Just a bit further . . . Somehow she found a last scrap of strength, enough to shove Nammu’s heart up against the bark of Bitterblight, to nudge it into the hole that Elowen had started.

As she did, she saw the blue light begin to melt away the darkness. It crackled and hissed like burning hair and the air was filled with a chemical stench. The wood around the heart began to fold in on itself, collapsing in chunks that rapidly became bigger and bigger. A chain reaction that grew faster than Liska’s eyes could follow.

In an instant the heart of Nammu had been swallowed, tumbling into the very core of Bitterblight and pulling every atom of the horrid thing in after it. Screaming filled the air, and Liska couldn’t tell if it came from Noxis or the tree itself. She had a sense of things whipping past her faster than the wind, as the roots, branches, tendrils, spores . . . everything that had filled the bottom of the crater . . . was sucked away into a tiny point in space.

Her last sight, before her legs turned to jelly and she fell, was of Nammu’s heart hanging in the air as the branches and roots around it snapped and broke, tumbling into the blue light and vanishing. And then the heart itself blinked out. Gone.

Liska hit the ground with the smile still spreading on her face.

Chapter 17

Liska only had a dim memory of what happened after the battle. She was sick with dizziness and every part of her ached from forcing herself to shapewalk before she was ready. There were bumps, gashes and scratches all over her face and arms, and her legs burnt where Bitterblight had wrapped her in its shoots.

Patches of things came back to her after. Glimpses she saw and heard as someone – Embla? – carried her out of the volcano crater and back to her home.

Noxis, or the thing he had become, had been shattered by the battle and the death of Bitterblight. A limbless chunk of living wood remained, with his screaming face trapped in the middle, wailing and gibbering. It would, perhaps, have been better for him if he’d died.

Elowen and Fishbone had been with her as they walked down on to the battlefield. She remembered the kittimew’s sandpaper tongue cleaning a cut on her forehead, and how cold Elowen’s hand had been as she held it.

She had a half picture of the Rotlands as they staggered across it. It was empty now. The giant worm had left, leaving a crater almost as wide as Bitterblight’s volcano. All the seepers and gorgaunts were gone too. Smashed to pulp by Nematus, or blown into mist when the shadow tree died – there was nothing but a crust of grey slime to show they had ever been there.