Claimed by the Elven King: Part Four (7 page)

I was also grateful that my water had yet to break. I would rather be
somewhere less public when that happened. I glanced over at the guards, some of
which were staring at me with way too much interest. Yes, somewhere less public
and hopefully with less of an audience.

A few moments later when the air began to shimmer and warp in front of
me, it was all I could do to keep from crying in relief. Even before Sethian
had completely faded into view, I was already reaching for him. Although a bit
caught off guard, he easily caught me under my armpits and lifted me to my feet
as though I weighed nothing.

My face must have showed my fear clearly because he immediately pulled
me into a tight embrace and said, “It’s all right. Soon the unpleasant parts
will all be over, and you will have our child in your arms.” I could hear the
excitement and pure joy in his voice.

He looked over at Lariel and Saeria. “Have all the necessary items
prepared for when we return to my rooms. I suspect you will not see us until
this evening.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” they replied in perfect tandem.

I flashed them a tremulous smile before the scenery around me began to
change, and a tall, gold-plaited door that I had never seen before, reminiscent
of a vault to a treasure room in some late-night adventure movie, faded into
view before us.

That Sethian unlocked such an intimidating door with a large, though
ordinary-looking golden key rather than with some form of elven magic seemed a
little strange to me given the mystical bent that surrounded this particular
room. However, the moment Sethian ushered me across the threshold, it felt very
much like the time I had accidentally gotten too close to an activated Tesla
coil during a lab at the university. The room positively thrummed with power in
a way that sent every warning bell in my subconscious screeching.

Then another contraction hit, and the uncanniness of the room became
the least of my worries as the strength of that sudden pain almost had me collapsing
to the ground in a ball of agony.

“Wait! I can’t—” I moaned as Sethian continued to urge me forward. If
the pain was already this bad, I couldn’t imagine how I would be able to endure
it when it inevitably got worse closer to delivery.

Sethian began rubbing my back as I bent over with my arms wrapped tightly
around my belly. “Just breathe slowly,” he said. “We are almost to the pool.
You will feel much more comfortable once we are inside the water.”

Right, the water. I had been a little surprised when Sethian had stated
that all elven births were water births.

After a few more seconds, the contraction subsided, and I was able to
breathe more easily. I straightened, and said, “I’m okay now.”

I was able to focus on the room again while he left my side for a
moment to pull the heavy door closed. The room was completely composed of marble
from ceiling to floor. In the center was a large, circular pool about forty to
fifty feet in diameter that was sunken into the floor. It was filled to the rim
with water so clear that it almost appeared to be empty. The space reminded me
of a futuristic version of an old Roman bathhouse without the columns.

Along the edge of the pool was a large pile of towels and next to that,
looking completely out of place, a small, leather-handled dagger. That was it.
No flasks of medicines or bowls of herbs that I had half-expected, but Sethian
had told me he would be personally seeing to my pain with his healing abilities
so I suppose painkillers were really not needed here.

A loud series of clicks suddenly resounded throughout the room, and I instinctually
turned towards the sound in enough time to see Sethian turn the last of the
door’s four locks.

“Shouldn’t we wait until Yara gets here before you lock us in?” I asked,
rubbing my stomach anxiously.

“Yara?” he echoed in confusion. Then he shook his head. “I never did
explain, did I?” he said as he wrapped an arm around my waist and guided me
towards the pool. “It is forbidden for anyone other than a child’s father to be
present for a birth. An outsider’s presence would interfere with the familial
bond that is newly being formed.”

“Lariel did mention something like that, but…”
But what if something
goes wrong?

“A healer is not necessary for a successful birth,” Sethian said as if
reading my mind. “It is very rare for a
Sidhe
woman to have
complications during the delivery.”

“But I’m human,” I couldn’t help adding. “We have complications all the
time.”

“Yes, but you are having an elven child,” he said as if that answered
everything.

Then another contraction hit, and I lost the chance to question him
more as I focused completely on breathing slowly through the cramping pain. Before
the painful spasm had ended, Sethian busied himself with unlacing and removing
my dress. I kicked off my slippers, and he carefully guided me into the warm, barely-waist-deep
water. There was a seat made of marble in the very center that reminded me of
an open-ended toilet seat on three legs, and I sat down somewhat awkwardly onto
it at his urging. I concentrated on keeping my breathing even while he
undressed.

A huge wave of warmth suddenly began gushing out of me, and startled, I
looked down to see that the once pristine water was now slightly cloudy around
me.

“My water just broke!” I exclaimed, and then I was unable to speak
again for a long moment as my body was rocked with a contraction twice as
strong as the last one.

When it was finally over and I raised my head with a grimace, I saw
that Sethian was already in the pool and wading out to me. Once he reached me,
he positioned himself behind me, to my surprise, and knelt down. Wasn’t he
supposed to deliver the baby? Why in the world had he knelt down back there?

“Lean back against me for a moment,” he said before I could voice any
of my questions.

I did as I was told, and Sethian immediately wrapped his arms around my
waist, his hands position flat on either side of my belly.

“Close your eyes and relax,” he murmured in my ear. “I am going to ease
your pain now, though it will not disappear completely. You will still feel
each contraction as a mild twinge. For now, just concentrate on connecting with
the baby’s soul just as I have instructed you rather than on the frequency of those
twinges. The time between now and a mark before the birth is the most important
time of the whole process. This is when we both shall bind mentally and
spiritually with our child.”

I nodded and closed my eyes, trying my hardest to relax against Sethian’s
chest as the weird chair I was sitting on wasn’t very comfortable. I
concentrated on sensing emotions that I knew I was not feeling just as Sethian
had taught me, but without really understanding what it would be like to “hear”
the baby, I couldn’t be certain that I wasn’t missing something already.

For the next six hours or so this is what we did. As the seventh
approached and Sethian informed me that I still had not dilated completely, I
was counting my blessings that Sethian was a healer because I don’t think I
would have been able to handle such excruciating pain for so long without
losing my mind. As it was, I was already exhausted.

So far, the only emotions I had been able to sense were definitely
Sethian’s, as he was having a hard time containing his excitement and
occasionally, impatience. During this time, he had only spoke to me a few
times, and mostly just to ask if I was comfortable and if I had heard the baby
“speak.” No and no on both issues, but I had kept the first one to myself as it
involved the chair and there was probably nothing he could do about it. He
still didn’t seem worried about my failure to hear the baby’s soul, so I
decided not to worry about it either at this point.

As it was getting fairly close to the actual birth, I was more
concerned with how awful the actual birth would be and whether or not I would
be able to push the baby out at all than something that was completely out of
my control.

Another half hour and I was starting to wonder if it was possible to
overdose on Sethian’s healing magic as my head had started to spin and
everything took on a blurry, surreal look.

That’s when I felt it, a rush of bewilderment and fear that was not my
own. Was that…?

“The baby’s…scared,” I said a bit deliriously.

Sethian rubbed a hand across my stomach. “Ah, your minds have finally
bonded,” he said with satisfaction. “It won’t be long now, I think.”

“Wait, you mean it’s because of the baby that everything’s gone all
loopy?” I slurred.

“Yes,” he replied, rubbing at my shoulders. “You perceive the world
partially as the world the baby perceives. It is skewing your sense of
reality.”

About fifteen minutes later, I was finally pushing, and Sethian was
half embracing my body and half reaching between my legs in preparation for the
baby’s appearance. A couple of pushes later, the baby was partially out and I
was certain that I would be unable to push no more.

Then at Sethian’s coaxing, I managed one last big push, and I felt the
baby’s body slide out completely amidst a cloud of red and a huge surge of
adrenaline. I collapsed back against Sethian’s chest, exhausted to the point of
passing out, but I struggled to keep my consciousness with everything I had in
me. I had to see the baby. I
had
to—

As Sethian had warned, there was no cry as he lifted the baby from the
water, just a small gasp followed by a larger, startled gasp behind me as I
looked at my child—no, my
son
—for the first time. Only then did I
understand Sethian’s reaction.

Tiny, pointed ears poked out cutely from within a mass of wet,
black
hair.

A son. I have a son,
I thought, still a little shell-shocked about
the idea as I stared at the tiny bundle in my arms who silently stared back at
me with the most brilliant green eyes I had ever seen. He was beautiful, so beautiful,
and I couldn’t get enough of just looking at him.

Sethian sat beside me on our bed where he had propped me up with a
multitude of pillows so I could hold the baby properly, perhaps equally as
shell-shocked as I was, but for an entirely different reason. He was looking
down at our son as if he couldn’t quite believe that he was real.

“You’re
sure
that this has only happened once before?” I asked
for the umpteenth time, still kind of freaked out about the whole thing.

He shook his head. “As I said, I have only
heard
of one other
instance. Whether or not it is actually true is anyone’s guess as there is no
physical documentation to support any of it.”

“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?”