The Dark Lord Clementine

by Sarah Jean Horwitz

  “And you have been knights for . . . how long, exactly?”

  A few of them shifted uncomfortably.

  “About three days, ma’am,” Sebastien finally said.

  “Ah,” said Darka. “And you think you should be doing more . . . what did you say, ‘knightly things,’ is that right? Fighting battles and rescuing princesses from towers?”

  A few nods.

  “Have any of you ever used a sword?” asked Darka, stopping to look each of the boys in the eye. More silence. “A bow, then?” Darka held up her own. Three hands tentatively went up, but no one volunteered any more than that. “Trained in hand-to-hand combat? Military strategy?”

  She really is very good, thought Clementine. The knights were practically squirming under Darka’s skeptical stare.

  “I didn’t think so,” Darka said, crossing her arms as she came to stand next to Clementine. “If you lot want to be ‘real’ knights, as you say”—she looked pointedly at Gregor, who gulped—“then you’ll have to prove you’re up to the task. First, you’ll have to train.”

  “Er, train with who?” Sebastien asked. The boys looked around as if they expected big, hairy warriors to sprout up right out of the ground like cabbages. Unfortunately, that was a trick even the Dark Lord Elithor had not yet mastered.

  “With me,” said Darka Wesk-Starzec. “This castle’s captain of the guard.”

  For the first time, the silence that followed after Darka spoke was punctuated with a handful of snickers. Clementine, for one, wished that Darka had thought to discuss this change in job description with her, but she was not about to argue with her now and look the fool.

  “Is there something funny I should be aware of?” Clementine demanded, which made the boys laugh even more.

  “It’s just, well . . .” said Sebastien.

  “She’s a girl!” blurted Curly Cab.

  “And a witch,” muttered Roderick.

  Sebastien cuffed Curly Cab, who was closest, around the head. Clementine wanted to point out that young as she was, Darka Wesk-Starzec was most definitely a woman, and not a girl, but another boy had already piped up.

  “Curly’s right,” said Gregor the Whiny, who seemed to have regained some of his courage. “You can’t train knights. How are we supposed to learn to fight from a girl?”

  Darka twisted her mouth in a way that made even Clementine nervous.

  “Lady Clementine,” Darka said, looking straight ahead, “do you happen to have any of those charming letters of yours on you?”

  Clementine stared at Darka blankly. Charming letters? And then Darka’s meaning hit her: the messenger birds. Darka wanted Clementine to conjure one of the flying letters.

  Fortunately, Clementine had a piece of parchment on her already, though it was only a list of items she’d been meaning to pick up in the village. She rummaged through her pockets and smoothed out the wrinkled list, murmuring the words that would lift the ink from the pages. It was harder, with the letter not being fresh, but she managed.

  The boys gasped as a gray-eyed blackbird formed before them. It shrieked, and a few jumped back.

  “Thank you,” said Darka. “Now just a moment, please.” Darka jumped over the rows of the garden and ran until she was over a hundred yards away—leaving Clementine to the mercy of the boys’ growing mutterings.

  “Go ahead, my lady!” called Darka.

  Clementine leaned in toward the bird she had created, which was perched lightly on her forearm, and whispered, “Darka Wesk-Starzec.”

  The messenger bird launched itself from Clementine’s forearm, leaving little pinpricks in her skin, but Clementine barely noticed. She watched the bird fly straight for Darka, who drew her bow and aimed it . . . straight up in the air?

  “What is she doing?” Clementine muttered to herself, but Darka had already loosed the first arrow. The boys watched it sail high overhead until finally, it could do nothing but drop—but Clementine’s eyes were on Darka. Quicker than Clementine could imagine, Darka had fired a second arrow, this time straight into the bird’s path.

  Both arrows hit the messenger bird at the exact same time. It exploded in a shower of ink, utterly obliterated.

  “Seven Sisters,” breathed Sebastien.

  “She is a witch!” exclaimed Roderick, but it sounded strangely like a compliment. The boys turned back to face Darka and Clementine, eyes wide.

  There was the look of fearful respect that Clementine liked to see.

  By the time Darka sauntered back to the garden, the messenger bird had reformed and perched on Darka’s shoulder; the birds were, in the end, impervious to such mundane intervention, but that didn’t seem to dampen the boys’ shock.

  “Are there any further questions?” asked Darka, shouldering her bow.

  “Yeah,” said Curly Cab. “How long before we get to do that?”

  ***

  And so Darka Wesk-Starzec, the new captain of the guard of Castle Brack, came to a deal with her raw recruits. For every task they completed on the farm for Clementine, they received a training session with her in return. The knights practiced shooting at targets and hacking at scarecrows who had finally lost the last of their magic with the swords they had all chosen with the help of the Lady of the Lake. (Fortunately, the Lady listened to Clementine’s stern warning not to actually throw any more swords at the boys, as not all of them were as coordinated as Sebastien.)

  The knights often practiced in a courtyard near Clementine’s garden, as far from her father’s tower as possible. Clementine would peek around her garden wall and watch Darka drilling them on balance, endurance, and proper stance. Far from minding the disturbance to her work, she found she rather liked the sound of Darka’s voice and the boys’ shuffling feet and the thudding blows and grunts of exertion. For the first time Clementine could remember, Castle Brack felt like more than a dusty, silent relic of days gone by. It felt . . . alive.

  But even as the Brack Knights brought life to one part of the castle, Clementine knew that in another, a different life was fading fast.

  She was no closer to finding a cure than she had been since her father had shut himself in his laboratory. And considering that Lord Elithor no longer let Clementine see him as she helped the Brack Butler with his meals . . . she didn’t think he was any closer, either. She continued to scour the library for references to the Whittle Witch, but other than an introduction to arbomancy, she found little that would help her. The gaps in the shelves told her that Lord Elithor must have taken all the texts on witches, woodworking, and curses—and barricaded them, along with himself, in the tower.

  There seemed to be so little she could do, even as she did . . . well, everything. She woke up at dawn with Darka and worked until dusk just to keep the farm afloat, rushing to carve out enough time to keep an eye on the training knights and squint at the reams of complicated reports spewing from the Decimaker. In the evenings, she practiced her spellwork with the Gricken until she was so tired that she fell over, accidentally set something on fire, was forcefully scolded by Darka, or some combination of all three.

  She and Darka would sit down to a simple supper of fried fish from the lake, or sausages from her father’s stores, and look up at the mountains together. And with each passing day, Clementine began to wonder . . . was this what other people did? Did they always get up in the morning and have breakfast with their families without fear that they might be poisoned by some rival for power? Did they grow food without worrying their plants might eat them instead? Did they sometimes laugh when they did their chores together, and sometimes grouch at one another, and more often than not, a little bit of both? When they gathered in front of the fire at the end of a long day, did they, too, have someone to brush and braid their hair and tuck them into bed?

  Clementine had not ventured out beyond the estate since the Whittle Witch’s storm. She told herself that
she was merely abiding by her promise to her father not to seek out the Whittle Witch, that she would only put both of their lives in jeopardy by putting herself in harm’s way. And she had plenty of time before the Council of Evil Overlords would expect another Dastardly Deed. It was easy—easier than she would have ever hoped—to lose herself in the whirlwind of her days, in the physical hardship of the work itself, or the companionable silence of meals shared with Darka, or the rambunctious antics of the Brack Knights. It was easy to forget that just outside her father’s wards was someone waiting for the right moment to snatch it all away.

  But in those rare moments when Clementine did find herself alone, she couldn’t escape the real reason she didn’t fly her broomstick straight into the forest and scour the land until she found the Whittle Witch’s hiding place. She was afraid—and not just of what would happen if she failed. She was afraid of what might happen if she succeeded. She was afraid of what would happen to her life as it was now, crushingly exhausting as it was, because for the first time, it was a life she had built for herself—a tiny, delicate rose she had somehow coaxed into growing out of the darkness.

  A small, traitorous part of her heart—that same part that made her grow flowers in her secret garden, and dwelled a little too much on a certain Sebastien Frawley’s freckles, and delighted in the giggles that bubbled up inside her when the black sheep tried to “help” her feed the chickens and got a singed backside for his trouble—wished that somehow, she could break the Second Rule of Evildoing and travel through time, if only to freeze herself in this moment forever. No Dastardly Deeds to worry about completing (at least not for a while). No constant glowering and disappointment and unpredictable rages, or equally unpredictable cold silences from her father. No lessons in how to kidnap princesses for ransom, or conjure a plague of locusts, or how to look down her nose with just the right amount of disdain.

  She would think back, sometimes, to her conversation with Kat Marie Grice. The mere suggestion that Clementine—future Dark Lord Clementine Morcerous!—could ever be a Good Witch was preposterous. Because, spewing sunbeams or not, good people did not think the sharp, wicked thoughts that flitted across Clementine’s mind.

  Good people did not feel relieved at the thought that their fathers might die.

  And as Clementine stood in the main hall of Castle Brack, surveying the still, silent jet-black suits of armor that lined the walls on either side of her, she could not help but feel judged by their empty, unseeing helms. She could not help but feel that they knew her secret, just as they knew about the village boys running around their castle, playing at being knights. How could the likes of Sebastien and Curly Cab and Gregor the Whiny ever fill these suits of armor? How could they ever compare to the long-dead Brack Knights, servants of the earliest Dark Lords, who had conquered the Seven Sisters with sword and fire and dark magic? How could she, Clementine, ever live up to the legacy of Dark Lords past?

  The empty suits looked decidedly skeptical.

  But when Darka called for help carrying some rusty maces up from the dungeon, Clementine went. And for a while, at least, she left the thoughts of her disapproving ancestors behind.

  Chapter 17

  The Monster in the Tower

  or How to Lose Every Friend You’ve Ever Made in Three Minutes

  “MAN YOUR POSTS,” shouted Sebastien, raising his sword in the air. “WE’RE BEING ATTACKED!”

  Darka gingerly took the flat of his blade in two fingers and pointed it toward the ground. “You’re going to take someone’s eye out,” she said. “Your knights can hear you just fine.”

  Sebastien looked like he was about to protest that it was more fun to do things his way, but by then, the “invaders” had breached the gatehouse at the foot of the mountain, and he was preoccupied with other duties.

  From her perch up high on the battlements facing the courtyard, Clementine suppressed a giggle at Sebastien’s enthusiasm, then returned her own attention to the fight at hand. It had been Darka’s idea to stage a mock defense of Castle Brack, and in the absence of real adversaries (at least for the moment), it was Clementine’s job to supply the invaders. She’d spent much of the day before practicing a spell for animating the scarecrows that the Gricken had laid for her, to create the attacking army. The Brack Knights had had a grand old time tying together old tools and rusted weapons and bits of scrap wood to make the dummies, and Clementine had added her own finishing touches by furnishing a few of the opposing “generals” with chimaera heads she’d swiped from the castle walls.

  “You’re only collecting dust sitting up here, anyway,” she told one of the heads, a scaly combination of lion and snake, when it scowled at her for moving it from its mount. “It’s time to live a little!”

  It tried to bite her hand off.

  “Well, I supposed you’re a bit past that stage,” she’d admitted.

  Now, the cobbled-together creations really did look intimidating as they lurched toward the second gate, propelled by Clementine’s spell. She hoped her brave knights wouldn’t lose their nerve—and that she wouldn’t lose hers. Not only did she have to animate the fake invaders, but she also had to keep an extensive soundproofing spell running. She could not risk her father hearing the racket their practice was making.

  “Nock, draw, loose!” cried Sebastien, and a hail of arrows rained down on the dummies. Clementine was pleased to note that a few of them even hit their targets.

  Two other boys ran to the gatehouse’s murder holes. They perched over the openings carved into the stone and prepared to dump vats of boiling oil onto the heads of any stragglers below who made it past the archers and attempted to take the gate. (It wasn’t really boiling oil, because that would have been terribly unsafe, but plain well water. Clementine, however, would stop any scarecrows she saw struck by it, so the end result was the same.)

  A few of the invaders, including the scaly-headed general, made it past the murder holes unscathed. They pushed through the giant wooden doors far too easily—had one of the boys left the blasted things unlocked?—and came galumphing into the inner courtyard, scythe hands waving about and generally looking menacing. (Clementine was quite proud of their motor skills, if she did say so herself.) At this, Sebastien and his best knights left the gatehouse battlements and came charging down the stone steps, swords and spears in hand. It gave Clementine quite a thrill to see them all rushing to defend her castle like that, even if it was only pretend, and even if she was a little bit distracted by the fear that the boys might poke one another with the spears.

  She rushed to the edge of the wall as the knights let out their battle cries.

  “FOR YOUR LADY!” Sebastien cried at the head of the formation, sword glinting in the sunlight.

  “Go! Go get them!” Clementine shouted, pumping her fist in the air. There was a sudden crackling sound, and the dummies stumbled; Clementine refocused on keeping them marching along.

  Darka looked up at her with a smirk, which left Clementine fighting a smile of her own. She did not think the sacking of one’s castle was supposed to be quite this much fun.

  The dummies had not been spelled to fight back—merely to advance on the castle—and so they did not put up much resistance against the knights’ defense. Still, the boys rushed at them with gusto, and the sounds of swords clashing filled the courtyard.

  “Watch your left flank!” Darka shouted to the boys as they fought. “Widen your stance!”

  Gregor and the few boys who remained on the walls heckled the invaders from above, pelting them with strangling vine clippings.

  “Isn’t it over yet?” moaned the black sheep from next to Clementine. He had plastered himself against the wall and refused to look over the side. “You know what Vivienne would say: it’s all fun and games until someone loses—”

  Ploink. The chimaera heads snarled as the strangling vines wound themselves in and around their skulls, p
opping out their glass eyes.

  “You were saying?” Clementine said to the sheep, though she cringed a little at the sight. Still, she could always put the heads back together again.

  The sounds of the battle began to die down as the last of the dummies succumbed to the knights. A great cheer went up as Sebastien lopped off the head of the scaly chimaera, sending Clementine into fits of giggles—of all the heads least likely to approve of being killed twice!—and only the twitching remains of the artificial invaders remained.

  “Sebastien! Sebastien!” chanted the boys, still riled up from their fight.

  “Yes, yes, you were all amazing,” said Darka with a bit of a grumble. “Except for the small error of leaving the door unlocked.” But no one paid her much heed.

  Clementine rushed down the stairs two at a time to join the knights, the black sheep at her heels. The boys continued their cheering, and Roderick and Sebastien hauled one of the heads over and presented it at Clementine’s feet with a bow.

  “For you, my lady,” Sebastien said, and though she knew it was not quite ladylike to be so pleased by being presented with a severed head, she did feel a bit of a thrill.

  “Yuck,” said the black sheep.

  “You fought very bravely, my Brack Knights,” Clementine said, trying to be as serious and solemn as she really would be on such an occasion, but the effect was rather ruined when Little Ian skipped over to her, grabbed her hand, and insisted on leading her in a victory dance around the courtyard.

  “Oh, this really isn’t the time,” Clementine said, breathless with laughter, as Little Ian spun her around, and the rest of the boys joined in, jumping and kicking aside the spare parts of the dummies. “We’ve still so much work to do!” she protested, but her heart wasn’t really in it.

  It wasn’t until the sound of thunder boomed across the sky that any of them noticed something was amiss.

  “WHAT. IS. THIS. NOISE.”