The Elf Prince Is My Baby Daddy novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Three Heartbeats
Linnet hears three heartbeats in her own belly, sees the father's face on the crown prince's betrothal broadsheet, rides to Starhold and tells the whole feast she's carrying his triplets.
I heard three heartbeats in my own belly on the same morning I found out who their father was.
It started at the miller's house, at four in the morning, with his wife screaming at him to get out.
"Out, out, OUT," she yelled, and he went.
I'd delivered two hundred and eleven babies in Rushford.
The miller's fourth son made two hundred and twelve.
He came out purple and furious, with a full head of hair and a voice.
"He's got your temper," I told her.
She laughed and cried at the same time, which is what most of them do.
I cleaned up, packed my bag and pulled the listening horn out to put it away.
Then I stopped.
I'd been sick every morning for two weeks.
I'd blamed the miller's well water.
I sat down on the back step in the gray light, pressed the wide end of the horn to my stomach, and put my ear to the narrow end.
One heartbeat. Quick and light.
I moved the horn.
Another one, off the beat of the first.
I moved it again.
A third.
I sat there so long the miller came out to ask if I'd died.
"Counting," I said.
"Counting what?"
"Not sure yet."
Mam was at the kitchen table when I got home, shelling peas and reading the herald's broadsheet from Starhold.
Mam is human, sixty-three, and has a face that's seen everything.
She found me in a basket on her doorstep twenty-four years ago and trained me to catch babies before I could read.
"Miller's wife?" she asked.
"Boy. Loud."
"Good." She turned the broadsheet toward me. "Look at this. The crown prince is getting engaged tomorrow. Pretty, isn't he? Shame he looks so miserable."
I looked.
The drawing showed a tall elf in a white coat and a silver circlet, with long pale hair to his waist.
Next to him stood a golden-haired woman with braids.
His Highness Prince Ilvar Vael, to wed the Lady Aurelia Marrin, daughter of the Lord Chancellor.
I knew that face.
I'd stitched the arm under that white sleeve.
Eight weeks ago a soldier stumbled into our yard with a gash from wrist to elbow, from a blight-boar out of the Burnt Wood.
He was bleeding all over Mam's herb bed and apologizing to the herbs.
"Sit down before you fall down," I'd told him.
"I'm fine."
"You're green. Sit."
He sat.
I put eighteen stitches in him, and he didn't make one sound, but he gripped the table so hard the wood cracked.
"Who taught you to sew?" he asked, through his teeth.
"My mother. On pig skin."
"It shows."
I tied off the last stitch tighter than I needed to. "Say that again."
He actually smiled.
He said his name was Ilvar and he was a soldier, sent south to see why the blight kept spreading.
He stayed three days.
He was terrible at everything except listening. He couldn't split wood, chop onions or milk the goat.
On the second day he followed me to a birth and held the lantern for six hours without once asking to sit.
On the third night it was Midsummer.
The whole town was at the bonfire on the river meadow, and we walked back early because neither of us wanted to share the other.
At the foot of the loft ladder, he asked me if I was sure.
I said yes.
I took my time on the ladder.
He stood at the bottom and watched me climb, one hand on the wood beside his head.
"You're staring," I said.
"I am."
I reached the top and looked down at him.
"Are you coming up, or have you forgotten how ladders work?"
He climbed.
When he stepped into the loft, he stopped and looked around like a man memorizing a room.
The lantern hung on its nail by the open door.
The far drums from the river meadow beat slow and steady, like a heart under the whole town.
"Stop being careful," I said.
"I am being careful."
I reached for the laces at the front of my dress.
"I'm not going to break."
"I know what you are."
I pulled the first lace loose.
"Do you?"
He watched my hands.
"You stitched my arm while I bled on your table. You told me to sit down before I fell down and you meant it. You are not breakable."
I pulled the next lace.
"Say that again."
He smiled, that small crooked thing that had cracked his face open on the second day.
"It shows."
I laughed, and the dress went slack down my front.
The air in the loft was warm and smelled of hay and goat and the smoke from the bonfire on our clothes.
I pulled my arms out of the sleeves and let the green linen drop to the boards.
I stood in my shift, thin enough that the lantern light went through it.
"Linnet."
His voice came out low, the way it had when I'd pulled the last stitch through his skin.
I lifted the shift over my head and dropped it on top of the dress.
He made a sound like the wind knocked out of him.
"You can look all you want," I said. "But if you just look, I'm going back down that ladder."
"I am not just looking."
He crossed the loft in three steps.
"Come here," he said.
"I am here."
He put his hands on my waist.
His fingers were hot through nothing at all, and my whole body went tight and loose at the same time.
I put my hands on his chest and pushed him back a step.
"Shirt off first."
He pulled it over his head.
I'd seen his chest when I'd stitched him.
I'd seen the long lean lines of him, the pale skin, the muscle under the soldier's tan.
I hadn't let myself look long.
Now I looked.
"Like what you see?"
He said it the way he'd said "It shows," dry and quiet, but his breathing had gone rough.
"Shut up," I said, and pulled him down to me.
His mouth came to mine and he kissed like he'd been thinking about it for three days.
Heavily, patiently, learning exactly how I kissed back.
His hands came up my sides, slow, and I felt every callus on his palms.
I got his trousers open while he was still kissing me.
He broke off and looked down.
"You are very good with your hands."
"I'm a midwife. I can undress a man in the dark."
He laughed, low and startled.
"Of course you can."
I got his trousers down and his cock came free and I took him in my hand.
He said my name again, all breath gone out of it.
"You're hard," I said.
It was the stupidest thing I could have said, but it came out because it was true and because I wanted him to know I knew.
"For three days," he said. "It shows."
I laughed.
He kissed me again and walked me backward until my bare back hit the rough wood of the loft wall.
I made a noise into his mouth.
His hands went to my breasts, cupping them, his thumbs stroking across my nipples until they were tight and aching.
"Tell me what you want," he said against my mouth.
"You."
"That's not specific."
"Your mouth on my pussy. That specific enough?"
He made a sound like a growl and went to his knees in front of me.
I looked down at him, at that pale hair and those violet-blue eyes, and I thought: I have caught two hundred and twelve beginnings for other people.
This one is mine.
He kissed my stomach, just below my navel, and my whole body shivered.
"Spread your legs," he said.
I did.
He put his mouth on me and I stopped thinking.
He was slow and thorough and he listened.
When I gasped, he did it again.
When my hand went into his hair and pulled, he made a low satisfied sound and stayed exactly where he was.
He learned my clit with his tongue like a man reading a map.
I hit the wall with my shoulders and rode his mouth.
"Fuck," I said, and it came out strangled.
"That's the idea."
He said it against my skin, and the vibration went through me like a bell.
I came on his mouth, hard, with my thighs shaking and his name caught in my throat.
He stayed on his knees and looked up at me while I shook.
"Good?" he asked, and his mouth was wet.
"Get up," I said. "Get up and get that cock in me."
He stood.
He was still in his trousers around his ankles, and I almost laughed at the sight of him, this elegant soldier with his cock out and my wet on his chin.
He saw me almost laugh and he smiled.
"What?"
"Nothing," I said. "You just look..."
"Like what?"
"Like mine."
Something moved through his face, something that wasn't wanting.
He lifted me.
I wrapped my legs around his waist and he carried me to the hay and laid me down in it.
The hay scratched my bare back and I didn't care.
He settled between my legs, and the weight of him was the best thing I'd ever felt.
He braced himself on his forearms and I saw his left arm, the eighteen black stitches from wrist to elbow.
"Careful with that," I said.
"I am not thinking about my arm."
"Think about it. I didn't sew you up so you could tear the stitches in my hayloft."
"I won't."
He pushed inside me.
I stopped talking.
He was big, and he went slow, and I felt every inch of him.
I watched his face while he did it.
He was watching mine.
"Linnet," he said again, and it sounded like a vow.
"Fuck me," I said. "Properly. I want it."
He did.
He fucked me hard and deep, with his mouth at my ear, saying my name over and over, and I came again with a cry that echoed off the loft walls.
"Again," he said.
"I can't."
"You can. Look at me."
I looked at him.
His eyes were wild and focused at the same time, the way they'd been when he'd held the lantern for six hours at the birth, never once asking to sit.
"One more," he said. "I want to feel it."
He put his thumb on my clit and kept fucking me, harder, and I came for the third time like a wave breaking out of me.
I screamed his name.
The sound of it must have carried over the drums, and I didn't care.
He dropped his head to my shoulder and kept moving, three hard thrusts, and then he said my name one last time and I felt him spill inside me.
We lay there in the hay, breathing like we'd run all the way from the river.
The drums had faded.
I put my ear on his chest.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
It was a habit, from years of listening horns and pregnant bellies, and I did it without thinking.
He started to laugh softly.
"What are you counting?" he asked.
I smiled against his skin.
"Your heartbeat."
"What for?"
"Practice."
He didn't ask what I needed practice for.
He just put his hand in my hair and held me there, and I thought: one night.
I'm taking one night.
And I did.
When I woke up he was gone.
On my pillow lay a cloak pin of star-silver, a seven-pointed star, and a note in very neat writing.
"I'll come back at the new moon. Keep this for me. I."
The new moon came and went.
So did the next one.
I told myself soldiers get sent places.
I told myself it was one night and I was a grown woman and I'd known exactly what it was.
Now I stood in Mam's kitchen with my hand flat on my belly and his face on the broadsheet under my thumb.
"Linnet?" Mam put the peas down. "You've gone white as milk."
"I'm pregnant."
She didn't even blink. "I know. I've been waiting for you to notice."
"Three, Mam. There are three of them."
That made her blink.
"And their father," I said, "is getting engaged tomorrow."
I tapped the drawing.
Mam looked at the drawing. Then at me. Then at the star-silver pin on the cord around my neck, which I'd told her I found in the river.
"Oh, my girl," she said.
I could have stayed.
Rushford knew me. Rushford would have helped me raise three babies and never asked whose they were.
But I thought about him going home to his white towers and never even knowing.
I thought about some golden woman in his bed while I was splitting my own firewood with three babies screaming.
And I thought: no.
He doesn't get to not know.
I packed my bag that afternoon.
Mam packed me bread, cheese and a knife, and told me not to use the knife unless I meant it.
It's two days' ride to Starhold on the miller's old mare.
I made it in a day and a half.
The betrothal feast was in the great hall of the palace, and the doors stood open for the city to gawk at.
Five hundred elves in silver and white sat at long tables under floating lights.
Nobody stopped one dusty half-elf with a midwife's bag, because nobody looks at servants.
He was at the high table.
He wasn't smiling.
The golden woman beside him was smiling enough for both of them.
An old man in a chain of office stood with his cup raised, mid-toast, a ring on every finger.
"To the future queen," he said.
I walked straight up the center aisle.
The music stumbled. Heads turned.
Ilvar looked up.
I watched him see me.
The cup in his hand tipped over and spilled wine across the white cloth.
I stopped at the foot of the high table, where everyone could hear.
"Hello, soldier," I said. "I'm carrying your children. Three of them."
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