The Dark Lord Clementine

by Sarah Jean Horwitz

  Every animal on the Dark Lord Elithor’s estate was entirely silent.

  It’s not that there weren’t any sounds on their farm. Muffling every footstep or tail swish or closing door would have taken up far too much magical energy, even if Elithor had wished it. It was a safety issue as well—better to be able to hear any approaching invaders. But as far as was within his power, Lord Elithor Morcerous liked things quiet, and so quiet they remained. The nightmares could not neigh. The mandrakes could not cry (though that was for the best, considering their cries were deadly). There was no music and no singing and very, very little laughter, with the exception of occasional maniacal cackling practice. (A Dark Lord must always be prepared to deliver a decent maniacal cackle.)

  So on the day the stable became even more quiet than usual, Clementine noticed. She put down her brush and edged out of the nightmare’s stall, conscious of the sound of her skirt rustling against the hay, the nightmares shifting from hoof to hoof. A black sheep dozing in front of one of the stalls peered at her blearily, blinked, and stood up to follow her. She walked to the back of the barn, expecting to see one of the farmhands pitching hay, as it had been doing when she’d entered.

  But the farmhand had stopped pitching hay. It had stopped doing anything at all. The scarecrow—one of many that did most of the manual labor on the farm—was frozen midshovel, its grip on the pitchfork gone slack. The pitchfork slid free of the scarecrow’s skinny iron fingers and fell to the ground, landing in the hay with a thump. The black sheep skittered back at the sound; no doubt it would have baahed had it been able.

  Clementine stared at the scarecrow. Not once, in all the years she’d spent watching the animated scarecrows at work, had one ever stopped in the middle of a task. In fact, sometimes they were a little too enthusiastic in their work. They had to be given specific instructions, like exactly when to start and stop, or they were liable to turn the same pile of hay over and over again for days on end, or trim the grass in the castle courtyard until there was nothing left but dirt.

  Like many things on the farm, the scarecrows were animated by her father’s magic—a complex combination of spells and wards and willpower that kept their estate secure, productive, and most importantly, operating according to the Dark Lord’s express rules and wishes. Nonhuman farmhands would never show up late, or demand vacation time or dental insurance, or even tire. The Dark Lord’s estate hadn’t employed any actual people—with the exception of their castle cook and Clementine’s ever-rotating cast of ill-fated governesses—for decades, at least since her father had inherited the title. Why bother with human workers when the alternative was so much simpler and efficient?

  But Clementine had never seen Ethel the cook or any of her governesses simply stop like this, every limb frozen in place. This scarecrow wouldn’t have looked out of place in an actual cornfield—and what use would the Morcerouses have for it then?

  Clementine carefully smoothed her expression, hiding her shock as best she could—it wouldn’t do to look too vulnerable in front of the nightmares or the overly inquisitive black sheep—and picked up the pitchfork. She held it out to the scarecrow, looked him right in his black beaded eyes, and pointedly cleared her throat.

  “Ahem.”

  The scarecrow remained stubbornly still. The sheep shuffled behind her. Clementine glared at it.

  Clementine took a deep breath, standing as tall as her four-foot frame would allow, and stared down her nose at the scarecrow with her most commanding air.

  “Don’t you have work to be doing?” she demanded with a sneer, returning the pitchfork to the scarecrow’s hands with a shove. The scarecrow teetered on its feet, but to Clementine’s relief, it grasped the pitchfork and gave the tool a mighty swing. Clementine dashed out of the way. It continued spearing hay as if it hadn’t been interrupted at all.

  Clementine put her hands on her hips with satisfaction. The scarecrow had just been a temporary hiccup—nothing more—and she had been more than up to the task of setting things right. It shouldn’t have surprised her that things on the farm might get a bit . . . out of sorts . . . while her father worked on lifting the Whittle Witch’s curse.

  She would just have to make sure things ran as smoothly as possible in the meantime.

  ***

  The next morning, Clementine was surprised to find that her hair had turned blue. It had remained a subdued mousy brown for several days in a row—due in no small part to Clementine’s anxiety over her father, she was sure—and she’d been a little worried it would simply stay that color forever. Clementine’s ever-changing hair was a great source of irritation for her father, who was always trying to spell it back to a more dignified black, befitting a future Dark Lord, but Clementine didn’t really mind. Besides, since almost all of her clothes were black, too . . . well, a little color never hurt anyone, did it?

  Clementine took a few extra minutes to brush out her newly cobalt locks until they fell in shining waves to her waist. Though Clementine would have preferred to braid her hair, she left it hanging long and loose, as her father preferred. He ought to see her looking well when she checked in on him.

  Perhaps her hair was a sign that all of this . . . unpleasantness would soon fade away, as well. The Dark Lord Elithor was hard at work on a cure to reverse the Whittle Witch’s curse, and it was only a matter of time before he perfected it.

  The fluttering of wings outside her window made her start as she secured the finishing touch—a black velvet bow—to the top of her head. A raven hovered just outside, flapping its shiny black wings close enough to clip the edge of the window.

  “You’ve got the wrong room,” Clementine said patiently, pointing out the window and to the right, careful of the raven’s beak. It wasn’t a real raven, but Clementine still paid heed to her father’s lesson about pointy objects.

  The raven cawed.

  “Shh!” scolded Clementine. She snatched back her hand. “There’s no need to be rude,” she told the bird in a whisper. “He’s in his laboratory, in the far tower. Shoo!”

  The bird ignored her, hopping onto the stone windowsill and poking its head into Clementine’s room, no doubt looking for a spare bit of parchment on which to imprint itself. Clementine scampered over to volume M–Z, which lay open on her bed, and snapped it shut, lest the bird get any ideas. When presented with a clean writing surface by its intended recipient, the bird would dive right into the parchment, the inky black of its feathers splintering and reforming into the decoded words of the letter it contained. Only sorcerers sent messenger birds, most often to other sorcerers. They were common but tricky bits of magic; Clementine hadn’t mastered them yet herself.

  Lord Elithor had been receiving a steady stream of ravens, crows, and sooty owls the last week or so, and more letters flew in every day. Clementine only had to look at the birds’ red, gleaming eyes to know where most of them were from: the Council of Evil Overlords.

  Clementine held up volume M–Z threateningly. “You aren’t for me,” she told the raven. Clementine had never received a messenger bird in her life—she was far too young and unimportant (for now) to be involved in official Evil Overlord business. No, this messenger surely wanted her father . . . though Clementine didn’t care to dwell on why. If the Council had found out about Lord Elithor’s curse . . . if they declared him unfit for evildoing . . .

  Clementine hefted the dictionary again and gave the bird her best evil eye. It screeched and finally turned tail with a great flap of its dark wings, the draft strong enough to blow Clementine’s carefully brushed hair out of place. She huffed.

  So it was going to be that kind of day.

  Clementine couldn’t remember precisely when she started getting up earlier to feed the chickens (both the fire-breathing and the normal ones) or rotate the mandrake pots in the greenhouse so they faced the shade, or milk the demonic cows. Suddenly, there were just more things that needed doin
g every day, like brushing her teeth or practicing her threatening posturing, than there had been before.

  She took her father’s meals up to his study. She unearthed past years’ ledgers from the library and made a few to-do lists—just to keep things running smoothly. Just for a little while. She kept track of when the snake pit needed cleaning and when the magic beans needed watering and when Stan, the first trader of the season, would come across the mountains.

  It wasn’t . . . bad, exactly. But it was a little bit harder. Everything was a little bit harder.

  One morning, Clementine discovered that the fence between the fire-breathing chickens and the regular chickens had been burned to a crisp (shouldn’t her father’s fireproofing charms have stopped that from happening?), and she spent over an hour corralling terrified hens back into their coop. Afterward, a slightly singed Clementine trudged into the dining hall for breakfast, only to find there was no breakfast to be had. She tiptoed into the kitchen and was greeted by nothing but a cold hearth and a smug note from Ethel the cook, a sullen kitchen witch who’d owed Lord Elithor a debt. Ethel had cheerfully absconded with her freedom, a handful of magic beans, and two weeks’ grocery money. That was what one got for keeping witches around, Clementine couldn’t help but think, even if they were servants who’d signed a contract in their own blood to make you supper for the next forty years.

  Clementine made herself some peanut butter toast—it took her two tries not to burn the bread—and took one of the last mealy bananas.

  It occurred to her that she did not even know where the bananas came from. They certainly weren’t for sale in the village. She would have to ask Lord Elithor—and that meant telling him that one of his prisoners had escaped.

  She found him in one of the smaller studies in Castle Brack, sitting at the Decimaker—a machine of his own invention that was part abacus, part printing press, and part pipe organ. It was a genius thing, really; into the pipes went a few samples of their exports, a few facts and figures, and a smattering of hair and teeth or a dead mouse or two for the blood price—and a few (silent) keystrokes and foot pedals later, out came a neatly printed, detailed financial report on whatever matter her father required.

  Lord Elithor struggled to pick up the papers shooting out of the Decimaker with his feeble wooden fingers. Clementine helped him pick them up and politely looked away as he scowled at them, muttering to himself.

  A shiny black disk the size of a serving platter skittered across the floor with a whirring sound—her father’s mechanical assistant, a slightly too intelligent creation that Lord Elithor did not have a name for but that Clementine privately called the Brack Butler. (Castle Brack had no real butler, as far as she knew, though a few of the castle ghosts occasionally insisted they’d been stewards long ago.) The Brack Butler zoomed over to Lord Elithor, another report clenched in one of its extended metal appendages, and placed the paper on his desk. The metal arm shrank back into the disk with a soft click.

  “Father,” said Clementine. She was loath to interrupt him at work at the Decimaker, but a missing kitchen witch was surely to affect their finances, as well. “I do believe Ethel has run away.”

  Clementine took a step back, preparing for her father to jump to his feet in an explosion of rage at the idea that any of his prisoners might dare to escape. His wrath would be a sight to behold. Fire and shadow would shoot from his fingertips. His thunderous voice would shake the whole mountain. He would scour every inch of the Seven Sisters for any trace of the traitorous kitchen witch, and when he found her . . . Clementine shuddered at the thought. What a foolish woman.

  But the Dark Lord Elithor did not destroy the room in his wrath, or lock Clementine in their dungeons for being the bearer of ill news, or even seem very upset at all. He simply looked down at the Decimaker’s reports, frowned, and muttered, “Yes, well, feeding her was an expense, as well,” and turned his back on Clementine completely.

  If the Dark Lord Elithor noticed the sharp decline in the quality of Castle Brack’s cuisine, he did not mention it to his daughter.

  ***

  More ravens came, by day and by night. Clementine took to closing her window to keep out the noise of their fast, fluttering wings.

  If only they could be silent, too.

  ***

  Of all the Seven Sisters Mountains, the Fourth Sister was Clementine’s favorite.

  The villagers might suppose it was because the Fourth Sister was the Morcerouses’ ancestral home. Castle Brack was built right into the side of the mountain, overlooking the entire valley and reachable only by a long, narrow winding staircase carved into the cliffside. Located at the very center of the mountain range, it was a formidable fortress, and a good reason why the rule of the Dark Lords Morcerous had gone unchallenged for hundreds of years. How could such an advantageous position not be prized?

  But Clementine had another reason—a secret reason—for loving the Fourth Sister (as much as a future Dark Lord was capable of loving anything): it was also home to the Lady in White.

  Castle Brack, though higher than the surrounding farm and the village in the valley, was only a third of the way up the mountain. Few except the wild mountain goats trekked much higher than that—not even the Dark Lord Morcerous, though there were plenty of ledges that looked perfect for standing on while looking lordly and impressive. Near the top, the Lady in White—a patch of snow shaped like a woman in a beautiful white dress—watched over the whole valley. The Lady in White never melted, even on the hottest days of summer. She was taller than the castle at her feet, and she had been there as long as anyone could remember. The people of the village couldn’t help but look up at her shining form and feel a sense of hope, no matter what sorrows the Dark Lord Morcerous inflicted upon them. He could never squash them down forever—not when the Lady was watching.

  The villagers were not the only ones who looked to the Lady in White, who wished upon her and whispered to her out of their windows on starry nights. In a small, forgotten courtyard on the eastern side of the castle, a few crumbling doorways from the snake pit and down a set of rough, narrow stone stairs, there was a garden. It had not always been a garden. It had not always even been a courtyard. Clementine suspected it was a subfloor of some sort—the start of some addition to the castle that was never finished. Clementine had been eight when she’d discovered it, clambering about the hidden parts of the castle to avoid her latest (and ultimately last) governess, a chatty young woman from over the mountains who hadn’t even believed in magic. (She was quickly disabused of this notion—and then of all notions, when she quite literally lost her head in an unfortunate encounter with some strangling vines.)

  Clementine had mentioned the courtyard to her father shortly after finding it, but he hadn’t seemed aware of or concerned with its existence. He merely told her to be careful of old booby traps if she was going to go exploring the older parts of the castle, and to alert him to the presence of any interesting plant life that might prove useful in his potions.

  The courtyard had contained plant life, but not the kind that the Dark Lord Elithor would have approved of. It was full of flowers. Plucky clusters of white and light purple primroses had sprung up between the stones, and even more surprisingly, they bloomed brightest in the moonlight. A few sessions in the library researching night-blooming plants, and Clementine was able to call up even more flowers from the damp earth. The flowers came more easily to her than any of the other plants she helped her father conjure or cultivate, and it was rather nice, after a long and stressful day of very carefully picking hemlock or trimming stinging trees, to sneak down to her secret garden and tend to something that was much less likely to kill her.

  But the flowers weren’t the only reason Clementine loved her secret garden. The ledge the garden was perched on jutted out just enough so that if Clementine looked—if she really looked, up and up and up—she could catch a glimpse of the Lady in Whit
e on a clear night. She might see only the corner of her white, flowing skirt, but it was enough. She’d tell the Lady her troubles, and suddenly, life wouldn’t seem quite so hard.

  But Clementine’s list of troubles was getting longer and longer.

  Dear Lady, she thought, the chicken fence has burned to a crisp, and I can’t find any books in the library that will tell me how to mend it.

  I found another scarecrow today, frozen as still as . . . well, a scarecrow. I worry the time will come when they won’t listen to a good talking-to at all.

  We ran out of bananas, and I still don’t know where they come from. I asked the Brack Butler, but all it did was vibrate threateningly. I don’t think it likes me.

  The mandrakes will be ready for pickling soon, but I’ve never harvested them without an extra soundproofing spell of Father’s before.

  I’ve never done any of this without Father before.

  Father is eating less and less. I wonder if it’s because of my cooking, or because—

  But Clementine would not let herself think it, not even in her secret garden, not even if only the Lady and her moonlit blossoms would ever bear witness.

  Chapter 3

  A Stranger Comes to Town

  or Why All Hair Ribbons Should Just Be Black and No One Should Talk to Anyone Else, Ever

  As terrible and powerful as the Dark Lord Morcerous was, and as ideal as the silent farm was for raising nightmares and mandrakes and poisonous herbs, there were some more mundane necessities that Clementine and her father had neither the time, the resources, nor the inclination to produce or conjure themselves. Unless Clementine wanted to spend all of her days squinting at a needle and thread or sweating over a hot stove, items like soap, bread, and bolts of cloth were best purchased (or threateningly demanded) from outside the estate—and that meant the occasional trip into the local village. Clementine had been putting off such an excursion for too long.