The Elf Prince Is My Baby Daddy novel · Chapter 10 of 32

Chapter 10: The Ledger Page

Somebody knocked before she could say another word.

I opened the door. Ilvar stood there with a basket in one hand and a jar of plums in the other.

"I thought your mother might be hungry," he said.

Then he saw our faces.

"What's happened?"

"Let him in," Mam said. "He should hear it too. They're his as well."

Ilvar came in and shut the door. Seren had gone down to the library to give us the room, so there were only three of us and the little silver tree on the windowsill.

Mam folded her hands in her lap. She looked at them while she talked.

"I didn't find you on my doorstep," she said. "I've told you that story so long I nearly believe it. I didn't find you. I caught you."

The room went very quiet.

"Twenty-four years ago this Midsummer, a boy came running into Rushford after dark. A wood elf boy, ten or eleven, with leaves in his hair. Nobody'd seen a wood elf in town for years. They kept to their trees."

"He came to your door," I said.

"He came to my door. He said, the queen's baby's coming wrong and our healer's dead. Please. So I took my bag and I went with him."

"You can't ride," I said stupidly.

"I didn't ride. I ran. I was thirty-nine." She almost smiled. "It's three miles to the edge of the Heartwood. It was the most beautiful place I've ever seen. Trees as tall as these towers, with lights in the branches. Houses grown out of the trunks."

Ilvar was standing very still by the door.

"The queen of the wood was lying in a hollow under the biggest tree," Mam said. "The Heart Tree, they called it. She had dark hair like yours. She wore a crown of leaves. Real ones, green, growing."

My hand had gone to my belly without my telling it to.

"The baby was turned. I turned her. It took two hours. And while I was working, I smelled smoke."

Mam stopped. She picked at a thread on her skirt.

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