As he roamed the grassy headlands, he headed back toward the cliff edge to watch the white waves roll in. He wondered who Nicci was, what drove her. Did she think about him, too? Bannon pondered what he could do to make her notice him, to consider him a worthwhile traveling companion, instead of just a coincidental one.
Bannon peered over the verge and watched rooster tails of spray leap into the air. A flash of color caught his attention, wedged into the mossy sandstone just down the cliff, and he knelt to see a clump of unusual flowers growing within arm’s reach. The blossoms were vibrant, the deepest and most intense violet he had ever seen, shot through with veins of crimson and a central splash of yellow stamens. They had thick fleshy stems and swordlike green leaves.
The beautiful flowers gave him an idea, a perfect idea. Beautiful flowers for a beautiful woman!
Bannon stretched out, extending his arm over the edge to reach the blossoms. He picked four of them—a bouquet. It was a small gesture, but perhaps Nicci would be grateful. Perhaps she would notice him.
He bounded back through the grasses, searching for his companions, and he was panting hard by the time he caught up with them. The breezes blew his ginger hair wildly around his head as he hurried up to Nicci.
When he extended the flowers, all his suave words were snatched from his mouth as if the wind had stolen them. He could only manage to blurt, “I found these for you.”
She frowned with a glimmer of annoyance, but when she looked at the flowers, her expression filled with interest. She narrowed her blue eyes and reached out to take one of the flowers from his bouquet, leaving him with the other three. She showed extreme care as she touched the stem with just her fingertips.
Bannon waited for her to smile with delight or nod in warm appreciation. He couldn’t remember whether he had ever seen her respond with a genuine smile.
“Where did you find these?” she demanded.
“Over by the cliff.” He pointed. “Growing in a cranny in the rock.”
“Such flowers are rare. I could have made use of them many times.” She looked over at Nathan.
The wizard’s eyes were wide with recognition. “Do you know what those are, Bannon Farmer?”
“Pretty flowers?”
“Deathrise flowers,” Nicci said, studying the one in her hand.
Bannon looked at the rest of his bouquet, confused.
“Deathrise flowers,” she repeated. “One of the most dangerous plants in existence. They are extremely hard to find, and valuable. Assassins would pay a king’s ransom for these four. But this is far more than we could ever use.” She held up the stem in her hand. “One will be more than sufficient.”
“What—what do you mean?” Looking down at the violet-and-crimson flowers, he felt his skin crawl.
“Do you expect to kill an entire city, my boy?” Nathan asked. “Or maybe just a village?”
Bannon blinked, still trying to grasp what they were telling him. “You mean they’re … poison?”
Nicci’s face smoothed in a fascinated smile as she rolled the thick stem in her fingers, careful not to touch the broken end. “The deathrise flower has many uses. From the petals one can concoct an ink so lethal that any victim who reads a message written with such ink will die a painful, lingering death. Consuming even one seed causes a horrible agony that has been described as swallowing mouthfuls of glass shards, then regurgitating them, and swallowing them all over again.”
Bannon’s stomach twisted into a knot. “I—I didn’t mean…”
Nicci continued, “Tinctures, extracts, and potions can be made from all parts of the deathrise flower. Emperor Jagang had his alchemists and apothecaries test the various mixtures on his prisoners of war.” She raised her eyebrows. “About five thousand died in those preliminary experiments. The camps for the test subjects became known as the Places of Screaming. Emperor Jagang pitched his tent nearby so he could drift off to sleep listening to that music.”
Bannon felt sick. He stood trembling, looked down at the other three deathrise flowers in his hand, afraid to move his fingers.
“Even touching the juice to your skin will cause rashes and boils to break out.” Nicci looked at the single flower she had kept, obviously impressed although not in the way Bannon had wanted. “I thank you very much. One never knows when such measures might be required.” She wrapped the flower carefully in a scrap of cloth and tucked it into her pack. “I am pleased with how you think.”
Embarrassment—and the fear that his hands and arms were about to burst into leper’s sores or swollen boils—rendered him speechless. He turned and bolted headlong into the wind, running toward the pine trees, intent on reaching the pond and the stream again. When he reached the weeds of the shore he flung the deathrise flowers as far as he could out into the water, then dropped to his knees, plunged his hands into the pond, and dug his fingers into the sand. He scrubbed and scrubbed his palms, his fingers, the backs of his hands, his wrists, all the way up his arms. He frantically tried to remember any place he had touched with the deathrise flower. He filled his cupped palms, and was about to splash water in his face, but he didn’t dare go near his mouth or eyes.
Even when his hands looked clean, he plunged them into the sand again, scrubbing and scrubbing. He scoured his skin a third time and a fourth, until even his fingertips were raw, his palms pink, his knuckles sore. Finally, he stepped away, breathing hard, still afraid that the poison had gotten inside him.
He swallowed. What more could he do? He would find no antidote here … if an antidote even existed.
Heart pounding, pulse racing, he struggled to regain his composure. Finally, he left the pond and ran to catch up with Nicci and Nathan.
* * *
At dusk, four dwarf deer crept out of the eucalyptus forest where they had rested in the tangled shadows throughout the day. They ventured forth, their delicate hooves stepping on twigs while they worked their way along a faint game trail.
Though there were few large predators here on the coastal headlands, the deer possessed natural caution on their journey to the freshwater pond where they drank each night at sunset. The deer approached the shore, uncertain and skittish. They took several steps, then paused, their ears flickering to detect any threat, then moved forward again. One hung back as a sentinel while the other three stepped to the pond’s edge.
The deer sensed something amiss. The water was smooth and clear as always, but they noticed, without comprehension, the glimmering silver shapes that drifted on the surface of the pond. Hundreds of the small fish that had darted like small mirror flashes in the last sunlight now floated belly-up like a stain on the water.
The deer struggled to understand what had changed. Frozen like statues in the forest, they waited for long minutes, but nothing approached, nothing attacked. Finally, one of the deer dipped into the water and drank. The next two joined her, drinking their fill. When it was his turn, the sentinel buck also drank, and the twilight shadows deepened around them.…
By the next morning numerous fish still drifted on the surface, though some of the bodies had begun to sink. On the shore, four dwarf deer also lay dead.
CHAPTER 21
They camped in the shelter of thick cypress. During the night, the maddening, mournful breezes died down, which allowed a thick fog to settle in. The cold wet swaths made the three miserable while they huddled near a small fire, adding more moist twigs in an attempt to keep the blaze going. Nicci used her magic to maintain the fire, but the flames gave out too little heat.
Nicci had never been overly concerned with her personal comfort, so long as she could function. Now that they’d been shipwrecked on the unknown coast, despite the unexpected rock cairn reaffirming their destination of Kol Adair, she could not guess how many miles they might need to walk before they found a settlement in this wild coastal wasteland.
Despite the solitude, Nicci reminded herself that this land, bleak and untamed as it was, was now part of the D’Haran Empire. Nicci wa
s doing what she had promised Lord Rahl, and she would, in fact, walk from one end of the world to the other for him, if that proved necessary. But neither she nor Nathan could continue their quest until they actually found a village or city.
Finally, morning brightened the murk, and Nicci stopped wasting effort to keep the useless fire going. “We should get moving. That will generate heat.”
Nathan used the tortoiseshell comb to untangle his long white hair. “I don’t know if even running will keep us warm enough.” He looked in disappointment at his moist and rumpled shirt. “I never realized how many ways I relied on my gift. A little internal magic could always keep me warm on a blustery, miserable day like this.”
Nicci shouldered her makeshift pack. “We won’t be any colder than we are now, and at least we’ll cover distance.”
Bannon squinted into the fog. “But can we see where we’re going?”
“We’ll see when we get there,” Nicci said.
Nathan tucked away his life book in the leather pouch and fastened the flap. “I doubt I can add much detail to my map today.”
They headed out. Guided by the rush and boom of the ocean off to their right, they walked far enough from the edge to stay safe. “I’m not so much worried about falling off a cliff, as I am of reaching the edge of the world,” Bannon said, panting. “Then we would just fall forever.”
Nathan lifted his bushy eyebrows. “You believe we’ll find the actual edge of the world, my boy?”
“I’ve seen maps that cut off.…”
“If we find the edge of the world, then we will know that we’ve come to the boundaries of Lord Rahl’s empire.” Nicci did not waste time or effort worrying about such things. “Then we will turn and explore in a different direction.”
“I hope we find Kol Adair before then,” Nathan said.
Ever since offering her the deathrise flowers, the young man had seemed subdued. Before she rebuffed him, Nicci had noted the bright gleam in his eyes, recognizing that he was probably smitten with her—and those feelings were woefully misplaced. His imagination was already too active.
Nathan had a certain fondness for the young man. Despite the thousand-year difference in their ages, the two had much in common, since even the old wizard had a flash of naiveté about him.
The fog thinned for an hour as they continued, but the chill deepened. Bannon shivered. “Maybe we should go inland to the thicker forest, where at least the trees will shelter us.”
Nicci shook her head and kept going. She walked in a straight, determined line, defeating the distance as if it were an enemy. “If we follow the coastline, we’ll be more likely to discover a river outlet or a port. And we can see farther ahead, once the fog clears.”
Nathan kept his eyes to the ground, preoccupied with finding berry bushes, wild onions, or bird’s nests and breakfast eggs. Bannon ranged ahead like a dutiful scout.
The wind went quiet again and the fog closed in, so that Nicci didn’t see the young man until he was right beside her. He looked sheepish, smiling for the first time since the debacle of offering her deathrise flowers. This time, Bannon held a handful of orange lilies on long stalks. “I found these for you, Sorceress. I hope you like them better than those poison blossoms.”
Nicci regarded him coolly. “But I valued the deathrise flower. I told you in great detail about all its uses.”
“These are pretty flowers, though,” Bannon said, extending them toward her. “Grass lilies. They used to grow all over Chiriya. They won’t last long after they’ve been picked, but I wanted you to have them.” When Nicci did not reach out to accept them, his expression faltered. “Are they not to your liking?”
She recognized that Bannon Farmer was competent enough, and he had proven his mettle in fighting the selka. She would let him accompany her for as long as she considered him useful, or at least not a hindrance. She could imagine far worse company, but she had to nip his infatuation in the bud.
She realized that her response to his clumsy offering yesterday had not been a sufficient rebuff. She had to set him straight, or she would have to kill him sooner or later.
Nicci recalled all the times she’d been abused, forced to spend weeks with Jagang’s soldiers as a plaything for their sadistic enjoyment, as well as the times when Jagang had taken her himself, sometimes beating her bloody. With her twisted experience of so-called love, she had convinced herself she was in love with Richard Rahl. Back then, she had been a Sister of the Dark, corrupted by her service to the Keeper as well as her brutal enslavement by the emperor. Her attempt to express that misguided love for Richard—forcing him to live a false life with her as man and wife—had only made Richard resent her more.
Nicci had eventually learned her lesson. She herself had killed Jagang, and now she served Richard wholeheartedly, in her own way. She knew that she did love Richard, that he was the only man she could love … but it was a different kind of love now. He had Kahlan, and he would never be satisfied with Nicci, not in that way, no matter how much he respected and valued her. Because of her iron-hard devotion, Nicci had made up her mind to conquer the Old World for Richard Rahl—single-handedly if necessary.
She had no time or patience for a young mooncalf who thought she was pretty.
Bannon beamed when Nicci reached toward the flowers, but instead of accepting them, she wrapped her grip around his wrist. Clenching tight, she released a warning flow of magic that sent a sharp tingle into his flesh like a hailstorm of steel needles.
His hazel eyes widened, and his mouth gaped open in shock. Before the young man could say anything, Nicci spoke through gritted teeth. “I am only letting you stay with us because Nathan likes you, and because you may be useful in helping us get where we need to go. But know this”—she lowered her voice to a growl—“I am not some fawning village girl looking for a stolen kiss.”
His fingers spasmed and he let the lilies fall to the ground. Nicci didn’t even glance at them. She maintained her tight grip on his arm.
“I’m—I’m sorry, Sorceress!”
She had to drive the point home, so that the problem did not occur again. She didn’t soften her voice at all. “We face serious problems. We are lost, and we must find out where we are in order to continue our mission. If you ever get in my way, I will skin you alive without a second thought.”
He gawked at her with just the proper amount of terror and dismay, which would resolve itself into appropriate respect soon enough. She would not need to worry about this nonsense from him again.
She let go of his wrist, and Bannon flexed his hand, flapping it as if to fling away the pain. He stammered, “But—but … I only—”
She had no wish to be part of his starry-eyed view of the world or his nostalgia for a peaceful island home. “I’ve heard the stories you tell yourself. I am not part of your perfect boyhood. Do you understand me, child?” She used the last word intentionally.
His fearful expression suddenly darkened, as if she had torn the scab off a still-festering wound. “It wasn’t perfect. It was never perfect.” Looking ashamed, he turned away to find Nathan standing there with a concerned and compassionate look on his face.
Nicci didn’t interfere as the wizard put a comforting hand on Bannon’s shoulder. “Best you understand the way of things, my boy. Remember, she was called Death’s Mistress.”
Bannon walked away, his expression downcast. Heading off into the thickening mist, he said, “No. I will never forget that.”
The fog melted around him.
CHAPTER 22
After they traveled for three more days, the headlands shifted to forested hills and fertile grasslands. Bannon nervously kept his distance from Nicci and spent even more time with the wizard. Though she spoke no more of the incident, Nicci was inwardly relieved that he had learned his lesson.
She heard Nathan telling the young man tidbits of history or ruminating about his time locked in the Palace of the Prophets. Some of the legends sounded absurd to Nicci, as d
id events in the wizard’s own life, but Bannon had no filter to determine what might or might not be true. He lapped up each of Nathan’s tales like a cat facing a bowl of cream. At least it kept the two occupied as they trudged along, which Nathan did his best to document on the rudimentary map in his life book.
On the fifth day, they came upon a path that was too wide and well traveled to be a game trail. Ahead, they saw stumps where trees had been cut down.
Bannon cried out, “That means people have been here!”
The trail soon widened into a footpath, then an actual road. Coming over a rise, they could see the hills spilling down to a neat, rounded bay into which a narrow river drained. A large village of wooden homes, shops, and warehouses had sprung up on both sides of the river. A high wooden bridge joined the two banks. Piers thrust into the water, providing docks for small boats in the bay. A point of rocky land swooped around the far end of the harbor, punctuated with a lookout tower.
The hills held terraced gardens and pastures where sheep and cattle grazed. Down by the docks, people were unloading a catch from the fishing boats. Stretched nets hung on frameworks drying in the sun. High on the beach, five overturned boats were being repaired by shipwrights.
“I was beginning to think we’d have to walk around the entire world,” Nathan said.
Nicci nodded. “We’ll find out where we are, and choose our next course. We can inform them of Lord Rahl’s rule, and maybe someone here can tell us where to find Kol Adair.”
“I assume you are anxious to save the world, Sorceress,” Nathan said. “As anxious as I am to be made whole again.”
Nicci’s mouth formed a hard, straight line. “I will reserve judgment on just how seriously to take the witch woman’s words.”
Death's Mistress--Sister of Darkness Page 15
