Claimed by the Elven King: Part Four

by Cristina Rayne

  I would have said “I told you so” had I not been so damned glad to see him.

  “He was scared,” I said. “We both were! Sethian, someone attacked me in my sleep! He fuzzed out my mind with elven magic and tried to make me think it was you! He tried to—”

  My throat closed on the words and I couldn’t finish. The tears I had been trying so hard to keep from rising now began to spill freely from my eyes, and this time, I didn’t try to stop them.

  Without warning, a wall of rage slammed into me, and everything instantly went black. The next thing I knew, one of Sethian’s arms was wrapped around my waist bearing the entirety of my weight and the other was now carrying Thaylan, who clutched at the front of his father’s tunic and was staring at me with wide eyes. Not even an echo of that powerful rage was left within me.

  Sethian eyes swam with guilt as he said, “Are you all right now?”

  I clung to his middle and closed my eyes. “I think I need to sit down for a moment.”

  He immediately helped me lower myself to the ground, urging me to lean against him as he sat cross-legged beside me and wrapped a comforting arm around my waist, Thaylan securely nestled within his lap. For now he seemed content to just snuggle against Sethian’s chest. I hoped he would fall asleep.

  Sethian planted a tender kiss on my forehead and said, “I’m sorry for that. I am in control of myself now, so please continue.”

  The sound of hoof beats and men shouting reached my ears before I could open my mouth to reply. I looked behind me and saw the other four riders I had glimpsed before plus an addition six in the process of dismounting and rushing towards us. Sethian immediately held up a hand, and every one of them stopped dead in their tracks as though they had suddenly met with a barrier only they could see.

  “Return to your steed and wait,” Sethian commanded them. “I wish to speak with my wife, alone. We shall return to you, shortly.”

  Without a word, they all bowed and moved to obey. Knowing how well elves could hear, I wasn’t at all certain that they would be out of earshot so was hesitant to say anything more about what had just happened back in the bedroom. However, I found myself watching the world around me fade out for the second time that night, only to phase back to a point that looked virtually identical to the place we had left. I glanced back towards the road, but Sethian’s guards were nowhere to be seen.

  “No one will hear us speak here,” he assured me. “Tell me.”

  I closed my eyes again and buried my face into his shoulder. I knew we should probably be racing back to the palace ASAP, but I needed this time with Sethian to wash away the feelings of violation that were beginning to surge back to the surface now that the initial crisis was over. My attacker hadn’t gotten far, but he had gotten far enough.

  Also, I felt guilty for leaving Saeria and Rinwen to deal with the bastard alone, but I was more worried about them freaking out about our disappearance than the chance that they would be hurt. They had shown me on more than one occasion just how deadly they could be.

  “I couldn’t hear you,” I said, knowing he would understand what I meant. That was probably what had ultimately saved me. Not even an elven enthrallment could fake a soul bond. “Even when he had my mind totally under his control, the fact that I could feel no emotion emanating from him broke the enthrallment, I think. The only reason I was able to push him off me was because I completely blindsided him.”

  Even though Sethian had deliberately blocked any emotions from reaching me, and likely Thaylan as well, at the moment, he was so enraged that some of that rage managed to leak through. I could feel his whole body quivering with the effort of keeping it contained.

  “Go on,” he urged when I hesitated, his voice eerily calm.

  “I screamed for Saeria and Rinwen then went straight for Thaylan. The bastard grabbed me just as I was picking him up. I tried to shake him off, but he was just too strong. That’s when Saeria crashed through the door, but by then Thaylan was so freaked out that he took us to the one place where he knew we would be safe.”

  “It seems my royal guards will have much to answer for when we return,” Sethian said blackly, his arm tightening around my middle.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I never thought in a million years that I would actually see a medieval-style dungeon outside of a movie set being put to its real use rather than as just a tourist attraction. It was just as dark, dank, and smelly as I imagined it would be, the smell of waste and unwashed bodies assaulting my nose from the moment the guards had opened the door to admit us at the bottom of the longest staircase I had ever had the misfortune to descend.

  Beside me, Sethian was still bristling with unhappiness that I was even there at all, but in this one thing, I had not backed down. I wanted—no needed—to hear with my own ears why the elf had chosen to assault me because I didn’t trust that Sethian would tell me the whole truth in an effort to spare me more pain.

  We stepped into a wide corridor made, or maybe even carved, out of a dark gray natural stone that could have been granite or some other stone found only within the elven realm. With my arm looped tightly with his, Sethian led me down a long row of thick, wooden doors that were swung wide open to reveal, I was glad to note, the empty, fully-enclosed cells beyond and came to a stop before the one on the end.

  I instinctually stepped closer to Sethian as one of the three guards that had accompanied us unlocked the cell door and entered first. I was relieved when I saw that the cell was pretty well illuminated from several oil lamps hanging from the walls that had probably been pre-lit just for the king’s visit.

  Even though I should have expected it, it was still a shock to see my attacker chained by his wrists and ankles back against the far wall. I guess the whole setup just seemed a little too barbaric for a people as refined as the Sidhe.

  Sethian’s expression was cold and utterly without mercy as he confronted the man that had done such an unspeakable thing to me for the first time. “Speak in the tongue of my wife so that she may understand your every word,” Sethian commanded. “I would first hear the reason why you assaulted my wife and defiled my home. We shall discuss your method of entry afterwards.”

  I expected him to turn his head, to refuse to talk, maybe even to sneer defiantly, but he looked his king straight in the eye and said without any hesitation, “I did what I had to do. Nothing more, nothing less, and I shall not apologize for it.”

  There wasn’t even a hint of shame or fear in his expression. His voice was also eerily relaxed, completely out of place for a man currently accused of assaulting a member of the royal family. Was he an assassin? Did one of the king’s enemies hire him to do this to me in order to send Sethian some kind of twisted message?

  Sethian’s eyes seemed to ignite in the face of such nonchalant defiance. “I fail to see how committing the worst kind of sacrilege against the royal House of Elerren could be to your gain.”

  “There is nothing that I would not do for my Esdil, even go so far as to mate with a human,” was his confusing replied.

  “Esdil?” Sethian inquired with a frown.

  Instead of answering, his eyes turned from the king to me. They were now accusing, angry, as if I was the one who had committed a great wrong against him by preventing him from succeeding. Just looking at him made my stomach turn. However, I didn’t look away, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing that his very presence disturbed me.

  He turned his attention back to Sethian. “I did what I had to do,” he repeated. “Soon, another will, as well.”

  After that maddening declaration, no matter how Sethian threatened him, he did not utter another word.

  Needless to say, we never did make it to Talloth that day.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Looking at myself in my hand mirror, it was hard to believe that I had been living in the elven realm for thirteen years now. My features were the same now as they were the day I first looked into this mirror and saw a semi-stranger sta
ring back. Had I been in the human realm, I would have been nearing middle age. Now, except for a few hiccups now and then, it was as though I was living the best years of my life over and over again.

  I didn’t wait ten years to give Thaylan a sibling like I had once sarcastically told Lariel. He was four when his brother Anir was born. A year after that, my daughter, Rinya, arrived. The last had been my youngest daughter, Arra, four years ago. After four children, it had become apparent that Thaylan really was a special little boy as the rest of the children were born as blond as their father and nowhere near as powerful.

  As it turned out, Thaylan’s ability to phase to different places just like Sethian had only been the tip of the iceberg, a fact that had no doubt shaved off a few hundred years from my lifespan before he had grown old enough to understand that he shouldn’t go around creating and leaving what amounted to mini-portals in walls, floors, and furniture for his poor unsuspecting mother to fall into.

  By age six, he had mastered the ability to permanently alter the space around him. It had been a year before either Sethian or I had realized that the little booger had carved out an entire separate room the size of our sitting room from a dimension none but him could touch where he and his little brother could run around and play with his portals without having to worry about their mother scolding them about “the dangers of messing around with reality.”

  By this time, I had integrated so deeply into the elven realm and life as a member of the royal family that my old life back in the human world no longer seemed real. Now, except for official ceremonies, I always appeared in public on Sethian’s arm, his clearly favored wife, which had raised more than a few aristocratic brows in the beginning.

  The queen as well had been less than impressed with this new development, but over the years we had finally managed to find a compromise of sorts where we basically pretended that the other did not exist—on the surface, at least. I still could not quite shake the suspicion that she was up to something, so I had finally caved and shared my concerns with my friends, asking them to keep their eyes and ears open for me without alerting Sethian to my fears.

  However, it was really because of Thaylan, more than Sethian’s influence, that I had been accepted into elven society as well as I had. Even those who clearly despised the fact that a human dared walked among them as though she were a Sidhe didn’t dare say or do anything publically to express that disgust because of their fear of Thaylan’s power, never mind that he was still only a kid. Thaylan’s affection for me was obvious to anyone who had eyes, so to disrespect me, the adored mother of their future king, was essentially akin to political suicide.

  He had also proven to be a problem for some on another front. Over the years, people had begun to realize that Thaylan resembled the mythical elf, Hirion, in more than just his unique looks. Although not clairvoyant, he had an uncanny ability to sense when someone was up to no good, whether it was his younger brother playing a prank on him or something more sinister like a plot against my life—and there had been a fair few of those in the early years.

  I felt a chill go up my spine as I remembered the last, a scene four years ago that I would unlikely forget, even after a thousand years. It was the day our enemies had truly learned to fear my son.

  “My human bride-to-be wishes to speak with you, milady, before she makes her final decision.”

  I had heard this request twice before in the past two years, but I was a little surprised to hear it from the noble before me. He had been among the ten families that had just been given permission by Sethian to seek out a human bride a moon-cycle ago. That he had found a bride so quickly was astonishing. There were some from the very first group that had set out seven years ago that still hadn’t had any luck.

  I glanced at Saeria, and she shrugged. “We can go now if you like.”

  When we arrived to the point between worlds he had been frequenting, I could tell immediately that this was going to be another bust without the blonde woman who was sitting in a daze in the middle of the field having to even say a word. This was what a lot of the nobles didn’t understand. Here under a Sidhe’s full enchantment, a woman would agree to anything because to her, this was only a dream world. However, almost every time the women returned to the human realm and their minds became clear again, they freaked out about what had happened and would never return.

  Seeing this dazed woman, it now made sense how he had found somebody so quickly. He really hadn’t. There was no way she would pass Sethian’s final test to gain permission for the change in this kind of state. Still, I had promised the noble I would talk to her, and I would.

  I was so busy observing the woman that I didn’t notice that the noble had stopped at the threshold of the “door” we had used to enter this space.

  Without warning, he lunged at me. I don’t know if he had intended to grab me or push me into the space beyond the barrier between both realms where God-only-knows what terrible thing would have happened to me, but the moment both hands came within an arm-span of me, they disappeared up to his wrists in an instant. There had been no flash of light, no sound, or not even a sign that his hands had met with some kind of resistance. They were just—gone.

  I stared in a kind of horrified shock as he fell, screaming, to his knees, holding out his arms before him to reveal two perfectly healed stumps where his hands had been only seconds ago. They looked like amputations that had happened years ago, the skin only slightly darkened along the end of the stumps and none of it bloodied or even reddened with inflammation.

  However, even though the stumps looked completely healed, the elf continued to scream and scream while the poor human woman he had probably forcibly brought into the Inbetween as his red herring rocked back and forth with her arms wrapped firmly around her knees, having woken up from the elven enchantment straight into what had probably seemed like a nightmare.

  Understandably upset about all the attempts on my life, Thaylan had somehow used his spatial manipulation abilities along with the natural familial bond we had between us to erect a barrier around me that he had said would prevent anyone with ill intent from harming me physically. When I had pressed him for more details, he had just shrugged and said that his gifts were instinctual, and it wasn’t something he could really explain

  Even though we had tried to keep what had happened that day a secret, word had still somehow spread, but instead of causing the problems for Thaylan that Sethian had feared, it had instead been the solution to mine. No one has tried to come after me physically since.

  Now, despite my misgivings, Sethian, the children, and even Thaylan, himself, have the same protection, but that was the maximum amount of barriers he could maintain without draining his personal reserves of energy too much.

  But now Thaylan was gone, off studying with a renowned, four-thousand-year-old mage from the Lithvir Sidhe for a year, and I knew that Sethian was secretly worried that the attempts on my life would start again. Not only that, but this time there were also a handful of human brides now living in the realm that could also be targeted. None of them had conceived yet, so I prayed that some anti-human fanatic didn’t get it into his or her head to get rid of the “problem” before it became a problem.

  I also worried for Thaylan, afraid that while he was far away from the protection of the king’s mantle and the eyes of the elven court with its convoluted system of social checks and balances that someone would try to assassinate him as well.

  No, there was one thing that was different about my reflection. The eyes that stared back at me this time were just a bit heavier with the weight of the ages I still had before me.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “I don’t care if it is your duty. You. Are. Not. Going!” I said firmly as I pushed Sethian equally as firmly back down to the mattress as he tried to sit up for the third time since we had woken up this morning.

  “It is not a matter I can just pass off onto the queen,” he insisted stubbornly, but at least he did
n’t try to rise again, “especially since it is Limira.”

  Or more correctly, he just didn’t have the strength to make the attempt.

  “It is just a little weakness. As long as I am seated, I shall be fine.”

  I sighed in exasperation and shook my head. “After thirteen years, this is the first time I have ever seen you sick. You Sidhe are always going on and on about how you rarely get sick, so the fact that you suddenly woke up this morning in a cold sweat and feeling as weak as a kitten is definitely cause for alarm. I’ve already sent Lariel to fetch a healer. Those traveling dignitaries can just wait a little longer. Besides, aren’t you the one who is always telling me that time means very little to an elf?”

  “Time has nothing to do with this. There are certain protocols that must be followed; you know this.”

  “So says the man that is constantly thumbing his nose at those same protocols,” I countered.

  The dismay that washed over his face was almost comical. “I shall see the healer. That is all I shall promise.”

  I nodded, though there was no real satisfaction in having won the argument. He couldn’t see himself. He couldn’t see how gray his complexion was or how his brow was glistening with sweat even though his skin felt as cold as ice to the touch. No, the reason I was being so stubborn about him staying in bed was because I was worried as hell. I was supposed to be the only one that got sick around here. Powerful beings like the elven king were supposed to be invulnerable.

  “Where are the children?” Sethian asked.

  “I sent them to the archives with Rinwen for their morning lessons today,” I replied. “I didn’t want them getting sick, too, if whatever you have is contagious. If that’s the case, it’s already too late for me. Whatever you have, you’ve probably had it for longer than just the last couple of days, and we’ve exchanged spit more times than I can count during that time. I’ve noticed for a while now that you’ve been looking more tired than usual. In hindsight, I should’ve been more suspicious, but I thought it was because of all those trips to Talloth you’ve had to make lately.”