Claimed by the Elven King: Part Four

by Cristina Rayne

  “As did I,” he said with a sigh.

  When the healer arrived a few minutes later, he took one look at Sethian and dove immediately into his examination without a word. After what seemed like an eternity, he finally drew back the hands that had been pressed against Sethian’s chest and opened his eyes. The expression within them was less than reassuring. “Forgive me, Your Majesty,” he said, “but I would like to bring in a couple of my associates to examine you as well. What I am seeing—well, I fear it has me at a loss.”

  “What do you mean?” I demanded before Sethian could even open his mouth.

  “His life-force is severely disrupted as it would be with any illness,” the healer explained. “The problem is that I searched his entire system over and over, and I simply cannot find what is causing the disruption.” He turned to Sethian again. “Your energy levels fell inexplicably even as I examined you! Except for the depletion, I can find nothing amiss at all!”

  “Can you bring them now?” I asked anxiously.

  He nodded. “Of course.”

  Once the healer had gone, I went to sit on the bed beside Sethian. “What do you make of that?” I asked.

  “That perhaps you were right to be as concerned as you are,” he said grudgingly. He closed his eyes for a moment, a frown of concentration wrinkling the skin of his brow momentarily before he opened them and continued, “Now that he has pointed it out, I can clearly see the disruption in my life-force he spoke of.”

  “If it isn’t viral or bacterial, couldn’t just plain fatigue cause a drop in your energy levels?” I asked.

  He shook his head. Even that simple gesture seemed to require a tremendous effort. “Not like this, and especially not this quickly.”

  “What are the odds that you picked up some new, unknown sickness?”

  “Yesterday, I would have said next to zero, but after seeing this…” He shrugged.

  “Maybe I should have one of the healers take a look at me, too, when they come,” I said, now more alarmed than ever.

  “That would be best,” he agreed, closing his eyes wearily.

  I took his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Rest for a moment,” I urged.

  He must have been feeling really awful at that point because he just nodded without even a token protest.

  By the time four more healers returned with Sethian’s chief healer, Sethian had fallen into a deep sleep. Agreeing that he should not be awoken, they each carefully examined Sethian in turn, and each emerged from their healer’s trance with the same frustrating answer. There was definitely something wrong with Sethian—any fool with eyes could see that—but other than his rapidly depleting energy, every other aspect of his physical body was functioning normally.

  An examination of my life-force thankfully did not show any anomalies, but they suggested minimal contact all the same until they could get to the bottom of it. I immediately sent the children to stay with Lariel in my old suite while Saeria and Rinwen remained behind to aid the healers and me.

  By evening, it had become apparent that Sethian was no longer just sleeping but had fallen into a coma-like state despite the healers’ best efforts to restore his lost energies. A mage was brought in at that point to examine Sethian’s depleting energy reserves in the hopes that seeing the problem from a different perspective might yield a better understanding of the anomaly, itself. It was then that the healers finally realized that what they had been trying to diagnose and fight was not an illness at all.

  That day, I learned the frightening truth that curses were only too real.

  When the commotion first started somewhere beyond our bedroom, my heart clenched with instant dread, and I involuntarily squeezed Sethian’s lifeless hand more tightly and hugged Arra, who was currently sitting in my lap, closer to my chest. Was it another assassin? It had been so long since the last. Had we grown too complacent, so much so that they saw the distraction of Sethian’s illness as a golden opportunity to exploit that complacency?

  The two healers bending over Sethian visibly stiffened. The one on Sethian’s left opened his eyes, breaking his healing trance, and turned towards the noise with a frown. He started to take a step towards the door. I opened my mouth to shout a warning, but before I could utter a word, the door crashed open with all the force of a battering ram. A swarm of guards, their swords drawn, began spilling into the room without so much as a “by your leave.”

  Arra screeched and swiveled in my lap, wrapping her arms around my neck and burying her face in my hair in fear. As I tightened my arms around her, my eyes anxiously scanned the faces, looking for the men who had been on guard duty to the royal suite since last night, but none of them were present, none of them even looked vaguely familiar. I gathered my daughter more securely and started to stand from the chair beside the bed where I had been keeping constant vigil ever since Sethian had fallen into his coma-like state, but then the final person that walked through the door behind the men froze me on the spot.

  For one seemingly eternal moment, our eyes met, and the triumph I saw within those normally cold, green eyes made all the blood instantly drain from my face. I remembered seeing that look only once before—and it had immediately been followed by the suggestion of a plan that would have killed Thaylan before he had even been born.

  “Take her,” the queen ordered, sounding as casual as if she were only saying hello.

  It had been inevitable really from the moment Sethian had fallen unconscious yesterday. With the king incapacitated and the heir out of reach, the seat of power automatically fell to the queen until either of the previous two could take up the mantle again. She could have me forcibly banished back to the human realm, killed, tortured, and not one person could lift a finger to help me without being accused of treason and having the same done to them.

  Her endgame had finally been revealed, and it was quite the master stroke.

  Knowing that resisting would likely end with a sword in the gut, a child traumatized for life, and a very satisfied queen, I softly whispered into Arra’s ear to get on the bed with Sethian. I then took his hand again and gave it one last squeeze as I stood, willing him to feel my love, my desperation for him to fight the curse that was slowly draining the life from him. I could only pray that he was somehow able to hear what was happening here, that his resulting anger would fuel his soul and keep him in the world of the living long enough for Thaylan to return to take back the power of the throne from Limira, to save his siblings from falling under her thumb, because I didn’t really expect to live past the day.

  My eyes stayed on my family’s faces, one slack, and one pinched with fear, as I felt hands grab both my arms roughly from behind and pull me away from the bed, forcing me to release Sethian’s hand before we could be wrenched apart.

  Then suddenly one of the healers was marching forward, and he grabbed one of my shoulders until I momentarily found myself in a strange kind of tug-of-war between him and the guards at my back.

  “With all due respect, Your Majesty,” the healer said before the guards could raise their swords, “whatever quarrel you have with the Royal Wife must be set aside for the time being for the sake of His Majesty. We have finally managed to slow down the effects of the curse a bit, and I fear depriving him of her presence will deplete his essence more quickly.”

  “It is already too late for the king,” the queen said harshly, “and I shall not allow his murderer the satisfaction of witnessing his final breaths no matter the reason! To allow him die with dignity is the only gift I can give him now!”

  “What?” I blurted, turning to look back at the queen in utter shock. She wasn’t seriously going to—just what was her game this time?

  She smiled at me nastily. “A witness has come forth, one who overheard a very interesting conversation with a Lithviri mage and a small, hooded woman who spoke with a very strange accent. The mage in question was captured as he was fleeing the palace with the aid of Lariel of the family Elerdir. I have just returned from interr
ogating both of them, and while your lady-in-waiting has stubbornly refused to speak, the mage was much more forthcoming after a little persuasion from a few of my personal guards. However, your servant will talk, of that I have no doubt.”

  You lying bitch! I snarled in my mind, though outwardly, I struggled to keep my expression from changing. I would be damned before I gave her the satisfaction of seeing me lose control in front of my daughter.

  “I didn’t think even you would have the guts to just flat-out lie,” I said, staring at her challengingly. “Lariel was just in this very room dropping off my daughter a few moments ago. These healers can attest to that. I hardly think you had the time for an interrogation between then and now.”

  “The coin of power within the royal court is very tempting, especially when the one paying has blood ties to the heir and the heir is blinded to his mother’s perfidy by affection,” the queen continued as if I hadn’t even spoken.

  “Mama!”

  “Stay with your father, Arra,” I told her as calmly as I could, which didn’t amount to much as I was likely inadvertently drowning her with my inner turmoil.

  “Do not worry. The half-blood will be—dealt with appropriately,” the queen sneered.

  And that’s when I lost it.

  A red haze seemed to fill my eyes as I tore out of the grips of the two elves that held my arms and lunged for the queen’s throat. I just managed to get my hands around her neck when the back of my head abruptly exploded with pain a split-second before everything went black.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A rush of panic thundered through my awareness and I shot up from the rough surface I had been lying on to a seated position, my heart trying its damndest to break out of my chest. I looked around wildly, confused about where I was and why I felt like I was currently having a full-blown panic attack, then winced when that frantic movement set off an explosion of pain in my head. It was dark, so dark that the only thing I could make out was the outline of a door because of the very faint light coming in through the thin crack between what looked like a stone floor and the bottom of the door.

  I raised my hands to cradle my head and moaned as it continued to throb. I tried to take slow, deep breaths in an effort to stem the panic that had permeated my entire being, and that’s when I felt Thaylan’s essence and realized that the panic I was feeling was his.

  Thaylan never panicked…

  “Thaylan!” I called out into the dark, but my increasing confusion and now rising fear was met with only silence.

  The excruciating pain in my head was making it extremely difficult to think. So I was alone here, wherever here was. I drew in another deep breath, and this time I noticed that the air was muggy and had a faint odor of mold and old sweat. It was a familiar combination, somehow. Where—

  “Shit!” I cursed loudly, dropping my hands and scrambling to my feet.

  I stumbled over to the door, praying that I was wrong as I frantically felt for a door handle and was instead rewarded with a palm full of splinters. Biting back a sob, I backed up until my back hit the stone wall behind me and let myself slide down to the floor.

  How in the world had I ended up in the palace dungeon?

  It was the queen. It had to be the queen. No one else other than Sethian would have had the authority to lock me up here, and as far as I could remember, the only “crime” I had been guilty of was nagging Sethian to stay in bed because he had really looked like crap...

  And just like that, the image of my hands wrapped around the queen’s throat and those hateful eyes widened with shock flashed within my mind, followed by the memory of sitting at Sethian’s side helplessly watching the life drain out of him with every breath while his healers fought to prolong his life long enough for Thaylan to reach the palace.

  Even with the incredible distances he could reach with his phasing ability, the Lithvir Sidhe lands were on the other side of the world, and not even Thaylan could move that kind of distance in a single jump, nor could his personal energy reserves support the amount of spatial manipulations it would take to reach the palace without resting several marks between each. The healers had given Sethian a day at the most, and that was about the amount of time it would take his son to reach him.

  It was no wonder that Thaylan was so panicked!

  At that moment, I felt like the most worthless person in existence. Tears of self-loathing began to flow down my checks. While Sethian lay dying and the queen was doing God-only-knew-what to my children and friends, I was stuck here in the dark waiting for the ax to fall—literally. I clenched my hands tightly into fists at the image that thought conjured up, of the queen smiling smugly as she ordered the downward stroke of a sword in an old-style beheading.

  No—there was something I could do. Fury like I had never felt in my life erupted within me, washing away the anguish as I scrubbed angrily at my tears. I really would be worthless if I just sat here crying without trying to do something.

  There was no way I would be able to get out of here, but maybe I could use our familial bond to send a warning about the queen to Thaylan. At the moment, he had no idea about the nest of vipers he was about to walk into, and despite all the fuss about the incredible power he wielded, he was still just a twelve-year-old boy about to face the cunning of a snake thousands of years his senior. I didn’t have even an ounce of Thaylan’s empathic abilities, and I knew that he was probably still too far away for my puny efforts to reach, but maybe if I kept shouting out to him in my heart he would eventually be able to sense me.

  It was the only weapon I had, and I only prayed that it would be enough.

  I had no idea how long I had been mentally shouting into the void, but it was only when I suddenly heard voices outside my cell door that I came back to myself and realized I was on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion. I smacked both my palms against my cheeks hard in an effort to clear my head and managed to drag myself to my feet just as I heard someone turning a key in the lock. Damned if I would meet whoever was on the other side of the door sitting down.

  For a split-second, I considered charging the first person that walked through the door and in almost the same thought dismissed it as incredibly stupid. It would probably be a guard, and what were the odds that someone like me would be able to get more than half a step past a heavily trained guard without a whole lot of hurt? I doubted my title of Royal Wife held any weight at all anymore, and I would end up with another goose egg or worse on my head. For all I knew, these guards were in the pocket of the queen or anti-human zealots just itching for any excuse to permanently remove the source of the current “taint” that had begun to permeate the elven realm.

  “Unless you want a sword in your gut, back away from the door and stand against the back wall,” an unfamiliar male voice called through the door.

  I did as instructed with an air of resentment, and a few seconds later, the door creaked open. Even though the light in the corridor was poor, I still flinched away violently when it hit my eyes. Squinting against the illumination, I watched as a couple of guards stepped across the threshold, swords in hand but thankfully pointed down at the ground, followed unsurprisingly by the queen, a lit oil lamp hanging from one hand.

  The expression of extreme smugness on her face looked so uncannily like the one she had worn in the image I had conjured of her during my imagined beheading that for a moment, I felt slightly unbalanced.

  “Leave us,” Limira ordered the guards. When both of them hesitated, she added without taking her eyes off me, “If the human wishes her children to remain untouched, she will not lift a finger against me. Now go.”

  I fisted my hands angrily at my sides but said nothing. To use my own children as her shield was the lowest of the low. I suddenly had the irrational urge to bare my teeth at her.

  “The king is failing fast,” she said as soon as the door closed behind her. “He will be lucky to last more than a few more marks.”

  My eyes narrowed angrily. “Thaylan will
come to save him.”

  That was the only thing that mattered now.

  The queen smirked. “Yes, the mongrel’s healers said as much. I, of course, immediately dispatched a messenger to the Lithviri informing your brat of the king’s imminent demise and urging him to come home at once. Of course, he will arrive only in enough time to bury his father and learn of the execution of his traitorous mother. You understand, don’t you? With both parents deceased, the heir, your children will of course belong to me.”

  “So what are you waiting for?” I demanded bitterly. “It’s just you and me down here. The whole of the elven court already believes me guilty of cursing the king to his death thanks to you and your cronies’ lies. No one but my friends and children would cry if you just slit my throat right here in a fit of ‘rage.’ Or are you too much a coward to dirty your own hands? I hate to tell you this, but they’re already blacker than pitch and that shit doesn’t wash off.”

  “I could,” she said with a nod, seemingly ignoring my crude taunts, “but that would not even begin to repay me for these past thirteen years of insult you and the House of Elerren have afflicted on me and my family name. A thousand years of suffering would not be enough, but that’s exactly what you will receive. A thousand years to sit here and rot, knowing that the fault of your husband’s death lies solely in your hands for refusing to leave the realm when I asked, knowing that your children will grow up hating you not only for killing their father, but also for the human taint that runs through their veins.”