But his face was nearly unrecognizable. The hair of his eyebrows and mustache had turned into black paint on his rough, scraped skin. His cheeks were sunken, the bones protruding like those of a starving man. Even though he was turned away from her, she could see what remained of his fists clenched at his sides.
How much she wanted to run to him, to unclench those poor brittle fingers before they broke even more from the stress, to kiss them and press them to her cheek, rough edges or not. For the first time in a long time, she wanted nothing more than to put her head in her father’s lap and just cry. The tears welled up in her eyes. But she did not dare—especially not in this room. Not in Lord Elithor’s tower.
“Clementine,” her father said, still bent over his notes, “I thought I told you not to disturb me in my work.”
“I-I know, Father, but . . .”
“Fix that door on your way out.”
“I’ll try, Father, but . . .”
“And do something about those chickens. I can smell the smoke from here.”
“Yes, Father, but I came here to—”
“I WILL NOT ASK AGAIN.” Elithor’s fist slammed down on the desk with a terrible crack. He cried out, clutching his arm to his chest.
“Father!” Clementine ran to his side, all fears of the tower forgotten, and knelt beside him. If this was what the witch’s curse was doing to him on the outside, she could only imagine what it was doing to him on the inside. She reached up and placed her hands on his arms, ever so gently. The Butler skittered around them, buzzing with alarm.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Lord Elithor muttered, trying to wave her away. He nudged the Butler with the tip of his toe, and it immediately quieted. “At least . . . not in the way you’d expect.” He sighed.
Splinters from his damaged hand littered the desk. A breeze from the window scattered the pieces before Clementine could gather them up. Lord Elithor made no attempt to retrieve them.
“Father,” said Clementine. “Please, please tell me you’re close to finding a cure. Please tell me how to help you.”
Lord Elithor said nothing. The only sounds in the room were the strained whistling of his breath and the low hum of the Butler. Clementine looked away.
“The farm is changing, Father,” she said softly. The farm is dying. “The magic is . . . I’m not sure how much longer I—we—can keep going like this.” Clementine looked down, as if the folds in her sap-stained dress were the most fascinating thing in the world, and tried to fight the hitch in her own breath. After a few moments, she felt something touch the top of her head. Her father’s other hand, hard and stunted as it was, tentatively caressed her hair. She leaned into the touch.
“Have you so little confidence in my abilities?” her father finally asked with a huff. But the fight was all but gone from his voice.
“I have all the confidence in you, Father,” said Clementine. “But I also know that . . . that you’re dying.”
His hand paused in its stroking. As horrible as it was to admit, Clementine felt . . . almost relieved, to finally say those words out loud. Now there was no putting them back where they’d come from, festering in the back of her mind.
She brushed a handful of splinters off her skirt.
“I will counter this curse, Clementine,” said her father, resuming his stroking of her hair. “The Morcerouses have not ruled the Seven Sisters for generations to be defeated by a . . .”
“A witch?” guessed Clementine, this time barely in a whisper.
Lord Elithor sighed. “You must promise me something, Clementine,” he said. “I will do everything in my power to undo this spell. And until that happens, you are not to come to this tower anymore.”
“But what about—”
“That is not a request. My assistant will see to it that I am taken care of.” The Brack Butler buzzed in assent, lights flashing on its shiny black surface.
Clementine almost protested, but then she understood. Her father did not want another incident like today’s. He did not want Clementine to see him in this condition—especially if things got worse before they got better.
“Do not leave the farm, if you can manage it—though I suppose you must go to town occasionally, lest the villagers begin to suspect something. Trust no one, and tell no one. Do you understand?”
Clementine swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded.
“Y-yes, Father.”
“And promise me, above all else, that you will not go looking for her.”
Clementine looked up at her father, and even with the sharp corners of his bones and the effort it clearly took him to speak, it was what she saw in his eyes that scared her most of all: fear. Lord Elithor Morcerous, dread Dark Lord of the Seven Sisters Mountains, professional oppressor and perpetrator of Dastardly Deeds, was afraid.
“Promise me,” he said, “that you will not go looking for the Whittle Witch.”
***
The Witch of the Woods sang as she walked through the trees. Birdsong and the chattering of the other small forest creatures fell silent as the eerie, discordant melody washed over them. Squirrels abandoned prized acorns where they lay and skittered away from the sound. A young doe froze in her tracks, as spooked as if she’d been cornered by a hunter’s bow, and did not bound away until the Witch was out of sight. Only the trees leaned in to hear the woman sing, their boughs twisting toward her outstretched hands.
A faint buzzing, followed by a soft pop, caught the Witch’s attention. She paused in her song long enough to watch the small woven charm hanging in an oak limb above her head snap down the middle, threads bursting and scattering to the winds like a broken spiderweb, and fall to the ground. The local hedgewitches’ defenses were powerless against her. She knew it, and they knew it. That was why they fled from her, hopscotching around to the parts of the forest still free from her influence. But it would not be long before the whole wood was hers. It was her specialty, after all.
The Witch rolled her neck, sighing at the resulting crackles and pops. She ran a hand along her neck and was displeased to find her skin looser and more wrinkled than it had been when she’d set out that morning. She’d been putting herself through her paces lately, pushing the limits of her magic. Her old bones tired more easily than they used to, when she was a few hundred years younger. Older bones needed stronger magic to keep them going, to keep her skin supple and her hair blond and thick and glossy. What they needed was powdered unicorn horn, and the Whittle Witch’s supply had been dwindling for a very long time.
The effort would be worth it, she assured herself, and she resumed her song. The wood was not the only thing that would be hers before long. Soon, when the Dark Lord Elithor was desperate enough, or when his wards grew weak enough, she would rule supreme over the Seven Sisters Mountains. And as the new Dark Lord, the lands where the unicorn roamed would be hers. The unicorn would be hers, and she’d need not worry about rationing its power ever again.
Well, at least not for another hundred and fifty years or so. Eternal youth had a voracious appetite.
***
Clementine closed the door to her father’s laboratory with much more care than she had opened it. She rubbed her tired, puffy eyes, pushed her hair out of her face, and nearly tripped right over a fluffy black sheep. The fluffy black sheep. He had somehow made his way into the corridor—could sheep even climb stairs?—and was watching her with a somber expression.
“You’re going to break his rules, aren’t you?” the sheep asked in his nasal, shaky voice.
“Shh! Shoo!” Clementine anxiously looked back toward the tower room, the door firmly shut and locked again. Her father might have been ill, but he wasn’t deaf, and he didn’t need to know things had sunk so low on his own farm that cursed talking sheep were now freely wandering the hallways. Clementine led the sheep away from the door.
“I suppose you heard e
verything then,” Clementine said testily. “And what makes you think I would disobey him, exactly?”
“You’ve got that look in your eye,” said the sheep as they made their way down the stone steps. (He could, in fact, navigate the stairs with surprising ease.) “The I’m-going-to-disobey-my-parents look. It’s one I’m quite familiar with.”
Clementine stopped at the foot of the stairs and glared at the sheep.
“I’m not going to break my promise,” said Clementine. “I’m just going to . . . bend it.” She strode down the hall and out onto one of the castle’s balconies to survey the valley below. “Looking for information about the Whittle Witch isn’t the same as looking for the Whittle Witch.”
Clementine rested her hands on the stone railing. Here she was, not two minutes after her tearful promise to her father, confessing the intimate details of their struggles to someone who had apparently irritated Lord Elithor enough to get himself permanently transfigured into a sheep.
Even though Clementine knew that a talking sheep probably couldn’t be much help or hindrance in fighting a foe as powerful as the Whittle Witch, and that she was making the offer just to have someone—anyone—to talk to while her father stayed sequestered in his tower, and that Lord Elithor had instructed her to trust no one . . . she couldn’t shake the idea.
“And you’re going to help me,” Clementine declared.
The sheep bleated in surprise.
“I can’t keep the farm running and research this witch all on my own,” Clementine said. “If you help me, I promise . . .” She took a deep breath and turned to face the sheep. “I promise to find a way to turn you human again.”
The black sheep shuffled on his hooves but said nothing.
“Well,” said Clementine with a huff. “That’s honestly an offer that would be good enough for most people.”
The sheep chewed on his top lip, evidently considering her proposal.
“Can I have free run of the library, too?” the sheep asked.
Clementine was immediately struck by the mental image of the sheep’s woolly bottom sitting on her father’s thrones.
Compromises, she reminded herself.
“Done,” she said.
***
The huntress retreated into the woods. She would have preferred to stay in the village—how long had it been since she’d slept in a real bed?—but her unfortunate encounter with those schoolboys in the town square had put an end to that foolish flight of fancy. As soon as she was out of sight of the townspeople and their suspicious glares, she had balled up her cloak and shoved it in her pack for the rest of her journey, half-grateful she no longer needed to bother with wearing it in the late summer heat. The trees and the mountains were unlikely to be as offended by her presence as so many of her fellow humans seemed to be. And it was better to be closer to her prey, wasn’t it?—the better to watch and wait, to observe what extraordinary abilities it might put to use against her.
As she walked, the huntress did not see any signs of her quarry—not that she really expected to, this close to the village. But she did start to see other clues that she was not the only one seeking shelter in the woods. It did not take her long to notice the white scratches on the trees that started to form a pattern—trail markers, she guessed—or the rabbit and deer traps, or the small clusters of stone, fur, and wood that others might take for bundles of forest debris but that she immediately recognized as charms. There were hedgewitches in these woods, and they would almost certainly not approve of the huntress’s business in their domain. She veered off their marked paths and into less traveled parts of the forest.
It was rougher going, but the huntress was used to rough going by now. And as soon as she’d made the decision to keep near the mountains instead of the heart of the woods, she’d known it was the right one. She’d followed the trail all the way over the mountains, after all. She’d been listening to the villagers for longer than she’d allowed herself to be seen among them, and their rumors all pointed her in the same direction. And the tingling in her bones and the warm breeze’s kiss on the back of her neck as she skirted the Third and Fourth Sisters told her that her prey was nearby, close to its rumored center of power.
She had no real evidence to suggest this, of course. Tracking this type of monster was not like hunting deer, or bears, or dragons. There would be no telltale tracks or scorched earth or disturbed brush. But the tingling sensation that prickled from deep in her bones and seemed to skitter across her old wound, making her mouth twitch at the memory of pain, was all she needed to confirm her suspicions. She felt it like a thin but taut string, a thrumming connection between her and the creature she sought, pulling up and up and up into the mountains until it disappeared into the mist.
There was a unicorn in these parts. And Darka Wesk-Starzec was determined to kill it.
Chapter 6
The Black Sheep of the Family
or The Early Bird Is Mightier Than the Sword
There was one small problem with Clementine Morcerous’s offer to turn the black sheep back into a human: the black sheep in question wasn’t so sure he wanted to be human again at all. With the exception of not being able to talk or read—Seven Sisters, how he missed books!—it really wasn’t a terrible existence. It was actually rather peaceful, if you asked the black sheep. And now, with those two major inconveniences done away with, life was looking up. He figured he had about a decade of reading material in the utterly fascinating Morcerous library to go through before he even started to get bored.
The black sheep’s real name was David Turnacliff. At some point in his youth, in an effort to make his son sound a bit tougher and no-nonsense, David’s father had shortened his name to Dave. However, it wasn’t long before everyone realized that Dave Turnacliff possessed a mild and nervous temperament uniquely resistant to toughening up by any means, but by then, the nickname had stuck, so Dave he remained.
Dave was the eldest and only son of Houston Turnacliff, mayor of the village of the Seven Sisters Valley. The office of mayor was more of a ceremonial position than anything else—and not a terribly sought-after one, as the mayor was sometimes called upon to be the liaison between the villagers and the Dark Lord, and nobody in their right mind wanted that job. Houston, while technically an elected official, had been mayor for nearly two decades and run for office entirely unopposed every time.
But Dave had been raised to see his father’s position as the highest office in the land, bar the Dark Lordship itself. Naturally, Dave was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, but it did not take him long to figure out that he was not very good at most of the duties associated with being the village mayor: public speaking (or speaking to anyone in general), remembering people’s names, smoothing over disputes between neighbors or village elders, kissing babies during election season (not that the babies seemed overly enthused to be kissed by the rough whiskers of his father, either). Dave’s father, mother, and older sister, Henrietta, could not understand that Dave was happiest immersing himself in every book he could get his hands on, or weeding the garden by himself, or even just gazing up at the stars and the Lady in White for hours at a time. They were an Important Family who did Important Things.
So Dave, well . . . Dave went and did a rather Cowardly Thing, as opposed to an important one. On the eve of his twelfth birthday, with his father’s pressure to take on more responsibility in the village mounting, Dave paid a secret visit to the one person who might have the power to reverse his fortune: the Dark Lord Morcerous. But Dave found Lord Elithor an unsympathetic listener, and he quickly learned his lesson about complaining about being “the black sheep of the family” to an evil wizard. It had been nearly two years of woolly existence since then.
Being a sheep had its drawbacks, sure, but in the end . . . he’d sort of gotten what he wanted, hadn’t he? It was true, he sometimes missed his mother and Henrietta, and
even his father—and also having opposable thumbs—but there were worse things to be in the world than a reasonably well-cared-for sheep on a beautiful mountain. There were no expectations, no cumbersome family legacies to live up to. Dave had gone from being the black sheep of the family to just another sheep in the flock, ignored and overlooked by everyone, and that mostly suited him just fine.
But Dave the black sheep was far too embarrassed to admit this to Clementine. He knew that humans, traditionally, were not supposed to prefer being sheep. People were supposed to want to stay people. Stories were always full of grateful frogs turning back into princes and swans into fair maidens.
Dave felt bad for Clementine. She seemed like a nice enough girl, and he didn’t like to see her so sad. He was concerned about the Dark Lord’s possible death, too, though for different reasons: he suspected that if Lord Elithor died, the curse keeping him a sheep might break, too. Clementine’s proposed “reward” for Dave’s help was supposed to be the perfect happy ending, and yet . . . why didn’t it feel that way?
***
The sun was high and bright in the afternoon sky, and the walk to the lake was a long one—mostly because the lake in question didn’t like to stay in one place too long, so you could never be sure exactly where between the Fourth and Fifth Sisters, or even beyond, it might turn up. Dave suggested that Clementine summon a broomstick to ride for the journey, as he’d seen her do a handful of times.
She nearly tripped over her own two feet in surprise. “How do you know about that?” she demanded.
“What?” asked the sheep. “I’ve seen you do it at least a few times! Though, come to think of it, it’s usually when your father’s away or holed up in his tower—” He broke off at the sight of Clementine’s hair turning a storm-cloud gray, her expression dark enough to match.
The Dark Lord Clementine Page 5