“See?” cried Shirin, backing away from the flaming path. “She’s just as bad as her father!” Some of the other witches shouted their agreement. Charms popped in the air, burning to crisps as they hit Clementine’s wards.
“Stop!” cried Kat Marie, and Clementine could not tell if she meant her or Shirin. Clementine’s breath came in shallow gasps. Her wrists blistered red.
Kat Marie slashed her staff, and the flames on the ground were extinguished. Clementine felt the cool sensation of trickling water flow over her body, but her fire still flickered. The flames outlined her fingers like glowing gloves.
“HELP!” a voice called.
And then, very suddenly, they were not alone. The trees to Clementine’s left rustled as ungainly limbs crashed through the branches, and two people burst out onto the charred path: Sebastien Frawley and Henrietta Turnacliff.
“Oh, I’m so glad we found you,” said Sebastien to the witches. He leaned over with his hands on his knees, breathing heavily. “We’ve been looking everywhere, but you weren’t at your camp, and we need your help.”
Henrietta Turnacliff had also stopped, leaning heavily against a tree that was probably too polite to whack the mayor’s daughter. She looked pale and sweaty and—unless it was Clementine’s imagination—slightly . . . violet?
They both noticed Clementine at the same time. At the look on Sebastien’s face, Clementine felt her flames sputter out as suddenly as if she’d been dunked in the lake.
“It’s her!” said Henrietta, pointing a finger at Clementine. “This pestilence comes from the Dark Lord!”
“Well, you don’t know that,” hedged Sebastien. He would not meet Clementine’s eyes.
“Child, what is the matter?” asked Kat Marie, shuffling forward and putting her hand to Henrietta’s brow, where her blond curls were lank and dark with sweat.
“The villagers are falling ill,” explained Sebastien. “We don’t know what it is. First they get the rash, and the fever.”
Henrietta breathed out heavily through her nose as Kat Marie examined her. “When the rash gets over the throat and chest,” Henrietta said, “they start to have trouble breathing. Some of our elderly are suffering dearly. ” Her eyes narrowed with loathing as she looked over Kat Marie’s shoulder at Clementine.
“We thought you might have something that could help,” said Sebastien. He addressed the witches, though his eyes flicked to Clementine. She barely noticed. She was remembering.
Clementine remembered purple mushrooms that grew only in the woods. She remembered a potion that had made the villagers just a little sick—if it affected them at all—and turned their skin a light shade of violet. How her father had tried to muster an appropriately evil chuckle at the poor (slightly) purple people, but eventually just sighed and said, “Well, I suppose that’s good enough.”
“I have never seen a sickness exactly like this,” Kat Marie said, turning Henrietta’s head to the side to get a better look at the bright markings.
Clementine remembered the list, the list that was the second most important list in her life, outside of the Three Rules of Evildoing: the Qualifying Dastardly Deeds.
1.A poisoning
2.An unfortunate transfiguration
3.A racket
4.A stampede
5. A frame-up
6.A murder
7.A tempest
8.A kidnapping
9.A plague
Turning the villagers purple had never been the intended final result of the poisonous potion. Someone else had managed to execute it with far more success than the Dark Lord Elithor Morcerous ever had. Someone else had started racking up their own list of Dastardly Deeds.
The Whittle Witch didn’t just want to kill Lord Elithor. She wanted to be the next Dark Lord. And if she was attempting Dastardly Deeds, the Whittle Witch considered the title already won.
“I have,” said Clementine. Everyone turned to look at her.
“She admits it!” cried Henrietta, wrenching herself away from Kat Marie’s care. She stumbled, and Sebastien caught her under the elbow.
Clementine shook her head. “It’s true I know this sickness—or at least, I think I do—but I’m not the one who poisoned you . . . and neither is my father.” She locked eyes with Kat Marie, who nodded grimly.
“Can you help us?” asked Sebastien.
It was the first time he’d spoken directly to her since that day at the castle, and suddenly, nothing that had happened since mattered. It didn’t matter that she’d lied, or that he’d been angry with her, or that he’d abandoned his post as a Brack Knight. All that mattered was that he was Sebastien, and he needed her help, and maybe—just maybe—she could give it.
But if she went with him, if she left to help the villagers, that meant losing more time to the Whittle Witch’s schemes.
And it meant letting her father go.
Suddenly, Kat Marie was in front of her, hands gently resting on her shoulders. When she looked down at Clementine, her face was kind, but her voice was firm.
“Come with us, Clementine,” she said. “Help us save those who still might be saved.”
Clementine took a deep breath. She closed her eyes. She remembered, again. She remembered the smell of old parchment and fresh, pungent plants mashed with mortar and pestle, and swinging her feet on the stool next to her father until he scolded her to stop. She remembered his harsh words and his scowl, and how he never remembered to tie his robes back, even when the long, draping sleeves caught alight over the fire (which happened more than once). She remembered a man who was Dark Lord, and turned people into sheep and made children cry and enforced cold silence in his domain. A man who settled for slightly purple, rather than deathly ill.
Because his heart had never truly been that of a Dark Lord, either. And yet he had still chosen that life, ill-fitting as it was and with all the suffering it caused.
Clementine opened her eyes. She nodded. First, she had to be sure. They had to identify the source of the poison—if poison it really was—to stop the spread of the sickness as soon as possible. Fortunately, Clementine had just the magic flower for the job.
“Take me to the village,” she said, and let the mayor’s daughter, a disgraced knight in training, and a coven of hedgewitches lead her out of the woods.
Chapter 20
What Friends Are For
or The Real Siege of Castle Brack
The Whittle Witch was a woman of wood, of growing things and green things and things that take root. Castle Brack, on the other hand, was a thing of stone. It was hard and cold. It could not be molded by her hands—not slowly and gently, not as she liked. It was part of the mountain itself. She would not be able to go about this the way she’d like—a little sanding here, a little scraping there, a careful peeling with a sharp knife.
Today was not a day for waiting. She had been waiting for so long.
Her trees followed her out of the forest. They screamed as their roots tore from the ground, leaving great gaping wounds in the earth, but they followed. They dragged themselves across the moat and climbed up the stone path, trailing crumbling earth with each splintering step, until they reached the castle gate. They used their own brothers to make battering rams, bashing and bashing against the gate until the Whittle Witch could not tell the screams of pain from the battle cries.
Her wooden dolls came with her, too. Some were so small she wore them strung around her neck, some were lashed to the tail of her broomstick (these were usually the naughty ones), and some were large enough to limp along with the trees, like half-finished marionettes without strings.
The Dark Lord’s wards prickled against her skin, even though he was nearly gone. They put wrinkles in her forehead and made her knees ache with the pain of a few hundred winters. It cost her more effort, more years of magic, than she’d pla
nned. She would have to find the unicorn quickly.
The Whittle Witch had thought she would sense the creature’s presence as soon as she entered Elithor’s domain. She had been able to feel its magic only in fits and starts out in the woods, but there had always been a pull toward the epicenter of the Dark Lord’s power—the Fourth Sister, and Castle Brack. And she had wondered—of course she had—what kind of unicorn would let a Dark Lord rule with impunity on its mountain. They were not known to be meddlesome creatures, and yet the unicorn’s silence all these years was . . . troubling. And now, its power did not seem any nearer than it had before—except for that same pull.
The Whittle Witch had heard the stories, of course—the stories the hedgewitches whispered about the Dark Lords Morcerous and the unicorn. She never did know what to make of them, and now she found she didn’t much care. She would take Castle Brack for her own, and if the unicorn became hers sooner rather than later—well, so much the better.
She found the scarecrows scattered across the farm, called to their wooden souls, and bid them follow, too. A few more soldiers would not hurt her cause.
By the time the Whittle Witch and her trees and her dolls and her scarecrows reached the front doors of Castle Brack, the Whittle Witch could see the edges of Elithor’s magic stretched across it—thin, sad ribbons, as flimsy as spiderwebs. She pulled out her whittle. It was her oldest knife, her favorite knife. No other would do.
The ribbons of magic shivered, frayed bowstrings playing one last, feeble song.
The Whittle Witch raised her knife and did what she did best.
***
The black sheep could not believe what he was doing. If anyone had told him years ago, when he was still just a small lad in the village, that one day he’d be risking life and limb to save the Dark Lord Elithor Morcerous, he’d have said they were crazy. Now, he was quite certain he was the crazy one.
The sheep had been grazing in the valley when he saw the Whittle Witch emerge from the forest. In truth, he saw only the signs of her emergence from the forest, as a rush of deer and squirrels and owls and all manner of other woodland creatures fled from her destructive path. He heard the ripping and stomping of the trees next, and when the first of them mowed down their still stationary fellows to leave the forest behind completely, well, the black sheep knew it was time to say goodbye to his life on the Morcerous farm.
The sheep ran for the castle as fast as his short legs could carry him. (Do sheep run? he wondered. Trot? “Gallop” seemed like a word that belonged to horses.) He raced past the empty Brack Knight suits of armor that were swinging their weapons wildly, as they surely felt but could not yet see the enemy approaching the castle. He was breathing hard—the life of a human-turned-sheep had made him rather soft, and he hadn’t been much harder to begin with—but still he pressed on and up the stone stairs to the laboratory.
The Dark Lord was little more than a barely breathing pile of sticks. He glared balefully at the black sheep as the sheep approached, and the mechanical metal disk Clementine called the Brack Butler waved its sharp, spindly appendages in a way that suggested the black sheep would get much more than a shearing if he came any closer.
The tower shook with a sudden blast of energy from outside. Dust rained down from the roof and walls.
The sheep really should have said something like, “My greatest apologies for the intrusion, my lord!” but instead he aimed a swift kick at the overprotective Butler, bleated, “Go on and get on!” and nudged his head under Lord Elithor’s little wooden body until the Dark Lord was forced to either take hold or fight his way back onto the bed.
“Do you want to see Clementine again or not?” asked the sheep testily. He felt what remained of the Dark Lord’s fingers grasp on to his coat. At least that would make his job easier.
“Hold on tight, my lord!” cried the sheep, and he bounded out of the tower with the Dark Lord of the Seven Sisters clinging to his back as the castle trembled around them.
Yes, the black sheep thought, he was definitely crazy.
***
Just as Alaric had done all those years ago, Darka searched for the perfect spot to break a girl’s heart. She followed the black sheep’s directions to the rocky slope at the foot of the western side of the Fifth Sister, where the trees grew up almost against the mountain’s face. She noticed with unease the animals fleeing the forest. They paid her almost no notice in their race to get away from the Seven Sisters, and it unnerved her. Darka had gotten used to being the most dangerous thing in the woods.
The Whittle Witch was coming, and that meant Darka needed to complete her mission soon. She might even need the unicorn’s horn to protect herself from the witch, if it came to that.
Better the devil you know, thought Darka, and wondered, not for the first time, how she’d gone from village farm girl who barely believed in magic to a unicorn huntress playing one evil sorcerer against another.
You know exactly how, Darka reminded herself. And then, since she had nothing to do but wait, she let the memories in.
***
Alaric had been distant for weeks. They’d had another false lead on the unicorn, and he blamed Darka for their wasted time.
“Maybe if someone double-checked their sources, instead of believing every piece of worthless gossip out of a barmaid’s mouth because she bats her pretty eyelashes—” He’d stopped short and spat into their fire.
Darka sat back, stunned. He’d been the one to tell her to get close to the locals in the first place—to befriend them and listen to their stories.
Just like he had done, when he’d come sniffing around Darka’s village.
She reminded him of that, and he didn’t talk to her for nearly a day and a half.
He insisted they leave for the woods again soon. No explanations, no attempt to smooth things over with the contacts they’d been cultivating in the town. When she protested, he told her she was more than welcome to stay behind.
Without him.
Darka followed. He led them through the forest at a backbreaking pace, scaring off any game they might have hunted for food. By the time they finally set up camp—in a clearing that was far too exposed for Darka’s tastes—she was burning with anger and confusion.
“What is wrong with you?” Darka asked Alaric. “Why are you acting like this?”
“Let’s just get some rest,” he snapped. They went to bed hungry. She heard him get up several times throughout the night, moving restlessly about their campsite.
And in the morning, with the sun shining cheerily down on them, Alaric broke her heart.
She awoke to find him diligently separating their supplies into equal portions—two portions, she realized, for two separate journeys.
Alaric noticed her watching him.
“We both know this isn’t working anymore,” he said with a small, sad smile.
“What?”
The rest of his words were a blur—how it had been fun while it lasted but clearly, Darka wasn’t cut out for his line of work. How it would be better for both of them if they went their separate ways—Alaric to his hunting and Darka back to her family.
As if they were not hundreds of miles away from her village. As if she could go back to her family now. As if their nearly two years together had not happened.
“What is wrong?” Darka asked him. “What happened to you?” And finally, when she could gain nothing satisfying from him in response: “What did I do?”
“Nothing, my love,” said Alaric, taking Darka’s face in his hands. “You played your part to perfection.”
Darka stared at that small, sad smile—that condescending smile, she realized—and wondered if she’d been hunting the wrong monsters all along.
“My . . . part?” she sputtered. “What did you think I was doing, Alaric? Leaving my family and everything I’ve ever known behind, to . . . to tra
vel across the world with you and kill with you, and . . . you think I’m just playing house with you? Playing adventurer? I haven’t been playing at anything!” She shoved him hard in the chest, and he stumbled backward.
He righted himself, brushing the dirt off his pants with a short laugh, like he was pleasantly surprised at Darka’s outburst.
“Ah, Darka, but you see . . . I have been playing—I’ve been playing a game, and a very long one.” He ran a hand through his hair, looking almost—but not quite—embarrassed.
“What are you saying?” Darka asked. But Alaric was already shouldering his pack and turning away from her. She grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. “Why? Why are you leaving?”
“Because some monsters,” he said, cupping her face again and running his thumb down her tear-streaked face, “just can’t resist a young maiden’s tears.”
He left her there, confused and crying, and so very, very alone—or so she thought.
It was a matter of minutes before the unicorn found her.
***
The blue rose was lowered into the well with a rope. When Clementine and Sebastien pulled it up again—slowly and carefully, for they could not risk another drop touching anyone else—it had turned a wilted purplish black.
“Poison,” Clementine said, her suspicions confirmed.
The few villagers gathered around took a step back with a gasp, as if they could become ill merely by hearing Clementine speak the word.
“Do you know of an antidote?” asked Kat Marie Grice, frowning at the shriveling flower.
Clementine shook her head. “Not by heart, no,” she said. “I’d have to consult my father’s grimoire, or the original recipe for the poison, and that’s back at the castle . . .” She looked at the villagers eyeing her warily, some showing early signs of the disease. The truly sick—mostly the elderly and the very young—had been brought to the town hall. Clementine imagined more and more benches filling up with the people standing by her now, wheezing with swollen throats and bruise-colored skin.
The Dark Lord Clementine Page 18
