Claimed by the Elven King: Part Four

by Cristina Rayne

  I immediately placed my hand in his, and he clenched it tightly. “Let this be our bond,” he said firmly, his voice echoing throughout the large chamber.

  “Let this be our bond,” I echoed, my voice sounding weak and unsure in comparison.

  I was just glad that the words hadn’t gotten stuck in my throat. It had been one of my main worries, but focusing completely on Sethian and refusing to look at anyone else had ultimately been my salvation.

  Sethian lowered our hands but did not release me, instead threading our fingers together more securely. Now came the part I dreaded the most. I slowly pivoted to stand beside Sethian to face the whole of the elven court for the first time. I tried not to look too closely at all the various expressions, but I saw them regardless, the excitement on some of the women’s faces, the scrutinizing looks on others…a flash of disgust, a look of anger, a look of sympathy, though that last one was not directed at me but in the direction of the queen.

  Sethian turned slightly to me and placed his free hand on the curve of my belly. “In a little over four moon-cycle’s time, the plague of sadness that has ravaged our lands will finally see its first hope. Within the Royal Wife’s womb lies the next potential heir to the throne of the Second Realm. With my child’s birth, a new generation of Sidhe will come forth!”

  The room abruptly erupted in a roar of voices, swallowing the last echoes of Sethian’s last words. It was generally a sound of joy, there were even a few tears, but I couldn’t help noticing the one noble here and there that remained silent while their neighbors celebrated. Some had their eyes fixed on me; others were looking at some of the other nobles around them with disdain. It wasn’t just the men. I caught more than one woman looking at our joined hands with open disgust. I was actually a little shocked at how blatant these elves were being in their contempt.

  It was a little galling to see how right the queen had been in her warnings, but I wasn’t about to discount those warnings just because they came from someone I didn’t like. It made me wonder if that had been her intent all along.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I placed one hand on the stone ledge and gazed out towards the far horizon while my other hand rubbed my belly absently. Not for the first time, I wondered what my friend and roommate, Anna, was doing now. I could only imagine how much she had probably freaked out when she had realized that I was actually missing. It would have been only a matter of time before she decided to go through my room and discovered that not only was my car still parked outside the apartment, but my purse with my driver’s license, wallet, cell phone, and car keys inside was still sitting on my desk where I had left it.

  Was she still living in the same apartment we had shared? The lease would have ended a month after I had disappeared. Had she renewed it in the hopes that I would either return or be found? So many unanswered questions…questions that would forever remain unanswered on both sides.

  My chest tightened painfully as guilt surged up within me. Anna had been there for me during my grief after my mother had died as well as during my frequent bouts of self-doubt as I pursued my PhD, and this is how I had repaid her—a lifetime of wondering if her friend’s body was rotting in a ditch somewhere.

  Without warning, something hard and solid hit me square in the back, making me jerk forward violently against the balcony ledge. For a split-second I had no idea what had just happened until the sick feeling of falling registered in my mind, and I frantically reached my hands out blindly in a desperate attempt to grab onto something, anything! My arm slipped through one of the marble rungs that ran vertically across the entire length of the balcony, and my hand immediately clutched at it and hung on for dear life as my arm very nearly wrenched out of socket as I jerked to an abrupt stop, my hip slamming painfully against the unforgiving stone wall of the castle.

  “Help me!” I screamed as I frantically tried to reach my other hand up to grab onto another one of the rungs and only succeeding in making my grip on the other more tenuous. “Lariel! Saeria!”

  My arm was screaming with pain at the shoulder socket and my feet could find no crevices within the castle’s outer walls in order to dig my toes into. Then something seemed to grab onto one of my legs and pull down harshly, and I shrieked fit to wake the dead when I nearly lost my grip.

  “Emily!” I heard Saeria suddenly cry out in horror from above.

  She immediately fell to her knees and grabbed the arm above the elbow that I had wrapped around the rung with both hands just as I was losing my hold. She jerked up on my arm, trying to heave me up and through the gap between two rungs, but she could not raise me more than a couple of inches, as though my body weighed a ton.

  Her hands gripping my arm like a vice, Saeria moved from her knees to her bottom and braced herself with the soles of both feet against a couple of the rungs just as I saw Lariel drop down to her knees and reach down for me with a look of utter terror in her eyes. “Rinwen! Summon the guards, quickly! We cannot pull her up on our own! Emily, reach your other hand up to Lariel!”

  I immediately tried to lift my free arm higher towards Lariel’s outstretched hand, but just as my fingers brushed her palm, my arm suddenly felt as if someone had strapped a hundred pound weight to it and dropped helplessly to my side again.

  “I can’t!” I cried, my voice high-pitched with fear and panic. “Something’s pulling hard on both my arm and one of my legs!”

  As if on cue, I abruptly lurched downwards with a shriek of pain as my leg was pulled hard enough that I feared it had been dislocated at the hip. There was an enormous pressure surrounding my calf, as though a huge hand was squeezing it tightly. I tried to reach for Lariel’s hand again, but the invisible weight on my arm was too much. I didn’t dare use more force, afraid that I would accidentally jerk out of Saeria’s hold.

  Then suddenly, impossibly, the air shimmered and warped behind Lariel and Saeria like a heat wave in the distance, and Sethian faded into existence. The second he spotted me, his expression melted into a look so horrified that I knew I would never forget it for the rest of my life. He brushed the younger girl away without a word as he fell to his knees and thrust his arms through the rungs to grab my arm over Saeria’s hands. Our eyes met, and my whole body seemed to freeze.

  “Don’t let go,” he told Saeria in a tight voice.

  Then the rungs of the balcony above me began to fade and change and my knees abruptly slammed painfully down onto something hard as on of the couches in Sethian’s suite faded into view. I grunted in pain as I started to fall forward, but then Sethian’s chest was suddenly there, his arms reaching out to catch me before I could fall more than a few inches.

  I couldn’t help it. All the fear and panic came rushing out in an overwhelming avalanche of emotion, and I burst into tears just as he gathered me up into his arms.

  I almost died! I almost died! Oh my God, I almost died!

  That terrifying realization ran through my head like a mantra stuck on infinite repeat as I clutched the front of Sethian’s robes so tightly that my fingers ached and sobbed noisily into his chest. I don’t know how long I remained in that state, but when my sobs finally began to die down and the world outside my head came into focus again, I became conscious of the fact that I was sitting sideways across Sethian’s lap with one of his arms wrapped snuggly around my body and his other hand gently stroking through my hair. He, in turn, was sitting on one of the couches. I had been so far gone that I hadn’t even felt him lift me up and carry me over.

  I drew in a slow, shaky breath in an effort to stifle the last of my sobs and snuggled even closer to his body. I would have been fine to remain as we were for the rest of my life, to not have to deal with what had just happened, but as always, reality had a bad habit of intruding.

  A loud knock sounded at the front door, and I practically jumped out of my skin with a cry of alarm. I felt Sethian stiffen beneath me, but then Lariel’s familiar voice called through the door and he instantly relaxed. He began to run my back s
oothingly.

  “Enter,” Sethian called, and the front door swung open to admit both Lariel and Yara, my healer.

  I immediately lifted my head from Sethian’s chest and began scrubbing at my eyes vigorously, embarrassed to be seen in the aftermaths of my emotional breakdown, even by my friend and a woman I had grown to trust implicitly over the past three months.

  Both women came into the room only a few steps and bowed to Sethian while the guard that had admitted them closed the door behind them. The room was so silent that I easily heard the guards bolting the door heavily from the other side.

  “Hold on to me,” Sethian said suddenly, turning my attention back to him.

  I hastily put my arms around his neck as he gathered me more securely in his arms and stood.

  “She will be more comfortable in the bedroom while you examine her,” he directed at Yara before proceeding to carry me, bridle-style, to the bedroom.

  Sethian carefully laid me down onto the bed without bothering to draw down the blankets. I winced when I started to straighten my legs and a sharp pain flared up in both my hip and my knees. Now that I was no longer sobbing, I realized just how much my body was hurting.

  “Where does it hurt?” Sethian asked, his brows furrowed in concern.

  “Almost everywhere,” I replied truthfully, “but the worst places are my left hip and both knees. I remember hitting both pretty hard.” I rubbed a hand over my swollen belly. “I was lucky,” I said softly, my throat tightening when I felt a little flutter of movement inside and another onslaught of tears threatened to rise. “I didn’t hit my stomach at all, not even when I went over the edge of—”

  Sethian placed a finger against my mouth and shook his head. I flushed, realizing that what had just happened wasn’t something I should be discussing in front of the healer.

  He lifted up the skirt of my dress and I gasped loudly when I saw the huge blood-red bruise that had already formed along my hip and extended half-way down the side of my upper leg. The look on Sethian’s face was almost murderous as his eyes moved from my hip down the length of my legs. A couple of reddish bruises had also begun to form on both knee caps, but nowhere near as alarming in appearance as the one on my hip.

  “I shall deal with these injuries,” he said, turning to look at Yara. “It is the child I wish you to examine.”

  That’s right. I had completely forgotten that he had mentioned healing as one of his abilities. I hadn’t really thought about what that meant, so I had no idea what to expect. I lay still and watched quietly as he gently ran a hand over the bruise on my hip while Yara placed both of hers onto my stomach as she always did when examining me.

  I had always been able to sense that Yara was doing something, as though I was somehow being touched on the inside of my abdomen. However, whatever Sethian was doing was definitely causing some kind of change because for the first few seconds, my hip lit up sharply with a pain very much like the pain I had suffered when that elven mage had transmuted my body into its current form. I let out a startled whimper, but managed to keep from moving as the pain swiftly lessened. The ugly red blotch on my skin began to noticeably fade along with the pain until the skin returned to its normal color and all I could feel was a pleasant warmth.

  Sethian looked up at me, concern swirling in his eyes, and I flashed him a watery smile. “I’m fine,” I assured him.

  He nodded and moved down to tend to the bruises on my knees. I braced myself for the coming pain.

  “All is well,” Yara announced a few minutes later just as Sethian was finishing up my second knee. “The child was not physically harmed at all by the accident. I have calmed her energies, so there should be no lasting trauma to either.”

  I closed my eyes in relief. “Thank God,” I whispered.

  Yara removed her hands from my stomach and drew the skirt of my dress down again. I opened my eyes in enough time to see her bow again to Sethian.

  “Shall I remain here to watch over her for the night, Your Majesty?” she asked.

  Sethian shook his head. “I shall call for you is there is need.”

  She bowed again without protest and turned to me one last time. “Rest—at least for a couple days just to be safe. I do not want you walking around unless absolutely necessary.”

  I sighed but nodded. So much for that trip into Talloth tomorrow that I really had been looking forward to. I swear the universe really was conspiring against me.

  “You may take your leave,” Sethian said formally, and after squeezing my hand affectionately, Yara quietly left the room.

  Now that we were alone, I expected Sethian to immediately start grilling me on what had happened, but instead of the Spanish Inquisition, I was met with dead silence and a hard stare.

  I wet my lips uneasily and said, “Sethian?”

  Only then did he seem to shake himself and look back at me with a more normal expression. “They can wait,” he said enigmatically.

  Puzzled, I watched him swiftly round the bed and then climb onto the mattress beside me. He pulled a couple of pillows from beneath the coverlet and used them to prop himself up against the headboard. Then he held out his arms to me.

  “Come. I need to feel you against me. I need to hear our child’s soul.”

  I didn’t need to be told twice.

  I settled myself between his legs, sitting with my back pressed up against his chest. His arms immediately snaked around my middle until both hands rested on my baby bump.

  For a long moment, we just sat together in silence, his nose buried into the crook of my neck where he would occasionally inhale deeply as if savoring my scent, before he said simply, “Tell me.”

  “Something or someone pushed me from behind while I was standing near the edge,” I said with utter certainty.

  Whatever hit me in the back could be explained away by a piece of falling stone that had suddenly broken off from the castle walls above, or other such debris—if it hadn’t been for that invisible force that had tried its damndest to pull my leg off before Saeria and Lariel could pull me back up, and I said as much.

  I felt him go positively rigid beneath me.

  “Have you ever felt something like that before?” he asked in a voice so devoid of emotion that it was chilling.

  I shook my head, suddenly unable to talk around the huge lump of anxiety that had formed in my throat as I felt his presence swell around me until it had become a physical thing that was slowly weighing me down from all sides. He must have sensed my sudden distress because the suffocating pressure around me immediately lessened, and his hands started to rub soothing circles over my belly.

  “I shall find the one responsible, I promise you,” Sethian said, each word dripping with a potent anger.

  Once again, I could only nod my head. Although his anger scared me, I took some comfort in his obvious outrage.

  “How did you know I was in trouble, anyway?” I asked once I could make my tongue work again.

  “I heard your cry of fear.”

  “So you were already nearby? Thank God for coincidences.”

  I felt him shake his head. “No. I heard it here.” I followed his hand with my eyes as he lifted it to tap the side of his head. “And here.” He placed that same hand over my heart.

  I looked back at him incredulously. “How is that possible? I’m not an elf. I can’t do incredible things like that!”

  “Is it so strange to think that when you cried out with your voice with such strong emotion, your soul cried out as well? One needs only the ability to listen. After all, you have ‘heard’ the voice of my soul once before.”

  “Huh? Oh…that’s right…” He was referring to the Incident, the one that he still hadn’t explained. The one I would have to bring up later because right now I had a more important question.

  I turned a little in his arms so that I could see his face better. His expression was grim. “Do you know why someone would want to try to—to try to k-kill me?” I asked tentatively.

/>   The queen’s face flashed through my mind, but it was a choice so obvious that I immediately dismissed it. Besides, it wasn’t that long ago that she had warned me in a roundabout way that something like this could happen. Although she probably wasn’t the culprit, that hint alone said that she knew a lot more than she was telling either me or Sethian.

  Sethian’s lips tightened as his anger resurfaced. “Unfortunately, there are more reasons than I can name, any just as likely as the other,” he replied. “There are some that had hoped my coupling with you would fail, that after a hundred years or so without an heir being conceived, my claim to the throne would become invalid by reason of sterility.”

  “Then—this isn’t about me being human? Someone wants your throne? Someone in the queen’s family maybe?”

  As soon as those last words left my mouth, I wished desperately that I could take them back. I hadn’t meant to accuse her at all given my obvious bias against her from the beginning, but I was still severely shaken by my near-death experience; the pause button between my brain and my mouth was apparently still broken.

  However, instead of an increase of anger, Sethian’s expression merely became much graver.

  “Perhaps yes to all of that,” he said. “Today you saw some of that contempt firsthand when a few from the court looked upon you. It is resentment born from feelings of failure. How can we need the genes of humans to insure that the next generation is fertile, especially when it was those same human genes that caused the sterility in the first place?

  “On the other hand, there are more things afoot than the desire to erase an imagined shame. Limira’s people have always coveted the power my family wields. A king will never bear their family’s name. Their desire for the throne has been something of an open secret for millennia, a deadly game our families have played against each other since my ancestor won the right to rule over our people tens of thousands of years ago.