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

“Do you do that often—visit all the
different provinces one right after the other?” I asked as we sat side-by-side,
not on a marble bench as I had originally intended, but on the slightly-damp grass
just a couple of steps from the edge of the pond.

Upon reaching the pond, when I had tried to
sit down on the bench, Sethian had squeezed my hand sharply, shaking his head
when I had looked back at him quizzically. He had made a face at the
ornately-carved bench and had suggested that sitting in the grass before the
pond would be much more comfortable.

So far I had kept the conversation on safe
subjects, mostly on his everyday duties as king as well as everything he had
been doing for the past month. He even seemed to enjoy talking about them,
never once giving me the impression that my barrage of questions was becoming
tiresome. Although his answers helped me understand more about his standing in
the elven realm, it told me very little of the man, himself. We had been
talking for at least an elven mark—equivalent to around an hour and a half
according to Saeria—and I still hadn’t figured out how to ask him the questions
I really needed the answers to.

Sethian nodded, his thumb absently stroking
the back of my hand. “At least once a year. I like to see the state of my lands
and people with my own eyes and not through the mouths of the stewards of those
lands as often as possible.”

I was still upset from learning that he had
returned from making the rounds of his kingdom yesterday. It was a struggle to
keep my expression neutral as we talked. He had mentioned it so offhandedly
earlier, as if it wasn’t a big deal, that I couldn’t bring myself to ask him
why he had waited until today to see me.

Although he hadn’t mentioned specifics, I
figured that if he had left soon after the last time we had parted, the entire
trip had taken him about three weeks or so, even by elvensteed. The kingdom was
a lot bigger than I had imagined.

Lariel had told me that the elves had brought
over horses from the human realm a few thousand years ago and had used their
magic to change them into a creature that was almost unrecognizable as such.
Her description was of something opaque, fast, and highly intelligent. They
were the main mode of transportation within the elven realm.

When I had asked why they didn’t just bring
a few cars over instead, all three women had heartily laughed as if it was the
most ridiculous thing they had heard from me, yet, and had said that those
types of metals and materials were incompatible with the natural laws of the
elven realm.

Lariel had promised that everyone would
take me out riding as soon as Sethian returned and they could ask for
permission. Remembering how I was locked within my apartment, the thought of
having to ask my husband for
permission
to do
anything
that
required the guards to unlock the door was grating to say the least. Yet
another issue I really needed to bring up but had no idea how without sounding
accusative.

“But enough about me,” Sethian said. “You
have yet to tell me how you have fared these past few days while I was away.
You did say something about not sleeping…”

“It was just last night,” I assured him. “I
usually have no problem nodding off as I’m sure Saeria will be happy to tell
you. They’ve been teaching me your language, customs, and history. There are a
lot of things they talked about that I would like to see—the cities beyond the
castle, the elvensteed, even just the countryside.” I hesitated briefly, then
continued determinedly, “I would like to see these things together with you.”

He blinked in what looked like surprise. “If
that is what you wish, then I would very much enjoy showing you around the
realm. Perhaps when you are a bit more rested and your cheeks are not so pale.”

Although I was looking directly at his face,
I couldn’t tell by Sethian’s expression whether he was hinting at something
more by bringing up my state of being, or just genuinely concerned that I might
be coming down with something. Lariel had told me that although elves rarely
got sick, viral and bacterial illnesses occasionally popped up here and there.
They seemed to think that the possibility was doubly likely for the sole human
in their midst, whom they rather matter-of-factly considered much more fragile
than an elf in every way.

“I’ve never ridden a horse before, so
you’ll have to teach me,” I said, steering the conversation away from my
health.

It was a small miracle that I could even
ignore my health at all right now, but as long as Sethian held my hand and was
concerned about keeping me calm and relaxed, I knew that my nausea would be
kept at bay. Sitting here with the elven king had so far been exponentially
easier than I had ever thought possible back when I was still redirecting my
friends’ suspicions while my stomach and head rebelled. I hadn’t gotten even
close to all the answers I needed before I felt I could confess to my probable
pregnancy, but for the first time, I started to think that things might not be
so hopeless after all.

Sethian grinned, an expression that gave
him a more boyish look that instantly made me want to melt. “Then you will have
no problem as an elvensteed is not a horse. Although unable to speak, they
understand our language completely. You need only tell them your desires, and
they will accommodate you.”

“Really?” I said in disbelief. Lariel had
not mentioned that part at all! “That’s amazing! Oh, but would they understand
me
?
Right now I only know a few words and phrases in Elvish…”

“For now, I shall speak for you. I suspect
within a few moon-cycles you will be proficient enough in Elvish to direct them
yourself.”

I looked down at our joined hands in
embarrassment. “I wouldn’t count on that. I’m not very good at learning
languages and even worse at pronouncing them—and don’t tell me that garbled mess
of a welcome I gave you earlier was anywhere near good enough! Even the
elvensteeds would laugh at my horrendous accent!”

He chuckled, then released my hand and drew
me into a tight embrace. He kissed my nose playfully and said, “I think your
accent is cute. Perhaps you shouldn’t try so hard to correct it.”

Hearing an elven king say the word “cute”
sounded all kinds of wrong somehow. I let my head fall forward onto his chest
and closed my eyes, unsuccessfully trying to will away the heat that had
invaded my cheeks.

“It’s not fair,” I muttered into the silky
fabric of his robes. “Why is it that you, Lariel, Saeria, Rinwen, hell, even
the guards outside my door, can speak English with virtually no accent
at
all
?”

I felt Sethian kiss the top of my head.
“It’s not the great feat you are imagining,” he replied. “We have just had a
few centuries more of practice.”

“Centuries—you say that as if you’re just
talking about a few days or something. Just—how old
are
you?”

“By elven standards, I am still fairly
young, a little over two thousand years. My father was nearing his ten
thousandth year when he died. I have been on the throne for less than five
hundred years, so you can say that I am a young king as well.”

Two thousand, ten thousand…compared to them
I was practically an embryo! The life of a human was literally just a blink of
an eye for the
Sidhe
. How in the world had I ever thought we could have
a more deeply connected relationship when my life was practically a third of
the way over? My bones would be dust before Sethian even hit middle age!

I must have stiffened or given him some
other sign of my sudden distress because his arms abruptly tightened around my
body and he said, “It wasn’t my intention to upset you.”

I shook my head, and ruthlessly stamped
down the despair that had started to engulf me. Now was definitely not the time
for me to start blubbering. Given everything that had happened to me
already—the shock of a sudden pregnancy, then having to hide such a violent
case of morning sickness from everyone—I would likely cry straight through the
night, and then it really would be impossible to keep my secret. Sethian would
either guess the reason for my emotional upheaval or send me to a healer who
wouldn’t need longer than a few minutes of examination to learn the truth.

I forced myself to look up at him and
smile. “You didn’t. It was just shocking to hear,” I said. “To live thousands
of years…it’s pretty unimaginable to a human. I can’t even begin to wrap my
head around what that would be like. I bet your head is a treasure trove of
sights and experiences.”

A strange look flashed across Sethian’s
face before he blinked and his lips lifted slightly at the corners,
transforming his face before I could decipher this new expression. “You like
bedtime stories?”

My own smile widened, pretty sure that he
was baiting me. “Sometimes.” My pulse sped up as I added boldly, “But not
tonight.”

Then my heart skipped a beat when his eyes
instantly sharpened and his large pupils dilated in unmistakable desire. Maybe
I wouldn’t have to worry about eating dinner after all…

“We should go,” Sethian said softly, but he
made no move to stand.

This time I wasn’t surprised when the world
around me blurred, and we were suddenly sitting on the rug before the already
blazing fireplace in Sethian’s bedroom. I totally expected him to scoop me up
and head for the bed, so when he loosened his hold on me and grabbed my upper
arms, I was understandably confused when he merely stood, tugging me up with
him, and then stepped away.

“We have the entire night ahead of us,” he
said, raising a hand to remove his crown. “For now, let us enjoy a meal
together. Go on ahead to the dining room while I change out of my formal
robes.”

I nodded and left without comment. Once I
closed his bedroom door behind me, I took in the unfamiliar sitting room before
me and realized that this was the first time I had been in any other room in
his personal quarters besides his bedroom. The layout and furnishings were
similar to mine except being the room of a king, I wasn’t surprised that
everything from the paintings to the rugs on the floor was much more expertly
crafted and beautiful than the ones in my apartment.

Figuring that the layout of his rooms was
also similar, I headed to the door on the far left in search of his dining
room. The room on the other side was just as large as the sitting room,
furnished with a single long, wooden table in the center that could seat up to
sixteen people comfortably. Several covered dishes were already spread out and
waiting at the head of the table.

My eyes swept the room, half-expecting at
least one of the king’s staff to be awaiting our arrival, but the room was
thankfully empty. A month living in an elven palace, and I still hadn’t gotten
used to having several of the royal staff hovering around me while I ate with
the girls. It was unnerving having all those eyes watching my every move.

I sat down at the end of the row, leaving
the head for Sethian, and eyed the covered dishes warily. Even though Sethian
was no longer touching me, my earlier nausea had not returned. I knew better
than to hope it remained so. I supposed I should have felt grateful that the
elven diet involved very little meat, but I wondered if that first bite would
be the thing that ultimately triggered the bomb just waiting to explode in my
stomach.

I was relieved to see that the kitchen
staff had left both a decanter of wine and a pitcher of water. No doubt I had
Saeria to thank for that as I had luckily established from the very beginning
that I preferred water over wine. I was only an occasional drinker back home,
and even though having wine for breakfast, lunch, and dinner was the norm here,
that was one elven custom I didn’t plan on adopting.

I quickly poured myself a glass of water
and sipped at it nervously as I listened for any approaching footsteps. I was
definitely beginning to regret not continuing to entice Sethian to forget all
about dinner while I’d had the chance.

When Sethian finally appeared a few minutes
later dressed in a simple tunic and trews, the first tinges of queasiness were
already starting to rise within my body, and I was on the verge of a full-on
panic attack. I knew logically that I was making it worse by freaking out about
it, but I just couldn’t seem to calm down. Sethian couldn’t have walked in at a
worse moment.

There was no way I could eat now. What was
I going to do? I couldn’t just give up now and spill everything to him, not
when our relationship was still so murky. He had shone interest in spending
time with me that actually required us to be dressed, yes, but that hardly said
anything about what he thought of me personally.

“You have gone pale again,” he remarked as
he took his seat at the head of the table, regarding me with a concerned frown.

Thinking frantically, I made a big show of
covering my face as if I was embarrassed in order to stall for time. “I was
just thinking…” I said, my voice muffled.

“About?” I could see him tilt his head
curiously from the openings between my fingers.

About not puking all over the table
,
I thought a bit hysterically. “I just—”

A loud knock abruptly sounded on the dining
room door, making me practically jump out of my skin.

“
My apologies for interrupting your
meal, Your Majesty, but I have a message from the queen
,” a male voice
called through the door in Elvish. I was pretty surprised that I actually understood
almost all his words.

“
Enter
,” Sethian commanded, and a
male elf I didn’t recognize stepped through the door. He headed straight for
Sethian, and after glancing at me briefly, bent to whisper his message into the
king’s ear.

I watched as Sethian’s face suddenly became
as expressionless as a marble statue’s. Whatever the message was, it couldn’t
have been good. When the messenger straightened, Sethian waved him away without
a word.

Once we were alone again, he turned to me
with that same unnerving blankness and said, “It seems a matter as come up with
Limira that I must attend to right away.” Hearing that name was like a slap in
the face, and it took every ounce of stubbornness within me to keep the dismay
from showing on my face. “Have dinner without me, and retire for the night, as
I may not return for some time.”

He reached over and softly caressed my
cheek. “Perhaps a bit of rest will bring some color back to your cheeks. We
shall talk more then.”

I was suddenly overwhelmed with a mad
desire to grab his arm, to beg him not to leave me. I was utterly shocked at
the power behind that desperation, and in the end, that shock was what saved me
from doing something so embarrassingly stupid.

Therefore, instead of clinging to him like
a limpet, I managed to nod and say, “I hope it’s nothing serious.”

“It’s not,” Sethian said with a finality
that immediately gave me the opposite impression. However, I knew better than
to call him on it.

“I shall return soon,” he said as he rose
from the table.

Yeah, but your “soon” may not mean the
same as mine
, I thought as my eyes followed him across the room and out the
door. Would he make me wait another month to see him again? Two?

As soon as I heard the front door open and
close, I pushed away from the table and stood. There was no sense in me
remaining if I wasn’t going to eat. As awful as I was feeling at the moment, and
not just physically, I decided that it would probably be best to just go to
bed.

Having none of my nightclothes available, I
stripped to just my slip and tried to make myself comfortable on Sethian’s
enormous bed. For a long moment, I lay on my back and stared up at the exposed
beams of the ceiling while I tried to will my returning nausea away and my mind
raced.

Although the messenger’s unexpected arrival
had saved me from the corner I had inadvertently backed myself into, it brought
with it a problem that was perhaps equally troubling. For all his talk about
the queen not caring much for him, she sure seemed to intrude a lot in the few
conversations we’ve had so far—or just flat-out intrude as I thought back to
the mortifying incident of her walking in on us while we were having sex.

Maybe she
did
care more about him
than Sethian thought, but that really wasn’t what had my chest tightening in
distress. I realized that Sethian had not said one word regarding his feelings
for the queen. For all I knew, he was deeply in love with her and was pining
after her just as much as I was starting to yearn for him. After all, he’d had
centuries to develop his relationship with her, and I was virtually a stranger
to him.

I turned on my side and curled into a fetal
position, wrapping my arms around myself in sudden anguish. Who was I kidding?
There was no way Sethian could give me what I wanted from him in such a short
time. That he rushed off the moment the queen had beckoned told me this
clearly. No matter that I was the one who would be the mother of his children,
I would always be secondary to his duty to his first wife. I was only a human,
after all.

What place did a human have in an elven
court?

It was only when I felt the damp trails
falling down my cheeks that I realized that I was crying, and I curled up
tighter into a ball of misery and silent tears, trying to keep the sobs that
were now building in my throat at bay. I didn’t want the elves outside the door
with their radar ears to hear me and tattle to the king that I had been crying.
The last thing I needed right now was to be confronted about yet another thing
I couldn’t possibly explain nor wanted to even talk about. Telling him about
the baby would be hard enough.

With a start, I realized that this was the
first time I had even thought the word “baby” since I had ended up on my knees
heaving into the aqueduct. It brought home the fact that there was a life
growing inside me; this was no longer just about me.

Babies were something I had never given
much thought. Motherhood was a far-off concept that hadn’t even registered on
my radar yet. For the past few years, the only thing I had cared about was
finishing my PhD to the point that dating had even fallen to the wayside. Now
suddenly I was about to be a mother to a child that I might not understand, and
I was terrified.

I covered my mouth as a small sob broke
free. It was in that moment I knew that, no matter what, I wouldn’t tell
Sethian about the baby. No—not for a while. I needed my husband to keep coming
to me, to comfort me, to kiss me, to hold me in his arms. I needed him to be my
pillar until I could come to terms with the crazy path my life had taken and
stand on my own two feet.

I had chosen this for myself, after all.
After everything Lariel, Saeria, and Rinwen had told me regarding the distant
past when elves had taken human brides, I truly believed that Sethian would
have allowed me to return home if I had cried and pleaded with him after that
first night. I had chosen the
hope
of finally not being alone over the
certainty. I had given up everything I had worked so hard for just for that slim
hope.

I now had to lie in the bed I had made and
somehow convince my husband that he wanted to be there as well—because
I
was there. The thought only made me cry harder.

I doubted that I would get much sleep that
night.