Clementine froze at once, her heart leaping into her throat. She thought at first it was the Whittle Witch, come to attack with another storm, as Clementine had feared since that day in the woods. But though the sky had darkened, it was a darkness she recognized all too well; the thunder had not really been thunder at all, but the sound of every door in the castle being opened and slammed at once. The very walls seemed to shake in the aftermath. The remains of the dummies went terribly still, all thought of keeping the spell going swept from Clementine’s mind. The crackling she’d heard earlier hadn’t been her scarecrow spell stuttering. It had been her soundproofing spell breaking.
And standing above them on the battlements, hardly recognizable even to Clementine, was her father.
“WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?” Lord Elithor screamed, his voice high and rasping. Even the effort of standing seemed to be difficult for him, and it was easy to see why. He was little more than a walking wooden skeleton. Normally over six feet tall, he was now hardly taller than Clementine—everything about him had shrunk to doll-sized proportions. He could barely take a step without tripping on the oversized black robes that were nearly falling off his tiny, pointed shoulders. His hair was gone, replaced by patchy dark paint. His eyes were filmy and huge in the emaciated triangle that was his face.
A chorus of gasps arose from the children as they registered Lord Elithor’s arrival.
“Did we miss one?” Little Ian whispered, pointing to the discarded dummies strewn about the courtyard.
Roderick shushed him with a hand over his mouth and pulled him close.
Her father had heard everything. How could Clementine have been so stupid? How could she have lost focus like that? She’d been caught up in the moment, caught up with her silly friends—her knights—and now . . .
“WHO ARE THESE INTRUDERS WHO DARE TO DISTURB MY PEACE?” roared Lord Elithor, waving his spindly arm in a slicing motion. Lightning bolts zigzagged down from the sky, along with more thunder—real thunder, this time—and landed within feet of the terrified knights. Some of the boys screamed, dropping their weapons. The black sheep scampered into the shadows of the gate.
Clementine ran forward. “Father, stop!”
Lord Elithor’s eyes focused slowly on Clementine.
“Clementine!” he said. “What . . . what is the meaning of this?” He swayed on his feet.
“Father, these are . . .” Clementine looked around at the white-faced village boys, half of whom had dropped their weapons in fear. “These young men are your knights.”
“MY WHAT.”
“Your new Brack Knights,” explained Clementine, taking slow steps forward. “I thought that the Castle could use some . . . ex-extra protection, given . . . your current condition, and—”
“You told these . . . commoners of my affliction?” Lord Elithor’s eyes blazed white, and more lightning crashed to the earth, accompanied now by a light rain.
The knights fell, crying, to their knees.
“No, Father,” shouted Clementine over the thunder and Little Ian’s wailing. “I’d never—”
“GET OUT OF MY SIGHT,” roared Lord Elithor at the knights. Dark clouds swirled overhead, blocking out the afternoon sun. “AND IF YOU DARE TO ENTER THIS CASTLE AGAIN . . . IF YOU DARE TO . . . IF YOU . . .” The Dark Lord Elithor stuttered, stumbled, and fell flat on his face.
“Father!” Clementine exclaimed, rushing into the castle and up the steps. It was lucky he hadn’t fallen right off the edge.
Behind her, the boys were staggering to their feet—to seize their chance to run as far away from Castle Brack as they could get.
“Come on,” Roderick urged, hauling Little Ian up. “Let’s scram!”
“Before that monster roasts us like marshmallows!” Gregor agreed, eyeing the scorch marks on the ground left by the lightning.
Weapons abandoned, the boys scrambled through the gate and down the steep mountain stairs as fast as they could, sparing a glance backward only to be sure that the monster that had appeared on the balcony wasn’t following them.
The monster in question was lying facedown in a rain puddle of his own making. Clementine skidded to his side and turned him over, choking down her revulsion at how shockingly easy it was to lift him. She hoped the rest of his face—or Seven Sisters, his neck—had survived the fall better than when he’d banged his arm on the table.
Fortunately, other than a few dents and smears of mud, he seemed to be all right—or at least as intact as he had been before. But his eyes were wild, darting this way and that, and he hardly seemed to see Clementine.
“Father, please say something,” she said, holding his head in her lap.
She looked up to see Darka Wesk-Starzec on the battlement with her, inching along the wall like a cat, her expression as wary as Clementine had ever seen it. Behind Darka was Sebastien—Sebastien, who was the only knight to stay behind when real trouble arose, but whose disgusted expression she could see even through the falling rain.
He was still holding his sword.
“Don’t come any closer!” she snapped.
Sebastien flinched. Darka held up her open hands higher.
“Clementine,” rasped Lord Elithor, finally seeming to notice her. He held up a shaky, skeletal hand in front of his face.
“Father, we need to get you inside,” said Clementine. “You should not have exerted yourself so . . .”
But how would she get him inside? As light as he was, Clementine still wasn’t strong enough to carry him back to the tower by herself.
Darka squatted down, her hands still up in surrender, to bring herself to Clementine’s level.
There was no getting around it. Slowly, Clementine nodded, and Darka helped her get the Dark Lord Elithor to his feet. If Darka thought anything of being so close to a Dark Lord, she did not show it, and if that Dark Lord thought anything of being half carried by a strange peasant woman, well . . . he did not seem alert enough to be thinking much about anything.
The three of them faced Sebastien, who still stood there trembling, his sword raised. But he did not attack them, or scream, or even run away—any of the things that Clementine might have expected. He wasn’t even staring at Lord Elithor anymore. Instead, he raised his chin, his lip quivering, and looked right at Clementine.
“You could have told me, you know,” he said, finally lowering the sword to his side. “I thought we were friends.”
“Please,” Clementine whispered through her the tightness in her throat. “Just leave.”
Sebastien ran after the other knights, his shape disappearing down the mountain and into the mist. And just like that, Castle Brack was almost as empty and silent as it had been for Clementine’s entire life.
Chapter 18
The Darkest Heart in the Forest
or Reevaluating One’s Options upon the Appearance of Wooden Stick People
It was funny, Darka reflected, how the weather in this land so conveniently changed according to the emotional state of its inhabitants. She wished, for the first time, that she, too, could have the power to make the world storm-cloud gray when she felt it should be. It was a convenient and effective mood setter.
Sunlight had been streaming from the sky the day that Alaric and Darka finally cornered the unicorn. After nearly a year of searching—of sleeping rough and following rumors to dead ends and hunting down other, smaller catches and artifacts just to keep themselves from starving—they had finally found it. And there, in the sun-dappled woods, Alaric had tried to kill it.
But the unicorn had killed him first.
It had been resting peacefully, its head in Darka’s lap, when Alaric’s arrow came whipping through the trees. By this point, they had both figured out that Darka was a better shot, but like it or not, she was the bait.
She had always been the bait.
Alaric missed.
The unicorn reared up in alarm, its great white head flailing. Darka tried to duck away, but she wasn’t fast enough. The edge of the beast’s horn caught her on the right side of her face, barely missing her eye. It was a glancing blow—if the point had gone through her cheek, she would have never made it out alive—but the edges of the horn’s spiral cut deep and jagged.
There was so much blood she could hardly see through it. Or perhaps it was just that her hands were clutched so tightly to her face as she writhed on the ground. All she knew was that the world existed only in flashes of white and green, and hot, pulsing red. She could not remember all of it.
But she saw enough. She saw Alaric rush into the clearing, heard him screaming her name. She saw the unicorn charge. She tried to shout, to warn him or to scare off the creature—it didn’t matter—but all that came out was a strangled cry.
She saw the unicorn impale the love of her life right through the chest.
If Darka Wesk-Starzec could have, she’d have made the sky itself split apart, too.
***
It was nearly sunset when the gatehouse door creaked open. Clementine looked surprised to see Darka still there at all. She hovered in the doorway.
“Come on in, then,” said Darka. “It’s your house, after all.”
Clementine shook her head. “My father’s house,” she said, but she closed the door behind her. She leaned against it with a soft thud.
“Aye,” was all Darka said. She was still trying to reconcile her mental image of a Dark Lord with the ranting, sickly stick man she’d just tucked into bed like a babe.
“I . . . I’m sorry I lied to you,” said Clementine, suddenly quite fascinated by the floor.
Darka sighed. “I would’ve lied to me, too.”
Clementine looked up at her in surprise. Darka shrugged. Little had the girl known of Darka’s own plans. She almost laughed. And what plans had those even been? Her grand strategy of gaining the Dark Lord’s support had amounted to exactly zip. That man looked more ready to break in two than to go out hunting unicorns.
If Darka was being honest with herself, she knew she’d been letting her plan gather dust for weeks now. She’d had her suspicions about the Dark Lord’s whereabouts from the start, and she’d done nothing. She’d played house with a lonely girl and a ragtag bunch of country boys no more fit to hold swords than the black sheep was. Sure, she’d explored the surrounding mountainside, learning the lay of the land and, she told herself, diligently looking for signs of the unicorn. But it had been just as easy—easier, even—to spend her days mending fences and milking demonic cows and teaching those boys to shoot. It had been easy to spend quiet evenings in the gatehouse with a cup of tea and Clementine’s blood-curdling stories about her ancestors, and the black sheep sitting at the foot of the bed, keeping their feet warm.
It had been easy to forget she had come here with the sole purpose of taking a life. And now, for the first time since Alaric had died, Darka wasn’t so sure she wanted to remember.
“You should leave this place,” Clementine said tightly. She rushed to the wardrobe, flung it open, and began folding up the few shirts that Darka had claimed as her own during her short stay at the castle. “I absolve you of any obligation to House Morcerous. The villagers will be back soon—I’m sure of it. They know about Father now. They know he’s not fit to defend the castle . . .” Her hands shook as she scrambled for more of Darka’s meager possessions to pack. Darka could practically see the image of the crowd with raised pitchforks reflected in Clementine’s eyes.
Neither of them could forget where they came from, she realized. Clementine would always be the daughter of a Dark Lord, and Darka would always be the outcast—always the disfigured witch woman, to be shunned or reviled or hunted—unless they became the hunters.
And Darka wouldn’t—couldn’t—give up so easily, could she? Could she dishonor Alaric’s memory, and let a single unicorn roam free, a danger to anyone who crossed its path?
No, she couldn’t leave. And not just because of Clementine.
There was a very sick Dark Lord who could use her protection in his hour of need. She could hold off more than a few country bumpkins with torches in a fortress like Castle Brack. And once she’d firmly secured Lord Elithor’s favor, she could be even surer of securing his permission to hunt on his lands. The man was clearly desperate, and whatever disease or curse was taking over him did not look likely to run its course anytime soon. He needed a miracle cure.
He needed the horn of a unicorn.
“Nonsense,” said Darka, putting a hand over the shirt Clementine was folding on the bed. “What did I teach you to defend this castle for, if we were just going to abandon it?”
“You’ll . . . You mean you’ll stay?” Clementine asked, sitting on the bed with a thump.
“I didn’t take care of all those giant pumpkins just to watch someone stomp all over them,” said Darka.
“We have giant pumpkins?” Clementine cocked her head.
“Ah, that might’ve been a different kingdom,” said Darka. “But you get the idea.”
Clementine smiled, but her eyes darted to the window with a fearful glance. Darka reached out and tugged one of her braids.
“Hey,” said Darka, thinking that they might not have any real Brack Knights to protect them anymore, but the townspeople had no reason to know that. “Any chance you can cast one of those fancy spells of yours on those suits of armor in the hall?”
***
They prepared for a siege. Clementine conducted drills with the suits of armor until she had them marching up and down the battlements like real knights on patrol. She whipped up an epic batch of a watery butter-yellow paste called “bee stings in a bottle,” from one of her father’s books, to pour through the murder holes; it kept well at room temperature, so she could have it at hand at a moment’s notice. Darka spent hours making arrows, until Clementine was sure she must have enough for a whole army, never mind one woman. The black sheep surveyed all of the farm buildings and helped Darka and Clementine herd the animals into the closest and most secure. They harvested what they could from the kitchen garden and brought Darka’s few possessions to the castle proper. Darka and Clementine made a bed for Lord Elithor in his laboratory—it was at the top of the tallest tower, which would be hardest to take—but Darka hardly saw him after that. Clementine insisted on taking care of her father alone.
It wasn’t until late the next afternoon that the cry Darka had been expecting came.
“Someone’s coming!” called Clementine, and Darka rushed to her side at the window. But there was only one lonely figure trudging up the mountain path—a hooded man with cloven-hoofed feet pulling a wooden cart laden with goods.
“Oh, it’s just Stan,” said Clementine with a sigh of relief. “He trades with father sometimes. I’d better see what he wants.”
There was something about the man—and the name—that seemed vaguely familiar to Darka, but without seeing his face, she couldn’t put her finger on it. “Clementine,” she said, “we shouldn’t let anyone in without—”
But the girl had already run for the door. Darka sighed and followed.
“Halloo, my lady!” called Stan as he huffed and puffed his way up the mountain. He stopped to rest outside the gate as Clementine bounded up to him.
Darka hung back in the courtyard, surreptitiously shaking her bangs in front of her face. It had been a while since she’d tried to hide her scar, but if the satyr seemed familiar to her, there was every chance she’d be familiar to him.
“Hello, Stan,” said Clementine, helping him heave the back wheel of his cart over a loose stone in the steps. “We weren’t expecting you.”
“Well, I wasn’t expecting me, either,” said Stan with a wink. “But I picked up a few things in the Ensorcelled Sandbanks that I thought would just tickle your father, and since he
and I haven’t had a good sit-and-chat—or sit-and-scowl, since this is Elithor we’re talking about—in a while, I figured I’d pop on by!” Stan wiped his brow, lowered his hood, and peered around the open gate, as if hoping to catch Lord Elithor right there in the courtyard.
What he caught instead, unfortunately, was the sight of Darka. “Ah, but I see you’ve already got company!”
“Oh, yes!” said Clementine. “But, no, not company, just . . . Darka, why don’t you come and say hello to Stan?”
There was no way to avoid it now. Darka cursed herself for not staying behind, in the castle—and yet she’d had to make sure Clementine was all right.
“Hello,” said Darka with a curt nod. She took just a few steps forward.
If this man was a trader . . . if he and Alaric had known each other from the magical artifacts circuit . . .
Darka didn’t have to play the what-if game for long. Stan’s eyes widened as he took in Darka’s face.
“And such interesting company, too!” said Stan, slapping his knee. “I’m surprised the Dark Lord would deal with an . . . expert such as yourself.” He nodded at Darka.
“You two know each other?” asked Clementine.
“We’ve passed in the same circles,” Stan said with a shrug. He wouldn’t stop staring at Darka with that shrewd look of his. She wished she could ram one of his packages down his throat before he opened his mouth to blab any more. “But I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure. Not that’s it’s strictly a pleasure, mind. Folks do get a bit squeamish about your kind—”
“Your kind?” said Clementine.
“But it’s not every day one meets the fiercest unicorn huntress in the known lands!”
Clementine froze, as utterly still as an animal in the path of a raised arrow. The color drained first from her face. Then her hair turned so black it seemed to suck the light from the air around them.
“Ah,” said Stan, scratching his beard. He looked from Clementine to Darka and back again. “It seems I’ve gone and put my hoof in my mouth again, haven’t I?”
The Dark Lord Clementine Page 16