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.
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.