The Warrior Princess of Pennyroyal Academy Read online

  “He’s going to break it!” shouted Evie.

  “Get off me!” shouted Rumpelstiltskin.

  “You get off me!” bellowed Rumpelstoatsnout. He raised the harp and smashed his brother in the nose. The Bandit’s Chair went spinning across the room, coming to rest just in front of the empty dais.

  Rumpelstiltskin roared. He leapt at his brother, tackling him onto his back. The decrepit old trolls fought with the ferocity of all tragic brothers. Now both of them were pushing and pulling on the harp, each trying to free it from the other.

  “If it breaks, it’s worthless to us,” said Forbes. “We’ve got to get it away!”

  Rumpelstoatsnout started to kick his brother in the rotten wooden leg. “Rumpledshirtsleeves sent them to me! The chair—is—mine!”

  “RUMPLEDSHIRTSLEEVES?” The mention of his younger brother’s name sent Rumpelstiltskin into a frenzy. He used the harp to knock his brother off his feet. “He sent you? You dare to partner with the treasonous viper who revealed my name to that princess?”

  Evie inched forward. The brothers were so focused on each other that she thought she might be able to make a grab for the harp.

  “I have no partners,” said Rumpelstoatsnout. “If our brother chooses to send me a bewitched chair, then who am I to refuse?”

  “If the chair comes from that old rat, then I’ll burn it and use this harp for kindling!” He tried to wrench the harp out of his brother’s hands with such force that Evie thought it would snap in two.

  “Now! Grab it!” shouted Forbes.

  Evie lunged for the harp, but Rumpelstoatsnout came crashing down on top of her. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe. Even when he’d scrambled off and started punching at his brother, she could barely inhale. Forbes lifted her from the floor and pulled her back from the fight.

  “Are you all right?”

  She couldn’t speak, so she nodded. As the air started to flow, she rubbed her throat and remembered the neckband. Her eyes went wide. She unclasped it.

  “Whoever brings me the harp gets this as well!” she shouted, her voice emanating from her hand.

  “Treachery!” bellowed Rumpelstoatsnout. “It isn’t yours to give!”

  The brothers raged across the floor in a violent dance, each trying to wrest the harp free from the other’s grip.

  “It’s mine!” shrieked Rumpelstoatsnout, shoving against Rumpelstiltskin.

  Locked in combat, the two of them fell as one. The momentum of the battle carried them across the room.

  “You can tell our brother what I did with his—”

  The words echoed faintly in the sudden silence of the throne room. The brothers were gone. So, too, was the harp. The empty Bandit’s Chair tottered onto its back, clanking hollowly on the stone floor.

  Evie and Forbes looked at each other in confusion. Rain hissed against the castle’s stone walls.

  “What happened?” said Forbes. All the air had been sucked from the room.

  “The chair! They sat in the chair!” Evie ran to the Bandit’s Chair and set it upright. But wherever the trolls had gone when they stood back up, it was far, far away.

  Forbes walked over to join her. They both stared in disbelief. “It isn’t even a nice chair.” He picked it up with one hand, underscoring how light and dead the wood was. “And this bloody thing has just destroyed the world. I don’t suppose you’ve any idea where it’s sent them?”

  “None,” said Evie. “Sit in one place, rise in another. They could be on the moon for all I know. And wherever they are, the harp is with them.”

  Forbes looked around the silent throne room with annoyance. “So that’s it? After the giants and the witches and the goblins and the trolls and the bloody Gray Man? After losing more than half our team along the way? Our one chance at saving the realm, and we come this bloody close, only to lose it because of a chair?”

  “What do we do now?”

  “Put your voice back on.”

  Evie fastened the neckband. “What do we do now? We failed our mission.”

  They stood there, astonished and gutted. Slowly, Forbes began to laugh. His voice echoed off the stone castle walls. It was a dark, rueful laugh. “They sat in the bloody chair! Of all the idiotic ways to fail the mission! We carried this thing all the way here from the Academy, through all those trials and tribulations, and the troll brothers sat on it!” He grabbed the chair. “You cost us the mission!” He slammed it on the floor. “You cost us the mission!”

  “Forbes, stop!”

  He bashed it down again and again. Within seconds, gray splinters began to fly. He was left with two broken stumps in his hands and an array of broken wood at his feet. He looked over at Evie, his breath coming hard.

  “That was a priceless artifact!” she said.

  “So what?” He tossed the stumps aside with a clatter. Then he stormed out of the throne room, leaving Evie surrounded by spun gold that suddenly didn’t seem to have any luster left at all.

  She stared at the broken remains of the Bandit’s Chair and let the meaning of it all wash over her. Everything Forbes had said was right. They’d come so far through difficult circumstances, only to have it end in the most ridiculous of ways. Finally, with feet as heavy as granite, she trudged out of the castle.

  Forbes was sitting on the drawbridge, throwing pebbles into the murky gray water. She joined him, a wintry wind howling steadily down from the mountain pass on the far side of the castle. Numb, she stared across the marsh, back toward where they’d entered. The mounds of peat and earth and moss looked like great, green beasts asleep beneath the clouds. The urgency, the tension they’d felt ever since the witches had first attacked, had suddenly vanished, leaving them adrift like ships in dead winds. They had lost.

  “Brothers,” he said, winging a stone into the moat. “It’s almost poetic, isn’t it? The fate of the world upended because of a petty family squabble. Why can’t people understand that family isn’t there to help you? They exist to give you one gift—life—and then you’ve got to move on the first chance you get. Birds leave nests, fish leave eggs, and we should be smart enough to do the same.”

  “You can’t possibly blame this on family.”

  “Why not? As soon as they were able, those stupid trolls should have shaken hands, turned their backs to each other, and started walking. The world would be a whole lot better off if they hadn’t clung to the idea of family.”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “He just said he’d rather destroy the harp than give it to his brother. We could have calmly negotiated with him if his family hadn’t been involved.” He fired another stone into the water. “Family’s the anchor that drowns us all unless we shed it and learn to swim.”

  “You sound like your father.”

  He gave her a sardonic look. “Ha-ha.”

  “I’m serious. If you think family is some sort of anchor that you’ve shed, you’re wrong. He’s inside you now, speaking for you, controlling you. You haven’t shed him at all.” He threw another stone but didn’t say a word. She turned to face him, softening her tone. “Family isn’t something we use until we don’t need it anymore. It’s inside us forever, whether we like it or not. It’s up to us to see the good and the bad in them, and then to find it in ourselves. Family isn’t an anchor. It’s a current that can help to carry you along, or something you can spend your life fighting against only to end up in the same spot.”

  He sighed and tossed another stone, though this time he didn’t throw it nearly as hard. “And how does any of that help us? Even if what you’re saying is true, and I’m not agreeing that it is, we’re still sitting here harpless and hopeless.”

  Another wind blew across their backs and howled south over the marsh. Evie’s muscles felt quivery, as though she’d just climbed a mountain. But for all that climbing, her view was still the bottom o
f a marsh. She had been resilient from the very first moment of the mission, adapting to unexpected circumstances every step of the way. Yet she couldn’t figure a way forward now. And she was exhausted.

  They sat with their feet dangling off the bridge for quite a long time, neither of them speaking. “Should we just stay here?” he said at last. “Save us from having to watch the witches celebrate.”

  Evie pulled her nearly empty knapsack onto her lap and took out the feather she’d stolen from Cumberland Hall. “If you’d like to stay, I completely understand. I won’t hold it against you. But I’ve got to go back.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “An enchanted feather. Supposedly it will lead us where we need to go.”

  “Why not,” he said as he stood up. “What better way to end a ludicrous mission than by following a magic feather?”

  Evie twirled the feather between her finger and thumb, watching the wind flutter through its downy barbs. She stared at it and was struck with profound sadness. The depth of their failure was only now starting to sink in. After all the perseverance it had taken to get to Rumpelstiltskin’s castle, when she’d finally seen the harp sitting there, she really had believed they’d accomplished the mission. And then, with one foul breath from the Fates, it was over.

  She held the feather up into the wind and let it go . . .

  It flew straight back, directly into the howling wind. Somehow, instead of catching the gusts and carrying south across the marsh, the feather flew north.

  “Ah, that’s more like it,” said Forbes. “Let’s end the mission with a faulty magic feather.” He walked down the bridge and turned onto the mossy path between marsh ponds toward the way they’d come.

  Evie stood alone on the bridge. She watched the feather as it darted and swirled against the wind. It flew past the castle, headed for the gap between the harsh stone cliffs.

  “North,” she said to herself. She took a step forward, watching the feather get smaller and smaller. “North.” Her mind wandered, sailing high above the countryside. Blood pulsed into her head as a realization struck her as solidly as a jousting lance. “Forbes!” she shouted. “Forbes!”

  He turned back in annoyance. “What?”

  “Everything I’ve just said to you, I should have been saying to myself!” Suddenly, her body felt like it was full of electricity. She couldn’t stand still, couldn’t control the words pouring out of her. “I’ve been so worried for so long . . . ever since I realized I was different, I’ve been waiting for them to reject me, so I rejected them first!”

  “What are you on about?”

  “But they’re my family! They’ll always be my family! Oh, I’ve been such a fool!”

  “Yes, and you still are. What are you blathering on about?”

  “We haven’t failed. Our mission wasn’t to find the harp. Our mission was to save the Academy.” She turned to face him, her eyes alive. Gooseflesh broke out all across her arms. Another icy wind blasted across the bridge and she began to smile. “Come on,” she said. “It’s time you met my family.”

  THIS WOULD BE so much easier if I still had Boy, thought Evie. She missed her horse as a friend, of course, but also for his utility. The treacherous mountain pass was littered with rubble from long-ago rockslides that Boy could easily have navigated. Finally, after a tense climb with calloused fingers and cheeks red from wind blasts, Evie and Forbes made it through. The cliffs opened into a vast expanse of rolling green forest cloaked in heavy, unmoving fog. As they paused to catch their breath, a hole opened up in the cottony gray, a small window that revealed a colossal mountain range on the northwest horizon.

  The Dragonlands.

  It had taken some convincing to get Forbes to agree to this latest adaptation to the mission. “You can’t possibly be serious,” he said. “You want me, a knight, to go ask a dragon for help.”

  “Two dragons.”

  “It’s not possible,” he said. “Look, at the risk of complimenting you, you have managed to somewhat alter my opinions on dragons. I’ve always thought of them as mindless beasts, but you’ve convinced me that they’re actually free-thinking enemies with their own agendas.”

  “How enlightened,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “Be glib if you like, but I’ve just spent two years preparing to kill them. And I have every confidence they know that. They’ll devour me the moment they see me.”

  “Forbes, they’re my family. They will help us. Trust me, it’ll mean a lot that it’s a knight asking for help.”

  “Not a chance—”

  “I changed Remington’s mind about them. And I’ve clearly started to change your pig-headed mind. Why couldn’t I change dragons’ minds as well? Particularly since the dragons in question are my own mother and sister?”

  He had stomped his foot and hardened his jaw and refused to go north. So she had left him standing there in the marsh and gone off after the feather by herself. Thirty minutes later, he was climbing next to her, and he was only too happy to let her know how he felt about it.

  “I’ll kill them both if I have to.”

  She’d ignored him all the way up the pass. Now, standing above the vast northern woodlands, it seemed he had finally given up fighting. “There’s the feather, there.” He pointed down the hill to where the trees thickened into a rolling beech forest.

  They headed down the mountainside, thankfully a much more gentle grade than the southern half of the pass had been. They entered the forest and walked in silence for the better part of an hour. The ground was carpeted in the brittle remains of last autumn’s leaves. The smell of rain hung in the air.

  “Bit of daylight up ahead,” said Forbes. “I can hear a river.”

  Evie listened. There it was, the distant burbling of water. A good place to refill their waterskins. They passed through a rare clearing in the dense forest and came upon a small stream sluicing through the long grass on its way down the mountain. Evie knelt and let the bracing water wash over her hands as she filled her waterskin. She took a deep breath. The air tasted of home. Pine and earth and far off storms. She hadn’t planned on coming home, maybe not ever again. Now that she was here, she couldn’t believe how foolish she’d been.

  When she opened her eyes, something moved in the corner of her vision.

  Her head shot over, but the forest was silent and still. Next to her, Forbes dunked his face in the river and gave it a rinse.

  She stood, looking off into the forest. She stepped onto a large stone at the river’s edge and used it to vault across. Her heart raced as she walked on, eyes opened wide. She could sense that something was there but found only the soft hiss of the wind and gently waving grass. The forest gave way to another clearing just ahead. She moved slowly through trees as still as a painting, and when she entered the next clearing, she gasped.

  There, alone in the meadow, stood a whitish-gray unicorn. Its horn was as long as a sword, pure polished white, like ivory. Evie had never seen a unicorn before. She stepped forward, as gently as she could, showing her open palms to prove she wasn’t a threat. The creature took a bite of grass and chewed it, watching her.

  “Hello there, beauty,” she said. The unicorn snorted and waved its head but didn’t retreat. Evie extended her hand. She was close enough to smell the familiar horse smell she’d grown to love from her time with Boy. “Easy now, beauty. What are you doing out here?”

  The unicorn inched its head forward, blowing warm breath across her hand from its velvety snout. Finally, satisfied, it took a step toward her. Her smile cracked open with a laugh. “Hi there! Well, you’re nice, aren’t you?” It butted her affectionately with its head. She placed her palm on the unicorn’s face. The hair was soft and smooth. Its eyes regarded her, large and expressive and so, so beautiful. She ran her hand down the unicorn’s back, and an idea came to her. “Would you like to help me, beauty?”
she said in a soft voice. “My friend and I have some urgent business in the north, and it’s taking us an awfully long time to get where we’re going. Do you suppose I might try riding you?”

  The unicorn nudged her again.

  She glanced around and found exactly what she needed. There was a small patch of celerywood trees at the edge of the clearing. The bark was dangling off like a snake’s skin. She began to tear away pieces and set to work fashioning a crude rope, which she slipped around the creature’s neck. It threw its head back proudly as she climbed onto its back. She found the unicorn incredibly responsive to her cues with the rope, and even more intuitive to ride than Boy had been. She ambled back up to the river where Forbes had taken his boots off and was washing his feet. When he looked up and saw her on unicornback, his jaw dropped. She sat just a bit taller. Nothing she had ever done had made her feel quite so much like a princess as riding on the back of a unicorn.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he said.

  “I’ve found us some help. She’s brilliant to ride.” She lifted her handwoven rope. “I used to make dresses out of this stuff. Very easy to weave.”

  “That’s a bloody unicorn.”

  “I know,” she said with a smile.

  His eyes rolled back in his head as he let out a long, irritated sigh. “You don’t know much about unicorns, do you? They . . .” He trailed off as his eyes moved past her toward something down the hill. “Ah, here we are. Well done, Evie. We’ll never be rid of them now.”

  She turned to see an entire herd of the majestic creatures walking up the hill with great curiosity. Forbes pulled on his boots and leapt over the stream, waving his arms in the air. “Get on! Get on!” he shouted. They stopped and regarded him warily. Finally, he let his arms drop. “What a disaster.”

  “Why must you always be so dour? We’ve got mounts now. We’ll be with my family in no time.” She jumped off her unicorn and went to a nearby tree, where she quickly began lashing pieces of bark together. “Why are you always so negative?”

  He faced her with the same mix of exasperation and anger that she’d come to expect. Behind him, dozens of unicorns stepped forward, each the same smoky color, their horns shimmering in the murkiness of the forest.