An image flashed through Nicci’s mind of Jagang sitting outside his tent to listen to the prolonged agony of the test subjects after they consumed the poison. Some took hours to die, some took days. Even the mildest dose caused eyes to hemorrhage and made blood ooze from ears and nostrils. Some victims writhed so wildly that their convulsions cracked their spines. They screamed until they coughed up their vocal cords in bloody strands. Their skin would swell, their joints burst. Some clawed off their own faces trying to escape the pain.
The orphan girl shuddered in Nicci’s arms, and she began to cough. Her skin was already chalky, her lips bloodless. Her mournful honey-brown eyes were bloodshot.
Nicci knew what was going to happen to the poor girl. “There is no cure, child. Why would you do this to yourself?”
“For you,” Thistle choked out. “To give you what you need. To make the choice for you.” She squirmed and thrashed, and Nicci tried to hold her tight to keep her still. “What you can do—is give me a quick and painless death. End that for me.” She looked up. “Take one of the arrows, pierce me through the heart, quick and clean. Before it’s too late.”
“No!” Nicci called up her magic, tried to find healing spells. She sent power into the girl to keep her strong, but the deathrise poison raged like a wildfire through her body. “I can’t!”
“Take my heart’s blood. You need it against Victoria.”
Nicci glanced over at the razor-sharp, iron-tipped arrows she had left on the writing desk.
“If you love me, you’ll save me from what you know is coming,” Thistle said. “Kill me. Use the arrow to stab me through the heart.”
“No!”
The girl continued in a hoarse voice. “You’ll have the blood you need. The necessary poison.” As she began convulsing, her small hands clutched Nicci’s black dress. “Stop Victoria and save my land.”
Nicci was torn, her heart broken. She held the orphan girl, felt her spasms grow worse. She knew the pain was only the start of what would be long hours, possibly even days as Thistle slowly tore herself apart, screaming the whole time.
“I know you love me,” Thistle murmured, lifting a trembling hand to touch Nicci’s cheek just for a moment.
“No…” Nicci whispered, and she wasn’t sure the girl even heard her.
Thistle coughed and shuddered, pressing her face against Nicci.
Not wanting to release her hold on the dying girl, Nicci extended her other hand and reached out with magic to pull one of the arrows from its resting place. It slid through the air, across the room, and landed in Nicci’s palm. She wrapped her fingers around the shaft, saw the silver sheen of the sharpened edge, the pointed tip.
Thistle could no longer hold back her pain. She convulsed and cried out.
Nicci squeezed her tight, knowing the agony would only grow worse. She held the arrow in her right hand, turning Thistle just slightly with her left arm, finding a vulnerable place in the girl’s chest. As tears came to Nicci’s deep blue eyes, she drove the arrow forward, taking away the pain as gently as she could.
And when she pulled the arrow out, its tip and the end of its shaft were red with a thick layer of blood from Thistle’s heart. The necessary poison.
Nicci bowed her head and unwittingly added even more poison to the bloody arrow—a single tear. The first tear that Nicci had shed in a long time.
CHAPTER 74
As she stalked through Cliffwall preparing to kill Life’s Mistress, Nicci felt like a black shadow filled with razors. Hollow inside, her heart a bottomless pit like what she had seen at the center of the Scar, she clutched the bloody arrow, its sharp tip not at all blunted by the sticky coating. The necessary poison was based on dangerous love, a love that Nicci had never admitted existed.
Now her heart was just a hot wound.
The spunky orphan girl had surrendered her very life, had forced Nicci to do such a terrible thing in order to achieve the victory they all needed. Thistle had seen something in Nicci’s heart that the sorceress did not even know she had. She squeezed the arrow tighter, but she forced her muscles to relax, so that her anger would not snap the shaft. She dared not waste this weapon she had acquired at a great, impossible price.
Thistle’s blood.
Her normal reaction would have been to deny such feelings, to burn them away or wall them off, but she needed that emotion now because love was the vital component. Love was the poison. In this case, as Victoria would soon discover, love was deadly.
As she prepared to make her way out into the primeval jungle, Nicci saw that she had stained her black dress with the innocent girl’s blood. More poison.
She paid no attention to other tense, frightened scholars who huddled in Cliffwall, looking at her as a savior to stop Life’s Mistress. Poor Thistle had already paid the price.
Victoria would pay a higher one.
Future and Fate depend on both the journey and the destination.
Bannon met her in the wide hallway, dressed in fresh traveling clothes and carrying his unimpressive sword. His face looked drawn and pale. “I am ready to go with you, Sorceress.”
Nathan stood beside him, haggard and distraught, but he had a fire in his azure eyes. “Even if I can’t use my magic, Bannon and I are deadly fighters. You know it. We’re going with you.”
The young man swallowed hard. “Thistle made it possible. We should all do it together.”
She looked at them for a long, silent moment, then shook her head. “No, I go alone. This is my battle. Thistle did her part. Now I will do mine.” Nicci didn’t dare need them. She slung the dragon-bone bow over her shoulder, and carried her one blood-tipped arrow. She did not bring spares. This one would be deadly enough. It had to be. “I have everything I need.”
After a long, solemn moment, Nathan seemed to understand. He reached out to clasp Bannon’s shoulder before the young man could say anything else. “It’s not about us, my boy. You’ve proved yourself over and over. The sorceress needs to do this alone.”
Bannon looked helplessly at his sword, as if it had become useless in his hands. When he glanced up and met her eyes, his expression froze at what he saw on her face. He stepped back, swallowing hard. “Our hearts go with you, Sorceress. I know you will succeed.”
Nathan drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Nicci herself is the deadliest of weapons.”
Traveling through the tunnels, she reached the wall on the far side of the plateau. She had remolded the rock to seal Cliffwall’s defenses against the intrusion of the madly growing jungle, but even stone walls could not stop her. Releasing her magic, she shifted the slickrock and shoved it out of her way like soft clay, opening the wall to the outside.
She looked out upon a primeval disaster, an encroaching wall of twisted, thrashing greenery, tangled vines, fungi that grew as tall as houses before exploding into a blizzard of spores. Thunderheads of gnats and flies buzzed around the fetid forest. In order to solve an extreme problem, Victoria had unleashed an even more extreme solution.
Branches stretched out, vines writhed, ferns uncoiled. A haze of pollen and spores thickened the air into a choking miasma. The rustle, crackle, and hiss of all that growth battering against the mesa cliff sounded like an unstoppable army of life. Too much life.
But Nicci was Death’s Mistress.
“Make way,” she said. She held out both hands and released her magic in a thunderclap of devastation, clearing the path. Wizard’s fire rolled out, unquenchable, unstoppable, and the flames charred the grasping branches and thorny vines into ash. Under the onslaught of heat, massive tree trunks exploded and the storm of splinters shredded adjacent monstrous plants.
Once she had blasted a path, Nicci stepped out into the wreckage and made her way across blackened ground, descending the steep slope. In only moments, the scorched earth already stirred and simmered with new shoots bursting forth. Grass blades and vine tendrils whipped up to grasp at Nicci’s feet, trying to hold her back or take her prisoner. She s
ent a thought toward them, the merest taste of vengeful anger, and the new growth shriveled and died.
Then she went hunting.
Victoria would not hide from her. The memmer sorceress, swollen with lush fertility, wanted to kill Nicci. She had already sent the shaksis to attack them, and now Nicci would go to the heart of this primeval jungle. She knew what lurked there.
She adjusted the dragon-bone bow on her shoulders and walked forward, her blue eyes focused ahead. Dead things crunched under her boots. The writhing jungle reached out to seize her with clawlike branches and lashing fronds. Nicci summoned the winds, bringing great raging storms of air that blasted the vegetation, snapped trees, stripped leaves off of branches, exploded mushrooms, uprooted ferns. She tore open a path to insure that her progress would be unhindered. Nicci was the eye of a walking storm.
The distance did not matter. She knew her destination, her target.
Expending so much magic should have weakened Nicci, but the anger and hurt inside her were a rejuvenating force. When she had cleared the way far ahead, she stopped the winds and continued deeper into the mad infestation of life. The plants themselves seemed cowed after what she had inflicted upon them.
In that momentary respite, the insects came, a cloud of black, biting gnats, a swarm of stinging wasps, and a thundercloud of dark beetles, tens of thousands of them.
Nicci spared them barely a glance. As the swarms descended upon her, swirling in the air, she released a thought. She did not even need to gesture with her hands as she stopped tens of thousands of minuscule insect hearts. Gnats, wasps, and beetles fell to the ground like a pattering black rain.
Nicci stepped forward, and the jungle fell into a hush. But she knew she wasn’t finished. She had not yet won.
Ahead of her, branches and leaves stirred, and three figures emerged, figures that had once been lovely young women. Audrey, Laurel, and Sage. Now they had been possessed and transformed by the forest. Their skin was the mottled green of mixed leaves, their eyes fractured and glinting with many shades of emerald, their mouths filled with sharp white fangs. Their hair was a stir of moss about their heads.
The women closed in to stand in front of Nicci and block her way. She regarded them with a withering stare. “Victoria sent you to stop me? She fears to face me herself?”
The thing that had been Laurel chuckled. “It is not because she fears you. It’s because she rewards us.”
When the forest women spread their arms, long thorns sprouted from their skin. Glistening sap oozed from the thorn tips as if they had become scorpion tails.
“This is a chance for us to test our powers,” said Sage.
“And we’ll have fun,” Audrey said.
Nicci did not touch her dragon-bone bow, leaving her single poisoned arrow in its quiver as the deadly forest women approached. “I don’t have time to play,” she said.
She unleashed the still-seething magic inside her, manifesting three writhing spheres of wizard’s fire. They rolled forward like miniature suns. Audrey, Laurel, and Sage had time only to reel backward and throw out their hands in desperate defensive spasms before the trio of suns exploded, one for each of them. Unstoppable flames engulfed their green-infested bodies, closing tight, crushing the inhuman women with incinerating fire. The female figures crumbled to ash that smelled more like burning wood than burning flesh.
“Death is stronger than life,” Nicci said.
She stepped over the ashes of their bones and made her way to the heart of the forest.
CHAPTER 75
The jungle stopped fighting back, as if it had accepted its own doom, and instead the writhing, simmering forest welcomed her, lured her ahead. Trees bent out of the way, and vines curled aside to clear a path for her. Weeds and spiky shrubs bowed down before Nicci. She walked forward, dressed in black, her blond hair flowing behind her.
She knew Victoria had not surrendered. The open way before her was a green tunnel surrounded by drooping ferns and low, twitching willows. It reminded her of a spiderweb … a trap. Nicci’s lips curved in a thin smile. Yes, it was a trap—but it was her trap, and Victoria would learn the truth soon enough.
The terrain that had been the Scar was unrecognizable, but after a long journey she realized she had reached the center. Twisted obsidian pillars and broken black rock had once risen up from the Lifedrinker’s lair here, but now Nicci saw a glade of lush, suffocating green. Trees stretched high overhead, their boughs arching inward like hands clasped in prayer—a prayer directed toward the vicious green thing that grew at the center of the glade.
Victoria was no longer the matronly woman who had instructed the memmers, a mentor who took young acolytes under her wing and taught them everything she knew. Victoria was no longer human. She still possessed the knowledge, the tangled spells, the lore that filled all the magic preserved by generations of memory-enhanced people, but she had become something so much more.
The skin of Victoria’s naked body was encrusted with a lumpy excrescence of bark. Her legs had planted into the ground, taking root as twin trunks, twisting and coiling with bright green vines gathered into a burgeoning nest of growth where the two legs fused into a single torso-trunk with rounded wooden breasts. Victoria’s arms stretched out as thick curved boughs, her fingers a myriad of branches. Her hair spread outward in a panoply of twigs, a thicket of tangled brush. But Victoria’s face was still recognizable, if awful, her skin not just wood but suffused with green. Pulsing lines of dark sap ran up her cheeks and along her ears.
Seeing Nicci, Life’s Mistress preened like a bird displaying its feathers. Victoria drew strength, pulling energy from the ground where her roots had spread throughout the primeval jungle, where the growth had built up enormous spell-forms to enhance and reinforce the magic. Her mouth opened in a loud, sharp-edged laugh.
Neither showing nor feeling fear, Nicci stepped into the glade, paying no heed to the rustle and whisper of angry branches, of slithering undergrowth. Her enemy was here. Victoria had sent the three forest women to block her, but now she would face Nicci herself.
Nicci stopped in front of Life’s Mistress and planted her boots in the soft forest loam. Her black dress clung to her with perspiration, and Nicci touched the drying bloodstain on the fabric. Thistle’s blood. A reminder.
She spoke in a haughty challenge. “For a woman who wanted to restore life and make the land thrive, you have caused far too much pain and destruction, Victoria.”
As her huge trunk body writhed, the layers of thick bark cracked. A bellow came out of the forest woman’s mouth. “I am Life’s Mistress!”
Nicci was unimpressed. “And I cannot let you live.”
She unslung the ivory bow from her shoulder and calmly, without taking her eyes from Victoria’s monstrous face, bent the curved rib of Grimney, the blue dragon. The bone thrummed with energy, the magic of the earth, the source of creation. The string itself came from the people of Cliffwall, and although it had no magic, it did have the power of human creation, stretched taut, ready for what the weapon had to do. Ready to use life to destroy life.
Victoria’s laughter stirred the crouching trees and angry underbrush. “One insignificant sorceress? One bow? One arrow?”
“It will be sufficient,” Nicci said. “We found the spell, a magic that draws upon the very power of life. A bone of creation … the bone of a dragon.” She held the bow, grasped the tense string, and felt Grimney’s rib vibrate.
“The bones of the earth,” Victoria said, her boughs creaking, her body bending. “The magic inside a dragon’s rib?” Her face folded and shifted, as if her mind sorted through all the ancient knowledge of thousands upon thousands of arcane tomes that she and many generations before her had memorized.
Nicci pulled out the arrow, looked at its sharp end and the thick red coating, still sticky. Her throat had gone dry. “And I have an arrow tipped with the necessary poison. The heart’s blood of one that I loved, one that I killed.” She knocked it on the string. ??
?Thistle’s blood.”
Victoria suddenly jerked back as Nicci provided the last clue. In her vast mental library of ancient lore, the other woman recalled the spell. One of her trunklike legs ripped itself out of the ground. The boughs whipped, branches cracked.
Nicci did not flinch. “You remember. I wanted you to remember. Thistle deserves that.”
A desperate Victoria rallied the primeval jungle to attack. The forest closed in, the ferns, vines, and wildly growing trees lunging toward Nicci. Thorns, branches, stinging insects swept to the attack, rushing in a desperate last attempt to stop her.
But Nicci had only one thing left to do. She drew back the string of the dragon-bone bow and aligned the arrow. She aimed its blood-dipped point directly between the large rounded growths of Victoria’s breasts.
As branches, vines, and thorns thundered down upon her, Nicci loosed the arrow.
She didn’t need to use magic to guide the shaft as it flew. The air whistled and sang like a last keening cry, and the razor-sharp point struck home with a loud thump. Poisoned with an innocent girl’s blood, the arrow sank into the flesh of the transformed woman.
In Nicci’s hands, unable to bear the tension of the bowstring, the dragon’s rib snapped in half. It had released its magic, the last energy, the final gift of the blue dragon who had sought adventure in his life long ago. As the attacking jungle froze and quivered, Nicci dropped the now-useless weapon to the ground. It had served its purpose.
The Victoria thing howled with screams so loud that her mouth cracked open. Her head splintered; her branch-limbs writhed in pain, broke, and fell like dead wood to the floor of the glade.
Death spread outward from the center of the arrowhead like a blight of revenge, reclaiming the life that Victoria had stolen. The necessary poison had swiftly penetrated her heart, and the green sorceress crumbled. The bark cracked and festered. Smoking sap-blood oozed out of the wound, spilling in thick, stinking gouts down her rough body.