The Soulstoy Inheritance

The Soulstoy Inheritance

Jane Washington

Copyright 2015 Jane Washington

The author has provided this ebook for your personal use only. It may not be re-sold or made publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

http://www.janewashington.com

Kindle Edition

Edited by David Thomas

ISBN-10: 0994279523

ISBN-13: 978-0-9942795-2-1

Table of Contents

Chapter One
:
Resting Monarchs

Chapter Two
:
Kinship through Queenship

Chapter Three
:
Harrowing the Line

Chapter Four
:
The Pain in Trust, the Life in Dust

Chapter Five
:
A Glass of Tears to Dispel your Fears

Chapter Six
:
You Can Run, But You Can’t die

Chapter Seven
:
Lies, Spies and Allies

Chapter Eight
:
Resisting the Resistance

Chapter Nine
:
Burning Lashes, Battering Ashes

Chapter Ten
:
How the Haunted have Sauntered

Chapter Eleven
:
Misbehavior of the Saviour

Chapter Twelve
:
Respite in the Ground

Chapter Thirteen
:
Into the Cold

Chapter Fourteen
:
A Therapy of Violence

Chapter Fifteen
:
Harbringer of Pain

Chapter Sixteen
:
Antagonising the Upswing

Chapter Seventeen
:
Drinking with Vampires

Chapter Eighteen
:
How the Tainted are Sated

Chapter Nineteen
:
Festival of Revelation

Chapter Twenty
:
Fields of Betrayal

Chapter Twenty-One
:
The Spider’s Web

Chapter Twenty-Two
:
Queen of the People

Chapter Twenty-Three
:
From the Reign, Comes the Drought

Epilogue

About the Author

For Ishie,

I don’t know how you’re still sane.

Maybe you’re not.

Acknowledgements

First of all, thank you to the man who had to drag me to bed at sunrise every morning and make me coffee five times a day, despite my tousled appearance and general grumbling. Also, thank you to my wonderful editor. You make me look like a bit of an idiot sometimes, but I’m okay with it. A special thank you for my favourite girls, Leisa, Madison and Erin. Combined, you provide amazing support, much needed champagne breakfasts, and… well… Erin, you’re just super cute. I’m sorry, but I can’t see past your super cute-ness. Last but certainly not least, a massive thank you to Jesse, for being the very first person to buy my very first book, and for bugging me every single day to finish this one.

Chapter One

Resting Monarchs

My life had never been easy. Not by any measure. People either hated me or else they were drawn to me, a little too much for both their comfort and my own. The former was an aversion to my blood and the latter a desire for my power, for every synfee possessed some degree of allure. I had been alone for so long prior to starting at the Academy, and now I was at the epicenter of two very different kingdoms, two kingdoms that had nothing in common with each other and somehow even less in common with me. A year ago, I had nothing. Now I had friends, enemies and people in-between… mostly enemies, though.

Harbringer burst into the room just as I bent to check the King’s pulse, causing me to tumble from my crouched position in fright. 

“It’s not what it looks like,” I pleaded with him before he had a chance to accuse. 

His eyes were wide, disbelieving. I followed the level expression, witnessing the scene as he might, with a rapidly increasing sense of discomfort. From Hazen, who was barely managing to retain consciousness on the bed—boasting the façade of a man who had just been dragged beneath a parade of carriages—to the unconscious King, and then back to me. I was still crouched over Fenrel’s too-big and oddly crumpled body.

“It looks like someone knocked out the ruler of the Read Empire beside his son’s sick bed.” Harbringer strode forward and brushed my hands aside to check Fenrel’s pulse himself.

“Well when you put it like that, I guess it’s exactly what it looks like.” I slinked back to give him some room.

Fenrel groaned then, and Harbringer shot to his feet, grasping my arm and drawing me toward the door.

“He’ll be fine, but if he wakes up and sees you, you’ll be dead.”

I quickly scrutinised Hazen, but his eyes had already fallen closed again, and this room was the last place I wanted to be when Fenrel woke up. I let Harbringer pull me through the doorway and out into the hall, where two guards walked toward us from the top of the staircase. He slowed immediately and I collided with him, my forehead bumping the center of his back. It was like running into a stone barricade. After I recovered, we continued toward the men at a more civilized pace. Both of the guards nodded to Harbringer, eyes sliding over me only briefly. Harbringer fell into a run again once we were clear of them, pulling me behind him until we neared the ground floor. He took me down a back staircase through several narrow, damp-smelling passages that spearheaded into a maze of servants quarters. Many startled workers were forced to jump hastily from our path, muttering to each other. 

“This is not good,” he muttered, just as we tumbled from the kitchens, out through a service entry in the side of the building.

“I’m not going to apologise,” I panted, clutching a pain in my side as he dragged me to a small maintenance gate at the end of the well-worn path from the kitchen exit.

“Dammit, Harrow.” He slammed the gate behind us and then spun suddenly, pinning me back against it, his eyes fierce. “If you
ever
take off like that again without me, I won’t be responsible…”

I gripped the wrought-iron bars behind me, my breath catching on a choking gasp, the speed of his ranger-like movements more of a fright than his warning, though that look in his eye would have been enough to send me running on a good day. He seemed to realise how badly he had scared me, and backed off the tiniest bit, but his hands rose to press against the bars on either side of my head, deliberately trapping me in.

“Did you save him?”

“Yes.”

The corner of his mouth turned up briefly, “And I take it Nareon…
distracted
the King?”

“I… yes.” I hung my head, ashamed because Nareon was my
burden now. A burden I needed to learn to control.

A wailing sound filled the air, trembling through the ground and setting my teeth to chattering. It had the robust tenor of a horn, reverberating from one of the higher towers at my back, still enclosed within the castle walls.

“Fenrel woke up,” Harbringer groaned, “let’s get you out of here before he has you hung.”

He grabbed my wrist again and turned, barely waiting for me to gather my momentum before he was moving at an impossible speed. People on the paths beside the dirt road mostly ignored us. It had to be because the alarm had sent most of the Market District into a flurry of panicked activity, two more fleeing people were of little significance in light of the unrest brought about by the distress horn. It was possible that this was the first alarm to go off even though the castle had been attacked earlier. That struck me as strange, but I had no time to dwell on it as we came to a breathless stop outside of my father’s house. 

We barreled through the door and Harbringer slammed it shut, hands grasping fistfuls of his hair in pure agitation, the expression on his face strained, as if he were grasping for some notion which eluded him. It seemed as though the mental strings that he attempted to grasp were merely slipping through his fingers; no matter how he pulled at his hair, understanding could not be reached. I wondered if he were as confused about the alarm as I was, or if some other complexity perplexed him.

“We shouldn’t stay here,” he announced, walking into the sitting room and flicking the curtains closed to block off the small stretch of yard that led to the road.  “I need a chance to talk to Fenrel. The whole place is in a panic and you’re on tender footing as it is.”

“He saw me.”

“Of course he saw you. Did he also see Nareon?”

“No, just me.”

“And then he wakes up, with a nasty bruise on his head and no way of telling that his son has been helped at all.”

“Hazen woke up,” I countered, hurrying after Harbringer as he moved into the other room, probably to block out those windows too. 

“He looked pretty unconscious to—“

Harbringer’s reply died off, and just before I stepped into the room, he turned and grasped my arms, trying to turn me away.

“Harrow, no…”

But it was too late.

“Dad!” I screamed, pushing past Harbringer, and falling to the carpeted floor, my hands finding my father’s white face, and then his chest, skirting the knife embedded between the second and third button of his vest.

He was still almost warm, the death mark on his forearm looking faded and dull as it lay beside my knee. I shook him, the tears blinding my vision as I tore the knife from his chest in one sickening movement and tossed it aside.

My voice tore with a plethora of rough, half-formed words as pain spread down my throat and welled within my chest. I was strangling on nothing, my head swimming, black spots flashing across my vision, “Hell… Say something… open your eyes… Please don’t do this!” 

I could hear Harbringer swearing, could feel him behind me, pulling me away. When his hand covered my mouth, I finally stopped struggling, and the sounds from outside permeated my despair. There were soldiers on the lawn already. They were shouting at us to come out.

“I was wrong,” Harbringer whispered in my ear. “The King didn’t wake up and raise the alarm. He didn’t wake up at all.”

I felt my whole body slacken, and if Harbringer weren’t holding me up, I would have dropped straight to the ground.

“Nareon killed him?” My voice sounded flat, emotionless.

What did I care? My father was dead.

“No, he was fine before we left. Someone killed him after we ran.”

“Who?”

He released me and I fell to my father’s side again, this time silently.

“I have no idea.” He paced to the window, where the soldiers were barely visible, mere flashes of gold and red peeking through the gaps in the curtains.

I grasped my father’s wrist, trying to fool myself into thinking that he might still be alright, but his skin was considerably colder than the last time I had touched him. The stiffness of death was beginning to set in. My flame-haired, warm-hearted father was turning cold.

“Joseph! Bring the synfee out and we won’t harm her!” someone shouted, banging on the front door.