10

Pettifog Academy for Impressionable Young Minds

AFTER THE MANIFOLD indignities Anastasia had suffered at the hands of Ludowiga and Sir Marvelmop, she was almost glad to escape to Pettifog Academy.

Almost.

She canvassed the students gaggled outside the academy entrance, scouring the sea of blue Pettifog uniforms for any trace of Ollie or Quentin. However, she spotted neither hide nor hair of the Drybread brothers. Crumbs. Anastasia tightened her arms around her notebooks. She wouldn’t know a single soul at Pettifog Academy except Saskia, and Saskia, Anastasia decided, didn’t count. Her cousin had sailed to school in a separate gondola, and now whispered at the center of a bewigged clique. The coterie burst into a chorus of giggles and turned their heads to peek at Anastasia.

“You’ll have a grand time,” Baldwin reassured her. “Grand!” He thumped Anastasia on the back, sending her notebooks leapfrogging from her arms to splash in the canal. The papers fanned across the murky green water, and then an eel clamped down on the edge of a purple binder and spirited it away.

“Oops,” Baldwin said.

Anastasia swiveled her gaze back to her future classmates. “They’re staring.”

“Well, of course they are,” Penny said. “You’re the new Cavelands princess. Everyone’s going to be very curious about you!”

A brittle woman in a blue dress emerged from the academy entrance. She produced a hand bell from her skirts, held it over her white-wigged head, and swung her arm maniacally. DING DING DING DING DING! The schoolchildren groaned and turned to file inside.

“All right, my darling,” Penny coaxed, “off you go!”

“If Saskia gives you any trouble, just bite back,” Baldwin advised.

“I’ll remember that.” Anastasia hopped from the gondola and dragged her feet to the school door, where the woman in blue waited.

“You must be Princess Anastasia,” she said. “I’m Marm Pettifog. I will be your teacher for the remainder of the school year. I also happen to be the founder and headmistress of this fine educational institution. You’ll soon learn that I have a reputation for being a bit of a tyrant.”

“Oh,” Anastasia croaked.

“It’s a reputation for which I worked very hard,” Marm Pettifog went on. “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both. Machiavelli said that, and he knew a thing or two about running a tight ship. Now, tell me: are you a weeper?”

“I—I don’t think so,” Anastasia pondered. “I mean, sometimes I cry—”

“I get it. So you’re a hard nut to crack, eh? We’ll see about that.” Marm Pettifog smiled confidently. “Now, don’t think I’m going to give you any special treatment because you’re a princess, because I won’t. Here at Pettifog Academy, all students are equally lowly.”

Anastasia gulped and nodded.

Marm Pettifog consulted her watch again, then rang the bell in Anastasia’s ear. Pippistrella jolted awake and burrowed under the Ben Franklin in terror.

“You’re late!” the schoolmarm barked. “Get to class.”

Anastasia straggled behind Marm Pettifog into a cavernous lobby paneled in dark mahogany and overgrown with a veritable forest of carved spiral staircases. They hiked up one of the dizzying flights to the second story and squeezed through a narrow arch into a craggy, candlelit classroom.

“This is your new schoolmate, Anastasia Merrymoon,” Marm Pettifog announced. “Anastasia, you may take the chair beside your cousin.”

Crumbs again. Anastasia sidled between the desks. Either her galosh caught on Saskia’s frilled ankle, or Saskia’s frilled ankle caught on her galosh; either way, Anastasia executed a superb nosedive right into a diorama, crushing a model castle crafted from tongue depressors.

“My history project!” wailed one of the Morflings. Anastasia cringed. It was the gorgon boy from Sir Marvelmop’s wig shop. She jumbled the sticks back into the diorama, noting that she had also smashed its label: CAVEPEARL PALACE: ARCHITECTURAL MARVEL.

“Sorry,” she mouthed.

“Anastasia, off the floor,” Marm Pettifog said. “We don’t have nap time at Pettifog Academy.”

The children giggled as Anastasia peeled herself from the science project and crept to her seat.

“All right, class,” Marm Pettifog said. “Open your Echolalia primers to chapter forty-five. I hope you all studied hard over the winter holiday.”

Anastasia rummaged in her satchel for the thick purple textbook and flipped to “Squeak! A Bat in the City.” Vocabulary words mottled the page, bedecked in squiggles and dots and all sorts of symbols:

And so forth.

“Turn to lesson two. We’ll go down the row. Parveen, number one.”

“Peep-quee-crIIIck!”

“Correct. Jasper, number two.”

“Squee-peeEEEp-squee!”

“Good. Did you practice over break?”

“Yes, Marm Pettifog.”

As the interrogation snaked around the room toward Anastasia, her palms began to sweat. Perhaps, scholarly Reader, you have suffered nightmares in which you find yourself at the end of a school semester, in a class you can’t remember, on the precipice of an important test for which you are utterly unprepared. Perhaps, in these terrible dreams, you find yourself clad in underpants only. While Anastasia’s pantaloons were firmly in place, she otherwise felt she had been transplanted into one of these dark night terrors.

“Saskia, number ten.”

“Peep-peep CREEeeee squeak!”

“Excellent. Excellent pronunciation,” Marm Pettifog declared. “You would all do well to follow Saskia’s example. Listen to the EE in her CREEeeee. Perfect.”

Saskia fluttered her eyelashes.

“Anastasia: eleven.”

Anastasia stared at the hieroglyphics scrawling the page. “Um.”

“Well?”

“Peep squeeee!” Pippistrella chirped in her ear.

“Peep squeee?” Anastasia ventured.

“Princess!” Marm Pettifog glared over her spectacles. “Accepting help from your bat is cheating. Did you just cheat?”

“I—I was just—” Anastasia floundered.

“Cheating is not tolerated in this school. That’s detention for you, and your little bat, too. Now, go to twelve.”

Anastasia swallowed. A grandfather clock loomed in the corner, clucking its golden tongue. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

“Marm Pettifog, I don’t speak Echolalia. At all.”

The schoolchildren rustled, and a few twisted back in their seats to stare at Anastasia.

“Excuse me,” Marm Pettifog said. “I don’t think I heard you correctly. Did you just say that you don’t speak Echolalia?”

Anastasia juddered her chin, scrooching down in her chair.

“This is unheard of,” Marm Pettifog said. “A Morfolk child—a princess, no less—who doesn’t speak a peep of Echolalia? How do you communicate with bats?”

“I don’t,” Anastasia said. “I’ve only been down in the Cavelands for two days, Marm Pettifog. Pippistrella and I—”

“Have at least worked out a way to cheat at lessons. Well, I shall certainly speak to your parents about this.”

“She doesn’t have parents.” Saskia’s voice was syrupy with fake sympathy. “Nobody knows anything about her human mom, and her dad disappeared months ago.”

Anastasia’s jaw dropped.

There are many inventive insults that one may hurl in times of distress. Anastasia might have called Saskia a louse, or a meanie, or told her to “make like a tree and leave.” But Anastasia didn’t say any of these things. She instead flared:

“Shut up, you…you…you witch!”

Kablooey! Shocked exclamations erupted across the classroom like detonating cherry bombs, and Marm Pettifog leapt as though a grenade had exploded within her petticoats.

“Anastasia! You will join me in my office now.”