Parasite Soul (21 page)

“What… what is a heartstopper?” he asked, fearful of the answer.

“That which currently resides within you,” the leshy answered
curtly, stepping around Sasha and into the room. His expression suggested he
would as soon spit on Simon as speak with him. “Something unwholesome which can
be unleashed in moments of great emotion.”

“That can’t be true,” Simon fought to control his anxiety in case it
was. “I’m human.”

“Hmpf,” Hezben snorted, straightening a bone-tooth necklace which
was fixed about his neck so that it hung
just so
and striding across the
room to help Oswald. “That might once have been true.”

Simon shook his head vehemently. “But then, when did I become this…
heartstopper thing? I’ve noticed no difference, I…”

The leshy overrode him with an impatient gesture. “How do I
know
when
it happened? Am I your guardian? Your
chronicler? Suffice it to say that it happened, perhaps recently, as it
has not yet consumed you. Here, you oaf.” This last was directed at
Oswald. “The valerian root is
here
.”

“Sorry, Hez.”

“It will
consume
me?” Simon felt faint. He had been
standing, he was sure he would have collapsed. The leshy didn’t trouble
to answer him, just shot him a look swimming with venom.

Niu was now sitting as far from Simon now as the table would
politely allow. “All this time I traveled with you, yet you are as much a
danger to me as Princess Tiera.”

“I’m
not
,” Simon said urgently, reaching for her hand.
Biting her lower lip, she pulled it away.

“You are,” Hezben contradicted coldly. “You are danger to any
being with a functioning heart, and you will continue to become more so.”

“Then how do I stop it?” Simon asked desperately. “Assuming
any of this is true, how do I make this thing… go away?”

The leshy turned to study him, eyes roving in their visible wooden
sockets. He shook his head slightly.

“First, tea,” he grunted.

Minutes passed before Simon held another comfortingly warm mug
cupped between his shaking hands. Clearly aggrieved that the chairs had
been appropriated by unwanted guests, Hezben perched stiff-backed upon his bed
and sipped his tea sourly. Sasha, who had forgotten or elected to ignore
her warning to remain in the vicinity of the door mat, was engaged in a
close-quarters staring match with the mounted elk’s head. Niu had adopted
a wary, darkly speculative expression. On the rare occasion she caught
his pleading gaze, she favored him with a thin, tight smile which was hardly
reassuring.

“So,” Simon said when he could bear the tension no longer.
“Tell me more about this heartstopper thing.”

“It is a grievous affliction for those unequipped to handle
it. A malicious parasitic soul,” Hezben expanded, “Reliant upon the
instability of its host’s emotions. It takes only one bout of strong
emotion to unleash the soul’s power, but this can be a disastrous enough turn
of events to manipulate the host, in his confusion, to accidentally unleash it
again and again as his fear and despair strengthens and multiply.”

Simon moaned aloud, not caring how juvenile he might sound. “I
thought Vanyon was protecting me.”

“I could see how it might seem that way,” the leshy said
caustically, “To a toddler.”

Simon ignored the insult. “What… what can I expect?”

Hezben sipped his tea primly. “Some never come to understand
what is happening to them. They wind up killing their loved ones;
eventually, perhaps, even their entire communities in the growing depths of
their despair. Fortunately, such instances are more uncommon even than
the heartstopper souls themselves, which are mercifully few and far
between. But I say this: no one carrying the weight of a heartstopper has
ever seen their story through to a tidy conclusion. Even now, a
desperation is settling upon you that the soul is drawing power from. If
you cannot control your stronger feelings – positive and negative alike – there
will ever be consequences for those in your vicinity.”

“Positive as well?” Simon groaned. Somewhere at the back of
his mind, a fantasy had been forming, that he and Niu survived their journey to
Jynn and took up together in a cottage there somewhere - or whatever they lived
in in that eastern kingdom. That Niu grew to forget Cihau and love him
instead; that they lived happily. A simplistic, even childish fantasy
perhaps, but impossible to fulfill if love was also off the table.
“Please… how do I get rid of it?”

Hezben set his teacup down with exaggerated care. Then he
stood, folded his hands behind his back, and began to pace, stiffly
straight-legged.

“You don’t,” he said. “The curse will eventually consume
you. Your best option is to lose yourself in the wilds, where at least
you can bring no harm to those you care about. But not my wilds,” the
leshy added severely. “I will not have a parasitic curse haunting my
forest.”

“There must be a way,” Niu interjected, studying Simon’s crumpling
face. “Surely there is nothing that can not be reversed. Even
death.” She glanced at Sasha.

Hezben’s lopsided shrug gave Simon little confidence. “Perhaps
it is possible,” he admitted, “Though to the extent of my knowledge, there is
no record of it ever having been done, nor even a documented process by which
it might be attempted.” He glared at Simon. “When the rains let up, we
will guide you into the mountains. From there, I care not where you go or
what you do, but do not return to my domain.”

“The sword,” Simon said suddenly, unwilling to submit to
permanent exile so easily.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Right before… all this happened. I found a sword. A
rusty old thing, cast aside. It’s what inspired me to try my hand at
fighting the Cannevish Wyrm.”

Hezben’s eyes glittered. “Indeed?” His pacing grew more
frenetic. “That does have precedent. I seem to recall a text… when
Lady Sirena of Lossale became possessed by the soul in centuries long past, she
is recorded to have recently inherited a veritable treasure trove of wealth
from a deceased uncle. Her character began to change, historians say, from
about that time and she began to pick fights with nobles she didn’t care for,
eventually scaling up to neighboring kingdoms. Swaths of soldiers fell
before her, it is said, as though they were struck down by an invisible hand,
and likewise her own men fell. She was noted to have started wearing an
uncharacteristically unfashionable necklace around that time. Show me
this sword.”

“I don’t have it,” Simon said. “I left it in Vingate.”

The leshy’s eyes widened. One hand twitched as though he were
resisting the urge to slap Simon. “Then someone else is in possession of
the soul.”

“Isn’t it in me?” Simon returned defensively.

Hezben pondered this.

“I don’t know,” he admitted at length. “Whether the soul leaps
from item to host, or simply infects its victims while continuing to reside in
its original vessel, perhaps multiplying… no! Who can say? No one
has fully studied this force. Scholars cannot even decide whether it is a
conscious entity in its own right, or something more akin to a contagion; and
where I say ‘
scholars
’, I mean the two or three doddering old fools
throughout history who have bothered to tackle the subject with any attention.”

“I’m impressed you know all this, Hez,” Oswald chipped in
admiringly.

The leshy waved the compliment away. “I make it a habit to be
aware of what goes on in the world around me,” he said. “The better to
protect the forest.”

“So the gist of it is,” Simon said wearily, “That no one knows what
the heartstopper soul really is, whether it’s in me or not, or if I can purge
it or not.”

Hezben grinned coldly, all wooden teeth and no humor. “What I
do know,” he said, “Is that I don’t want it within miles of my home. So
get some rest; tomorrow you will be leaving the forest forever.”

Oswald smiled apologetically from just out of Hezben’s line of
sight. “We have some spare furs that you can sleep on. But first,”
he added, mock-heartily, “What would you say to a nice, hot meal?”

“I already ate,” said Sasha. “But I may go back for seconds
before they congeal entirely.”

That night, while outside the downpour dwindled to a light pattering
and the winds finally held their breath, Simon huddled on his furs, wide
awake. Niu was curled nearby, out of immediate reach. Simon didn’t
doubt her sympathy – he could see it in her eyes – but she wasn’t going to
chance succumbing to his spectral infection.

Sasha stood near the embers of the fire, unmoving. The eerie
bruxa wasn’t asleep, not traditionally, at least; she appeared to have simply
frozen in place. Oswald snored loudly, without a care in the world.
Hezben, Simon was sure, was awake and listening intently in case his unwanted
guests proved dangerous.

Unable to process everything that he’d just learned, too weary and
heartsick to predict his own uncertain future, Simon stared unseeing into the
darkness. Bursts of hope that his curse might be impermanent, that it
might fade if he was outside the immediate influence of the item which had
possessed him, were repeatedly trampled by his mounting fears and
uncertainties. His mind threatened to shred itself as he considered the
possibilities from all angles, so he forced his terror aside and attempted to
focus instead on what tomorrow might bring.
One step at a time
.

As he slowly surrendered to his mental exhaustion, his beleaguered
mind demanded the answer to one last burning question:
who now possessed the
sword containing the heartstopper soul
?

When Tiera awoke, Farrow was dead. Her final handmaiden lay
sprawled facedown on the floor clutching at her chest, her eyes wide with
shock. Tiera hadn’t heard a thing; her nightmares had consumed her
completely. As she’d slept, her various frustrations had boiled over into
a volcano of rage which had suffused her dreams with fury. Why, despite
her position of authority and influence, was she simply some political tool to
secure good relations between kingdoms? How long could she
stand a union with that insufferable dandy Prince Stallix? Why were her
brother’s chambers off limits to her? How had the insolent peasant
managed to evade her father’s troops at every turn? And
how
, above
all else - the one question which caused her stomach to seethe like a nest of
snakes -
could a cretin of such low birth and standing presume to find her
lacking
?

And now Farrow was dead, her corpse sullying the floor of Tiera’s
own bedchamber. The princess was struck by a second wave of fury.
Who would lace up her gown this morning? How could she attend court
without a servant? She would be the laughingstock of the nobles.
She had half a mind to drag Farrow’s body across to the window and toss it from
the tower.

Finally, the thought cutting through a thick haze of petulance, it
occurred to Tiera to wonder
how
Farrow had died.
Poison,
perhaps,
she considered.
Some concoction meant for me that the
silly girl couldn’t keep her hands off of
. This led Tiera to the
realization that if Farrow had accidentally suffered some death meant for her,
than someone wanted her dead even more so than usual. Rather than causing
her alarm, this pleased her in two ways. Firstly, she would take utmost
joy in having the culprit hunted down and eviscerated. Secondly, it meant
that someone had decided that she was noteworthy enough to have killed.

Finally. Someone recognizes my importance
.

Padding across to Farrow’s body, Tiera crouched beside it and, with
some effort, rolled it over. She wasn’t used to physical exertion, having
always relied on others to perform even the slightest of laborious tasks for
her, and found the corpse frustratingly heavy. There wasn’t a mark on it
that she could see. Almost certainly poison, then. Whatever had
happened to the girl, Tiera wanted her unsightly remains removed immediately,
and called for the guards.

No answer. For the first time, a prickle of something akin to
anxiety touched Tiera’s spine. She called out again, without
result. Finally, irritation trumping caution, she marched to her chamber
door and threw it wide. If the men outside had left their posts or were
ignoring her, they would never see their families again.

As it turned out, she wasn’t wrong: neither of the guards assigned
to her suite would be going home. One lay on his back, legs splayed,
clutching at his chest plate. The other sagged against the wall, eyes
wide and blank. Both had been dead for some time.

Tiera, unaccustomed to fear, went cold. Her voice rose an
octave as she called out again, choking into silence as she caught sight of a
second pair of crumpled lumps at the end of the hall.

An assassination attempt?
Tiera wondered
wildly, retreating into her rooms, slamming and barring the door. But how
could that be? The assassin had successfully eliminated the guards and,
if Farrow’s corpse was evidence, had managed to enter her chambers. There
had been no obstacle between killer and sleeping target.

Was the assassin still in the chamber
?
With a cold thrill of dread, Tiera considered the various possible hiding
places where a killer might lurk. Her expansive wardrobe and the space
beneath her bed took on a threatening aspect of a kind she hadn’t experienced
since childhood. She, Tiera Minus, daughter of the regent of Cannevish
and famously afraid of nothing, stood paralyzed and unable to think or act.

Eventually, she unthawed. The assassin was gone; why should he
or she hide? His aim had never been to kill her, or she would already be
dead. More likely this was a political statement, possibly meant for her
father.
Mess with us
, it said,
and look how easily we can get
to your daughter
. Her father had no end of political enemies, after
all. Perhaps this was the kingdom of Quell‘s way of ensuring that the
agreements which Tiera’s and Anton Stannix’s union were intended to cement were
honored. If Tiera ever determined that to be true, then her husband-to-be
was in for a truly rocky marriage.

A sudden thought struck her: had the attack been limited to
her floor? Had her father suffered a similar intrusion? She heard
no alarum, but her father was the kind of man to handle such affairs quietly,
just to show that he hadn’t been rattled. Or worse, had King Minus been the
target all along? Had the intruders killed her father and left her to
live for some enigmatic reason? Perhaps so that Quell could take
immediate control of Cannevish without waiting for the king to die?

No, that made no sense. Tiera took a deep, calming
breath. Even if Anton’s father intended to make such a grab for power, he
would certainly have waited until his son was married to Tiera and his line had
a legal claim to the land. There was nothing Quell could hope to gain
from such a move at present, except war. Unless someone
wanted
to
instigate violent confrontation? Not everyone was thrilled with the idea
of unifying the two kingdoms.

I’m getting ahead of myself
, Tiera
thought.
Before I worry about any of this, I have to get to
safety. Which means
…

Which meant she had to brave the hall of dead guards and whatever
might await her beyond.

A weapon. I need a weapon
.

Tiera did not keep weapons in her chamber. The guards were her
blades; this was a situation which she’d never prepared for. There was no
way she was going out into that hallway unarmed, though, and she cast around
for an improvised weapon. Her scissors, perhaps?

The peasant’s blade
! Tiera rushed
to her bed and, with some trepidation, knelt to peer underneath it. No
assassin lurked there, but the rusty old sword, scalded into ruin by dragon
acid, still lay on its bed of burlap. It was a hideously unsightly thing,
but it was a weapon, and it had sent the Cannevish Wyrm to an early
grave. Tiera had no idea how to wield it with any skill, but she felt
better with it in hand all the same.

Rushing to the door before she could lose her courage, she pushed
out into the corridor in her nightclothes, blade first. Stepping over the
bodies of the guards, she moved toward the downward stair, jumping at every
sound, no matter how innocuous or remote. The throne room seemed
impossibly far away, and she disliked the idea of appearing before the court
disheveled and afraid. Any measure of awe the nobles might hold her in
would be forfeit forever; worse, it would appear to them that her father could
not protect his own house, never mind his kingdom. Where then to go for
protection?

She might make her way to the chamber of her betrothed, Prince
Anton. The man was a primping buffoon, but his men could shield her from
whatever enemy had breached the house of Minus. Still, she
hesitated. She didn’t want to be beholden to Quell’s irritating peacock
in any respect. At the presentation which had been dubbed the Ceremony of
the Savior, where the scion of King Stallix had claimed victory over the
Cannevish Wyrm while posing alongside its head, he had refused to touch the
blade responsible at the last moment, on the pretext that it ‘might ruin his
gloves’. The man really was useless. No; Tiera had to get word to
her father without involving Prince Anton or the revealing her distress to the
nobility.

Breathing fast, she slipped downstairs with the twitchiness of a
squirrel, finding herself in the hall where the barricaded entrance to her
brother’s chambers was guarded now only by a dead man. She rushed down
the passage, deeply fearful now, pausing where it branched to listen.

From the direction of the throne room, muffled only by the great oak
door, she could hear voices. Was her father’s among them? She
couldn’t tell, but there were no sounds of panic or confusion, no raised voices
or shouted orders. Court life was proceeding as normal. Even if her
father wasn’t in attendance, members of the palace guard would be stationed
there. Her best and safest choice was to swallow her pride, run twenty
steps down the corridor to the throne room and throw herself upon their
protection.

Surprisingly, her feet remained rooted to the floor. She urged
her legs to move, but they wouldn’t cooperate. Unwillingly, her eyes
turned toward the forbidden door to Merequio’s rooms. Would she ever get
another unhindered chance to say goodbye to her brother? To give closure
to a decade of her life, a chance to lay her haunted nightmares to rest?

Killer be damned, she had to do it.

Her feet brought her to the fallen Warrington, Warrensworth,
whatever the lumbering lout’s name might have been. Tiera wondered if he
had a family, or indeed anyone who might miss him. She hoped his death
would cause them pain. Had she not been barefoot, she might have ground
her heel in his wide, stupid face.

Stooping beside him, she rifled about at his belt for his key
ring. She had no idea which of the twelve keys fitted Merequio’s door,
and each failed attempt increased her jumpiness. She cast constant
glances over her shoulder, certain that the jangling and scraping would draw
the attention of the assassin, but the corridor remained silent.
Eventually a small, rusty key turned in the lock and she breathed a sigh of
deepest relief.

The door opened only grudgingly. Tiera was forced to use the
rusty sword to lever it open, which was almost beyond her ability. Her
soft, pampered palms were sure to blister, but she accepted that as a
consequence of an opportunity she could hardly pass up. Once she’d pried
the resistant door open to a width she could slip through, she found herself in
a chamber much smaller than she remembered. Cobwebs shrouded the walls
and shuttered the high window so that little light spilled inside. Most
of the furnishings were gone, possessions crated up. Only a wardrobe in
which Tiera had once hidden during a spirited game of hide and seek remained,
stark and lonely against the bare stone walls. The room was as much a
skeleton as her brother. Tiera felt a lump swelling unbidden in her
throat.

With some effort, she dragged the door shut again so that she could
not be easily surprised and cast about for her brother’s spirit. Was
Merequio at rest, or did some part of him still haunt this place? She
thought she’d felt his ghostly touch on occasion before, as she passed the
door, an echo of his being. Did his soul walk these chambers? Was
that why her father had them sealed up?

“Merequio?” she whispered, her voice as tentative and uncertain as
she’d heard it since her memories of
that day
. “Are you here?”

No answer. Had she really expected one? A tiny corner of
her heart answered back:
yes, yes she had,
and she wasn’t about to
give up so easily.

“Brother?” she called again, stepping further into the room.
“It’s me, Tiera. Forgive me, Merequio… I wanted to visit you, I’ve wanted
to for so long, but father… father wouldn’t permit it.”

Silence. Tiera sniffed and fought the tears welling behind her
eyes.

“Are you no longer here, brother?” she asked softly. “Is
Vanyon’s kingdom better? Can you see me, at least? If you’re
watching, give me a sign.”

Nothing stirred in the chamber, but something in the wardrobe
moaned.

Tiera shrieked, stifling a full scream by clapping one hand over her
mouth. A suffocating terror descended upon her as she fled for the
door. Abruptly, as her fingers closed about the door handle, a thought
struck her. It took every ounce of courage to turn back, to face and
address the wardrobe directly.

“M… Merequio?” she whispered, heart hammering.

Another moan, prolonged this time, echoed from within the wardrobe
or, as Tiera now suspected, from some distance behind it. She took a
tentative step forward. For the first time, she noticed a trail though
the dust, connecting the wardrobe to the door. She was hardly the first
person to pass this way.

“It
is
you,” she said breathlessly, hope and dread battling
violently in her breast. “But how can that…?”

She left the question unasked. This couldn’t be
Merequio. Her brother had died many years ago; she shuddered as a vivid
recollection of his demolished face flashed across her mind’s eye. A
ghost then, but wasn’t a spirit what she’d come to see? And her brother’s
soul sounded as though it were in pain. She had to face it – him.
There was no other way of laying her past to rest. Gliding across the cold
floor in a nearly dreamlike state, she extended a shaking hand and opened the
wardrobe doors.

This was not the cozy space Tiera had once hidden in, so long ago,
when it had been filled with her brother’s best clothes and hunting gear.
Now it was an empty, uninviting maw, the back of which had been roughly cut
away. Behind this repellant opening, a stairway descended into near
blackness, although Tiera, straining her eyes, thought she detected the distant
light of a guttering torch. In that moment of indecision, as she was
deliberating as how to proceed, nothing appealed less than the idea of
committing herself to that dark throat to confront whatever phantom awaited
below. Best to find and confront her father, demanding to know what
abomination lurked beneath her brother’s old chambers.