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.
Victoria had uprooted one of her thick legs, but now the rooted leg shattered like a tree felled in a windstorm. She toppled in a long, slow collapse as her branches tangled in the encroaching trees. Vines whipped up as if to cushion her fall, but instead turned brown and withered.
Around the glade, the supercharged jungle that had swarmed across the open terrain began to shrivel. Trees collapsed, rotted, fell apart. All the extra life—the enforced growth and tortured fecundity that never should have existed—dissolved.
Nicci turned away. The corpse of Life’s Mistress had already rotted into mulch, returning to the soil. The balance of magic would be restored and the unnatural forest would die back to its former levels, its natural levels.
Nicci had accomplished what she needed to. She had completed her mission, and she had paid the price. There was no reason for her to stay any longer.
She strode back toward Cliffwall as the seething jungle collapsed around her. She didn’t give it a second thought.
CHAPTER 76
By the time Nicci returned to the steep uplift at the edge of the plateau, the unnatural jungle had already begun to retreat, a mere shadow of itself—a proper level of vegetation that did not strain the very foundations of life itself.
She felt no joy over her victory, Thistle’s victory. Nicci had done what was required. Her duty was discharged. She had paid the cost in blood and unexpected love.
She was done.
As the once-burgeoning trees sloughed into rotting vegetation, she saw a dart of movement ahead of her, a tawny shape. Mrra came to join her. Gliding out of the falling trees and collapsing ferns, the sand panther paced alongside, not close enough for Nicci to touch her fur, but she was there, and that was what mattered. Nicci drew strength from their spell bond, and the big cat seemed to need reassurance as well.
When the two reached the sheer mesa wall, Nicci saw that the steep slope had broken and eroded away. The gnarled brown strands of dead vines still clung to the rocks, but Nicci found a way up to the alcoves and the tunnels high above. At the base of the cliff, Mrra let out a low growl, a temporary farewell, and loped off into the foothills. She would be back.
Nicci climbed back up the steep wall, using magic when necessary to move aside crumbling blocks that the aggressive vegetation had broken away from the cliff.
Nathan and Bannon met her as soon as she reentered the tunnels. Crowds from inside Cliffwall also came, excited and amazed. While watching from the alcove windows, they had seen the festering jungle die away.
“We must have a celebration!” someone called.
Nicci didn’t see who spoke, didn’t even bother to turn in the direction of the voice. “Celebrate among yourselves,” she said gruffly. “Do not make me a hero.”
Life’s Mistress was dead, the enemy vanquished, the blight of twisted life now disappearing. Yes, there was good reason to cheer, but Nicci did not feel like rejoicing. Rather, she found a hard core inside her and held on to that.
She would never be Death’s Mistress again. She had left that dark part of her life in the past, and she had promised Richard. She had learned from the terrible things she’d done for Emperor Jagang. Though Thistle’s blood had provided the necessary poison to destroy Life’s Mistress, Nicci herself did not want to be that vulnerable.
Never again. She had saved the world, and that was enough. Even if Thistle could never see it, the girl would have her beautiful valley back.
The Cliffwall scholars were unsettled by Nicci’s response, and Nathan looked at her with a concerned expression. He gave her a slow nod, then lowered his voice. “You don’t need to dance and sing, Sorceress, but you did defeat Victoria and stop that terrible threat. You can feel satisfied.”
She looked at him for a long moment and then said, “I would rather not allow myself to feel anything at all.”
*
At Nicci’s suggestion, although it was obvious to anyone who considered it, they buried the girl out on the edge of the valley where the fresh vegetation, the healthy shrubs and plants, had begun to grow again.
It was a somber procession as they wrapped Thistle’s small body in the soft sheepskin rug she had loved so much when she slept on the floor in Nicci’s quarters. Nicci carried the body herself, and although her heart was heavy as a stone, the girl seemed to weigh almost nothing.
Franklin, Gloria, and many of the other remaining memmers and scholars left Cliffwall, emerging along the steep side of the plateau. They walked until they reached a spot just on the foothills overlooking the valley, which Thistle had so longed to see fertile again.