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.