Page 37 of The Broken Elf King
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The next morning I awoke in a weird mood. I’d been falling into this betrothal with Raife pretty hard and it all came crashing down when he’d bluntly told me not to fall in love with him. Now I was going to make an active effort to keep this illusion separate in my mind. Raife was my employer. Raife was a business arrangement. Raife was going to be myfakehusband.
With that in mind, I settled into the day as I always did. Cooking us breakfast, running his meetings, and then breaking for lunch.
After lunch, he did the dishes, an act I once saw as romantic but now saw as a duty to keep the kitchen poison free.
“The Bow Men are taking me out later for drinks to celebrate,” Raife said as he haphazardly scrubbed the plate with the brush. “When we do this, the wives have a social night of sorts. A crafting club or something. Would you like to go?”
Crafts? I mean, I’d rather a book club, but I wouldn’t mind making some girlfriends, especially if I was about to become queen.
That fact hadn’t really settled into me yet that I was not only marrying the king of the elves but that I was going to become the people’s queen. A fake queen but a queen nonetheless.
“Sure. I’d love that,” I told him.
He nodded. “I’ll take you over to Cahal’s wife’s house. Just after dinner.”
I wrung my hands together nervously, a bit shy to bring up the next topic. “Have you given any more thought to how you will get my aunt here to heal her?”
He set the plates on the drying rack and turned off the water. Facing me, he dried his hands on a towel. “I gave you my word and promise, I will bring her here and heal her soon, but I don’t think I can do it before the wedding.”
A month?She had to wait another month of worrying how I was? She probably thought I had been sold to the cruel fae king and was in chains all day long.
“The reason for this is that an extraction from the Nightfall territory is not a small feat. It will require a dozen laws to be broken, hundreds of gold coins to be spent, and lives could be lost. I will have to get the council’s approval, and I fear they will not say yes until you are queen.”
Wow, lives lost, laws broken… I hadn’t really thought that through when I’d asked him to do it. My aunt had another month of the seizure medication, which was cutting it close, but I nodded. She’d be okay for another month. “Thank you.”
The rest of the day passed with the usual business that was the king’s life. He’d been stuck up at the infirmary healing for the past three hours while I made a simple dinner of boiled eggs and seared meat with salad.
I wasn’t able to do any of the fancy pastry stuff, but Raife wasn’t complaining and I was enjoying not fearing for my life with every chew and swallow.
Dinnertime came and went and still the king wasn’t back from the infirmary, so I decided to pack the plated food with stainless steel lids into a basket and go see what was keeping him. After entering the front reception area of the infirmary, I waved to the healer on duty who recognized me. “He’s been in surgery for hours. Four-year-old child fell and became impaled, not sure she will make it,” the nurse told me.
Oh Maker.
That sounded awful, and I knew the cases with children affected Raife more deeply than adults. They all reminded him of the siblings he couldn’t save.
Dropping the dinner basket off with her and asking her to watch it for me, I shuffled down the hallway in search of the king.
I found him in the operating theatre, hunched over the lifeless body of a child with bloodeverywhere. A gasp ripped from my throat at the sight of the gruesome scene as I watched on through the glass.
“I cannot make blood appear out of nowhere!” Raife snapped to a nurse. There was no family in the viewing room and I knew why. This was way too traumatic to watch. They were probably in the waiting room, praying that the Maker protect their child. A sudden calmness came over me, and that same instinctual urge I’d had when the king was dying welled within me now. Walking briskly from the viewing area, I crossed through the double doors into the actual operating room.
Once I was standing under the bright lights and looking at the scene firsthand, Raife’s head snapped in my direction.
“Out!” he roared.
The nurse with him looked shocked at his outburst but I ignored it, merely looking down at the lifeless little girl on the table. Somehow I knew that her soul was about to leave her body; she was on death’s door. And as freaked out as I was, I couldn’t help but follow this instinct inside of me.
“Lani, no!” the king growled, when I crossed the room quickly and reached for the child. Grasping her face, I angled it up towards me and then leaned forward, readying my lips to press to hers.
“I forbid it!” Raife screamed in a panicked shout, and lunged for me.
I didn’t know what his fear was about, but it was too late. My lips touched the child’s and I exhaled. This time I didn’t pinch her nose shut or press my lips hard to make a seal—in fact, they barely touched hers, but the purple magical breath that left me filled her lungs and washed over her face. The nurse gasped at the same time the little girl did, turning it into a sputtering cough.
Raife ripped me away, holding my shoulders tightly and then looking up at my hair with absolute terror in his eyes.
My hands shook. Would there be another lock of white hair? If there was, what did it mean? Stress like Raife said? I didn’t feel stressed.
