The Soulstoy Inheritance (33 page)

I love you
, I thought to him,
I never said it, but I do
.
With all my heart, and to my very last breath
.

Harbringer let out a string of swear words, jerking off the bench and almost toppling the healer to the floor.

“Let’s go already.” He picked up a holstered sword leaning against the wall of the chamber and secured it deftly around his hips. “Tend to the King—” he waved dismissively at Hazen— “so that we can join the battle before it has ended.”

The healer scrambled to obey, but her movements were sluggish, and I moved to crouch beside her, placing a hand over hers, which had reached for Hazen. She froze, frightened eyes finding mine.

“Relax.” I took her other hand as well, securing her fingers between mine so that she could not escape. “Take my energy.”

Her eyes widened, a look of pure fear descending upon her.

“Only what you need,” I warned her. “Or you will find the side-effects less than desirable, I promise you.”

I tightened my grip on her hands, which seemed to spur her into action. Her eyes closed, proving to me that it
was
possible to draw life force through means other than those that Nareon had taught me. I felt a tentative tug on my chest, an immediate depletion of the savage energy of my Force, which was a constant, agitated cloud over my consciousness. I cut her off almost immediately, knowing that any more would see her drastically altered, and jerked away from her. Her eyes were bright, her hands trembling, and everyone in the room was staring at her as if she might grow an extra head.

Just in time,
Hazen muttered internally, managing to sound chastising and approving all at once.

I turned and smirked at him and he shook his head, allowing the newly invigorated Healer to take hold of him.

“You got lucky,” Harbringer said from across the room. “I wouldn’t try that again.”

“With any luck,” I answered, “I won’t need to.”

Once the Healer had finished with Hazen, one of the soldiers led us back through the tunnels for an excruciating amount of time, made faster only by the fact that we were travelling underground. The sounds of the battle raging above reached us at least an hour before we began our ascent to the ground. It was a rusted ladder, ending in a drain, which spilled us into the abandoned streets of Castle Nest. I ignored the shadowed faces peering out at us from behind curtains, consoling myself that they had, at least, remained inside. The soldier, who looked to have been running back and forth through the tunnels—judging by the state of his uniform—led us back to the giant wall where the Raven River spilled out into the sea, and then promptly turned and disappeared, probably back to the underground chamber. I briefly watched him go, wondering at the role he had been given by Teddy, Quick or Sweet, along with the roles of every other man suddenly involved in this battle.

“How are you going to find Elias?” Hazen asked, knowing already what my first priority would be.

“I won’t,” I shouted back, as we neared the fighting. “He will find me!”

We reached the edges of the township, ignoring the few, scattered men that grappled around us, as they were too occupied to take much notice, and took in the scene before us. I never could have guessed that the Synfee Empire possessed such an army. All the way along the bank of the Raven River, separating Castle Nest from Kingsbed, hoards of men struggled against each other; the mass of bodies ballooning around the edges of the wall that Elias had tossed me over. I could see waves of colour too, with the majority of silver, black and pearl seemingly backed against the wall and the river. They were outnumbered by red. The soldiers pushing them back each boasted a red cloth on some part of their person; brandished by the hilt of their sword, bandaged on their arm, or tied about their head.

I was spared the wonder that threatened to hold me frozen, by a mangled shout that spread across the sea of people, elevated eerily to raise goosebumps along my skin.

“He can feel your mind,” Hazen spoke, his eyes turned toward the sky, concentration etched into the lines deepening on his forehead. “It has enraged him… he is coming.”

We spread out unconsciously then, Harbringer and Hazen flanking my sides with Rose behind us, the slight incline we favoured giving her an aim over the top of my head. I felt the lack of Cale’s presence keenly, but it only fed the rage that had risen inside me when I had looked into Rose’s eyes. I filtered it out into my Force, using it to
feel
the earth around me, to gather a hold on whatever I might use against Elias.

“Beatrice Harrow!” The scream reached my ears before Elias broke free of the battle and stormed toward us, a small group of soldiers trailing behind him, protecting his back.

“They are all Force users,” Harbringer sounded at my left. “Be careful.”

I grinned, feeling an absurd sense of serendipity. These people had been my enemies once already, they had destroyed Red Ridge and Flintwood, had thrown the kingdom into a dependence that allowed Grenlow to manipulate and bribe the people.

They are the soldiers in black, silver and
pearl, I realised, somewhat dumbly.
I walked into the midst of Elias’ army the day I walked into Flintwood.

My grin widened ghoulishly, an expression I am sure had never graced my face before. With the severity of my emotion, my glamor slipped off naturally, and I embraced the monster within me. I couldn’t wait for Elias to reach me, I twisted the dagger in my hand and took off at a run, my golden-tinged hair flying behind me.

“I killed the human,” Elias snarled when I reached him, sidestepping the swipe of my blade, “and now it seems I must kill the synfee!”

His small contingent of Force soldiers ran at me, but I blasted them back with a wind so strong that Hazen, Harbringer and Rose were also knocked back.  Elias grinned, waving his hand before him, but I countered the invisible barrier—which would have sent me, too, flying backward—by directing it viciously toward the ground. The earth vibrated and split, a crack as big as my foot spearheading toward Elias. He jumped over it and a circle of flame burst around us, barricading me in with his Force-users. Almost as soon as the wall was constructed, his soldiers clutched at their skulls, crying out in a pain so severe, I had to block out their screams to concentrate on Elias. The show of mind power by Hazen and Harbringer seemed to have annoyed him, and his next attack was lashed out viciously. The blast of wind hit me from every side, buffering me between seemingly solid walls that threatened to crush me as I stood. I managed to push them away, but they flared the flames around us further, and I called desperately upon the rain, half-surprised when the big, fat droplets began to pound down around us.

This, too, annoyed Elias, and he waved his hand again, my dagger flying of its own accord from my hand and landing in his. He reached back and with a flash of his arm the knife was flying toward me, propelled by the force behind his elemental power. I propelled my own elemental toward it, but he was strong, and it did not change direction as I had intended. It hovered, trembling in the air, halfway between the two of us. Elias took a step forward, his deathly eyes staring straight through me; his hands were steady, mine were trembling. My hold on the knife slipped, and it flashed toward me before I managed to stop it again. Sweat was beading down the sides of my face, and the soldiers around us—contained within our dying wall of fire—were on their knees, crying out at their mental torture. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to hold it much longer, and I could see Hazen out of the corner of my eye, running at the dwindling flames, determined to reach me before my knife did.

I will stand before every knife leveled at you
. His words came to me unbidden, and I opened my mouth to shout at him to stay back, but Elias had already noticed him. The pressure against me increased, my own concentration slipping, but just then a man pushed in front of me. The impact of the dagger meeting his chest propelled us both backwards beyond the circle of wet embers. I gasped in breath after breath, overcome with horror at what had just happened so rapidly I was still trying to process it. We had both been so intent on Hazen’s approach that we hadn’t seen the other man rush forward. I could feel his blood spreading over my stomach, warm and sticky, his heavy convulsing driving me painfully into the ground. He was lifted from me, and I watched him float into the air bidden by, I assumed, Elias.

“Nareon…” Elias drawled. “You’ll not get in the way again. Silly of you really, wasting yourself on the girl, since I will kill her anyway… but first…”

The ragged man—whom I now recognised as the person Nareon had been controlling once before—screamed as the knife twisted in his chest. Hazen reached my side, his hand grasping mine tightly. The Nareon in my head began to scream in tandem with the man in the air, and I crumpled over, hands covering my ears.

“Stop!” I cried, unbidden. “Please, make it stop!”

He was dying all over again, and I was powerless to stop it, but it was forcing another reality into the forefront of my mind.
Kill him now
. I didn’t know if the urge had come from Nareon, Hazen, or even myself; but it was suddenly essential. I rose, my limbs heavy, my body undergoing some kind of torture through its connection to Nareon. I didn’t have my dagger anymore, but I didn’t need it. I looked around, knowing that she would be near, and found Rose standing just beyond the circle of burnt ground, her crossbow raised, leveled. I narrowed my eyes on Elias, exerting the full power of my Force into the ground, where gnarled, heavy vines escaped from deepening cracks, tearing across the earth. They rose the length of his legs, binding him to where he stood, capturing his arms and slithering around his neck, turning his face to me.

A crack of lightning struck the ground only a few feet from where I stood, but I only walked forward, drawn to where my power hummed in ferocious, untamed pleasure. The vines began to bite into his skin, embracing him tightly, and he seemed powerless to stop them. His Force-user army did not rise to defend him. They were dead.

“Are you ready to leave this place, Elias?” I reached him, another flash of lightning striking close by, leaving a distinct, burning stench in its wake.

The sky rumbled and Elias’ laugh rumbled with it. “Never,” he declared, as the crossbow bolt cut through the vines and buried itself into the center of his back.

His eyes grew wide in disbelief, staring down at the tip as it extended, barely, from the centre of his chest. Rose turned and walked away, having finished what she came here to do, and I hoped that she would reach the tunnels safely. We all stood in silence then, witnessing the veil of death descending upon Elias Soulstoy. I was sure that Nareon’s host body had perished, as the screams inside my head had quietened. Ashen appeared—as if summoned by the deaths of his brothers—just as Elias slackened against the mould of roots. Where they previously held him prisoner, they now cradled him in death.

Ashen was grasping two curved blades and blood was smudged down his arms, dirt covering his face. His eyes found Elias, flicked to the crumbled, bedraggled body that had once housed Nareon, and then found me. We shared the loss of Nareon in that look, knowing that we were perhaps the only two people left in the kingdom who would really mourn his passing, just as we both knew that he would not come back this time. He had been driven by the guilt of knowing what he had created, driven to end his brother’s life once and for all, even if it destroyed his own. He had taken on more than any one of us.

He had taken on Elias.

I turned to the battle still raging before us, and lifted my arms to the sky. The heavens seemed to open, outpouring a diabolical power from above. The ground shook, threatening my footing, as the rain became a drowning blanket, blocking my vision. The smell of sulfur preceded lightning strike after lightning strike, battering the earth with my uncontained wrath. And then just as suddenly, the assault was swept away. Heads turned upwards in wonder, their fighting forgotten as their weapons flew from their hands, hovering in the air above them, forming sharp, metal clouds.

Perhaps they could sense my power, or perhaps the clouds gathered around the spot where I stood, but gradually, every eye found me.

“The Queen’s army!” shouted Ashen, whose swords had remained in his grip.

He shoved one of those swords into the air now, and a sea of fists violently tore through the wind below us. They were waving their red flags, shouting things into the storm that were lost on me. I lowered the confiscated instruments carefully; curious as to how Elias’s remaining army would react to my show of victory. People began snatching their weapons out of the air and dropping to their knees, golden-glinted eyes peering at me through the slow curtain of rain that remained. It reminded me, eerily, of the day Nareon had died. Except that those people had not been mine.
These are my people
, I realised.
My army
. What remained of Elias’s contingent soon became clear, as they were left tensely clutching their weapons, wavering in indecision.

Walking past my friends, I waved a hand behind me, and Elias’s vine-cradle lengthened, the stalks twisting, reaching further into the air, until their charge lay statue-still and deathly limp in their overarching display.

“A Tainted Creature,” I called. “Elias Soulstoy has finally met with the death that had twisted his mind, and your homes—the very ground you walk on—for generations!”

I waited as the whispers travelled backward through the people, my message relaying amid the shouts of approval from my own troops.

“No longer will the water run toxic,” I continued. “No longer will the ground wither upon itself, starving entire villages into ruins! You will no longer live in darkness, but in freedom! The reign of the Soulstoy Inheritance is finished!”

I turned from the outcry, reaching for Hazen, who stepped to my side, taking my hand securely in his, allowing me to raise our hands into the air.