Parasite Soul (24 page)

Niu considered him wisely. She nudged him companionably with
her knee. “Yes. You would have to make certain sacrifices.”

“Would it…” Simon could barely choke the words out. “Would it
be a sacrifice for you, as well?”

Tilting her head, Niu studied him sadly. “Oh, Simon,” was all she
said.

It’s not me she wants
, Simon thought
bitterly.
It was never me, and it never can be.
It was this
Cihau, this damn street entertainer, whose memory she clung to. How could
Simon compete with a ghost?

“Whatever we do,” she said at length, “We should do it together.”

Swallowing the sour taste in his mouth, Simon nodded. Niu made
to stand; impulsively, he reached for her.

“Niu,” he managed, his voice hoarse. She returned his gaze
with a wary smile, and he understood instinctively that she knew and dreaded
what he was about to say. He said it anyway. “I love you.”

Averting her eyes, she cleared her throat.

“No,” she said softly, uncomfortably. “You do not.”

Simon wasn’t about to be told how he felt. “I do,” he insisted
earnestly.

“Simon, you do not,” she repeated more forcefully. “Love is a
powerful, passionate emotion. If love was what you felt for me, I would
already be dead.”

With that, she scrambled out into the embrace of the forest.
Stunned, Simon watched her retreating form until the trees swallowed it.
Burying his face into his knees, he allowed one final tear to dampen the
fabric. Then, fighting the sudden heaviness in his limbs, he wearily
pulled himself to his feet and followed her.

The road to Sallinger was aggravatingly, unnecessarily serpentine,
but at least the recent rains kept dust from kicking up. Tiera rode
alongside her masked and hooded brother with a small company of guards.
These men had no idea as to Merequio’s identity, but repressed their curiosity
and suspicion out of fear of triggering the princess’ wrath. Tiera had handpicked
young soldiers and an abrasive junior officer named Thornton to be her
escort. In the short term, these men were unlikely to ask
questions. Thornton in particular was blinkered by the hopes of potential
promotion. By the time he and the others understood that they’d helped
their patricidal mistress escape justice, she would have crossed the border
into Verivista.

As to what she and her undead brother hoped to accomplish once
they’d escaped into the neighboring kingdom was not a puzzle Tiera had yet
managed to solve. She had no intention of hiding herself away
indefinitely, nor of taking a disguise and assimilating herself into the common
masses. She was accustomed to a certain quality of life and had no
intention of sacrificing it entirely. Yet any hope she had of somehow
twisting her father’s death to her immediate benefit had been destroyed by her
instinctive flight from the capital.

Might it have been wiser to have remained and found some way to
blame her father’s death on assassins or illness? The question haunted
her, but panic had clouded her judgment and the damage was now done.
Surely she could have twisted the circumstances of his death to her
benefit? There was no physical proof that she’d killed him, after all, and
in her moments of deepest anxiety she doubted Merequio’s assertions that she
was responsible for what had befallen him. Where could such power have
come from? She’d experimented once or twice on the road, willing
Lieutenant Thornton or one of his subordinates dead, and nothing had come of
it, not so much as a twitch or gasp. Perhaps her vampire brother had
drained King Minus and his men of life himself, yet placed the burden on
Tiera’s shoulders for his own enigmatic reasons.

In her darker moments, she wondered whether she should have ordered
Merequio arrested and destroyed. There would have been no difficulty
blaming her father’s death on a creature such as that which her brother had
become. In her heart, however, she knew she would never have been able to
go through with it. This was Merequio after all, her only surviving blood
and, more importantly, the only person she’d ever given a damn about. She
would not betray him.

Still, as she was jostled about on the back of a huge piebald
courser meant for a knight – Tiera hating riding and horses and owned none of
her own - she cursed herself viciously. Flight had
not
been her
best option. Merequio had talked her into it. The vampire had
counseled – reasonably, it had seemed while Tiera’s thoughts had been stampeding
about like a herd of panicked jackalopes – that the nobles would blame her for
the incident, pouncing upon the opportunity to order her execution so that they
could squabble over the throne. Best to flee the country, he’d said, and
build a power base from which to retake it.

That advice had seemed good at the time, but Tiera had been
flustered and unable to consider her situation in cold blood. Now that
she was on the road, riding for a foreign kingdom which was unlikely to embrace
her with open arms, much less assist with her ambitions, she wondered if she
shouldn’t have remained at home and attempted to paint herself as an innocent
victim in her father’s demise. A bit of wailing and hair-tearing might
have convinced all but the most skeptical members of the court that she’d been
the hapless dupe of some plot against her family – as indeed, she might well
have been. She still wasn’t convinced that Merequio hadn’t manipulated
her to his own ends.

Had he ‘survived’, Merequio would have inherited the throne
, Tiera reminded herself.
He would have been first in line,
and without the baggage of this marriage charade that I got saddled with. He
has to be bitter about that. If I flee the country, I will have proven my
guilt beyond doubt to the nobility, after which my brother can take the throne
for himself. Nobody has yet seen his face, not even Thornton. It
would be easy enough for him to stage a miraculous return from the dead and
claim his birthright. He just has to get me out of the way, and perhaps he
has fond enough memories of me to be averse to killing me outright.

Or perhaps,
she amended, struck by a new
thought,
perhaps he’s afraid of me.
He had, after all, expressed
admiration upon discovering her newfound abilities. Did that approval
mask a deeper layer of fear?

Her brother brought his black charger up beside her own. Prior
to their flight from the palace, she’d assisted in the creation of a hasty
makeshift neck brace using a gorget from a fallen guard, his father’s belt, and
the stretchers from Merequio’s chair. The end result was awkward and
decidedly temporary. He was forced to turn his entire upper body stiffly
to face her, keeping his voice low so that none of their escort might
overhear. Tiera, straining to interpret his harsh whispers, was grateful
for the cloak and cowl which kept him from looking like a complete
imbecile.

“Sister,” he grated. “I do not remember Verivista as being a
kingdom welcoming to our own. Perhaps one of the northern kingdoms would
have been a better choice?”

“Things have changed since you died, brother,” Tiera returned.
“Verivista is militant, true, but we enjoy an uneasy alliance with them
now.” These were her father’s words. She was parroting him nearly
verbatim, which sounded dissimilar enough from her normal style of speech to
earn her an appraising look from her brother. “Their king is
opportunistic; he might invade if we showed weakness, but we have no official
quarrel. Their queen is sympathetic to us.”

Tiera had given all the kingdoms flanking Cannevish some
consideration, but she’d settled on Verivista. There were safer options,
perhaps, but she had an ulterior motive for determining her destination.
Of all the checkpoints dividing the various kingdoms, Verivista’s was the nearest.
Tiera was certain the peasant would attempt to flee the kingdom in that
direction, particularly since that bitch handmaiden, Niu, hailed from lands to
the east. Despite her unfortunate new circumstances, The Peasant and The
Bitch were still going to die, if the opportunity presented itself. She
needed
them to die.

“I see.” Her brother sounded unconvinced. “Perhaps Quell would
have been wiser. Your betrothed’s father might have shielded us.”

Tiera laughed loudly and bitterly enough to catch Lieutenant
Thornton’s attention. She hastily reduced the volume. “You would
trust our fates to the sire of
Prince Anton
? Had I been
wiser
,
I would have attributed this whole mess to that fop. It would have meant
war with Quell, perhaps, but not an elongated one. The pass between our
kingdoms is not suited to invasion forces. At worst, trade would have
halted between our kingdoms for a generation.” She cursed herself: why
had it not occurred to her to blame House Stallix for her father’s
murder? Was it too late to fabricate some story which would incriminate
them?

Yes, you fool, the second you left the capital. And now you’ve
left Anton holding the reigns.
She brooded
over this oversight for a time as an endlessly mundane quilt of farms rolled
past.
Perhaps I can at least work Anton into my narrative when we
reach Verivista. I could say that he had my father killed and took my
kingdom; I escaped only in time and require assistance to retake Vingate.
That could work. Verivista will certainly want something in exchange, but
that will be a sacrifice I’ll have to make. Of course, this all hinges on
Prince Anton having the balls to seize his opportunity. I wouldn’t be
shocked if the prancing eunuch flounces back to Quell in a tizzy
.

“I am growing hungry.” Merequio interrupted her thoughts.

Shuddering, Tiera chose not to look directly at the wolfish grin
framed by expressionless metal. “Not our men,” she cautioned. “We
will still need them.”

“Undoubtedly,” the vampire agreed. He gestured out across the
fields. “Now if a farmer or two were to disappear, however, or perhaps a
milkmaid…”

“Not in sight of the soldiers.”

Merequio sighed theatrically. “Tonight, then.”

Tiera rolled her eyes. “If you must.”

The vampire considered her with shadowed eyes. “Does my…
condition… offend you?”

“No,” Tiera answered truthfully. “But I am slightly
disappointed. You spent years chained in that chamber, with father
providing your meals, yet all you can think of upon gaining freedom is eating.”

Merequio chuckled. “Perhaps in the interim I’ve lost my sense
of wonder.”

“Mm.” Tiera supposed there wasn’t much to excite the eye in this
ocean of patchwork of farms. Yet Vingate hadn’t intrigued her brother
much either, as they’d left the capital. He’d studied some of the
passersby with a predatory eye, particularly the young women whose company he’d
been denied for so long; otherwise, he seemed to take little note of his
surroundings. No curiosity sparked as to the multitude of changes which
had transformed the city following his death and incarceration. He
demonstrated no jubilation at his newfound freedom. All that seemed to
remain was hunger, gnawing and ever-prevalent. Perhaps the forests and
mountains Tiera spied in the distance would remind him of his youth as a
hunter, recalling some semblance of the personality which the vampire had
consumed. If not, she felt she might begin to suspect that the thing
riding at her side was no longer her brother in any aspect beyond the physical.

“Little princess,” Merequio said softly. The words jolted the
breath from her. She turned her head to face him, eyes wide.

“What did you s…” she began.

The vampire held up one hand. “I still remember.”

Wonderful
, Tiera thought bitterly
.
Among his other new abilities, he can read minds
. Still, she couldn’t
prevent the nearly nauseous wave of longing which shot through her heart.
She pined for those days of innocence, when she was just a twelve-year-old girl
who looked up to an older brother who had pledged always to protect her.

“It’s as though we’re going hunting again,” she admitted at
length. “Like that last time, only…” Her throat closed.

“Only those two people barely exist now.” Merequio nodded. “Do
you remember the crush you had on that huntsmaster? What was his name?”

Tiera smiled slightly. “Aphridion.”

“I remember thinking you only came along to gawk at him.”

“I was a little girl. I didn’t realize how cavernously beneath
me he was.” She yawned affectedly to drive her point home. Her
brother’s knowing smirk made her wonder whether she hadn’t overdone it.

“Nobles, peasants, everyone in between. You all taste the same
to me,” Merequio said. Tiera thought about that, decided that she didn’t
want to explore the sentiment.

“I remember you killed a hare,” she said shortly. “
How
you killed it. That stayed with me for years.”

“Ah-ah,” Merequio corrected. “
You
killed the
hare. With a rock, remember? Poor beast. You were dead set on
making a mess.”

Tiera frowned. “But I remember…”

“”I told you I wouldn’t tell father what you’d done, if you beat me
back to camp in a footrace. He would
not
have been pleased, not
after… well. In any event, the creature’s blood was on your hands.”

“No, I’m quite sure that I…”

“My memory is flash-frozen in that day, the day of my death, dear
sister. I recall it with crystalline clarity.”

Tiera shook her head as though to rid it of a decade’s accumulation
of clutter. Had she truly killed the hare? Surely not. She
could remember gripping the instrument of the animal’s destruction, offering it
to her brother, and then... she recalled the crunching, the hare’s head
flattening grotesquely as blood and brains stained the snow… she remembered her
own sick horror. And fascination. No, horror. Definitely
horror.

“I have such a clear memory of it,” she said. Her voice
sounded more plaintive than she would have liked.

“Human memory is a tricky thing,” Merequio replied patronizingly,
and the conversation ended.

He can’t be right,
Tiera thought, angry and
confused.
I was a child. I didn’t have in me.
A
coldness descended.
But… what if he’s right? What else have I
been wrong about? Is he just toying with my mind
? Then with
more certainty:
He’s toying with my mind. That’s what vampires
and their kind do. Keep their prey off-balance and uncertain, then reel
them in
.
It doesn’t matter
.
The past is just
that. That little girl has long been lost to history. In her place
is a princess with more pressing concerns.

Why, then, do I still feel like a frightened child
?

The answer was obvious: Merequio. Was the thing with
brother’s memories truly was her brother? Had he simply misremembered the
incident with the hare? Was the vampire was tormenting her with
falsehoods? She couldn’t have been the child he described.
Could
she
?