It dawned on me as we were marched back to the castle—looking for all the world as though we were being given a royal escort for our own safety—that my plan may have worked, but I had still somehow failed. I didn’t want to admit it, but I felt it inherently. Grenlow had betrayed me, but there was more to it than that. Grenlow had expected me to find out. He had expected me to make a move like this, and he had expected that he would be escorting me back to the castle.
Be careful, I added as an afterthought to Leif. There is every chance that Grenlow has some trap waiting for you as soon as you slip away from us.
You have a talent for underestimation, Lady Queen.
By the time we arrived back at the castle, Leif was gone, and nobody seemed to notice, or else they simply didn’t care. We were marched up several flights of stairs to a room that I had never seen before. It looked like it may have been another council chamber, except that there was something off about it: something that set it apart from the rest of the castle. The floors were patterned with tiny, painted stones that managed to be several degrees colder than those adorning the hallways. It may have been the colours… blinking at me in muted black, silver and pearl, or it might have been simply the nature of stone that had never felt the heat of the sun. The large windows were all covered with heavy, three-toned paisley drapes. The colour scheme of pearl, black and silver was repeated often throughout the room. There was also a banner hanging from above the fireplace boasting a design that was vaguely familiar. Hazen, I thought, recognised it too. His dark eyes had fixed upon the banner almost immediately, and even now, he was transfixed.
It depicted a foreboding, starkly adorned tree with only three blooms to claim. One of the leaves was high atop the tallest of the scraggly branches, unfurling in health, while the other two were in the process of falling to the ground. I was still staring at the banner when a most terrible sound pierced my ears. Hazen was suddenly upon the ground, his face creased in horror and pain, his tortured scream tearing through the room. Somewhere behind me, I heard the door slamming shut.
“It begins,” Grenlow said calmly, watching Hazen with a fascinated expression, as if this were something he had been waiting to see for a long, long time.
I forced my terrified limbs to move, to go to Hazen, but somebody grabbed me, holding me back. It was Quick.
“Put on a good act, or we will both die,” he whispered.
I didn’t even give myself time to absorb what he said; it was all too easy to pretend that he had betrayed me, because in a way, he had. There would be no way that Grenlow and the others would believe this ruse, unless Quick had worked with them in the past.
“No…” my voice shook; the word echoing around the room, sounding weak and pathetic. “You lied to me!” I cried, causing Quick’s grip to tighten painfully. “I trusted you!”
The torment of knowing how thoroughly I had been betrayed was only now showing itself to me. I thought that I could almost believe that Quick meant to get us out of this alive—I tried to believe that he wouldn’t let me die, that there was a reason he was doing this… but things were too rapidly slipping out of my control. There were tears of fury filling my eyes and I blinked them away, needing to keep Hazen in my sight. He was now staring sightlessly at the ceiling, face creased in agony.
“I’m sorry,” Quick whispered in my ear.
I tried to wrench my wrists out of his grasp, but he held tight, and so I sent a burst of power at him instead. Not enough to truly hurt him, but enough to convince the others that I might have been trying. He jerked backwards into the wall, except that his grip on me remained true, and I went with him. My head smacked into the his chest even as his head smacked into the wall. He was holding on so tightly now that my fingers were starting to go numb.
“Enough,” snapped Grenlow. “Contain her.”
Even as he said the words, Quick was already forcing the linked metal onto my wrists, pressing the ends together until they clicked, locking me in. I felt the effect on my power immediately, blanketing it. My wrists were not bound together, but instead were retained separately in links of metal tight enough to cause a tingling in my fingertips.
“Hazen!” I called, trying to get his attention. “Hazen, please look at me! Tell me what’s happening to you!”
He answered me with another wretched bellow of pain, and I heard the sounds of booted feet thundering up the stairs. The doors flung open and half a dozen soldiers spilled into the room, led by a bedraggled excuse for a man. His shoulders and back were stooped, his clothes hanging in tatters, his feet bare and dirty.
“You brought me presents,” the man purred, the soldiers melting back into the corridor as he stepped forward, his façade transforming.
Hair sprouted from his balding scalp, his posture straightened with the sickening sound of dislocation, and the wrinkles upon his face smoothed out. He was ageing backwards, walking towards Hazen… whose screams were growing.
“Just in time,” the stranger rasped, life flowing into him with every step closer that he got to Hazen’s body, now arching from the floor of its own accord.
“King Elias,” Ayleth voiced from the other side of the room. “Welcome home.”
Elias had barely spared the others a glance, but he paused now, his hands hovering inches from Hazen’s skull.
“Thank you.” He flicked a look to each of them as his fingers threaded into the hair of the one lying at his feet.
His eyes met mine and Hazen’s sounds of pain seemed to morph into something else, something that made my stomach heave. I lurched over and vomited onto the carpet, Quick still holding tight to my arms, even though my power had been cut off by the metal bracelets. Elias scowled, withdrawing his hands from Hazen’s head.
“What a mess you’ve made,” he told me, moving in the swift and silent stalk reminiscent of the other Soulstoy brothers.
He waved his hand at the carpet, and my vomit was doused with water, which heated into steam and unfurled into the air. “Don’t worry.” He grabbed my face, forcing me to look away from Hazen and into his own eyes. “I’ll take things from here. I will clean up the mess that you have made of my kingdom, sweet girl, and allow you to move onto the next life in… peace. You deserve that much, for babysitting my throne so dutifully.”
Hazen had grown quiet, but I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see anything past the death calling to me through the grey void of Elias’s irises.
“You’re not living,” I whispered. “You’re something else.”
Elias grinned at me, his tight grip softening, falling away from my face.
“You’re right, of course.”
“What are you?” I flicked a look to Hazen now, swallowing my terror as I drank in his colourless skin and unmoving limbs. I wouldn’t let him die.
Hazen, I called inwardly, please answer me. Please.
“You’re a smart girl,” Elias was studying my face. “Take a guess. If you get it right, I’ll allow you to attend to your human. I’ve taken what I need from him for now.”
That got my attention. I returned his scrutiny immediately, taking from him what he took from me. Perhaps he saw a scared little girl, tears in constant supply, fumbling her way into the traps of greater warriors, greater schemers, greater leaders…
“You’re behind everything.” I did not offer it to him as a question, because I was suddenly sure. “You’re the darkness that has dogged my every step since Nareon approached me in the forest. You shot me with an arrow, warning me to stay away. You attacked Hazen at the castle. You killed Nareon… You killed my father.”
“And much, much more,” he added with a slow twist to his mouth. “But that will do for now.”
Quick released my wrists and I flew to Hazen, realising on some level that I should have attacked Elias instead. I could have put up a good fight even without my powers, but I would have certainly died much sooner. I couldn’t see any way out of my own death, but there was no use provoking it to occur sooner than Elias intend
ed.
I pressed my hands to Hazen’s cold cheeks, trying not to let my metal bracelets touch him, turning his face back up to the light. His head was heavy, his breath undetectable.
“Don’t do this,” I commanded him desperately. “Open your eyes.”
I tried to hold back my tears, but my body was shuddering with silent sobs as I bent to kiss his face. I pressed my lips to his cheeks and the backs of his eyelids, a litany of senseless, whispered words battering his skin with each kiss.
Finally, I felt him. He didn’t answer me, didn’t twitch so much as an eyelid, but he was there in my mind. His presence crept into my awareness like a lurking fog, settling into my senses, testing out my capacity to house his own consciousness.
Bea.
I cried even harder, clutching his face to mine, pressing one last kiss to his lips before I laid him down gently and stood to face Elias. The man was watching me with his head tilted to the side, Soulstoy-style. I shuddered, and a flash of pleasure sparked in his expression.
“I enjoy such mental bonds,” he drawled, stalking around the room to where Grenlow stood, he tapped the other man on the temple, and I paused. Grenlow’s eyes were blank.
He was an empty shell.
“You’ve been…” I choked on my own words, feeling another wave of nausea roll over me. “It has been you all along,” I repeated.
Elias grinned, snapped his fingers, and Grenlow stood to attention. The switch was chilling. Grenlow was back to his usual self. His face was stony and expressionless, as always, but he was present. And I saw beneath the mask to things that I had only begun to see as I had gotten to know him better. The hint of concern in his gaze, swirling with something deeper, something that I had once mistaken for empathy.
“Stop,” I begged. “Stop playing with him, I can’t stand it.”
Elias pulled his consciousness back into his own body, reached over and picked a dagger from inside Grenlow’s coat, and then began to play with it. I watched as he leaned back against a side table, dug the tip of the blade into the polished wood, and began to spin it slowly around, carving a small hollow into the surface. Cereen, Rohan and Ayleth stood silently off to the side, each of them standing sentry with a part-terrified, part-reverent countenance.
“As I was saying,” he continued. “Mental bonds have always been… rather fascinating to me. I was always jealous of Nareon’s ability as a child. So I killed a man just like him. I honed the power, stretched it to its limits, and yet there are still those precious few out there who have managed to surpass me.”
He moved back to Hazen, dragging the blade across the length of the table as he went, gouging a long, crooked line.
“His power is strong. I can feel him inside your mind right now. He’s using you to stay alive, did you know that?” He knelt down beside Hazen and pressed the knife to his throat, angling it in a way that would surely do irreparable damage if he jerked his hand even an inch to the right.
I felt a wave of panic hit me, and I knew that it wasn’t just my own.
“Well?” Elias pressed, his hand inching infinitely closer.
“Yes,” I hastened. “He’s in my mind. He’s watching everything that you do.”
Elias’s face split into a smile, and I shuddered once again at what would have been a charming gesture on either of his brothers’ similar faces.
“Fascinating, truly. He must have a strong mind partner, that’s important you know. Mine was somewhat…” he glanced back at Grenlow, “…lacking. When he started to go mad, people began noticing. Nareon suspected, so I had to take over.”
“When?” croaked Ayleth from the corner of the room, surprising both of us.
She was almost as white as Hazen, her lips quivering, her eyes wide in horror, staring not at Elias or me. She was staring at Grenlow, her fingers clutching his arm.
Elias spun around slowly, the smile on his face falling away to sorrow. “Oh, my dear. I’m afraid it has been quite some time now. After your love child was conceived, but before your revenge was plotted. Your beloved Grenlow was loosing his mind quicker than I could have dared hope. I had to come up with a plan. It was my first time, taking over Grenlow’s body—I used him to kill his own child. He didn’t want to live after that, so I hid my own body in the jails of the human kingdom, where nobody would think to look for me, and I gave him what he wanted. I took over. I crushed his soul, until there was nothing left of him but a vessel for me to exist through. Nothing left of the guilt at what he had done under my control, nothing left of the fear he harboured. I saved him, don’t you see?”
Ayleth’s knees crumpled, and she turned her white face to Elias, her mouth slack with shock.
“It was you. It wasn’t Nareon. You only wanted me to turn on Nareon. You killed my son, you killed his father, you did it all just so that I would turn on Nareon. You convinced me to seduce him, to get as close to him as possible, you promised me a chance to avenge our son… but all along, it was you. It wasn’t Grenlow, it wasn’t Nareon, it was you. IT WAS YOU!”
She surged to her feet and ran at him, so quickly that Quick actually stepped up and jerked me backwards. Nobody noticed; they were all too busy staring at Ayleth, who was now slumped against Elias, gurgling. She slid down his torso and crumpled to the ground, his knife buried in her stomach.
“Yes,” he cooed. “It was me.” He crouched down to smooth the hair from her face. “I made him kill your baby, and then I made him lie to you about it. It was the perfect plan really. Such an act weakened his soul enough for me to take over completely, and gave me the perfect ammunition to manipulate you. I made him tell you that it was Nareon, that it was jealousy, because Nareon wanted you for himself. I made it all up, and then I stroked your face as I am doing now, do you remember?”
He bent down and kissed her forehead tenderly as she stared up at him in horror, bloodied hands clutching her stomach.
“Shhh…” he continued to smooth her hair as her body started to convulse. “Everything will be okay, my love. You will be okay. I will protect you.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The Spider’s Web
Elias stayed with Ayleth until her last breath, stroking her hair and staring lovingly into her eyes. I couldn’t watch, couldn’t bear to see the expression on her face, or to know what she had been through at the hands of the monster that was Elias Soulstoy. It didn’t matter that she had plotted against me, all I could see was a broken woman, a woman whose everything had been ripped from her. A woman whose life had been driven by revenge and whose death had been a bloated jest, a perfect end to the perfect game as far as Elias cared.
When it was over, he stood and let her head thump carelessly to the ground.
“Clean this up,” he muttered, gesturing to her. “I have business with the girl, and business can never be conducted with bodies on the floor. It’s unseemly.”
I wasn’t sure who he was actually talking to, but Cereen and Rohan jumped to do his bidding. They didn’t make eye contact with anyone, not even each other. They simply lifted Ayleth and carried her away, before returning silently to their posts beside the empty shell that was once Grenlow. Elias straightened his overcoat, moved to the round table before the fireplace and sat down in the chair directly beneath the giant banner that had originally caught my attention. He propped his elbow atop the table and delicately rested his chin in his palm, dead grey eyes travelling from Hazen to me.
“Sit,” he finally commanded. “We have things to discuss.”
I moved to the table, stepping gingerly over Hazen, and sat myself opposite the man who had existed as my greatest enemy, completely unbeknownst to me.
“You will tell the Hereditary Scroll to name me, and then you will die,” he said calmly, pulling a small wooden case from his pocket, and placing it upon the table.
He opened the lid and turned it to face me. The Hereditary Scroll was there, folded in upon itself neatly.
“No,” I said firmly. “You can kill me, but I won�
��t name you. I’ll not leave these people with you. I didn’t want them at first, but they are my people now. All of them, even those that wish me dead.”
I found myself standing, reaching for the Hereditary Scroll. “I am an unwilling Queen, but I am still the Queen.”
I threw the case at the window, cracking the glass, and then turned back to Elias and slammed my fist onto the table. “Stop hiding behind your perverted games! I will summon a wind to rip you into a million tiny pieces. Except that it won’t stop there. I am a weapon, Elias Soulstoy. The end of everything as we know it is constantly burning inside me. Storms that will pull castles from the ground and toss them into the sea, lightning that will ignite fire enough to burn fields for days, and rain to weep away the bodies until nothing and nobody is left!”
“Ah yes, what you say is true.” He countered my outburst calmly. “But I do not think that you are so hasty, child. You might be willing to end your own life to end mine. But will you sacrifice the lives of your loved ones as well? And what of your people? Is no life at all really better than the alternative?”
I fell back into my chair, anger still boiling within me.
“Don’t hide behind these,” I said, holding up my cuffs. “Let us see who is more powerful. Let us see who is the true ruler.”
He chuckled delightedly. “Oh, Beatrice, how you have changed. But you shall not goad me. There is no need to fight. I have everything in place, and you will do what I say.”
He waved his hand, and the Hereditary Scroll flew back onto the table. “Now, it is simple.” He withdrew a quill from an inner pocket of his coat, and handed it to me. “Sign my name on the scroll, and mean it, or else your Hazen will die.”
As if on cue, Hazen groaned. I jumped out of my chair and fell to him again. “Hazen?”
His eyes opened, dark, emotion-filled irises focusing on me, shrinking and contracting.
“Bea,” he croaked. “Sign it.”
I drew back in shock. Hazen would never say that, he would rather die than allow a man like Elias to win. He knew that the two kingdoms needed to stand united against the Valens, and he knew that it would never happen as long as Elias was king.
The Soulstoy Inheritance (Beatrice Harrow Series Book 2) Page 23
