Claimed by the Elven King: Part Four (2 page)

I rose up a bit onto my elbows from my prone position on the bed and
asked, “Knew what?”

“His Majesty just informed us that a healer would be in to see you
after the midday meal and to make sure that you did nothing but rest until then,”
she replied. She stood at the side of the bed and peered down at my face
critically. “I
knew
you were sicker than you wanted us to believe. Why
would you even want to keep something like that to yourself?”

I let myself fall back onto the bed, internally sighing with relief.
They still didn’t know, and now I wouldn’t have to explain why I had kept the
pregnancy from them. I could tell them on my own terms.

“The healer isn’t coming here because I’m sick.” I paused and then
amended, “Well, I
was
pretty nauseous yesterday, but it wasn’t because I
had caught a bug or because of my nerves.”

I looked from Lariel and Rinwen and smiled sheepishly. “It seems both
of you were right to be suspicious. My lord husband confirmed it for me last
night. I’m going to have a baby.”

Although I didn’t expect any of them to squeal like a tween at a
boy-band concert or something as equally undignified, I did expect exclamations
of delight or the usual congratulations at the very least. That’s why when Lariel
suddenly burst into tears, I didn’t know what to think or how to react. She
didn’t sob noisily or even move to cover her face with her hands. They were
silent tears that fell slowly down her cheeks as she looked down at me with
eyes so full of happiness that they practically glowed, as though I had given
her the greatest gift in the world.

I reached a hand up to her, wanting to stop her tears but having no
clue what to do. “Lariel…” I said uncertainly, feeling my chest tighten almost
painfully with a maelstrom of emotions.

She smiled prettily at me and shook her head. “I’m sorry. This is
unseemly, I know.”

She sat down next to me on the bed and took my hand into both of hers
as gently and carefully as if they were made of glass. I finally got a good
look at the strangely silent sisters standing side-by-side over Lariel’s
shoulder.

Rinwin’s usually pale face was flushed red, and her expression was so
ecstatic it seemed she was a breath away from bursting, her eyes shimmering
with blatant happiness as she looked at me with a wide grin. It almost looked
as though she was on the verge of tears, herself. Saeria was both smiling and
absently wringing her hands as if she was anxious to jump forward, to touch me
or to hug me, I don’t know, but as the sisters always seemed to follow Lariel’s
lead, she would probably stay rooted to that spot while the younger elf was
still gushing over me unless I called her over.

I beckoned them with my free hand. “Come, sit with me. Just put the
tray on the desk over there, Rinwen. I’d like to talk for a bit before I eat.”

“You were so certain that you had not conceived—did you not hear the
child’s soul?” Saeria asked once everyone had arranged themselves comfortably
around me along both edges of the bed.

I shook my head. “Seth-my lord says that human women can’t hear it
until later on in the pregnancy.”

“I can just imagine your shock when the king told you,” Lariel said.

“I had no idea he would be able to hear the baby like that. In
hindsight, I should have asked more questions about elven children. I never
considered that things would be so different.”

“It seems we all should have asked more questions about each other,”
Saeria said. “Having a mental connection with our families is just so
fundamental that I never once considered that it would not be so for you and
your child, especially since you already have such a strong connection to His
Majesty.”

“Huh? Connection?” I tried to sit up, but Lariel’s hands were
immediately on my shoulders, pushing me back down again. “Wait a minute! What
do you mean?”

Saeria and Rinwen shared a
look
before Saeria answered, “So you
don’t hear His Majesty’s soul either?”

I was about to shake my head no, but then the memory surfaced again of
that strange incident when I had momentarily felt what Sethian was feeling. Is
that what everyone meant when they said they “heard” a person’s soul? Some kind
of super empathy?

“I think I might have once, on the second day I was here, but sometimes
I’ve gotten the feeling that—”

I abruptly stopped, unsure for what seemed like the thousandth time if
it was something I should even talk about. I wanted to scream and yank at my
hair in frustration. I
really
hated all this royal court etiquette crap,
having to second-guess myself every time I opened my mouth.

All monarchies should be abolished
, I thought crossly. “Never
mind,” I said aloud. “It was probably just my imagination, anyway.”

“No, the connection definitely exists,” Saeria insisted. “His Majesty
already knew you were feeling out of sorts before he saw you two evenings ago
when I spoke to him on my way to the royal suite.”

I looked at Saeria sharply. It seems I was right to worry that she had
been talking to Sethian while off running her errands that night. I would
definitely have to watch what I said around all three of them from now on. Not
that it would make a whole lot of difference, I suddenly realized. If Sethian
knew what I was feeling even when he wasn’t anywhere near me…

I closed my eyes with a groan. We seriously needed to talk about the
soul reading thing a lot more the next time I saw him because apparently I
needed to teach him a little something called boundaries.

“Maybe I can’t hear his soul or whatever very well because I’m still
pretty much human even with all the changes my lord said that mage did to me.”

“Perhaps,” Rinwen agreed, the sound of her soft voice startling me a
little. She had been so quiet during our discussion that I had forgotten she
was there. “The accounts of the human brides in the old texts are vague at best,
so I doubt anything was ever written on the matter. That being said, I think I should
go to the archives after the healer attends you anyway and ask the archivist to
find as many documents or books that reference the human brides of old. We may
find something important that our earlier histories have missed.”

“I wish I could read them, too,” I said wistfully.

There was very little I could read from both the bookshelves in my bedroom
or the library back in the apartment. Although Lariel had been trying to teach
me the seemingly endless amount of elven glyphs, it would be a long time before
I would be able to read with any proficiency given my dismal foreign language
skills.

“One day I expect you will be reading our histories to your child,”
Lariel said firmly.

My chest tightened at the mental image her words conjured up of me
sitting on one of the overstuffed reading chairs in the library with a small,
blond boy in my lap and a thick book in his much as I had done with my father
before he had died.

“But you three will need to teach him or her Elvish,” I said, my voice
thick with emotion. “God knows my horrendous accent doesn’t need to be passed
on.”

All three women laughed. “Your accent will get better, as well,” Lariel
said.

The sound of the front door opening abruptly resonated in the
background and everyone stilled.

“It’s still too early for the healer,” Lariel said with a frown towards
the closed bedroom door.

“It’s probably just my lord husband,” I said. “I mean, who else would
the guards just let waltz into the king’s rooms unannounced?”

A second later I nearly jumped out of my skin when the door to the
bedroom flew open, and there in the threshold as if the universe was giving me
the ultimate finger stood my worst nightmare glaring at us from a face as
beautiful as a porcelain doll’s.

“Leave us,” the elven queen commanded sharply. “I wish to speak with
the Royal Wife alone.”

I mutely watched Lariel’s back, stiff with unease, disappear as she
closed the bedroom door behind her with a feeling akin to panic. Once again, I
mentally cursed the courtly protocol that prevented not only my friends, but
also me from disobeying a direct order from the queen without severe consequence.
Sethian had said that our unborn child currently outranked the queen, but that
fact in no way meant that I did, too. Until he presented me to the elven court
officially as the Royal Wife, I didn’t even exist in their eyes.

I hastily sat up and scooted back against the headboard. If I had to
talk to the queen, I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it flat on my back. I
expected her to come over to the bed, maybe even order me to get up and demand
that I prostrate myself before her or something equally demeaning. When she did
neither and just continued to stare expressionlessly at me from across the
room, that’s when I realized that I really had no idea what kind of person she
was other than the bits and pieces I had gleaned from the rare times Sethian or
my friends had mentioned her over the past month.

There was no way that she was here to congratulate me on my pregnancy,
but maybe she did want to offer a kind of truce between us for Sethian’s sake.

“I trust that you warned your ladies-in-waiting not to speak of the
child?” she abruptly asked.

I didn’t, but I nodded anyway since I had every intention of doing it
later once this very visit was over. This definitely wasn’t how I thought she
would begin the conversation.

“It’s a disgrace, you see,” she continued, sounding quite
matter-of-fact, “a disgrace to our people letting a
human
birth the next
heir who will rule us all one day. Our king and a good many of our people may
see you humans as our race’s salvation as the people of old once did, but I am
not the only one who believes it would be better for our people to just fade
into the pages of our long history than to couple with lesser life-forms.”

The more she spoke, the more my back stiffened. Every ounce of good
will I had been prepared to offer her for the sake of civility drained out with
each ugly word. Then to add insult to injury, she suddenly laughed at what was
probably the look of disdain on my face that I just couldn’t hide.

“Is that so?” I forced out past the huge lump of rising anger in my throat.

”Truth is always hard to hear,” she said with a look that almost looked
like pity had someone else been wearing it. “I am speaking to you of this as
much for your sake as ours. What the king is doing is unnatural, and it was
this very unnatural act of mating with humans that is ultimately the cause of
our women’s sterility.”

“What do you mean?” I asked reluctantly, utterly sure that I didn’t
want to hear anymore but knowing I couldn’t afford not to.

At this point, I was pretty sure the queen was trying to rattle me for
whatever messed up reason, but it was for that very reason that the things she
was about to tell me would be the truth—or at least the truth as she saw it.

The smile she flashed me was bitter. “Sethian would never tell you
this, but our healers believe that our genome was irrevocably tainted sometime
in the ancient past when a few of our male ancestors for whatever unfathomable
reason mated and had offspring with humans. The
Sidhe
have never been a
very fertile race, and when it was discovered that these half-blood children
were extraordinarily fertile, they were sought out by all the noble families.
Thus, the human taint was spread far and wide through several generations
before the first of our women began to be born barren.”

“How can you be so sure that the human genes were the cause?” I asked.
“How can you be sure it’s not just a case of correlation rather than
causation?”

The queen sniffed. “Our present-day healers are not so primitive as
your human doctors. When examined, all the barren women had one thing in
common. Their genome had reached a threshold in which at least ten percent of it
was comprised of human genes.”

“But—with that logic, wouldn’t a first-generation child of a pure elf
and a pure human also be born barren?” I said pointedly. “That obviously didn’t
happen since you said that there was a lot of interbreeding with these
half-breed children over a long period of time.”

For a moment, the queen looked slightly taken aback, as though she
didn’t expect a “mongrel” like me to really understand her explanation.

Then she scowled, and with the air of the long-suffering, she replied,
“That is because it is a problem that can only present itself after a long
period of time. Human genes are not easily passed to my people, and the few
that do, with the exception of those that determine virility, are recessive,
thus remaining mostly dormant. However, once the human taint is introduced, it
can never be reduced, but it
can
accumulate, doubly so within our
daughters. Eventually, it is this human poison that disrupts a
Sidhe
woman’s very essence, an essence vital in the process of conception. Without
it, our partner’s seed will never reach its destination.

“Many a healer and mage have tried to remove the humanity from within
us over the millennia, but they have yet to find a way to do so without it
killing us. However, they believe that, in time, a solution
will
be
found.”

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why she was telling me all
this. What exactly was she hoping to gain? Was she trying to make me feel
guilty about her inability to have a baby out of spite? Did she want me to
apologize? I would do it, if only to reduce the amount of these kinds of
confrontations that I would have to deal with in the future.

However, the queen was still talking, so I kept any forthcoming
apologies behind my teeth for the moment.