards for each coach’s journey back to Waldeck.
After another hour of watching cadets and staff leave, a tiny voice sounded behind them. “How long are you two layabouts going to keep this up? Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
Evie and Maggie turned to find the Fairy Drillsergeant floating behind them. In place of her usual scowl, they found a rare smile. “Nowhere better than this, Fairy Drillsergeant,” said Maggie.
The fairy surveyed the winding streets of the Academy, the hulking stone buildings, and the soaring towers. “I do love it when it’s empty. Such a peaceful place.”
Despite the Academy’s beauty, Evie found herself instead staring at the Fairy Drillsergeant. She’s happy. That’s why she’s acting so strangely.
“Will you be here through the summer, Fairy Drillsergeant?” asked Maggie.
“Indeed I will. Busy summer, girls, very busy indeed. After that mass of new cadets we had this year, and then with the royal wedding next year, we’re due for a restock like never before. That’s why they’ve sent all the staff home early.” She nodded to a group of princess and knight instructors boarding one of the coaches. “A quick pop home to visit family, then back again with coaches full of supplies.”
The last knight instructor climbed on board, and the horses pulled the coach away.
“Right, off you go, girls. Last coach of the day.”
“Yes, Fairy Drillsergeant,” they both said.
The Fairy Drillsergeant turned and zipped away into the Academy, presumably to think up new ways to torture her cadets in the fall.
“Look,” said Maggie. “It’s only staff left, apart from us and her.”
The courtyard was nearly empty, save for a small pocket of the younger princess and knight instructors. And there, sitting at the edge of the fountain, was Cadet Sage. Early in their first year, Sage had been one of a group of three who had tormented Evie and her friends. Another, Malora, had turned out to be Evie’s stepsister, and also a witch. The third, Kelbra, had perished in the battle with the Vertreiben less than two weeks earlier. And now Sage sat alone, perhaps the only girl at the Academy immune to the excitement of joining Crown Company. “She looks so sad,” said Evie.
“Well, she has had a horrible time of it, hasn’t she? Maybe a harder couple of years than any of us.” Maggie stepped forward and called out, “Sage! Over here!” Sage looked up. Her hair was a fountain of tightly packed curls above a blank face. Maggie gave her a wide smile and waved her over. Without changing her expression, Sage picked up her knapsack and walked across the cobblestone courtyard to join them.
“What.” Like Evie, Sage had also been cursed by a witch, leaving her with no sense of humor. The medical staff was still trying to find a cure.
“Why don’t you ride with us? We’re all Crown Company girls now.”
“All right.”
“So,” said Maggie, leading her to the open door of the coach, “excited for the royal wedding?”
“No.”
And with that, they disappeared inside, followed by the rest of the staff members. Two heavily armed men waited for Evie to board, but she lingered there for another wistful moment. She wanted to let the image of the empty campus, washed orange with the sun, burn into her mind. The Fairy Drillsergeant was right. It was peaceful this way, without a soul there to see it aside from her. Birds sang from unseen trees in unseen baileys hidden behind castles and towers. The stone walls of the buildings seemed to settle with relief at another long year completed.
“Come now, lass!” called the coachman, waving to her from the coach stair. “She’ll still be here when you get back!”
Evie took one last look, then boarded the coach. Only about a third of the benches were occupied. Still, she suddenly felt quite self-conscious to be one of only three cadets amongst so many staff, some of them her former instructors.
“Come on, lassies, step lively!” called Professor Adelbert, the rotund teacher of Applied Courage. Ordinarily, his sharp mustache and beard made him quite intimidating, but today he was in a brighter mood than the girls had seen him all year. “I’ve got two weeks at a cabin on the lake and I’d like to begin them forthwith!”
“The first round is on me when we reach Waldeck!” announced Princess Leonore. “In honor of Princess Beatrice and these delicious little days off she’s given us!”
Evie and Maggie stifled laughter as they found benches in the back, but the teachers’ merriment still couldn’t penetrate Sage’s curse.
“Right, everyone, here we are, then,” said the coachman, an angular man with bushy hair coming out of his cheeks. “Everyone’s aboard . . .” He trailed off as the guardsmen pushed past him and sat in the first benches, two giant heaps of steel. “Right, now everyone’s aboard. As the last coach to depart, we won’t reach Waldeck until well past nightfall. But there’ll be plenty of rooms at the Hoxford Arms, so don’t fret about that, and they do a mutton so good a sheep would eat it.”
“And the second, third, and fourth rounds are on me!” called Captain Ramsbottom, a knight company commander. The rest of the staff cheered. Even the coachman chuckled.
“Now,” he continued, “there’s only one rule on my coach: no singing ‘Josephina with the Dark Blue Eyes.’ It gets caught in my head and drives me absolutely bonkers.”
“You’ve just put it in my head!” called Professor Adelbert with a wheezing laugh. “Oh, Josephina, how long I’ve yearned to find you . . .” he sang.
“No more, no more!” The coachman ducked outside and climbed into the driver’s box, where he gathered his reins. As everyone settled in for a long, bumpy ride through the Dortchen Wild, the massive enchanted forest that surrounds the Academy, the coachman urged the horse team forward. They circled the fountain and eased into the dirt wheel ruts that headed down the hill. At the bottom, a low stone wall separated the campus from the enchanted forest, marking an invisible barrier of fairies’ magic. Once
they passed through, the only way back in was with a fairy’s help. Luckily, Evie had no intention of returning, at least not until after several months of fun at Maggie’s. Though leaving was always bittersweet, and she still felt the slightest bit guilty about not going home, there was no doubt that she was excited to visit Sevigny. It was a snowy, frozen climate, farther south than the Dragonlands were north, a place unlike any Evie had seen. She also knew that Maggie, despite her sunny disposition and extra-wide smile, was desperate to have a friend in her homeland, where no one much cared about princesses. Well, this summer, there would be one person who did.
As the team pulled to the right and followed the road that ran along the outside of the wall, the teachers began to sing “Josephina with the Dark Blue Eyes” at the tops of their lungs. Evie laughed, staring out her window at the Academy sitting atop the hill. The Queen’s Tower glimmered in the late-afternoon sun, the tallest and most iconic structure of them all. It rose high above the jagged walls of the keeps and the sprouting towers of the castles like a mother bird in her nest. Soon, before Evie was quite ready for it, the coach veered to the left and disappeared into the enchanted forest.
“It’s a bit sad what the Fairy Drillsergeant said, isn’t it?” said Maggie.
“How do you mean?”
“About all the staff going to visit their families. I reckon Cinderella was her only family. Now she’s got no one to visit.”
Evie furrowed her brow. She’d never considered feeling sorry for the Fairy Drillsergeant before, but Maggie was almost certainly right. While the rest of the faculty sang their way home, the Fairy Drillsergeant was one of a skeleton crew left knocking about in an empty, silent kingdom.
Maggie cupped her hands and blew into them. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I wish I still had that riding hood my grandmother gave me. It’s cold out here.”
“Oh no, have you left it?” asked Evie.
“It’s at home, actually. I can’t stand the bloody thing. Grandmother always thinks that because I’ve got red hair, everything I own should be red as well. Wait until you see my bedroom.”
Evie smiled and turned back to her window. The air had gotten significantly darker beneath the canopy of the Dortchen Wild. As they bounced along through the undergrowth, the trees became a hypnotizing blur of green and gray and black. Evie rested her head on the cool glass. She could see the faint reflection of her own face and, beyond that, the dramatic swoops of the hills and valleys of the forest. Slowly, her eyes began to fall closed. Maggie said something else, something about seeing her father again, but Evie was too tired to hear it. Her second year of training had finally caught up with her. She fell asleep.
Her mind began to pull images and feelings together into the soupy beginnings of a dream. There was a royal wedding. A castle hall festooned with flowers. And there was, of course, Remington.
Remington, tall and confident, with a charming half smile and a quick wit, was the first human Evie had met since the dragons had taken her in and raised her as one of their own. She had rescued him from a wicked witch on their way to enlistment that first year. There was some disagreement on that score, however, as he claimed it was he who rescued her. Whatever the case, he had been there with her throughout most of the first two years, never judging her peculiarities as she tried to integrate into human life. In fact, he even had a few peculiarities of his own. Remington was the great-grandson of the famous Frog King, and he was able to transform himself into a hopping amphibian whenever he liked.
For nearly two years, every time she thought of him, her stomach did flips. Until, that is, he had been discharged from Pennyroyal Academy. Remington had easily been the most famous cadet in Evie’s class, heir to one of the most influential and wealthy kingdoms in all the land. When they’d arrived together to enlist, everyone had recognized him. And then, near the end of their second year, he had been sent away for trying to protect her.
I wonder what his parents said when he came home early. Based on what he’d told her about the royal family, his discharge was bound to be a massive disappointment, a significant black stain on his character. He could still be king, of course, but his rule wouldn’t be quite as lustrous as they’d hoped. Perhaps they’d even do something rash and pass him over for his younger brother.
As her dreams fluctuated from royal weddings to royal disagreements, she found herself being lulled from her waking sleep back into the real world. Her eyes opened and she sat up straight. She hadn’t even been aware she was asleep until she wasn’t anymore. The singing had stopped, replaced by the murmur of quiet conversations.
Out the window, darkness was gathering and fog floated between the trees like ghosts. Maggie and Sage were engaged in a discussion with a third-class instructor who had just finished her first year on staff, so Evie settled back in her bench and watched the passing forest. For a moment, the sun fought through the clouds and the forest glowed yellow-green. Beams of magical light diffused through the thick fog. Then they were gone, and the forest went dark again.
She sighed and reached down for her knapsack. Inside, she found the dragon scale necklace she’d been wearing since she first left home for Pennyroyal Academy. The scale had belonged to her dragon father, who had gone missing that same day. When she’d first found it, it had been broken off in a wall of stone, streaked with his blood from a horrible crash. Dragon’s blood was infused with the magical ability to show visions of the possible. Anything seen in a dragon’s blood vision could come true, if all the right conditions were met. Some of the visions Evie had seen had been borne out, like Remington’s near-fatal encounter with Countess Hardcastle, one of the most powerful of the wicked witches, at the end of their first year of training. Others, such as the suggestion that Evie was the Princess of Saudade, seemed to be possibilities that would never come to pass. But now the bloodstain had faded away. As she turned the scale between her fingers, a small piece of it crumbled off.
“Oh no!” In a panic, she tried to fit it back together, but it was no use. She carefully removed a small piece of canvas that was tucked inside the back and a bit more crumbled away. The canvas was a picture of her human father, King Callahan. She put that into her knapsack, then examined the scale. There was dust all over the palms of her hands. It was falling apart before her eyes. With a helpless sigh, she gently placed it inside her knapsack—
WRAAAACK!
In an instant, Evie felt herself go weightless. The coach twirled through the air, rocked by a deafening explosion.
Screams rang out. The horses whinnied outside. Evie’s body slammed off the wall, then fell to the roof, which had now become the floor.
The coach rolled one last time and skidded to a stop, finally settling on its side right at the drop into a great valley. Evie lay motionless. Hooves thundered as the horses scattered into the forest.
“Is everyone all right?” shouted one of the knight instructors.
“What’s happening?” yelled a princess.
Outside, there came a sound like metal shredding, followed by another explosion.
“Ambush!” someone screamed. “It’s the witches!”
AS EVIE STOOD, her foot shattered the window beneath her. The coach was dark, with only a flickering orange light to help her see. It took a moment to realize that it was fire. Outside, the trees were ablaze.
She could make out the silhouettes of people near the front of the coach. They were piling onto one another’s shoulders and climbing out through the roof. It isn’t the roof, she thought, it’s the door. We’ve landed on our side.
There was a sinister, dry-throated laugh from outside the coach. Then another. Then a whole chorus of them, like a howling pack of wolves. The horrible cackling scared Evie so badly, it forced her out of her groggy confusion.
“Maggie!” she yelled, her head throbbing from the crash. “Maggie!”
But there was no answer. There were
screams all around the coach, people shouting to hurry and climb, and more bone-chilling cackling. Cackling that never seemed to end.
Evie grabbed her knapsack and staggered to the front of the coach. Every bench was empty. There was broken glass everywhere, scattered with people’s belongings.
“To the trees! Hurry, everyone!”
She reached the front of the coach and found two princess instructors lifting people up through the door.
“Come on, love, up you go,” one of them said. Evie stepped onto their intertwined hands. They lifted her through the opening, where she was met with the smell of pine and smoke. The sounds were sharper outside, more immediate. People shouting and witches cackling. And there, above it all, she heard her own name in the distance.
“Evie!” It was Maggie. Her voice was coming from the fog-draped trees.
“Maggie! I’m over here!” She reached back down into the coach and grabbed one of the instructors’ hands. The princess emerged and clambered aside. Together, they pulled the final princess free.
Ten feet from the coach, sword raised and feet at a run, was the stone statue of one of the guardsmen. Beyond him, flames crawled up the pines. Just as they had with the fire at the Drudenhaus, the enchanted trees whipped and twisted to try to escape the flames, spreading a relatively small fire all around the woods. A horse ran past, tack dangling from its neck.
“Come on!” shouted one of the princesses. The three of them scrambled to the edge of the coach and dropped to the dirt.
“Look!” said Evie, pointing back down the road. In the glow of the burning trees, black forms began to float down from the treetops. Each of them was cackling.
“This way,” said the second princess. She and her friend raced to the edge of the road and vaulted over the side, disappearing down the sharp drop into the valley. Evie was about to follow when she heard a soft voice.
“Help . . . help me . . .”
It was the coachman. His leg was trapped beneath the mounting step. He was sprawled in the dirt, agony written across his face. She glanced at the witches staggering up the road, then back to the coachman. She ran to him, heaving the mounting step with every ounce of her strength.