The Dark Lord Clementine

by Sarah Jean Horwitz

  “N-no,” Clementine said, her throat tightening as she thought of Sebastien and the rest of the knights. How could she not think of them? How could she have gone all of these years thinking her life—and her father’s life—was just part of how the world worked? That it was occasionally regrettable, but definitely unchangeable: Dark Lords wrought evil. In the absence of a Good Witch or a hero—and every effort was made to stamp out those—the people had evil wrought upon them. And it wasn’t so very bad for Lord Elithor’s subjects, after all. There were Dark Lords much more irritable and given to gore. The villagers in the Seven Sisters Valley were lucky to live under her father’s light touch.

  This was what Clementine had told herself ever since she was young enough to understand what being a Dark Lord meant. But now, she knew that she had never understood it. Not really. Because now, as she watched the unicorn bleed, and thought of Sebastien and the knights, and their fathers and mothers, as well as her own—and even of Darka, and the brief moments they’d shared—she couldn’t pretend this was how things should be. She couldn’t pretend any longer.

  The unicorn’s front legs buckled. Clementine rushed toward it, but Darka turned, sweeping her bow to point at Clementine.

  “Not a step closer,” said Darka, her voice uneven. Her hands shook so much she had to keep letting go of the bowstring. “Isn’t it your job to destroy everything and everyone, especially the innocent?” She tossed her head, shaking sweaty strands of hair from her eyes. “What kind of Dark Lord are you?”

  Clementine’s heart shuddered against her ribs. “That’s just it,” she said. “I . . . I’m not. I don’t think the villagers deserve to be hurt. I don’t think anyone does. I don’t want to terrorize people, or kill them—or kill anything at all. Especially not the unicorn.” Clementine hiccupped through her tears. She hadn’t even realized she’d started crying. “Just like you said before, at the gatehouse. I’m not a true Dark Lord at all. ” Clementine took a step closer to the unicorn. “And I don’t ever want to be.”

  There was little time for Clementine’s declaration to register. A voice suddenly echoed across the mountains—impossibly loud and soft, low and high, all at once—making everyone in the clearing jump.

  “Castle Brack is mine,” said the voice, sending chills down Clementine’s spine.

  The Whittle Witch had taken the Fourth Sister. She had taken Clementine’s home.

  “I would say I expected more from the Dark Lord Elithor Morcerous,” said the Whittle Witch. “But I’d be lying.”

  Clementine clapped her hands over her ears, trying to keep out the magically enhanced sound. Darka pointed her bow this way and that, searching for the source of the voice.

  “Now, Clementine Morcerous,” the Witch mused. “From what I’ve heard, you sound much more promising. Why don’t you come out and play?” The Whittle Witch cackled, her laugh echoing like crackling sparklers in the air. A remote part of Clementine acknowledged that it was a very decent cackle.

  But Clementine barely heard the Whittle Witch’s taunts, because at that precise moment, Clementine looked into the eyes of the unicorn—the wounded, sweating, panicked unicorn, who had evidently used Clementine’s impassioned speech as an opportunity to remember that it was, in fact, the most dangerous thing on the mountain.

  The unicorn pawed the ground, its eyes afire. It bent its magnificent head, and before Clementine could cry out, charged straight at Darka. The huntress saw the movement just in time. She released her arrow, and Clementine watched it fly, as deadly as a diving hawk, toward the unicorn’s heart.

  Clementine did not stop to wonder exactly whom she was trying to save. She simply knew that she could not let either tragedy come to pass.

  She dove in between them.

  It was impossible to say which struck her heart first—the arrow or the horn—and in the end, it did not matter. Either way, Clementine Morcerous was dead.

  ***

  The Whittle Witch decided that she did not like Castle Brack. It was much too dark, and much too angular, and she could tell that everything in it—from the books on the library shelves that flung themselves at her face, to the chains in the dungeon that rattled threateningly when she walked by, to those black, shiny suits of armor that stood much too still with their freshly polished weapons—did not like her, either.

  It would be better to start fresh, she thought, as she circled the castle on her broomstick. Better to build her new home with a clean slate. She took a deep breath of the clear mountain air, flying higher and higher, until she reached that special place where the snow never melted, even in summer. The Lady in White, the locals called it. There would be more snow even higher, above the clouds.

  Nothing was cleaner than a fresh snow.

  Not even Elithor Morcerous’s wards, at the height of their strength, could have risen this high into the mountains. She was honestly surprised no one had thought to attack the castle from above before. But such complacency was what you got with hundreds of years of Dark Lords in power, she supposed.

  There was nothing and no one to stop her from calling the winds to her aid, finding the spots of weak snow under the glittering eggshell surface, and pushing them to their breaking point. The sound of crushing, crashing snow rumbled in the air like thunder, and the wave of white cascaded down the mountainside, smothering everything in its wake. It was headed straight for Castle Brack and, if she was lucky, the village beyond.

  The Lady in White crumbled under the weight of the avalanche. The Whittle Witch watched her disintegrate, from the top of her puffy head to her placid, stupid face, all the way down to her shining white petticoats. She was now a tool of destruction against the very land she was supposed to protect.

  The Witch flew as close to the fracturing snow as she dared, skimming the frothing waves with her toes and laughing into its roar. She would need the unicorn, and soon. She could feel its power strongly here, and hoped the snow would be enough to flush it out. But for the moment, though she had lived for hundreds of years, she had never felt so alive.

  Chapter 22

  The Lady in White

  or, As She Would Prefer to Be Called, the Unicorn

  Clementine awoke in her garden. It was bathed in moonlight, every flower in full bloom. Even the ivy shone under the moon’s impossibly bright caress.

  But the moonlight was not the only impossibly bright thing in the garden. The Lady in White stood across from Clementine, so tall she took up most of the far wall. It was almost frightening, seeing her this close. She was not as snowy white as she looked from down in the valley. Her skirts and her skin were streaked with gray and brown, speckled with bits of dirt and rocks and a few twigs. Clementine loved her even more this way. Though her eyes were made of ice, they looked warmly upon Clementine.

  “Hello, Clementine,” said the Lady in White. Her frosty lips never moved. It was as if her melodic voice simply appeared in Clementine’s mind. And Clementine knew, though she could not have said how, that it was not exactly the Lady in White speaking to her. The voice she heard in her head belonged to the unicorn.

  “Have I . . . died?” asked Clementine. She did not feel particularly sad about it—it was hard to feel sad about anything, standing next to the Lady in White in her favorite place in the world—but she did feel a little scared. She had spent so much time thinking—or not thinking—about her father dying that she had not given much thought to it happening to anyone else, least of all herself.

  “Mostly,” said the unicorn serenely.

  “Oh,” said Clementine. She supposed getting rammed through the heart with a spiral horn would not do much for one’s health, but she gasped as she remembered Darka’s arrow. “Have you died?” Clementine rushed to the Lady in White’s feet, but stopped just short of her frothy, snowy skirts.

  The unicorn chuckled. “Far from it, my dear.” The Lady cupped Clementine’s cheek. Her hand w
as pleasantly cool, and smelled like fresh snow and pine, with a hint of animal musk. “Thanks to you.”

  Clementine blushed, and even though she knew she was probably dreaming, her hair blushed red to match.

  “Do you realize what your sacrifice has done, Clementine?”

  Clementine shook her head. The Lady took Clementine’s small hand in her giant one, and together, they strolled through the garden.

  “Many, many years ago, when the first Dark Lord Morcerous came to the Seven Sisters,” said the unicorn, “the Dark Lord coveted my power . . . Coveted it, and feared it. And so he devised a clever way—cleverer than any wizard before or since—to trap that power and to tie me to these mountains. With an evil spell, he separated the true source of my power—of most creatures’ power, really—from my body.”

  “But . . .” Clementine thought of everything she knew about unicorns. “Your horn . . . ?”

  The Lady shook her head. “Not my horn, dear.” She placed an icy palm to her chest. “My heart.”

  Clementine gasped.

  “He locked my heart away, high up in a frozen prison, where no one could ever find it,” said the Lady, her voice turning harder than Clementine had yet heard it.

  “The Lady in White,” Clementine breathed.

  The unicorn nodded. “And even if they did find it, no one but a Morcerous could ever break the curse,” the unicorn continued. “And only then, by doing something no Dark Lord Morcerous would ever, ever do.”

  Clementine stopped in her tracks. “What’s that?” she asked softly, though she thought she already knew the answer.

  “Give up their own heart,” said the unicorn, “in exchange for mine.”

  Clementine brought her hand to her chest, and the Lady placed her cool fingers on top of Clementine’s. Clementine felt the Lady’s icy touch, saw her breath steam in the air around them, heard the crunch of the Lady’s snowy skirts against the ground. It was hard to believe that her life was over, when she could still sense all of these things. They walked on.

  “Not many would sacrifice themselves for a creature they barely know,” said the unicorn after a long pause, “or a friend who had betrayed them.”

  Clementine looked down, her eyes suddenly smarting. She hoped Darka and the black sheep, and her Brack Knights, were all right. She supposed they’d have to get on without her now.

  “In exchange for your selflessness,” continued the unicorn, “I will do something I have not done in a very, very long time: I will grant you one favor. I will grant anything you wish, as long as it is within my power.” The Lady let go of Clementine’s hand and peered over her perfect nose, right into Clementine’s eyes. “Choose it well.”

  “Anything?” asked Clementine softly. The Lady nodded.

  Clementine wished she knew how many times she would be forced to choose between the life she was supposed to want and the life she knew was right—or at least right for her. How many times she would have to shut the door on her heart and leave her father behind, even when she had the chance to save him, because she knew, deep down, that the world was better off without a Dark Lord ruling the Seven Sisters at all.

  It probably wasn’t even a choice. Her father would be gone by now, and she was certain even a unicorn’s magic could not bring back the dead. That was surely one of the Three Rules of Evildoing for a reason. But it still felt like a choice, and it still broke Clementine’s heart, even as she knew it was the right thing to do.

  And another choice—a real choice—did tempt her, glimmering like a dark jewel just out of reach: she could ask the unicorn to kill the Whittle Witch. Clementine could do it, and the Whittle Witch would never darken the doorstep of Castle Brack ever again.

  But Clementine remembered the words of Kat Marie Grice:

  I warned Darka not to be consumed by revenge. But it seems I should have extended that same warning to you.

  If Clementine used the power of the unicorn to avenge her father and her friends—if she used this creature that brought comfort and healing and magic wherever it roamed to take a life instead of giving it—then she would be no better than the worst of the Dark Lords.

  Clementine took a deep breath, her decision made. The people of the Seven Sisters had a long struggle ahead of them, if they wanted to defeat the Whittle Witch. Giving them a fighting chance was the least she could do.

  “Please, if you can . . . heal the villagers,” said Clementine. “It’s not too late for them. Please heal them. Heal everyone you can.”

  The Lady in White bowed her great glimmering head, and moonlight exploded through the garden, enveloping them both in its cold, bright embrace.

  ***

  The unicorn had disappeared. That much Darka Wesk-Starzec knew.

  It had simply blinked out of existence, leaving no trace of its presence behind—no trace, of course, except the tiny bleeding body it had gored straight through the heart. Darka knew she should have leapt up, grabbed a weapon—any weapon—and prepared for the worst. The beast could have been anywhere. It could have been preparing to charge again. It could have been preparing to turn the whole mountain to dust.

  But all Darka could do was clutch at the girl in her arms, desperately trying to stop Clementine’s bleeding. And even though she knew that it was useless, that Clementine was dead—had been dead, from the moment she stepped in between Darka and the unicorn—she could not let go.

  “What have I done?” Darka whispered. She stroked Clementine’s hair. It was a pale pinkish orange, which would have been as pretty as a sunset if it hadn’t been streaked with blood. “What have I done?” she asked again.

  Dimly, she was aware of a dull whump, a roaring in the distance, growing louder and louder, and the black sheep’s wet nose nudging her and bleating to Run, run now! But there was nothing in the world that could make her look away from the destruction she had wrought.

  What had she done?

  It made no difference whether it was her arrow or the unicorn’s horn that had dealt the killing bow. The fact remained that she had used Clementine—used a child—exactly as she had been used. She was able to admit it now. She knew that Alaric had wooed her, lied to her, accepted her love, and cruelly broken her heart—all to make her into the perfect trap for his unicorn.

  Some monsters just can’t resist a young maiden’s tears.

  She’d wanted to kill him, and then the unicorn did it first.

  He’d been right. And Darka had been obsessed with avenging him—obsessed with their love that had never been truly real—turning her into more of a monster than he’d ever been. She had manipulated a child, used a girl’s grief over her dying father to bait her own trap. And just as Alaric had failed, so had she—but the price of Darka’s failure was even higher.

  A child was dead. Clementine was dead. And Darka had killed her.

  “I have to congratulate you,” said a voice, finally cutting through the fog in Darka’s mind. “You’ve done my job for me.”

  A woman in worn robes and adorned with heavy wooden charms hovered over the clearing, riding on a broomstick. Her gray-streaked hair blew wildly about her face in the wind. She had a strangely ageless look to her: her skin was pulled taut across her high cheekbones, but crow’s-feet spread out from her eyes in deep furrows, and the skin around her neck hung in drooping rings, like the inside of some ancient tree. Her dark eyes were alight with amusement.

  “A surviving heir really would have made things much more difficult,” said the woman, and Darka recognized her voice as the one that had echoed over the mountains moments before. The Whittle Witch inclined her head with a smirk. “Thank you.” She touched down on the ground, gracefully dismounting her broomstick.

  “Don’t you dare touch her,” Darka growled, clutching Clementine’s body closer.

  The witch snorted. “Like I said, huntress. I don’t think there’s much I can d
o to her that hasn’t already been done.” The witch’s eyes darted above and behind Darka. “But as a thank-you, I’ll give you a word of advice—I’d get off this mountain if I were you.”

  Darka turned around and saw the reason for the witch’s warning. Through the trees, she could just glimpse the avalanche tearing down the Fourth Sister—and the disturbance seemed to have spread to this mountain, as well. Darka felt the ground tremble beneath her, and smelled snow and dirt in the air.

  Squinting up at the Fourth Sister, Darka thought she must be seeing things that weren’t there. Perhaps her guilt had consumed her mind already. But as she looked at the churning mass of snow, she couldn’t help but see the outlines of white figures leaping through the icy waves—white figures that looked suspiciously like horses.

  Like unicorns.

  The mountains, it seemed, were fighting back.

  Darka Wesk-Starzec did not have the darkest heart in the forest for nothing. She gently laid down Clementine’s body, smoothing the girl’s hair away from her face, and placed a kiss on her forehead.

  The roaring grew louder, and the ground shook so much it became hard to stand. Darka locked eyes with the black sheep, quivering just out of sight in the trees. They had both done this. They would both have to do their part in making it right.

  “Suit yourself,” said the Whittle Witch with a shrug, preparing to mount her broomstick. But the black sheep rushed out of the woods, straight into the witch’s knees, and knocked the broomstick out of her hand. Darka dove forward, grabbed the broomstick, and smashed it as hard as she could against the nearest cluster of rocks. It splintered down the middle with a great crack.

  “No one is getting off this mountain,” said Darka. She tossed the broken ends as far down the slope as she could.

  “What have you done?” shrieked the Whittle Witch. She advanced on Darka—whether to curse the huntress or defend herself from the onslaught of snow, Darka did not know. She supposed it didn’t really matter.