Claimed by the Elven King: Part Four (12 page)

“Maybe I should have one of the healers take a look at me, too, when
they come,” I said, now more alarmed than ever.

“That would be best,” he agreed, closing his eyes wearily.

I took his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Rest for a moment,” I urged.

He must have been feeling really awful at that point because he just
nodded without even a token protest.

By the time four more healers returned with Sethian’s chief healer,
Sethian had fallen into a deep sleep. Agreeing that he should not be awoken,
they each carefully examined Sethian in turn, and each emerged from their healer’s
trance with the same frustrating answer. There was definitely something wrong
with Sethian—any fool with eyes could see that—but other than his rapidly
depleting energy, every other aspect of his physical body was functioning
normally.

An examination of my life-force thankfully did not show any anomalies,
but they suggested minimal contact all the same until they could get to the
bottom of it. I immediately sent the children to stay with Lariel in my old
suite while Saeria and Rinwen remained behind to aid the healers and me.

By evening, it had become apparent that Sethian was no longer just
sleeping but had fallen into a coma-like state despite the healers’ best
efforts to restore his lost energies. A mage was brought in at that point to
examine Sethian’s depleting energy reserves in the hopes that seeing the
problem from a different perspective might yield a better understanding of the
anomaly, itself. It was then that the healers finally realized that what they
had been trying to diagnose and fight was not an illness at all.

That day, I learned the frightening truth that curses were only too
real.

When the commotion first started somewhere beyond our bedroom, my heart
clenched with instant dread, and I involuntarily squeezed Sethian’s lifeless
hand more tightly and hugged Arra, who was currently sitting in my lap, closer
to my chest. Was it another assassin? It had been so long since the last. Had
we grown too complacent, so much so that they saw the distraction of Sethian’s
illness as a golden opportunity to exploit that complacency?

The two healers bending over Sethian visibly stiffened. The one on
Sethian’s left opened his eyes, breaking his healing trance, and turned towards
the noise with a frown. He started to take a step towards the door. I opened my
mouth to shout a warning, but before I could utter a word, the door crashed
open with all the force of a battering ram. A swarm of guards, their swords
drawn, began spilling into the room without so much as a “by your leave.”

Arra screeched and swiveled in my lap, wrapping her arms around my neck
and burying her face in my hair in fear. As I tightened my arms around her, my
eyes anxiously scanned the faces, looking for the men who had been on guard
duty to the royal suite since last night, but none of them were present, none
of them even looked vaguely familiar. I gathered my daughter more securely and
started to stand from the chair beside the bed where I had been keeping constant
vigil ever since Sethian had fallen into his coma-like state, but then the
final person that walked through the door behind the men froze me on the spot.

For one seemingly eternal moment, our eyes met, and the triumph I saw
within those normally cold, green eyes made all the blood instantly drain from
my face. I remembered seeing that look only once before—and it had immediately been
followed by the suggestion of a plan that would have killed Thaylan before he
had even been born.

“Take her,” the queen ordered, sounding as casual as if she were only
saying hello.

It had been inevitable really from the moment Sethian had fallen
unconscious yesterday. With the king incapacitated and the heir out of reach,
the seat of power automatically fell to the queen until either of the previous
two could take up the mantle again. She could have me forcibly banished back to
the human realm, killed, tortured, and not one person could lift a finger to
help me without being accused of treason and having the same done to them.

Her endgame had finally been revealed, and it was quite the master
stroke.

Knowing that resisting would likely end with a sword in the gut, a
child traumatized for life, and a very satisfied queen, I softly whispered into
Arra’s ear to get on the bed with Sethian. I then took his hand again and gave
it one last squeeze as I stood, willing him to feel my love, my desperation for
him to fight the curse that was slowly draining the life from him. I could only
pray that he was somehow able to hear what was happening here, that his resulting
anger would fuel his soul and keep him in the world of the living long enough
for Thaylan to return to take back the power of the throne from Limira, to save
his siblings from falling under her thumb, because I didn’t really expect to
live past the day.

My eyes stayed on my family’s faces, one slack, and one pinched with
fear, as I felt hands grab both my arms roughly from behind and pull me away
from the bed, forcing me to release Sethian’s hand before we could be wrenched
apart.

Then suddenly one of the healers was marching forward, and he grabbed
one of my shoulders until I momentarily found myself in a strange kind of
tug-of-war between him and the guards at my back.

“With all due respect, Your Majesty,” the healer said before the guards
could raise their swords, “whatever quarrel you have with the Royal Wife must
be set aside for the time being for the sake of His Majesty. We have finally
managed to slow down the effects of the curse a bit, and I fear depriving him
of her presence will deplete his essence more quickly.”

“It is already too late for the king,” the queen said harshly, “and I
shall not allow his murderer the satisfaction of witnessing his final breaths
no matter the reason! To allow him die with dignity is the only gift I can give
him now!”

“What?” I blurted, turning to look back at the queen in utter shock. She
wasn’t seriously going to—just what was her game this time?

She smiled at me nastily. “A witness has come forth, one who overheard
a
very
interesting conversation with a
Lithviri
mage and a small,
hooded woman who spoke with a very strange accent. The mage in question was
captured as he was fleeing the palace with the aid of Lariel of the family
Elerdir. I have just returned from interrogating both of them, and while your
lady-in-waiting has stubbornly refused to speak, the mage was much more
forthcoming after a little persuasion from a few of my personal guards.
However, your servant
will
talk, of that I have no doubt.”

You lying bitch!
I snarled in my mind, though outwardly, I
struggled to keep my expression from changing. I would be damned before I gave
her the satisfaction of seeing me lose control in front of my daughter.

“I didn’t think even
you
would have the guts to just flat-out lie,”
I said, staring at her challengingly. “Lariel was just in this very room
dropping off my daughter a few moments ago. These healers can attest to that. I
hardly think you had the time for an interrogation between then and now.”

“The coin of power within the royal court is very tempting, especially
when the one paying has blood ties to the heir and the heir is blinded to his
mother’s perfidy by affection,” the queen continued as if I hadn’t even spoken.

“Mama!”

“Stay with your father, Arra,” I told her as calmly as I could, which
didn’t amount to much as I was likely inadvertently drowning her with my inner
turmoil.

“Do not worry. The half-blood will be—dealt with appropriately,” the
queen sneered.

And that’s when I lost it.

A red haze seemed to fill my eyes as I tore out of the grips of the two
elves that held my arms and lunged for the queen’s throat. I just managed to
get my hands around her neck when the back of my head abruptly exploded with
pain a split-second before everything went black.

A rush of panic thundered through my awareness and I shot up from the
rough surface I had been lying on to a seated position, my heart trying its damndest
to break out of my chest. I looked around wildly, confused about where I was
and why I felt like I was currently having a full-blown panic attack, then
winced when that frantic movement set off an explosion of pain in my head. It
was dark, so dark that the only thing I could make out was the outline of a
door because of the very faint light coming in through the thin crack between
what looked like a stone floor and the bottom of the door.

I raised my hands to cradle my head and moaned as it continued to
throb. I tried to take slow, deep breaths in an effort to stem the panic that
had permeated my entire being, and that’s when I felt Thaylan’s essence and
realized that the panic I was feeling was his.

Thaylan
never
panicked…

“Thaylan!” I called out into the dark, but my increasing confusion and
now rising fear was met with only silence.

The excruciating pain in my head was making it extremely difficult to
think. So I was alone here, wherever here was. I drew in another deep breath,
and this time I noticed that the air was muggy and had a faint odor of mold and
old sweat. It was a familiar combination, somehow. Where—

“Shit!” I cursed loudly, dropping my hands and scrambling to my feet.

I stumbled over to the door, praying that I was wrong as I frantically
felt for a door handle and was instead rewarded with a palm full of splinters.
Biting back a sob, I backed up until my back hit the stone wall behind me and
let myself slide down to the floor.

How in the world had I ended up in the palace
dungeon
?

It was the queen. It
had
to be the queen. No one else other than
Sethian would have had the authority to lock me up here, and as far as I could
remember, the only “crime” I had been guilty of was nagging Sethian to stay in
bed because he had really looked like crap...

And just like that, the image of my hands wrapped around the queen’s
throat and those hateful eyes widened with shock flashed within my mind,
followed by the memory of sitting at Sethian’s side helplessly watching the
life drain out of him with every breath while his healers fought to prolong his
life long enough for Thaylan to reach the palace.

Even with the incredible distances he could reach with his phasing
ability, the
Lithvir Sidhe
lands were on the other side of the world,
and not even Thaylan could move that kind of distance in a single jump, nor
could his personal energy reserves support the amount of spatial manipulations
it would take to reach the palace without resting several marks between each.
The healers had given Sethian a day at the most, and that was about the amount
of time it would take his son to reach him.

It was no wonder that Thaylan was so panicked!

At that moment, I felt like the most worthless person in existence.
Tears of self-loathing began to flow down my checks. While Sethian lay dying
and the queen was doing God-only-knew-what to my children and friends, I was
stuck here in the dark waiting for the ax to fall—literally. I clenched my
hands tightly into fists at the image that thought conjured up, of the queen
smiling smugly as she ordered the downward stroke of a sword in an old-style
beheading.

No—there
was
something I could do. Fury like I had never felt in
my life erupted within me, washing away the anguish as I scrubbed angrily at my
tears. I really would be worthless if I just sat here crying without trying to
do
something
.

There was no way I would be able to get out of here, but maybe I could
use our familial bond to send a warning about the queen to Thaylan. At the
moment, he had no idea about the nest of vipers he was about to walk into, and
despite all the fuss about the incredible power he wielded, he was still just a
twelve-year-old boy about to face the cunning of a snake thousands of years his
senior. I didn’t have even an ounce of Thaylan’s empathic abilities, and I knew
that he was probably still too far away for my puny efforts to reach, but maybe
if I kept shouting out to him in my heart he would eventually be able to sense
me.

It was the only weapon I had, and I only prayed that it would be
enough.

I had no idea how long I had been mentally shouting into the void, but it
was only when I suddenly heard voices outside my cell door that I came back to
myself and realized I was on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion. I smacked
both my palms against my cheeks hard in an effort to clear my head and managed
to drag myself to my feet just as I heard someone turning a key in the lock.
Damned if I would meet whoever was on the other side of the door sitting down.

For a split-second, I considered charging the first person that walked
through the door and in almost the same thought dismissed it as incredibly
stupid. It would probably be a guard, and what were the odds that someone like
me would be able to get more than half a step past a heavily trained guard
without a whole lot of hurt? I doubted my title of Royal Wife held any weight
at all anymore, and I would end up with another goose egg or worse on my head.
For all I knew, these guards were in the pocket of the queen or anti-human
zealots just itching for any excuse to permanently remove the source of the
current
“taint” that had begun to permeate the elven realm.

“Unless you want a sword in your gut, back away from the door and stand
against the back wall,” an unfamiliar male voice called through the door.

I did as instructed with an air of resentment, and a few seconds later,
the door creaked open. Even though the light in the corridor was poor, I still
flinched away violently when it hit my eyes. Squinting against the
illumination, I watched as a couple of guards stepped across the threshold,
swords in hand but thankfully pointed down at the ground, followed unsurprisingly
by the queen, a lit oil lamp hanging from one hand.