Claimed by the Elven King: Part Four

by Cristina Rayne

  “Sethian, will you please just tell me what you think this means?” I pleaded.

  He reached out a hand and ran the pads of his fingers caressingly down my cheek. “It’s not something bad no matter what the reason, so you can ease your mind,” he said. “Either his black hair is the result of him exhibiting a human trait as I explained before, or—”

  “—he’s just like the elf from that myth you mentioned,” I finished for him, “the one you still won’t properly explain to me.”

  He sighed. “I should have never brought it up at all. Most today do not believe that such a being as Hirion ever existed, that the circumstances that led to his extraordinary abilities and unconventional appearance are just too unbelievable to be anything but fiction. I have read some of your human literature over the centuries, and the works that are the most comparable are the stories of Merlin or the demigods of Greek and Roman myth, at least in regards to the extraordinary abilities they were born with.”

  He paused and suddenly grinned, probably because I likely had a stupid look on my face as I stared back at him in mute disbelief. I looked down at our son, looking small and cute and innocent and nothing like the mythical people he had just mentioned.

  “You’re joking. The last thing anyone would ever accuse me of being is something like a demigod, and unless there’s something really important you forgot to mention about yourself to me, you aren’t one either.”

  He nodded. “As I said, it is only a comparison of myths with similar themes. Just as a demigod was a child of two worlds, Hirion was said to have been born with the perfect balance of elven and human traits rather than just inheriting the few human genes like every other half-blood. As a result, he was able to wield the power of both races, giving him access to a power that had never been seen before nor since in all our long history.

  “The realm we now live within is not the first. The origins of my people lie within a realm that no longer exists. It was said that Hirion carved from the very fabric of a chaotic dimension normally beyond the reach of our own a mythical Third Realm by his power alone, a land of immortality, great beauty, and magic, and took half the then elven population with him.”

  “But,” I interjected, “humans don’t have the kind of power that elves do. Our abilities lie in innovation, not magic.”

  “No,” he agreed, “but the potential is there all the same. Otherwise, you would never have connected mentally with our son, nor would have any of the human brides of old with their children. Perhaps it is a matter of evolution—the next step—or humans simply just need to be shown the way by another. The moment our son reached out to you for comfort when he was frightened and confused during the birth was the moment that you were finally able to hear his soul, was it not?”

  “You’re saying it’s because of something he did, not something that happens naturally?”

  “Yes and no,” he replied maddeningly.

  I made a face. “That doesn’t help, Sethian.”

  He chuckled. “Bear with me, my Emily. These are questions an elf does not normally have to answer, much less spend much thought on. Our bonds to each other as well as our manipulations of the natural energies of the world are things that are as ingrained and instinctual to the Sidhe as breathing is to a human. A human does not have to be taught how to take that first breath at birth; they just know. Thus, our son reached out to you with his mind and in essence, joined with yours as easily as though he had merely reached out a hand to clasp your own. If you wish a deeper explanation, then that is a question you will have to pose to the scholars who study such things.”

  Now that I was becoming fairly proficient in basic Elvish despite my inability to correctly pronounce a lot of the more tongue-twisting words, I would definitely seek them out as long as Sethian allowed them to visit me in the royal suite. I doubted the archives were a good place to take a newborn for any extended length of time. The baby—

  I cut myself off mid-thought and frowned over at Sethian. “Do we really have to wait seven days before naming him?” I asked. “It feels kind of awkward to keep calling him ‘my son’ or ‘my baby.’ We humans usually have a name picked out long before the baby is even born.”

  He nodded. “It is important that we learn his natural personality from the beginning in order to select a name that suits him the most. For instance, my name means ‘the one who forces a new path.’”

  “Yes, I would say that name suits you perfectly,” I said dryly. Bringing me to the elven realm without so much as a “may I?” and taking a human bride despite the many protests from the elven court reflected the essence of that meaning very well. “Fine, we’ll wait, but I hope you at least have something in mind.”

  Even before the birth, I had decided to let Sethian pick the name without any input from me. I had gleaned enough from my conversations with my friends to understand that names were very important in the elven culture, and I was nowhere near understanding all the nuances involved.

  “I do,” he replied, smiling at me as if I had just said something incredibly funny, which I usually interpreted as “said something stupid.”

  “Good. Then we’ll leave that discussion for another time. Now, you were saying about the balance…?” I said, steering us back on topic.

  “Ah, yes. According to the tale, there was much speculation of how this balance came to be. Some said that the human mother was not human at all but of a race of beings from beyond even the human realm.”

  “Is that even plausible?” I asked with interest.

  “There are many realms,” he replied enigmatically, and I could have strangled him when he didn’t elaborate.

  “One of these days, maybe you’ll actually answer one of my questions completely,” I grumbled.

  “A few centuries from now you will better appreciate leaving some things for later discussion,” he said.

  As always, whenever he threw a wrench that big into the conversation, I had no idea how to reply, leaving me feeling a bit unsettled. It seemed it was happening more and more often lately, but maybe it was because ever since someone had tried to push me off the balcony, he had been spending more time just sitting and talking with me.

  The baby picked that moment to wiggle a bit, giving me the perfect excuse to turn my attention away from Sethian to him. I couldn’t believe how well he was already able to focus on my face, as though he was months and not hours old. When I looked into his eyes, I could practically see the wheels turning within. It had been a bit disquieting at first, but now I couldn’t get enough of just looking at him, wondering what he was thinking, if anything.

  I couldn’t resist bending down and kissing him on the forehead. The moment my lips touched his incredibly soft skin, I felt a tiny surge of an emotion that made me think of how pleasant it felt to feel the cool wind on my face while sitting out on the balcony.

  “I think I just felt one of his emotions,” I said in something like awe. “It made me remember a time when I had felt the same. Is that what it’s been like for you all this time when you said you could hear his soul?”

  “Yes,” he said, sounding strangely hesitant.

  I immediately looked over to him, but the expression on his face hadn’t changed. “What is it?” I asked anyway.

  “What we were talking about before, about the reason for Hirion being born with such incredible abilities, about how such a perfect balance came to be…”

  I could feel myself stiffen in response to the gravity I heard in his voice. “Just tell me,” I said firmly.

  Suddenly I felt a wave of foreboding crash through me so powerful that my entire soul as well as my body shuddered in reaction.

  “W-What did you just do?” I stuttered.

  “I just accepted the truth,” Sethian said.

  “Huh?” I said intellectually.

  He reached over with his free hand and gently cupped the side of my face. The expression in his eyes was something that I had only seen once before, and just as it had that t
ime, the shock of it hit me like a bolt of lightning to the heart.

  “There was another version of Hirion’s tale that offered a very different answer as to how the balance had come to be. It was said that his Sidhe father and human mother had bonded as soulmates at the same moment that he was conceived, something I never thought could happen—” The smile Sethian gave me was beautiful and simple. “—until it did.”

  I opened my mouth, to say what, I had no idea, but the implications of Sethian’s declaration left me stunned and unable to utter a sound. Tears welled up in my eyes as I suddenly understood the emotion I was seeing in his eyes. It was impossible. Things like this never happened to someone like me. I was suddenly terrified that this moment wasn’t real, that I had passed out during the birth and was dreaming this whole conversation.

  Sethian leaned forward and brushed his lips tenderly against mine, soft and fleeting. A rush of pure affection instantly flooded my being, causing the tears to begin falling down my cheeks. There was no more doubt. That strong connection we had seemed to form the second time we had made love still existed, and judging from the clarity of the emotions I could now sense from him, it had probably never faded at all.

  He pulled back and rubbed a thumb beneath my eyes, wiping the tears away. “There is nothing to fear,” he said. “I am truly here. This moment is real. Just as I never thought I would be able to gaze upon my child like this, I believed I would never find this kind of love with another and did not allow myself to see our bond for what it was until our son opened my eyes. Forgive me.”

  Love… Just hearing him say that one word, the word I had desperately wanted to hear him say for all these long months made a quiet sob burst forth from my throat. It wasn’t a straight out “I love you,” but it had been a declaration all the same. I needed only to feel the affection that had flooded my soul and see the love in his eyes to know it wasn’t just wishful thinking.

  A soft sound of exclamation from below had me instantly looking down at my son. His little arms were waving back and forth as if in either agitation or excitement. The moment my attention was entirely focused on him, a feeling of extreme interest washed over me, overriding Sethian’s own feelings of affection.

  Not wanting him to see me cry, I made a huge effort to pull myself together and smiled down at him brightly. He blinked and the feeling he was projecting changed to the one I had felt from him earlier, the one that made me think of the wind on my face.

  “He likes your smile,” Sethian said, the sound of his voice drawing the baby’s eyes to him.

  Sethian reached over and lovingly caressed our son’s head. The intensity of the baby’s emotions instantly doubled, making me feel a bit light-headed and dazed.

  That strong surge of emotion triggered the memory of the dizzying and near overwhelming rush of energy I had felt while giving birth of the moment my son was completely free of my body. At the time, I had thought it was a result of my own emotions going haywire about the event itself, the realization that I had just brought a life into the world that most first-time mothers probably experience.

  Thinking back to everything Sethian had told me about that mythical elf, Hirion, and the fact that I still knew very little about elven magic, it made me wonder if I had been wrong. What if what I had felt hadn’t come from me at all, but from him?

  “Sethian,” I said hesitantly, “when he was born, I felt a huge surge of what I thought at the time was an adrenaline rush. Now, feeling the baby’s emotions like this, how strong they are, I just realized how incredibly ignorant I am when it comes to an elf’s power. It never occurred to me to ask about things like are your abilities present at birth or do they come later at puberty or adulthood?”

  “An elf’s power awakens at birth,” he replied. “That initial surge of power is strong enough that it can be felt for many spans. Our son’s awakening was particularly strong. It released enough energy that I have no doubt it was felt by everyone in Talloth and perhaps even beyond.”

  “Then everyone knows I’ve given birth,” I said slowly, hugging the baby closer to my chest.

  I suddenly had a new appreciation for the lack of windows in the bedroom. Ever since someone had tried to kill me, I had been worrying about whether or not they would target the baby after failing to prevent the birth in the first place.

  Sethian’s eyes sharpened at my reaction, and he nodded approvingly. “Yes, and you are correct to think that the game has changed once again. We must both be doubly vigilant now.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  As we neared the king’s entrance to the throne room, my levels of anxiety rose exponentially as I remembered vividly the discomfort of having to endure what had felt like an eternity of stares and/or glares from the entire elven court during my presentation as Sethian’s pregnant Royal Wife. The whispering alone was enough to drive one mad. I could only imagine their reaction when they realized my son resembled an elf from myth.

  I felt Sethian tighten his arm around mine, and I glanced over at him sheepishly. No doubt I was sending some interesting emotions his way. Ever since he had acknowledged that we were soul-bound, the block his uncertainty had unconsciously placed between us had been removed permanently, and now our emotions always flowed between us like a two-way river. I still had not quite gotten used to feeling someone else’s emotions and wondered if it was even something you could get used to.

  “This is our son’s naming ceremony,” Sethian said. “Just focus on that, and all the rest will become merely noise in the distance.”

  I smiled thinly and nodded. He was right. I was finally going to learn my son’s name and that’s all that mattered. I was still a little miffed that I hadn’t managed to get him to cave and tell me the name beforehand, no matter how much I had begged. I had learned over the last seven days just how stubborn my husband could be.

  With my beautiful son cradled securely in my right arm and a husband whom I now knew loved me linked with the other, I really had no room to complain, anyway. A year ago, I could have never imagined my life ending up this well. That was probably why I really dreaded stepping into the throne room. The nobles would be bad enough, but the fact that the queen would be there as well left me feeling cold and angry, and if I were being completely honest, more than a little helpless.

  I did not want the woman who so casually insisted that I do something that would have surely caused me to miscarry to even look at my son. She had no right, but just because she was the queen, she had every right.

  Adding insult to injury, I still couldn’t even tell Sethian about what she had wanted me to do because I had no idea what her game was or if she really had been trying to help me in her own twisted way. For all I knew, her hands could be as tied as mine and my anger was misplaced, so for the time being, I had to face her with a neutral expression and pretend that I wasn’t dying to punch that china doll face until it cracked.

  It was probably for the best that I would be little more than a prop throughout the ceremony. It would take more than birthing their future king for the majority of the elven court to accept me as one of them, but after nearly dying for the sake of their political games, I wasn’t very keen on being included as a member of the court at all. I was happy to just step back into the shadows and allow Sethian to handle the political side of our lives. I had total confidence that he would keep our son safe.

  Four guards stood in pairs on either side of the double doors that opened up onto the dais. They noticeably stood more stiffly as we approached and then bowed to both of us as we came to a stop before the door. I saw a couple of the guards glance with unbridled interest at the bundle in my arms, but I had covered the baby’s head so only his face was visible. He had been asleep when we left the royal suite, but now he was wide awake, his eyes darting around and taking in all the new sights. I could feel his interest seeping in through my anxiety.

  Sethian nodded at the guards, and the inside two each opened a door. I heard the herald announce us, and a few seconds la
ter, we were through the door and facing the multitudes of courtiers. The atmosphere in the chamber felt completely different this time. Instead of curiosity or just-barely concealed hostility, the air was alive with excitement. However, it was completely disconcerting on how every eye immediately zeroed in on me, making my skin crawl.

  As we walked to the center of the dais to stand before Sethian’s throne, I glanced at the queen’s throne where Limira had already risen to her feet to face us, her face a mask of perfect neutrality, though unsurprisingly, her gaze was fixed on the baby.

  Sethian unlinked our arms, and I handed our son to him, glad to have something else to focus on briefly other than that sea of eyes or the queen. After uncovering his head, the elven king turned to face his subjects with the baby held out vertically before him with a hand supporting his head and the other his bottom and gave them their first good look at their new prince.

  The low buzz of conversation abruptly stopped in what sounded like one loud, collective gasp, followed by a silence so profound that I could feel it down to the very marrow in my bones. Nobody moved; nobody breathed. It was as though reality, itself, had frozen while teetering on the edge of a precipice.

  Seemingly unperturbed, though the slight feeling of concern I was picking up from him said otherwise, Sethian announced in Elvish in a booming voice, “Behold my son, Prince Thaylan of the royal House of Elerren, heir to the throne of the Second Realm!”

  His voice echoed loudly throughout the room, but all I could hear was my son’s name.

  Thaylan…

  My heart thumped loudly in my ears in excitement, once, then twice, three times, and then the room roared with the sound of a thousand voices that made the very glass on the windows tremble. Shouts of disbelief, cries of confusion, and accusations of trickery, all of this hit me with the force of a wrecking ball.

  Then the queen was suddenly beside Sethian, staring down at Thaylan as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. She reached a hand out as if to touch his face, and suddenly enraged, I started to move towards them, intent on stopping her. I only managed a single step before a surge of utter agitation raged into my being, and a clear wave of pure power suddenly erupted out from the baby, making me stagger as it pushed me backwards and knocked the queen completely flat on her back.