Claimed by the Elven King: Part Four

by Cristina Rayne

  As the queen looked at me with absolute hate in her eyes, I knew that she meant every word, that she really intended to keep me locked up here for a small eternity.

  Thaylan! Hurry! my soul screamed with all the desperation I had in me.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  As I sat in the darkness screaming my silent warnings to Thaylan over and over until I wondered if I would ever get those words out of my head, I occasionally had paused for a few moments and had tried desperately to sense Sethian’s essence deep within me in the place where our souls were bound. Over the years, his presence within me had grown to the point that I had been able to sense him without any real effort, like viewing someone from the corner of your eye. Now, it was as though a part of me had been cut away and only a gaping wound remained.

  I refused to believe that it meant that he was gone; I was certain the queen would have already come down to gloat and did the knife in just that much more deeper if that had been the case, so I comforted myself in feeling the emotions of my children even though they were currently dominated by anxiety and confusion. I don’t think I would have been able to bear it if their emotions had projected physical pain.

  Then clear as day, I heard somewhere in the space before me, “I’m here.”

  The dark outline of a small person suddenly appeared before me, then like an avenging angel, the slightly glowing form of my son was standing before me, long black hair hanging wild and tangled over his shoulders as though he had just come in from a windstorm. I was already hugging him to me before the glow about him completely faded and we were plunged into darkness again. The blackness was almost painful after that brief illumination.

  “We have to hurry to your father!” I said urgently, my voice thick with threatening tears. “The queen had a mage place a death curse on him, and—.”

  “I know,” Thaylan interjected. “I heard your words quite clearly when I reached the edge of the palace.”

  “I don’t know how they managed to get past your barrier,” I said as I felt rather than saw the air around us begin to warp.

  “It will be all right, mom,” he said, though I could hear the uncertainty that he had tried to hide.

  Then the darkness all around us began to rapidly lighten until we were abruptly standing next to the bed where Sethian lay as gray and still as a corpse. The healer closest to us backpedaled so quickly that he managed to trip himself up and ending up sprawled in a heap on the floor.

  The look of utter shock on the queen’s face is something I would remember for the rest off my life, but it was probably nothing compared to the shock on mine when Thaylan made a strange gesture with one of his hands and the very air surrounding Limira seemed to peel away in six large, oval-shaped strips and began closing inward on her like petals on an enormous, nearly transparent flower. She only had time to shriek once before the bizarre phenomenon enclosed her completely, and she winked out of existence as though she was never there.

  “Now she can’t cause us any more trouble,” Thaylan said with satisfaction into the dead silence that followed as he turned to Sethian without another word.

  He picked up his father’s limp hand and fell still, staring intently at Sethian’s chest as he furrowed his brow in concentration. I quickly put what had just happened with the queen out of my mind, filing it under the “things to have a long talk about with your son later” category in my brain, and stepped closer to the bed. I saw several of the guards within the room tense up the moment I moved, but after what Thaylan had done to the queen, no one dared say a word or even dared to move. Can’t say that I blamed them. Fear rather than rank was what commanded them now.

  “No…” Thaylan abruptly whispered, his voice sounding preternaturally loud in the silence.

  “What?” I demanded anxiously, laying a hand on his shoulder.

  “I can’t stop it,” he said, turning to me with a stricken look in his eyes. “The drain is connected to his very soul. The mere act of another’s essence touching it would kill him instantly, never mind me trying to extract it. His life-force is the fuel that sustains it. Another’s cannot be used to ease the burden. That’s why the healing energies given him by his healers have failed to revitalize him. It will continue to drain him until there is nothing left to drain and the curse can no longer be sustained.”

  He turned completely towards me and clutched both of my arms. “I can’t stop it!” he cried again, this time sounding every bit like the boy he was as tears began to well in his eyes.

  Those words stabbed into me as painfully as if I had been run through with one of the guard’s swords.

  I grabbed his arms in return. “There has to be something, something we can do?” I pleaded.

  “No one can touch his soul,” he insisted with anguish. “Not unless—”

  “Yes, there is!” I practically screamed.

  Our soul bond. Our soul bond had to be the answer. It was something that neither Sethian nor I had ever discussed with the children. Sethian had been reluctant to tell Thaylan his theory about why he had been born so different than everyone else in the event that he was wrong. He feared setting Thaylan on a path that he was never meant to take. Thus, we had mutually agreed to keep that aspect of our relationship to ourselves for the time being.

  “Your father and I are soul-bound,” I said. “Help me Thaylan. Help me connect with his soul again. It’s not something a human can do on their own. I’ll open my soul completely to him and feed him my life-force until the curse has consumed all of his and ends as it’s intended to do.”

  Thaylan’s eyes widened incredibly large. “What! No! Mom, I can’t!” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “Even weakened, an elven soul would consume a human’s!”

  “I know—your father warned me to never do it, but we’re out of options. One of us must survive this for you, for your brother and sister’ sakes, and the Sidhe need their king more than a Royal Wife.”

  “But we need our mother,” Thaylan said brokenly, releasing my arms only to throw his own around my middle and hug me with a desperation that almost made me lose my resolve.

  I hugged him just as tightly and planted a kiss on his forehead. I wished I could hug Anir, Rinya, and Arra once more before I did this in case the worst happened, but we were simply out of time. I compromised by sending them a wave of love through our empathic bonds.

  Thaylan released me reluctantly, his eyes suddenly looking way too old and weary for a twelve-year-old. It made my heart clench painfully with guilt.

  “Just remember that I love you—all of you,” I said with a tremulous smile. I wanted desperately to promise him that everything would work out just fine, but I had never lied to my children and I wasn’t about to start now.

  I kicked off my slippers and climbed onto the bed, trying not to get tangled up in my long skirt as I laid myself half-draped over his chest and threaded our hands together. “Here we go,” I murmured for Thaylan’s benefit.

  Then I closed my eyes, and remembering that overwhelming feeling from long ago when I had completely surrendered to Sethian and our souls had bonded, I sought to replicate that feeling, that total surrender. I sensed more than felt Thaylan guide me towards a tiny thread of Sethian’s essence that I had been unable to find before when I had searched while stuck in that dungeon cell.

  Once I touched that thread, I had about a split-second to feel the horror of his rapidly fading life-force before the thread suddenly latched onto me, this sudden influx of life energy it had found, and began to instinctually draw its fill more quickly than I had anticipated. It was like trying to stop the downward flow of a waterfall with a twig, and just as both Sethian and Thaylan had warned, the whole of my being was drawn into that flow before I could even think to pull away. As my consciousness faded, my last thought was not of fear, regrets, or even of death. It was of my family and the knowledge that they would certainly prosper with Sethian at their side to guide them.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I was surro
unded by warmth, that was the first thing that registered as my consciousness rose from the murky depths of oblivion. It was both comforting and comfortable, and I would have let my mind fall back into that blissful nothingness had I not suddenly felt something warm and soft brush across my lips. It was a struggle, but I forced my eyes open and managed to keep them open after a couple of false starts even though my eyelids seemed to weigh a ton each and my eyes, themselves stung a little. At first, my vision was one big blur of various flesh-toned colors and yellows, but eventually everything came into focus. I realized that my head was currently lying on Sethian’s bare chest, and he was looking down at me with a very strange look in his eyes.

  It wasn’t just his expression. There was something different about him, something that my still sleep-fuzzed mind couldn’t quite figure out. I lifted my head and looked at him quizzically. There didn’t seem to be anything different about his face that I could tell, but at the same time I knew there was.

  Without saying a word, Sethian cupped the side of my face and leaned forward. Thinking that he was going in for a kiss, I started to close my eyes again but then blinked at him in surprise when I felt him press his forehead against mine and close his eyes with a pinched look on his face as though he was struggling not to cry.

  Frankly, I was starting to get a little freaked out by the way he was behaving. In all the thirteen years we had been together, I had never once seen him cry, nor did I ever expect to.

  “Sethian?” I questioned, grimacing as my voice came out so raspy that it sounded as though I hadn’t had a drink of water in days.

  “I was beginning to think that you would never awaken,” he said thickly. He hugged me more tightly against his body.

  “Never awaken?” I echoed in confusion.

  He pulled back a bit and studied my face, his eyes swimming with worry. “You don’t remember?”

  I tried to think back to what I had been doing before going to bed, but my mind was coming up with a big fat nothing. Apparently there was a lot I was missing because aside from Sethian’s strange behavior, from the moment I had awakened everything had felt a little—off.

  I shook my head. “Did I have an accident? Hit my head or something?” I raised my hand to feel along my scalp, but there were no bumps and nothing felt even remotely tender.

  “You have been asleep for almost a moon-cycle,” he said.

  I sucked in a sharp breath. “What! Why? But I don’t feel—”

  If I had been unconscious for that many days, then shouldn’t I have been so weak that it would have been difficult to talk, much less move? However, other than an extremely dry mouth, initial confusion, and a little residual weakness, I felt no worse than if I had woken up with a slight hangover.

  “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, suddenly feeling a little overwhelmed. “My head is still a little muddled. If I’ve been out of it for so long, it’s no wonder I had so much trouble opening my eyes earlier. Just tell me Sethian. Please.”

  He ran his fingers through my hair. “Do you remember me being ill at all?” he asked.

  I furrowed my brow, considering. Yes, I did remember sitting in this room for long marks by his bedside, holding a hand that had gone as cold as ice while several healers fussed over him with faces that had become increasing graver. I dug a little deeper into the memory, and suddenly the queen’s infuriatingly smug face flashed into my mind, standing inside the dungeon cell she had condemned me to while she gleefully told me of Sethian’s impending death.

  “The queen tried to kill you!” I exclaimed, outrage coloring my voice. “That curse…!”

  It was all coming back to me now, as though my sudden rage at what the queen had tried to do to my family had cleared all the remaining haze from my mind, allowing my last memories to finally rise to the surface. Thaylan phasing into the dungeon to rescue me, what he did to the queen, his anguish when he realized that he could not save his father—everything.

  “Then Thaylan showed me how to save you,” I finished more softly.

  Sethian took my face into his hands. “And once you did, and the curse broke, he showed me how to save you.”

  “All I remember is blacking out once your soul had begun to consume mine. What happened after that?”

  “I woke up the moment the curse broke. It happened only moments before my soul could consume all your life-energy completely, and I was able to stop it before all hope to save you would have been lost. Because our souls were so intertwined and his so intrinsically linked with yours, Thaylan was able share some of his own life-force with you, enough so that with our combined efforts, we were able to brink you back from the brink of death.

  “I have been lying here with you day and night, every moment I was able, feeding you as much as my life-energy as was safe in the hopes that it would help you to recover, but the human soul is different, and unlike with me, I was not certain receiving the life-energy of an elf could help you at all as it appeared you were unable to absorb it well.”

  “I put my soul through a tremendous shock. Maybe all it needed was rest and time. And giving me some of your life-energy did help. Now it makes sense why I didn’t wake up still feeling half-dead.”

  “Nevertheless, you will not be getting out of bed anytime soon,” Sethan said sternly.

  “Well, right now you’re not exactly making it hard to obey you,” I teased. I turned and kissed the palm of one of his hand softly. “Is it night or day right now?”

  “It is early morning. The children will be up soon and anxious to see their mother. They have been keeping vigil at your bedside along with me as well.”

  Anger boiled to the surface again. “Limira, she didn’t hurt them, did she?”

  I could feel an answering anger within Sethian’s own emotions as he replied, “Not physically, but Arra witnessed a guard striking you over the head and then Limira had her sent to a relative within the palace who promptly informed her that we were both dead. She won’t be forgetting any of this anytime soon.”

  “Thank goodness Anir and Rinya were with Rinwen when that whole horrible mess started. As far as I know, the queen was never able to get her hands on them.”

  He shook his head. “Saeria and Rinwen were able to hide them with their father.” He pause a moment, flashing me a rather serious look, before continuing a bit hesitantly, “However, Lariel was not so fortunate. She has recovered, but when we discovered her in the dungeons, she had already been badly beaten by one of the queen’s guards. We believe it was to lend credibility to the lies about you that Limira had fed the court.”

  “Did Thaylan explain to you what he did with her?” I asked.

  Sethian’s lips stretched into a satisfied grin as he nodded. “He folded her up within the material of one of the many pocket dimensions he has created over the years. She fell into a kind of stasis until I was well enough to deal with her. In the end, she was less than forthcoming in the answers she was willing to give, and with the mage that had delivered such a deadly curse upon me still unknown, I had no choice but to perform a mind extraction on her before he could target us again.”

  “Why did she do something so stupid? She had to know the consequences of protecting that mage. She had to know how pointless it was to remain silent when you would get the answers from her anyway.”

  “Treason against the king carries a harsh punishment,” Sethian said, but when he did not elaborate further, I didn’t press him. I was probably better off not knowing, anyway.

  “At least her death was not completely in vain. The information within her mind pointed me to not only a dangerous mage but also to several enemies I had not even been aware of. It seems the queen was only one of many that wanted you removed from the realm. It was they, and not Limira or her family, that sent the many assassins that attacked you over the years, though she did aid a few of them wherever she could. The only one that could be attributed completely to her is the man that attacked you in
our bedroom. Unbeknownst to all of us, every guard on duty that night were those in the pockets of her family. By no means did we find all of them, but we have certainly struck a serious blow to their cause.”

  “The queen once told me that the healers and mages within her people believed that they would be able to safely extract the human genes safely from their genomes someday pretty soon,” I said quietly. “I believe this is why she hated me so much. She saw me as something that would make the ‘taint’ within the Sidhe blood worse. For her, at least, I don’t think it was about seizing the throne just for the sake of the throne at all.”

  I didn’t tell him the rest, about how she had tried to convince me to leave the realm voluntarily. The queen was dead. It was better to just let sleeping dogs lie on some things.

  Before he could comment, a soft knock sounded at the door.

  “The healers have arrived, Your Majesty,” Lariel called softly through the door.

  “Ah, yes,” Sethian said. “It is later in the morning than I had initially thought.”

  “I shall meet with them shortly,” Sethian called back to her. Then he suddenly smiled. “In the meantime, I believe there is someone here that would very much like to see you.”

  She gasped loudly, then the door flew open in the next second, and she was barreling towards the bed. “Emily! Thank the High Powers! You are awake!” she cried as Sethian carefully helped me to sit up to receive her very enthusiastic hug.

  While Lariel was bust fussing over me, Sethian used the opportunity to climb out of bed and change his clothes in order to meet with the healers.

  “I shall send them in to examine you, shortly, as well as the children” Sethian said to me, giving my hand an affectionate squeeze before turning to address Lariel. “After your visit, I need you to go to the royal baths and make certain the pools are hot and ready to receive us.”

  Her eyes immediately fell to the coverlet. “Yes, Your Majesty,” she said with a slight bow.