Bannon agreed. “And this isn’t necessary. Not now. “
Nicci reached out to touch the heaving female cat, cautiously extending her magic to measure the extent of its injuries. The branded spell symbols did not stop her, so she realized the protection must be specifically designed to deflect an attack. She moved her hand to touch the knife wounds she had inflicted. “I can heal it. I can heal her,” Nicci said, “but you need to know that these three sand panthers were spell-bonded. Her two sister panthers in the troka are dead. If we save her to live entirely alone, we may be doing this one no favors.”
“Yes we are,” Thistle insisted. “Please, Nicci.”
Her own wounds and blood loss were making her dizzy, making her weak. She didn’t have the strength to argue with the orphan girl.
Nicci touched the panther’s deep cuts. As she did so, some of the animal’s blood mingled with her own from the gashes in her arms and hands. The blood of two fierce creatures trained and ready to fight …
Nicci called up her healing magic, released a flow through her hand into the tawny beast, while also infusing her deepest wounds.
When she did so, Nicci felt a sudden jolt, like the last link being forged in a mysterious chain that connected her with the panther. The chain, the bond ran from her heart through her nervous system and her mind, and extended into each of the cat’s counterpart systems. Thoughts flooded through her as powerful healing magic surged into both of them, erasing the claw wounds, the knife cuts, the scrapes, the smallest scratches, even the sore muscles.
Yanking her bloody hands away, Nicci staggered backward. Even when she stopped touching the panther, she could sense the animal’s presence connected to her. Like a sister. She could not deny it.
“Her name is Mrra,” Nicci said in a hushed tone. “I don’t know what the word means. It’s not really a name, just her self-identity.”
The newly healed panther huffed a great breath and rolled over, coiling back onto her feet. The cat’s eyes were golden green. The long tail lashed back and forth, in agitation and confusion.
“What just happened?” Bannon asked. “What did you do?”
“My blood mingled with hers. The death of her spell-bonded sisters left a void like a wound inside her. When my magic healed Mrra, it filled that void within me at the same time.” Nicci’s voice grew breathy, and she was amazed at what she herself had experienced. “Now we are connected, but still independent. Dear spirits!”
The sand panther looked up at her, thick tail thrashing. Nicci looked again at the scarred spell symbols, but in spite of her link to Mrra, she still could not interpret the language. She did, however, understand the residue of pain—the lumpy, waxy scars from when red-hot irons had brutally branded those symbols into the soft tan fur.
Staring at her former prey, Mrra twitched, then dropped her gaze to the bodies of her two sister panthers. With a low growling moan, she turned to pad away, putting distance between herself and the three humans that the troka had meant to kill.
Nicci could feel the bond between them stretching, thinning. She couldn’t communicate directly, couldn’t understand what Mrra might be thinking. She just knew that she, Bannon, and Thistle were safe from further attack. And that Mrra would live now … if alone.
But not completely alone: there would always be a shadow of Nicci inside her.
With a thrash of her tail, the sand panther loped into the desolate wilderness, bounding up into the slickrock outcroppings, ledge by ledge.
Thistle stared after the sand panther, while Bannon still held his bloody sword, confused. As Nicci watched the panther go, she felt a strange sense of loss.
In a flash, the beast vanished into the uneven shadows.
CHAPTER 47
As he began to grasp the sheer breadth of the library, Nathan believed the Cliffwall archive might hold the secrets of the entire universe … if only he could figure out what he needed and where to find it. He pondered as he nibbled on an oat biscuit that one of the acolytes had brought him from the kitchens.
The problem was, no one understood the entire puzzle. Altogether, the hundreds of archivists and memmers knew only disconnected pieces. It was like trying to find the constellations on a cloudy night when only a few flickers of stars shone through.
Well, the constellations were all wrong now anyway, and everyone had to relearn the universe from scratch.
Nathan finished his biscuit and absently munched on another from the plate. He finished skimming the volume in front of him just as a shy young female scholar delivered more. Mia was one of the students assigned to assist him. About nineteen years old, she had short mouse-brown hair and darting eyes that seemed more accustomed to reading than making contact with other people.
“I found these for you, Wizard Nathan. They might contain viable lines of investigation.” She was a daughter of a canyon-dwelling family, and she had grown up learning to read and study. She had been born just after Roland fled Cliffwall and began to drain the life out of the world.
“Thank you, Mia,” he said with an appreciative smile. Whenever he asked her to find books or scrolls on a particular subject, she would hurry off and return with possibilities. As he ran his fingers down the words in ancient languages, Mia would often sit quietly beside him, reading books that had captured her own interest, hoping to help.
Now he picked up the top volume and opened the scuffed cover. “Ah, a treatise on enhancing plant growth.”
Mia nodded. “I thought it might offer some possible counteraction to the Lifedrinker’s magic that drains life. The foundational spell-forms might have some commonalities.”
“Excellent suggestion,” Nathan said, although he thought it unlikely.
The next volume in the stack was covered in letters he did not recognize, angled symbols and swooping curves of runes. The words seemed to exude a kind of power, and he touched the writing as if he could let the foreign alphabet seep into his fingertips. “Do you recognize this language?” he asked Mia. “It is not High D’Haran, nor any of the languages of the Old World that I know.”
The young woman pushed her short hair back from her face and tucked it behind her ears. “Some of our oldest scrolls are written in those letters, but no one can read them anymore. Some say they were part of an ancient library stolen from the city of Ildakar.”
Nathan set the volume aside, since the incomprehensible writing rendered it useless to him. He was delighted to see that the next book contained maps of a broad land area, although without any frame of reference. One chart showed a range of mountains extending from rolling foothills to sharp crags. Dotted lines indicated winding, treacherous paths that led up to a summit. The exotic names of peaks and rivers were unfamiliar—until his eyes fixed on a pair of words.