The Elf Prince Is My Baby Daddy novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: Three Cradles

"Eighteen days," Ilvar said, sitting up in my bed. "She can't do that."

"She just did."

"Then we use them," said Seren from the doorway. "All eighteen. Can I come in? I'm coming in. I have a book."

She always had a book.

This one was older than the palace, bound in cracked green leather, and it smelled like a cellar.

"Wood elf," she said, and dropped it on the blanket next to Ilvar's knee. "Or about them. Written by a star elf who lived in the Heartwood for a year, before. It was on the bottom shelf of the old history room. Nobody's signed it out in two hundred years."

"What does it say?"

"That they didn't start with light. They started with a heartbeat. Their children learned to feel their own pulse first, then their mother's, then a tree's." She chewed her thumbnail. "Which sounds mad. But so does a tree out of an orb."

The old glasshouse sat behind the Academy library, forgotten.

Star elves had built it a hundred years ago to prove they could grow oranges.

They couldn't. Every pot in it was dead.

Seren unlocked it with a key she'd stolen from the porter, very politely.

"Sit," she said, and pointed at a bench between two rows of brown stalks. "Hands on your belly. Feel."

"I've felt my belly, Seren. I know what's in it."

"Then it should be easy."

I put my hands on my belly.

I'd been showing for a week now.

All three of them together made a hard round curve under my dress, the size of a small melon.

The court seamstress had let out every gown I owned.

I closed my eyes.

I waited.

Nothing but my own breathing, and Seren's, and a fly against the glass.

"Don't wait for it," Ilvar said quietly. He'd come in behind us. "You never wait at a birth. You listen."

So I listened.

Not with the horn. With my hands.

There.

Quick and light. The first one.

Then the second, off the beat.

Then the third, slower, stubborn, the way I'd heard it on the miller's back step.

I didn't hear them. I felt them.

"I've got them," I whispered.

"Now go out," said Seren. "Find mine."

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