Claimed by the Elven King: Part Two (4 page)

“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 eagerness 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.”

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 nausea 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.