Claimed by the Elven King: Part Two

by Cristina Rayne

  After all, there was always tomorrow…

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The equivalent to a human earth month later, I would have given anything to be having that unsettling conversation again.

  As soon as Sethian had escorted me back to the rooms that were now essentially my new apartment, he had left to attend to his duties, leaving me to have lunch with only Lariel. Although I was more upset about it than I had wanted to admit, I was happy that I at least had Lariel to keep me company until I could see him again.

  The only problem was that he still hadn’t come back.

  Lariel told me not to worry, that the king had many duties that often kept him away from the palace, that the passage of time was perceived differently by the Sidhe, but I was still irritated that he hadn’t at least sent me a message or something to let me know that he wouldn’t be back for a while. As the days turned into weeks, my irritation gradually shifted to mild anxiety, then finally to full-out worry that my initial fears of being no more than a viable womb to the elven king were only too warranted.

  I struggled not to let my fears show to Lariel, instead trying to distract myself from my growing anger—and if I were completely honest, despair—by asking her and the other two elf sisters that had arrived to serve as ladies-in-waiting a little bit after I last saw Sethian as many questions about the elven realm and its many protocols and customs as I could. They had also begun to teach me the elven language, a dialect so incomprehensible and unpronounceable to my human tongue that I despaired of ever learning it. I had never been good with languages.

  It helped immensely that the three women were genuinely friendly and quite curious about the human realm in return. Otherwise, I probably would have curled up into a ball of misery after only a few days alone with only my dark thoughts and fears to keep me occupied.

  Today we were having an elven version of tea out on the balcony. After assuring me that the wind wouldn’t be a problem, it had become my favorite place, other than the private garden that the king had apparently given me as a marriage gift, to visit with the elf women whom I now considered as friends. The balcony had also become a favored place to think (worry) when I was alone.

  “So next year, you won’t have to work at all?” I asked Lariel in disbelief.

  She nodded seriously. “It’s custom. Long ago, our families tied themselves to the fortunes of the royal family. In exchange for our service, we are allowed to set up residence within a single wing of the palace, itself. Starting at age twenty, we begin working in whatever position we have grown up preparing to fulfill.”

  “One year of service. One year of rest,” Saeria cut in. “At least for those who serve within the royal household. The pact is different for those who wish to serve in governance or in one of the many trades.”

  She was the more outspoken of the two elf sisters. They looked like identical twins, but Saeria had just laughed when I had asked and said she was two hundred years older than her sister, Rinwen. The admission had floored me as the elf sisters looked to be around sixteen years old, as did Lariel. I still hadn’t worked up the nerve to ask any of them their true ages. For all I knew, all of them, even Sethian who looked to be around mid-twenties at the most, could have been thousands of years old. Sethian had certainly spoken of centuries as if they were nothing.

  Of course, I was going by human standards of aging. So far I hadn’t met more than a handful of elves, just my ladies-in-waiting, the queen, a couple of bath attendants, and a few rotating guards—not an ideal pool to draw a comparison.

  “You wanted to serve the king’s wife?” I asked, finding the idea incomprehensible.

  The three girls exchanged a confused look. “That you are human makes no difference to us,” Lariel said, grabbing my hand and gently squeezing it as if to comfort me.

  I shook my head and said, “That’s not what I meant. I’m just trying to understand your choice of jobs. You made it sound as if you chose to be someone’s lady-in-waiting as a child rather than be assigned the duty.”

  If anything, they looked even more confused now.

  “To serve at the side of the Royal Wife, to help in the rearing of the next king and his royal siblings, is something many of us desired,” she said. “His Majesty has told you about our difficulties in conceiving, yes?”

  Lariel looked so sad, that I suddenly felt like an idiot. Even with my trepidation of becoming a parent in such an uncertain situation, I could completely see how heartbreaking it would be if no one was able to have children.

  I nodded. “He told me an elven child hasn’t been born in the realm in at least five hundred years.”

  “And that last child was me,” Lariel said with a small smile. “Ever since my mother told me this, I have been determined to be by the side of the woman who would bring life back to our people.”

  Hearing that, not only did I suddenly feel like the lowest person alive, I suddenly felt the weight of an entire people crash down onto my shoulders. How had my life come to this?

  “But I’m not the only human trying to conceive an elven child right now, right?” I asked, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.

  “You are,” Rinwen said, sounding proud. “The heir must be born first. Thereafter, one male from each elven family is chosen to take a human wife to continue the family line.”

  “I’m not sure how many men you’re talking about,” I said slowly, “but somehow I don’t think a bunch of women suddenly going missing all at once in my world like I did will go unnoticed.”

  Lariel shook her head. “You were chosen specifically by His Majesty, himself,” she said. “That was not how it was done by our ancestors. During the last Plague of Infertility, doorways were set up throughout the human realm near most, if not all, human settlements that would allow our two races to meet in a dimensional space between our two worlds should a human woman wander inside. They were then offered a choice to join us in the realm. It is something that will happen slowly over a great length of time.”

  Her unexpected revelation hit me like a ton of bricks. I did not at all like the tiny surge of hope I suddenly felt that my elven husband truly did want me for me if I had been the exception to the rule. If this had happened thousands of years ago, I could very well imagine what those women thought when they saw an elf for the first time. Depending on their beliefs, they probably had mistaken them for gods. Nowadays, people would either know immediately what they were like I did thanks to popular media, or they would mistake them for aliens or maybe even angels. Either way, I didn’t think it would be quite so easy to find willing human mates this time around.

  “Just the fact that you are here, Emily, has our elder brother and his wife excited about the possibility of children in the near future,” Saeria added. She laughed suddenly. “His wife, Irdes, has asked me everyday since the night of your Consummation whether there have been any signs that His Majesty’s seed has borne fruit. I haven’t seen the ladies of the court this excited in quite a while.”

  I quickly looked down uncomfortably at my hands. While they still wouldn’t come right out and ask, during the last four weeks, all three women would often drop a hint of their desire to know whether or not I thought I was pregnant here and there in seemingly unrelated topics of conversation.

  “I don’t think it happened this time,” I said quietly. If anything, the light period I’d had over a week ago took care of the uncertainty even though I had kept it from my friends, having not been sure if I could keep my relief from my expression.

  Once again, Lariel took my hands between her own. “Please don’t let it worry you,” she fretted. “No one thought you would conceive so soon. I suspect it will take many moon-cycles, or perhaps even years. The old texts are quite clear on that.”

  “Besides,” Rinwen added, “your days of fertility will begin again tomorrow. Just in time for His Majesty’s visit.”

  My head instantly shot up. “He’s coming to see me tomorrow?” I said, wincing internally at the eag
erness in my voice. Dammit…I really had fallen for him, hadn’t I…

  “That’s what the messenger said this morning,” she confirmed. “We were instructed to have dinner prepared and waiting for you two in His Majesty’s personal chambers tomorrow evening. I believe he will come for you, himself.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I was exhausted when Lariel came to wake me up the next morning, having gotten very little sleep that night out of both anticipation of seeing Sethian and nervousness. It had been so long since I had last seen him that I felt it would be like meeting a stranger. Every other time he had come to see me, we had progressed to sex fairly quickly, and I didn’t want that this time. I wanted us to just hang out together for a while and just talk, maybe out on the balcony if he wasn’t in the mood for a walk in the garden—something I’m ashamed to admit to daydreaming about.

  Yes, I really did have it bad for the elf, but instead of being happy about it, it only made me angry at myself. I had always thought I had more common sense than to invest so much of myself into a relationship as uncertain as this one right from the beginning. Who knew that all it would take was a few kind words, a hot body, and mind-blowing sex to win me over so thoroughly?

  However, I was determined not to let my traitorous body get in the way tonight. After everything the girls had told me, I had a month’s worth of questions for him, and I would demand answers to at least some of them before going anywhere near a bed.

  After a visit to the royal baths, I was sitting in my bedroom at the dressing table brushing out my hair and snacking on a bowl of grapes while I waited for Lariel to return with the Maelenas sisters and my breakfast when the nausea hit. It came on so suddenly and violently that I almost fell out of my chair in shock.

  I clamped a hand over my mouth and an arm around my stomach and scrambled towards the en suite bathroom, whose door I had thankfully left open. I barely made it in time to drop to my knees in front of the elven version of a toilet—what amounted to a marble aqueduct of perpetually flowing water that spanned the entire length of one of the walls in which a person would squat or hover over to do their business. I then proceeded to spew everything I had just eaten and then some until my throat was raw and I was reduced to dry heaves.

  Once I was sure my stomach was finished rebelling, it took every ounce of the meager strength I had left to keep from falling face-first into the water stream and pull away to lean my back against the cool marble instead.

  I looked over and up to the ledge against an adjacent wall where a pitcher of water sat. As awful and weak as I felt, it might as well have been miles away rather than a few feet, but if I didn’t rinse the sour taste of bile from my mouth soon, I feared I would start to dry heave again.

  Yet, what I really wanted to do was curl up into a miserable ball and cry because even though there were several different explanations for my sudden sickness, I knew damned well which one was correct.

  “In contrast, humans are exceedingly fertile.”

  Sethian’s words echoed through my mind almost mockingly as I wrapped my arms around myself in an effort to control my sudden shaking. Sethian would be ecstatic. My friends would be ecstatic. The entire elven realm would probably be ecstatic, but the only thing I could feel in that moment of realization was complete panic.

  Despite all the previous signs that had pointed to the contrary, I was probably pregnant, and all I could think was, Sethian can’t know!

  My husband was finally coming to see me tonight after being gone and out of touch for a whole freaking month, and fate had chosen today of all days to drive me to my knees with morning sickness! Once Rinwen had told me about Sethian coming, deep down I had figured the timing of his visit corresponding with the start of my ovulation cycle wasn’t coincidental at all, and once he found out that I was probably pregnant, would he even have a reason to visit me except maybe to occasionally check on the progress of the pregnancy?

  I had to stop shaking and wallowing in misery on the floor. Lariel would be back any minute now with everyone, and there was no way I could let them find me like this. They would know immediately what was “wrong” with me, and nothing short of the end of the world would keep them from running immediately to their king with the glorious news.

  I needed time—time to sort out my feelings about having a child in the first place, something I had been spending the last few weeks trying not to think about at all, which, given my current predicament, was about the stupidest thing I had done since our “wedding” night. I needed time to talk with Sethian and figure out what kind of relationship he wanted with me. Now that my pregnancy was all but confirmed, things would definitely have to change, the first being that the elf-king couldn’t just leave me here waiting without a single word until he either got an itch for sex or I was fertile because there was no way I was just going to sit in this royal apartment and spit out babies for him like a damned machine.

  Maybe it was because I hadn’t been in Sethian’s overwhelming presence for so long or the panic of realizing I could very well be carrying an elven child within me, but for the first time in a long while, my mind felt clear and wide awake. For the past month, I had lived my life as if I were moving within a dream, accepting things as they had come along without thinking too hard about them, if at all, but now I was determined to never let myself fall into that deceptive spell ever again.

  If I was going to bring a child into this world, then dammit, it was going to be a family effort! And the only way I had a chance of making that happen was to work on establishing a deeper relationship with my husband other than as his occasional bed-warmer.

  An image of the queen’s sneering face flashed into my mind, and I scowled. If that was the way she acted with Sethian, then maybe my goal wouldn’t be as difficult as climbing Mt. Everest in the middle of winter.

  No—I just have to get through tonight without ever letting on how sick I’m feeling, I thought in despair.

  It would have to be an Oscar-worthy performance, and unfortunately, I was never a good actress at the best of times. Having to eat dinner with him with a queasy stomach would be absolute torture!

  Even so, I needed to talk with him without a baby clouding the issue. I didn’t want to ever feel like he was just humoring me because he didn’t want me upset for the baby’s sake. That would be infinitely worse than completely ignoring me. I didn’t want one of the most important relationships of my life to be a lie.

  But first things first—I had to get off the damn floor before Lariel and the others could find me!

  Just climbing to my knees almost had me hurling again, but I just gritted my teeth, and using the marble ledge of the toilet/aqueduct as a crutch, climbed back onto my feet with a stubbornness I had only exhibited a handful of times in my life. Don’t cry when the schoolyard bullies pull on your double braids like they were reigning in a horse; don’t cry at your mother’s funeral or you may never stop; don’t hurl just because an elven king knocked you up and you now have a little morning sickness…

  Once on my feet, my nausea subsided enough that I felt I could walk over to the pitcher of water across the room without sending me running to the aqueduct again. Finally being able to rinse out my mouth also improved my level of nausea to where I felt I might just be able to ignore it and act fairly normal after all. The only problem would be the breakfast I would be expected to eat in a few minutes.

  I frowned thoughtfully. Maybe being forced to eat breakfast wouldn’t be the tragedy it seemed. If I became queasy again, then maybe I could convince them that it was just nerves and that I had no appetite as a result. Lariel had remarked before that I always seemed to be in a perpetual state of anxiety and that she wished I would relax more, so there was definitely a precedent established.

  If anything, it would at least give me the practice I needed before my dinner date because if I couldn’t manage to fool my ladies-in-waiting, then there was no way in hell I would be able to fool Sethian. I knew better than to hope that my naus
ea would subside by this evening; life had never granted me any favors, and I really doubted it would start now at the moment when I really really needed a favor.

  I splashed some cool water over my face, hoping it would add a little color to my undoubtedly pale face, before I carefully left the bathroom and headed back to my dressing table. It was a relief to be sitting down again as my stomach decided to give another unpleasant lurch at that moment as if to remind me who really was the one in charge. After taking several deep, shuddering breaths to keep the dry heaving at bay, I pushed aside my bowl of grapes as far from my sight as possible and grabbed my hand mirror.

  Did my complexion still look a little green? Were my eyes dull or a little too bright? In the low light of a single lamp in my windowless bedroom, I couldn’t really tell. Maybe I could pass off looking a little sickly as nerves, too. Thank God Lariel had already seen me before I had puked my guts up. If I had gotten sick during the night, there would have been no hiding it from her, no passing it off as nerves. I swear elf ears could hear a pin drop ten miles away…

  “I can do this,” I muttered to my reflection, but I didn’t look very convinced.

  The front door to my apartment suddenly clicked open, and I instantly went rigid. Unfortunately, the sudden rush of adrenaline instantly triggered a humongous cramp in my stomach, and I very nearly lost it again as I doubled over momentarily before I could stop myself.

  A wash of female chatter that was distressingly close made it past the thundering sound of my own panicked heartbeat in my ears. I only had seconds to pull myself together!

  I can’t let him find out.

  I can’t let him find out.

  I can’t let him find out…

  CLAIMED BY THE ELVEN KING: PART THREE