Chapter 26 #2
“It ran off,” Elden said through strained lips as he laid in the couch with a hiss. “If I had known you were so fierce with that saucepan, I would have let you lead. As soon as it got a glimpse of you, it tried all it could to be free of me.”
I blinked. It hadn’t been frightened by me, a small human girl, no. But there had been something in its eyes when it’d seen me. I was certain of that.
Elden coughed again, and I worked to open his shirt. I needed to see his wounds.
“I-I’m fine,” Elden said through clenched teeth. “I just need a moment to allow my body to heal.”
Elves healed faster than humans, but how much faster?
Elden looked to have damaged several ribs, and could add a few more claw marks and bites to his growing list of injuries.
It would easily take a human several weeks to even start to recover from this.
But beyond that, I saw through the tears in his tunic, the inky blackness of the poison spreading closer and closer to his heart.
“Drink this.” I offered a swig of Jel’s potion to Elden which he received with a gulp and a hiss.
“It is spreading,” Elden said. “I have felt it for weeks, but now I know that I will not last the night.”
“Yes, of course you will!” I ripped the hem of my tunic and pressed it into a wound beside his chest. “Don’t talk like that.
” My chin trembled as I took in the slumped but beautiful form of the king.
My heart burned within me as a tear streaked down my cheek.
This was not how our story would end. It couldn’t.
We were here in this enchanted palace. We’d made it past the mighty shade monster that guarded the castle.
We would find a cure. We just needed time.
Elden coughed again as I pressed my tunic harder into his wound as if willing it to heal by sheer force. He’d always been so strong, almost fearless, as we’d made this journey. But now I saw the true panic in his eyes.
“Please, Noelle.” Elden placed his hand over mine. “Leave me now before it is too late.”
Elden’s words echoed through my mind over and over. Leave me. Leave me. I shook my head, my eyes burning with fresh tears.
“No,” I said with all the strength I could muster. With that strength, I spoke the words in my heart without fear, though I did whisper them. “I need you.”
“Need me?” Elden raised a white eyebrow, a ghost of that slight smile on his face. “So you have decided not to greatly dislike me?”
I cleared my throat and smiled. “Of course not. I just need help getting home. I was too busy trying not to be thrown from that beast of a horse that I could not pay attention to directions half the time.”
Elden chuckled. “Are you sure you weren’t just taken with your extremely handsome company?”
I blinked in surprise, but smiled. He was teasing me. I could do that. I could tease him back. “Oh dear. It seems you are under the unexpected effects of too much potion.”
Elden grasped onto my hands and placed them over his heart, with all hints of teasing gone from his gaze as he looked at me.
Straight into my eyes. His words almost pleading like a prayer.
“I was cruel to you when we first met, Little Baker. Cold. Because I knew that if I let you, you would claim my heart.”
Elden’s molten gold eyes met mine, and he held my hands fast. “You have warmed my heart little by little every day until I no longer know myself. I no longer see myself alone, but with you”—he swallowed— “forever.”
Heat filled my cheeks and my insides melted as easily as an icicle in hot tea. The fire blazed beside us in a steady column of flames. The Christmas mural wrapped around us in a peaceful embrace. I stared into the golden eyes of the king, my heart quickening.
All words fled my mind, but I smiled and nodded, “then I will make sure you live long enough to hold true to that promise.”
He loved me. Truly loved me. The Elf King.
The fierce male who trusted in my magic, who taught me all he could, who kept me warm through the cold winter’s night.
He loved me. My heart pounded in my chest, and I knew beyond any doubt that I loved him, too.
The power of that love threatened to undo everything I’d ever known.
I didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know what to do, so I busied myself with helping the king stay alive.
I peeled back his bloody shirt and pressed at the wounds, which were already sealing shut with whatever superior healing the potion and elves possessed.
But the black poison running through his veins, spidering out from his wounds, both new and old, covered his entire back.
The black lines twisted a geometrical line across his chest.
He didn’t have days, but mere hours before the blackness reached its destination.
The heart of the king.
“I will become a shade monster like my father and grandfather before me. You must go now. Get clear of this place before I forget your lovely face and hunt you down,” Elden said through clenched teeth.
“I brought you here to find a cure, but I think now it was to find a place far away that I could roam with a lesser chance of hurting my own people. Leave me. Go.”
“I will not leave you, Elden,” I said firmly. “We came here to find a cure, and I will have it.”
I steeled my resolve and nodded to myself. Then I hopped up and ran to the mess of books and papers that littered the floor in the western corridor. The answers would not have been neatly kept, but born of pain. This wreck of a space is where I would find them.
I pulled book after book off the floor, flipping through the elven runes I couldn’t read and ethereal illustrations I couldn’t appreciate.
One after the other, I tossed upon the ground, desperate for any sign.
Anything that looked like a clue. My hand stilled when I came upon an ancient tome.
Unlike the other books written in the neat penmanship of scribes, this one was written in a far messier scrawl.
I brought it over to Elden. “What is it? It seems to be a handwritten account.”
I laid the book in his hands. Elden winced as he worked to sit up. After a few moments of inspection, he said. “It is a journal, written in the hand of King Theronvere. My grandfather’s hand.”
My heart sped up at the discovery. “What can you read?”
Elden read a few passages, “This is his account of the wars with the humans.” Elden flipped excitedly to the middle of the book, “Here he meets Elayna. He writes of their love.”
Elden flipped farther into the book. “He writes of the birth of my father. He was very proud.” Elden flipped a few more pages, and his eyebrows laced together.
“His writing is faster here, his penmanship growing more and more messy. Here he says that his grief knows no bounds. He howls in the night.”
Elden turned back a few pages and inhaled, his deep voice sending chills spiraling down my sides. “My Elayna. She is gone. Dead. I awoke on Christmas morning to her lying dead in the bed next to me, her body growing cold in my loving embrace, and I shall never smile again.”
My eyes burned as Elden read page after page of Theronvere’s soul-rending grief.
He loved Elayna, truly loved her. Elden read as a darkness crept over Theronvere’s heart.
His grief morphed into anger. He hated humans and their frailty.
Hated that mortals could die from something so ordinary as a common illness.
And he hated Christmas more than anything.
No wonder the elves stopped celebrating it.
His entries became less and less frequent as he fell into grief and madness. He banished the humans from the lands of the elves. Then he sent his son to live with his aunt and uncle in Elkhaven, for he could not endure the endless questions about when his mother would return.
“This last potion I made myself, for I have dismissed the last of my servants. This next potion will work. It will return our magic to whom it belongs—the elves. So, I endeavor night and day to break the treaty. To go to war, for at least in war I will feel again.”
Elden and I shared a look, then he kept reading.
The writing was more frenzied now, erratic.
“I can feel the magic working through me. It is all-consuming. Filling my very soul. The pain is too much to bear. Can’t write.
Only feel. Pain, but what is new? I have only known pain this last year.
It is nothing to me now. I feel nothing. ”
Elden flipped the page to reveal a blank page, the rest of the book unfinished.
I sat beside him working my lower jaw, shaking my head.
It was the king, the first king of the elves, Elden’s grandfather, who’d broken the magically binding treaty between human and elf.
He’d taken magic from the humans; he’d started the blight.
Grief turned King Theronvere into a monster.