Tethered

Chapter 23: Invitation✔️

"I was invited to the ceremony tonight." I say with a smile to my lips, holding his hand to my cheek, uncaring of the sweat clinging to his muscular form.

"Making progress I see." His smile is everything. I have come to lose myself in his features, his cheekbones, his jaw, his scruff and the light sprinkling of hair on his chest. It fills a part of me when I can feel how proud he is of me. I am like a child, wanting to please their parent, but I do not care as he bends to kiss my cheek.

"Nyna is the only one though. The others still avoid me."

"Nyna is a good and kind person. She hasn't been dealt the best cards in life, so she tries her best not to judge others the way she has been judged."

I do not question this. I'm sure Nyna would not like me prying into her life no matter who is giving me the information.

A knock to the door interrupts us and I freeze as Rhovan calls for them to come in.

It is his mother, Vanya. Her hair in an intricate braided updo, her dress of a bright red. She wears no crown. There is no need. It is not hard to tell that she is above station amongst these people.

"This won't do at all." She tsks, walking around us in one circle before grabbing delicately onto my right bicep.

"What is it mother?" I can feel the worry in his voice. He has been concocting different scenarios in his head as to what his father may do to me once he figures out that the most powerful one here is not him, but I, with my magyk regained. He had not thought that Morrigan would send his own mother after his mate.

"Well she can't wear this to the ceremony, it's not proper." Vanya says as she pinches at the green fabric of my dress.

"She's not to go bare. I won't have it, mother."

"Not all of us go bare, dear. Just the young, and fertile, both of which little Gilryn is." She exclaims with a smile. "By the way, I hope you have been careful. As much as I would love a grandchild, we don't need an heir with the coming war. We have enough pregnant women as it is and we need her in the battle lines, once Morrigan agrees to give her back her magyk that is."

My eyes widen and Rhovan looks as if he might cough up a lung with the words that have come out of his own mother's mouth. She is not one to beat around the bush.

I can feel his worry creeping in and so I speak before he has the chance to. "It is not an easy task to impregnate my kind at my age, since our lives I presume are a bit longer kept than your own, our reproductive genes do not kick in so early in on." Although my own parents have had luck in that department, I do not mention this as I smile gently, trying to reassure her and skirt away from the topic of magyk, even if this subject is not much better.

"Well that may be true, but there are always the exceptions and my son is a halfling , he may be very well more virile then a full elven man is and-"

"Mother, that is enough. Everything is well. I am taking care of her." Rhovan interrupts before she can go on and I stand in her grasp, uncomfortable and unsure what might happen next.

"Well if you say so, now come along Gilryn we have work to do." She wink as she pulls me out, making me wonder what happened to Rhovan's real father and how this woman came to bare a halfling child in the midst of a war between our kinds.