The Dark Lord Clementine

by Sarah Jean Horwitz

  The school bell rang, and the children began to file inside. Sebastien waited until he was at the back of the line, as he always did. Any way he could prolong the time before he had to cram his too-long limbs behind a tiny desk and stare at numbers and letters that didn’t make much sense to him was time well spent, in his opinion. Still pondering chivalry, he glanced up at the Seven Sisters. If only all ladies were as obviously ladies as the Lady in White.

  Movement at the foot of the mountain caught his eye, and Sebastien watched a small, distant figure cross the drawbridge, walk under the enormous gatehouse, and start the steep climb up the path to Castle Brack, basket in hand: Clementine Morcerous. He thought he’d spotted her spying on them today, as he had a few times before. The others never seemed to see her watching them—it would surely be the talk of the school if they did—but maybe his classmates, like he did, simply pretended they didn’t see her. Perhaps they didn’t want to attract her attention—and the possible attention of her father.

  Oddly, though, Sebastien didn’t feel afraid the few times he’d seen Clementine watching the schoolyard. He’d felt curious, and almost . . . sorry for her. She looked like she wanted nothing more in the world than to join in on their games and sit at the same cramped school desks. He wondered if she had anyone to talk to besides the Dark Lord, up there in that gloomy castle on the mountain.

  Sebastien shook his head and followed his friends inside, laughing at something Roderick said and shrugging off a playful shove from Gregor, though he was barely listening to them. He was being ridiculous, of course. There was no reason in the world to feel sorry for Clementine Morcerous. She had everything the townspeople could only dream of: money, power, a storybook-worthy position guaranteed since birth. What could she possibly have to be sad about? And even if she did, why should Sebastien care?

  Clementine Morcerous was going to be their next Dark Lord. She’d grow up to be just as heartless and petty and cruel as her father.

  Besides, Dark Lords almost certainly did not count as ladies.

  Chapter 4

  An Interesting Change in Dynamic

  or The World Falls Apart

  Dear Elithor,

  I am, quite frankly, surprised that you have resisted me this long. The rumors of your spinelessness have been overstated.

  But now is not the time for digging in one’s heels—or what remains of them. We both know I am the only one capable of lifting your curse. (With one rare rumored exception, of course. I find myself even more surprised that this . . . exception . . . is an option you don’t seem to have explored. How very noble of you. It seems even Dark Lords have their limits.)

  As I’ve said before, I would prefer to take Castle Brack without unnecessary violence. Why should the innocent people of the Seven Sisters—or your lovely daughter, for that matter—be bothered by an ultimately unavoidable transition of power? If you come quietly, I may even let most of them live—until my rule as the new Dark Lord begins in earnest, of course.

  It is time for the Morcerous reign of the Seven Sisters to meet its end, as it is time for you to meet yours. Both are inevitable. But the choice of which happens first is still yours.

  I await your response.

  —The Witch of the Woods

  The Dark Lord Elithor Morcerous read the letter before him and would have snorted, had getting air in and out of his nostril slits not been so difficult. The Whittle Witch was crafty, he had to give her that. Her patience to hide in the shadows all these years, amassing her power and evading his detection, was a commendable trait that most of her fellow witches lacked. They were always shrieking about something—people cutting down trees, the undemocratic nature of the Evil Overlord system—and getting themselves noticed and burned at the stake or smote by a Dark Lord before they could get anything accomplished. Even the licensed Bad Witches were overly preoccupied with instant gratification, capturing small fry like children and young, impressionable knights. They lacked the resources, the authority, and the business sense to actually rule as the Dark Lords did.

  But the Whittle Witch was not like other witches. Oh, she could say whatever pretty words she wanted about not causing undue violence, but they both knew the real reasons she wouldn’t attack him outright, or even kill him quickly. First of all, even a witch knew better than to attack a sorcerer in his own tower. Elithor’s power was strongest here, in his home, under the protection of the Fourth Sister. His wards around the farm itself could repel an army. (Well, he was fairly certain they could repel an army. A small one. It had never come to that in Elithor’s lifetime.)

  As to why she didn’t just lop off his simulacrum’s head and be done with him, Elithor suspected it was a limitation of the spell itself. The Whittle Witch’s initial specialty had been arbomancy. And while most trees could be manipulated to serve a sorceress’s needs in a pinch, her control over them was usually temporary, and they would revert to their natural state once her spell ended or she traveled far enough away. Causing lasting, significant change—changing the overall energy of a forest from tranquil to sinister, for example—took almost as much time and effort as it took the tree to grow in the first place. It was possible that the task of permanently reshaping something as complex as a person (especially one as far away as Lord Elithor) through her beloved wood required similar subtlety.

  But Elithor suspected there was another reason for her uncommon willingness to wait for his surrender. Her letters made it clear enough that the Whittle Witch did not just want to kill Elithor; she wanted to replace him as Dark Lord herself. She expressed none of the usual witchy grievances against him, but had specifically mentioned her desire for his land and titles, and seemed perfectly cheerful at the prospect of leaving his undemocratic system of governance in place. And that meant she had to play by the rules.

  If the Whittle Witch simply killed Elithor now, she’d be treated as just another rebellious witch trying to overthrow the system, and the Council of Evil Overlords would come down in force before she got the chance to fly a single victory lap on her broomstick. But if she pretended that everything was aboveboard—that she simply wanted to be the next Dark Lord of the Seven Sisters Valley—there was nothing to keep her from officially challenging Lord Elithor’s position.

  Anyone could, in theory, challenge a Dark Lord’s rule; the odds of success, however, were so low that very few ever tried. Lord Elithor could find no instance of a single significant coup attempt at Castle Brack in the hundreds of years of Morcerous records. He supposed there was a first time for everything.

  Lord Elithor tossed aside the witch’s letter, but even as he moved on to read the rest of the awaiting messenger birds, he could not shake his suspicion that there was another reason—the real reason—the Witch of the Woods wanted to be the next Dark Lord, to lay claim to his side of the Seven Sisters.

  She wanted to capture the mountains’ unicorn.

  ***

  “Please,” said Clementine. “For the sake of all that is evil in the world, I need you to lay an egg.”

  The Gricken perched in the branches of the poison apple tree bobbed its head from side to side, ignoring Clementine completely. It flapped its papery wings, each feather dappled with the faded blacks, grays, and reds of the spells once transcribed on its pages, and hurled itself onto an even higher branch, quite out of Clementine’s reach. It was times like these that having a grimoire in the form of a chicken—and a moody bird, at that—was very inconvenient.

  Of course, it was entirely Clementine’s fault that the spellbook was a chicken in the first place. As a younger child, eager to soak up as much magic as she could, she had the unfortunate habit of stealing the family grimoire when her father wasn’t looking. No matter how many charms Lord Elithor cast upon it to make it too heavy for her to carry, or to sting her palms when she touched it without permission, or to hide it in some far-flung corner of the library behind a locked door guarded b
y a fearsome mounted chimaera head, he would inevitably find little Clementine curled up somewhere with the book on her lap, cheerfully flipping through pages she could barely read and babbling the broad strokes of some spell that could bring the castle down around their ears. Sometimes, the Dark Lord had told her, he was worried she was going to be too good of a Dark Lord. Clementine smiled at the memory.

  One day, Clementine had been trying a new spell to turn toads into chickens. (Well, anything into chickens—she just happened to have a toad on hand, and he looked like he wouldn’t mind being a chicken for a bit.) But one misinterpreted symbol later, and suddenly the grimoire itself exploded into a giant fireball. When the smoke settled and Clementine’s hair had finished turning bright red in shock, well . . . the toad was still a toad. The grimoire, however, had been transformed into an oversized hen. Its many pages were now unreadable speckled feathers, and the impressive red wax seal on its front had turned into a sharp, shiny red beak. Lord Elithor’s wrath at this unfortunate transformation had been . . . immense.

  After he’d finished threatening to string her up in the dungeon by her ankles, Clementine had done extra chores on the farm and kept herself as quiet as a mouse for months as penance. Even so, after examining the Gricken, Lord Elithor had refused to change it back to book form. Clementine would just have to learn from her mistakes.

  The grimoire took its new mother hen role a little too seriously, and now only divulged new spells to Clementine in the form of eggs, which it laid if and only if it deemed Clementine was ready, though Clementine could never begin to guess what “ready” for any particular spell meant. The grimoire was hers—well, her family’s, and mostly her father’s, but hers by birthright. What authority did an accidental chicken have to determine if Clementine could handle a bit of new magic or not? Lord Elithor, however, seemed as pleased as punch to have finally discovered a way to censor the grimoire’s deepest, darkest secrets until Clementine was old enough.

  But surely—surely—the Gricken could sense that times were not what they once were. Gone were the days of innocent, carefree Clementine, who could afford to practice every carefully doled-out new spell to perfection. Clementine had real duties to attend to now—duties that required no small amount of spellwork. It was the Gricken’s duty to ensure that she succeeded.

  Her pleas, however, fell on deaf ears. The only acknowledgment came from the black sheep, who had taken to following Clementine around the farm while she completed her chores. Perhaps he was wary of being near any scarecrows, should the farmhands’ behavior get any more unpredictable. Resting under the shade of one of the apple trees, hooves politely tucked under his woolly belly, the sheep looked at her with the kind of skeptical expression that said exactly what he thought about the Morcerous heir lowering herself to bargain with uppity chickens.

  Clementine surveyed the orchard around her and sighed. It should have been about a month before the poison apples were ripe enough for picking, but unless it was Clementine’s imagination, they weren’t getting any riper. In fact, they were looking decidedly . . . spotty. She grabbed one small apple and inspected it; sure enough, some of the skin had patches of green showing through, and there was even a small bruise on one side. Clementine dropped the apple in disgust.

  Poison apples were supposed to be perfect. They had skin as red and unblemished as polished rubies. Their juicy flesh was as white as snow. They even repelled dirt. They were supposed to look like the most delicious apple their victims had ever seen—that was the whole point. These apples, however, did not look like polished rubies. They looked . . . ordinary. Dull and imperfect and—this was what terrified her most—not the least bit magical. Clementine took a sample for the Decimaker, not looking forward to what predictions it might make about the fate of the crop this year, and then returned her attention to the Gricken.

  “If you lay me a spell to help with the trees,” said Clementine, “I shall . . . I shall let you play with the fire-breathing chickens as much as you like.” Now that was an offer the Gricken wouldn’t be able to refuse. The grimoire was always trying to hop the fence into the yard with its fire-breathing cousins, but Clementine and Elithor—fearing the entire Morcerous magical legacy going up in smoke—forbade it. (Well, Elithor forbade it. Clementine may have allowed a few carefully controlled sessions of frolicking.)

  The Gricken merely picked at one of the apples with its sharp red beak.

  “Hey, stop that!” Clementine ordered, stomping her foot. She had no idea what the effect of half-ripened poison apples would be on the insides of a magical grimoire chicken, and she was not in the mood to find out.

  “Well, this isn’t working very well, is it?” asked a voice.

  Clementine jumped, knocking the top of her head against a low-hanging branch and falling down on her backside with an oof. She rubbed her head and looked up at the Gricken—had the bird somehow chosen this moment to reveal new powers of speech?—but it looked the same as ever, still busy pecking at the apple. Clementine leapt to her feet.

  “Who said that?” she demanded, whirling around to look for the intruder. But there was no one in sight.

  “Oh, you can hear me now, can you?” asked the voice. It was a boy’s voice, but tremulous and reedy-sounding, like whomever it belonged to had a terrible head cold.

  Clementine’s gaze fell on the black sheep.

  “That’s going to be an, er, interesting change of dynamic,” the sheep observed.

  “You can talk,” said Clementine flatly, sinking to her knees, not caring about soiling her pretty dress or even getting sap from the apple trees on her skirts. (She should probably have cared a little bit, as the sap was highly acidic and would soon burn through the fabric if left untreated.)

  “Believe me,” said the sheep, blinking his heavily lidded eyes at her, “I’m as surprised as you are.”

  “I doubt that,” whispered Clementine breathlessly, staring at the creature in front of her.

  It didn’t surprise her that the sheep was capable of speech. Well, not much, anyway; she’d sensed he was a little too intelligent from the start, and it wasn’t hard to believe that he’d been granted greater powers of intelligence in one of Lord Elithor’s experiments, or even that he wasn’t a sheep at all, but a transfigured human. How the sheep came to be a sheep was his own business, but a talking sheep? That should have been impossible. All animals on the Morcerous farm—whether they’d always been animals or not—were supposed to be quiet.

  If the sheep could talk, it meant that all of the signs Clementine had been determinedly ignoring—the kitchen witch breaking her bonds, the stalling scarecrows, the failing fireproof charms—could not be ignored any longer. If the silent farm was silent no more, it could only mean one thing: the Dark Lord Elithor’s magic was fading.

  His time was running out.

  Chapter 5

  The Dark Lord in His Tower

  or How to Lie through Your Teeth

  Clementine pounded on the door. She did not lightly tap, or rap, or even knock with conviction. She balled her hand into a fist and went at it.

  “Father!” she yelled to the other side of the tower door—not “whispered,” and not even “spoke in measured tones.” Sheep were talking, the world had stopped making sense, and it seemed only right that she should be loud, because she needed to be heard—and Lord Elithor needed to listen. “Father, please open the door. I must speak with you!”

  She heard shuffling inside the laboratory, but the lock didn’t budge.

  “Father, please!” She pounded some more. And pounded and pounded and pounded until—swish. The great wooden door swung open on its iron hinges, and Clementine’s hand met air. But no one stood in the doorway.

  Clementine realized with a start that she’d blasted the door open—not with her fists, but with her magic. She’d just dismantled one of her father’s spells, and she hadn’t even done it on purpose.
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  Clementine entered the laboratory, suddenly conscious of how loud she’d been. She’d made a spectacle of herself with all that pounding and shouting. If anyone else ever saw her like that—panicked and afraid and not thinking clearly—why, they’d take the first opportunity they got to use her distraction against her.

  Those were the lessons she’d learned in this tower laboratory, where her father taught her the secrets of magic and the ways of Evil Overlordship—where his reprimands cut through the air like whips if she missed a single step in a spell, rattling her more than the original mistake ever could. She’d nearly always foul up again, and Elithor’s temper would flare, and they’d repeat the miserable cycle for hours until he eventually stormed off, the Brack Butler zooming at his heels and making judgmental clicking noises at Clementine. This was the room where Lord Elithor had once caught her singing—and it had only ever been the one time—and with a wave of his hand, made Clementine’s throat burn if she ever tried to raise her voice in song again. This was the room where he’d made Clementine mash fish eyes for his potions and chop freshly picked mandrakes, their faces contorting as they screamed.

  Her heart thudded in her chest. It was not her favorite room.

  Clementine took a step forward and squinted into the dimly lit laboratory. Her father had put long, dark curtains over the single window in the gray stone walls. Only a few rays of light streaked through the gaps in the fabric, glinting off the bubbling potions, the glass beakers and vials, and a few brass cages, which may or may not have been actually empty. She looked at the window, and the curtains slid aside at her magic’s unconscious demand, flooding the room with late afternoon sunlight.

  Lord Elithor winced at the sudden brightness and threw an arm up in front of his face—but not before Clementine caught a glimpse of him. He sat slumped over his black marble desk, his back to Clementine, a lamp burning low beside him. His now too-big shoes kept sliding off his feet, which didn’t quite touch the ground. The Butler sat under him, looking like a curled black cat in the shadows, except for the fact that it would occasionally reach up and replace the shoes on its master’s feet.