The Dark Lord Clementine Read online

  The latest dismal reports from the Decimaker discouraged her from spending any of her father’s money—and Lord Elithor rarely paid Stan in coin, anyway. The Dark Lord usually traded goods for goods, and supplied Stan with his latest inventions, elixirs, and poisons, or magical artifacts from his personal collection. But with the Lord Elithor focused on finding a cure for the whittling curse, there hadn’t been time for him to perfect any new products. While Clementine might be able to disguise her father’s condition, there was no disguising the fact that she had nothing to trade.

  “Grooming you for command already?” joked Stan as they reached the top of the stairs.

  Clementine ignored him. “We have . . . quite a good harvest coming in this year,” she lied, racking her brains for something—anything—that could tempt Stan to buy. They made their way through the gate and into the inner courtyard. “A handful of magic beans sprouted early. I’d be happy to give you—”

  “The early ones are runts,” said Stan with a wave of his hand. “Never grow tall enough to reach the sky. Which you know perfectly well, my dear.” The satyr fumbled in his cloak for his pipe, and Clementine wrinkled her nose in anticipation of the stinky smoke.

  “Father’s been working on his truth serum,” said Clementine. “He would love to offer you a sample—”

  “‘Working on?’” asked Stan. “I’ve been working on a boat for ten years. It’s still in my garage. Does the stuff work or not?”

  “On white lies,” admitted Clementine. “But just think! Your customers could protect themselves from all sorts of . . . um, false compliments.”

  Stan merely snorted and lit up his pipe. Clementine coughed at the purple smoke. The great steel-banded doors of the castle opened before them. She tried other offers as she led Stan down the candlelit entry hall: that door knocker—didn’t he always say he liked the skull door knocker?—and some of the snakes for breeding; her best cutting of strangling vines; and even the youngest nightmare. But the satyr remained unimpressed.

  “Honestly, my dear,” said Stan, shaking his head. “I expected at least a cannibalistic crystal ball, which your father swore to me he’d have in hand this time last year. So unless he’s got something special to offer . . .” Stan turned back down the hall, stomping toward the doors.

  “Wait!” cried Clementine. The flames flared in their sconces along the walls. Lord Elithor might not have anything special to offer Stan Glen—but Clementine did. “Wait right there. I’ll . . . I’ll be right back.”

  And with the barest acknowledgment of the merchant’s nod, Clementine bolted down the hall in quite the undignified manner. She turned left and right and left again, going up one staircase and down two others and through the maze of Castle Brack, which she knew better than anyone, until she skidded to a stop in the moist earth of her secret garden—sparing a quickly blown kiss to the Lady in White—and plucked a single pale blue rose. It was the fullest on the young bush, and the other blossoms trembled as she cut it away.

  “I’m sorry,” Clementine whispered to the flower. “But I need you.”

  She ran back to the entry hall only to see one of the giant doors swinging shut and hear Stan Glen swearing at his cart outside. Clementine burst through the door, nearly running straight into the satyr on the other side. She cupped her hand protectively around the blossom.

  “Ho!” exclaimed Stan, grabbing Clementine’s shoulders to stop her from bowling into him. But he wasn’t yelling at her. His eyes were fixed on the flower in her hands.

  “Now what have we here?” he asked, lowering his voice.

  Clementine took a step back. “An everlasting rose,” she said, holding the flower out with one hand and surreptitiously wiping her other on her black skirt, where the thorns had drawn blood. “It changes color in the presence of poison.”

  At least, it was supposed to. This was Clementine’s third attempt at the flowers, and this rose was barely ready to be picked as it was.

  “Now that is something you don’t see every day,” said Stan. He fished around in his cloak again—how many pockets did the thing have?—and pulled out a small vial of ominous-looking black liquid. Clementine took a step back. She was starting to understand that she’d been lucky it was only harmless peppermints Stan had been sneaking her as a child.

  “May I?” Stan asked, giving the bottle a swish.

  Clementine nodded. “Of course.” Reluctantly, she held out the flower toward the satyr, hoping he didn’t see the trembling of her hand. He uncorked the vial—careful to keep any of the fumes away from his face—and as soon as the rose came within a few inches of the poison, its petals began to turn as black as the liquid it had detected.

  “Ho, isn’t that a pretty bit of magic?” exclaimed Stan. Clementine withdrew the rose, and almost instantly, it brightened back to its usual sky blue. She did not know whether to be happy or offended; nothing about her magic was supposed to be “pretty.” Stan carefully corked the bottle and slipped it back inside his cloak. “Not old Elithor’s usual style, though, is it?” He rubbed his hairy chin.

  “Lord Elithor,” Clementine corrected, “is always pushing the boundaries of his craft. I don’t doubt one of your noble clients would appreciate such a useful artifact?”

  Stan rubbed his chin again, and Clementine started to worry he’d take out his smelly pipe again to mull it over.

  “You’re right enough about that,” Stan said with a wink, crossing to the front of his cart to pull out his ledger. “I’ll take it. Now, will that be trade or coin?”

  “Coin,” said Clementine, hoping she didn’t sound too eager. She ignored the brief, and admittedly insane, impulse to ask Stan for bananas instead.

  By the time she had finished escorting the peddler back down to the foot of the Fourth Sister and past the outer gatehouse, Clementine had decided to give an entirely different insane impulse a chance. There was simply no one else she knew to ask.

  “Stan,” Clementine said to the merchant, who was now stringing up a lantern to hang from his cart in the slowly fading light. “Have you ever heard of the Whittle Witch?”

  Stan paused, the flickering flames casting curious little shadows that danced across his weathered face. “Aye,” he said, his brow furrowed. “I’ve heard of her.”

  “And?” she asked. “What does she . . . Why do they call her that?”

  Stan sighed and narrowed his eyes at Clementine. “I’m not sure your father’d want me filling your pretty little head with scary stories, my lady.”

  “My father and I are scary stories, Mr. Glen,” countered Clementine. “Who is this witch?”

  “Well, she calls herself ‘the Witch of the Woods,’” answered Stan. “But that don’t account for her special proclivities, exactly.”

  Proclivities? wondered Clementine, suddenly wishing she kept volume M–Z of the dictionary even closer at hand.

  “She makes wooden simulacra of her enemies,” explained Stan. “Or anybody who gets in her way, really.”

  “Simulacra?” asked Clementine. She remembered the definition: Image. Representation. Copy.

  “Dolls,” said Stan with a small shudder. “Little wooden dolls she carves herself, with magic. All she needs is a bit of you—hair, nails, skin, you know—to bond to the simulacrum, and then, bippety-boppety-boo, your real body’s tied to your doll. That’s when she starts whittling away. I trust you don’t need me to explain that.”

  “No,” said Clementine softly. “I don’t. But why would . . . anyone . . . let such a witch near them?” she asked, crossing her arms. Her father certainly knew better than to leave bits of himself lying around for any wily witch to grab.

  “Well, they don’t always know it’s her, do they?” asked Stan. “Disguises herself, she does. Mostly like a beautiful young woman, though I hear she’s old enough to rival the Seven Sisters.”

  Clementine groaned inwardly. S
he could guess exactly how Lord Elithor had been fooled into getting close enough for the Whittle Witch to a snag a bit of him, and she didn’t care to dwell on it too much.

  “It’s getting dark,” said Clementine. “Thank you for stopping by. You should be on your way, if you’re sure you don’t want to spend the night.” She couldn’t imagine it would be comfortable for Stan to stay in the village, having to keep his hooves and horns hidden, but she also didn’t relish the thought of an outsider prowling around Castle Brack when her father was still ill.

  “Ah, but I’d best be on my way,” said Stan, tipping his hat to Clementine. “I’ll be sure to find a good home for that flower.”

  But he had only gone a few steps down the crumbling path, his cart trundling behind him, when he stopped.

  “You should not have asked me about her,” warned Stan, his voice gruff but kind. Clementine did not have to ask whom he meant. “A lesser gentleman than I might think you were asking for help.”

  And that, they both knew, could prove very dangerous indeed.

  Chapter 8

  The Three Rules of Evildoing

  or Unfriendly Reminders That Also Molt on the Carpet

  Clementine watched Stan make his slow way down to the village until he was but a mere dark speck in the twilight. The black sheep had said his own brief good night and trundled off to his preferred barn. Clementine sighed, thinking she ought to check on her poor rosebush before turning in herself, when she glimpsed a flash of movement from the corner of her eye—across the way, on the Third Sister. The figure picking a path through the cliffs was a bright, blinding white, as pure as the Lady in White’s skirts after a fresh snowfall. There was only one creature with as brilliant a coat on all of the Seven Sisters.

  Clementine froze where she stood. She watched the unicorn amble along the rocky ledges, its horn bobbing up and down with each step, until it stopped, too. And even though it was half a mountain away, Clementine could have sworn that it looked right at her.

  The unicorn was regarded as a legend by the townspeople, and even, Clementine had to admit, by herself. In all of her twelve years, she had laid eyes on it only twice before. It was real, she knew, but in the same way she thought of the other side of the mountains as being real; they existed, but in a world so far removed from her own that it didn’t pay to think of it.

  But staring at the creature across the mountains, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it before now. In all the hours she’d spent studying poisonous plants and potions and curses in her father’s laboratory, she’d also studied their cures, both magical and mundane. And there was no cure-all more legendary than the horn of a unicorn.

  Clementine shivered before she’d even finished the thought. She wanted to look away from the unicorn in shame for even considering such a thing, but she couldn’t tear her gaze from the beautiful creature, though it was hardly more than a white blur at this distance.

  There were not many rules for Evil Overlords. As one might imagine, practitioners of the trade were rather inclined to rule-breaking on the whole. But even as Clementine’s father had groomed her in the ways of terror and threats and general menacing, he had also taught her that there were certain lines that should never be crossed—both for the preservation of the sorcerer in question and for the entire world. He had instilled in her from birth his most important Three Rules of Evildoing:

  1.Never travel through time.

  2.Never try to bring back the dead.

  3.Never, ever kill a unicorn.

  The first two were fairly obvious. Terrible things had happened to wizards who meddled with time—they accidentally erased themselves from history or brought back the dinosaurs or created time loops that were a headache and a half for everyone else to sort out. Reviving the dead wasn’t even possible, no matter what some of the nutty self-styled necromancers might say, and any attempts to do so were usually dangerous failures. Lord Elithor had once passed by a town under zombie quarantine on his travels; catching a whiff of the smell as he rode by had been enough to turn him off the idea of any and all necro­mantic pursuits. (Though the screams and guttural chomping sounds had likely helped, too.)

  But unicorns were another matter entirely. They were the rarest of the rare in the magical animal kingdom, though even calling them “animals” seemed to do them an injustice. Clementine could not think of the unicorn the same way she thought of the nightmares or the fire-breathing chickens. The unicorn did not inspire fear or disgust—and yet it did not make her exactly happy, either. Even now, as goose bumps rose on her skin despite the warm evening, Clementine felt the presence of the unicorn like an ache around her heart. It felt like crying with her head against her father’s knobby knees, but also like the glow of moonlight on her favorite flowers as she talked to the Lady in White, or like hearing snatches of songs forgotten so long ago they were barely memories.

  Though unicorn horns were said to possess amazing magical properties—they could cure any disease, break any curse, or even grant immortality—few hunted them. Legend told that many years ago, the land had been full of unicorns, but that greedy humans had hunted them nearly to extinction, and discovered an unpleasant side effect in the process: anyone who killed a unicorn would be cursed for life, their every step dogged by violence and misfortune. It was the sort of underreported, vaguely worded curse her father would usually describe as “moralizing twaddle,” but even he did not take any lore regarding unicorns lightly.

  Even if one didn’t believe in the curse or have any qualms about slaughtering innocent, shining beings of pure magic and light, Clementine had a more practical concern: the presence of the unicorn was what kept the Seven Sisters thriving. Lord Elithor’s influence wasn’t the only force nurturing his silent farm. Her father had told her long ago that the unicorn’s powerful magic seeped into the earth itself, making the mountains and their surrounding valleys uniquely suited to raising magical plants and animals. If the unicorn were to die, like so many of its fellows, the magic of the Seven Sisters would fade, too . . . and with it, much of the Morcerous legacy.

  But this knowledge did not stop a small, dark corner of Clementine’s heart from skipping a beat at that sudden glimmer of hope. If by some miracle she could capture and kill the unicorn—though she nearly burst into tears, right there and then, at the thought of hurting something so beautiful—she could use the horn to cure her father . . .

  And she would doom the entire valley in the process. How would they live without the earnings from the farm? How would her father’s subjects, so accustomed to living with magic—even in small ways—fare without it? Would they realize the unicorn’s presence had affected them, too—that their crops never seemed to fail as often as the villages on the other side of the mountains, that the potions they bought from their hedgewitches actually worked (even if only about half the time) for a reason? What kind of a world would it be without enchanted blue roses and Grickens and poison apples, and satyrs named Stan? The mere thought of it terrified Clementine. If she were to kill the unicorn, life as she knew it would be over. The Morcerouses and the mountains would be ruined.

  If you looked at it that way, then the curse was real, after all.

  ***

  Darka Wesk-Starzec was eighteen when she met her first unicorn hunter.

  She didn’t know that’s what he was at the time, of course. After swaggering into her small town with nothing but a deadly-looking crossbow and the clothes on his back, Alaric had introduced himself as an “expert tracker, habitual woodsman, and professional adventurer.” She’d snorted in his face. He’d asked to sleep in her family’s barn. (The barn was one of the biggest in town, and as Alaric noted with a grin, “a gentleman of his caliber deserved the finest accommodations.” He said most things with a grin. Darka couldn’t help but laugh.) It was, as the stories always said, love at first sight.

  Though he professed only to be passin
g through, Alaric’s stay at the Wesk-Starzec household extended from a few days to a few weeks, and finally to several months. None of them minded . . . Not until the very end, at least. With his sandy hair and bright blue eyes, his tall and wiry build, and, most of all, that mischievous yet good-natured grin, he was generally impossible to be cross with.

  He did more than his fair share to earn his keep. He hunted for the family’s table, and it was here that his true gifts lay. Deer, rabbits—even a wild boar once, which they shared with half the town; no prey was swift enough once Alaric caught its trail. And one afternoon, after he caught Darka watching him practice shooting at impossibly difficult targets (or so they seemed to her then), he offered to show her how to use a bow, too. It surprised both of them when she caught on quickly, and soon (with minor protestations from her parents) she was accompanying him on his hunts.

  He taught her everything he knew—how to move soundlessly through the forest, how to mask her scent, how to rig traps and follow her prey’s trail for days. How to use her bow and arrow as well as the crossbow and the spear. And finally, he taught her how to hunt for monsters.

  The first time Darka made a kill bigger than a buck, she didn’t even know what she’d hit. When Alaric rolled the prone animal over, it had the head of a lion, the body of something like a goat, and a spiked, barbed tail covered in scales.

  “A chimaera,” Alaric explained while watching Darka’s face carefully.

  She had never seen a creature like it in her life. She’d assumed chimaeras were fairy tales, mythical creatures that had never existed or gone extinct long ago. Her blood pounded in her ears, her heart still beating with the thrill of the chase.

  Alaric bent down and withdrew the knife at his belt. With one fluid motion, he severed the creature’s tail from its body. It twitched for a moment before flopping to the forest floor, oozing green blood.

  “It’s the scales you want,” he said. “But you have to harvest them while they’re fresh. Otherwise, they lose their potency.” He sat down next to the carcass and began shimmying one of his smaller knives under one of the scales, as casually as one might shuck a clam. “Used for poisons, mostly, but what can you do. These’ll fetch a fair price on the magical markets. Well done, Darka.”