Page 11 of Accidentally Vital

"Now I think it simply waited. It found a slower way in. I am glad she did not live to see him like this. And I keep wishing she were here to tell me what to do, because I don't know, and there's no one left above me to ask."

"And I'll tell you the part I have told no one," I went on, because the dark made it possible. "I'm afraid he will die. And I'm afraid, almost as much, that he will not, and that I will spend the rest of my life trying to be the king he was — and failing, where the whole realm can watch. He was the strongest man any of us ever knew, and it did not save him. If strength could not save my father, I do not know what I am meant to be made of instead." I had never let that thought all the way out of my mouth. It frightened me more than the throne did.

"You're doing it," the human said. "Whatever she'd tell you to do, you're already doing it."

"I am letting a foreign woman with a broken arm save my father while I sit in a garden and grieve."

"You're sitting with him. You're learning his fear so he doesn't have to carry it by himself. You overruled your entire court to keep the one person who could help, and you've taken the bruises for it." She tipped her head back to the unfamiliar stars. "Where I'm from, we call that the hardest kind of strong there is. The kind nobody builds a statue for."

I did not have an answer for that, so I gave her the truth instead.

"It is not what my people call strength," I said. "You should understand that before you are tempted to admire us. A Kaithran measures a man by what he can endure without showing it. We do not weep where we can be seen. We do not bare a throat, not to a friend, not to a mate. A bared throat is a gift, and a gift can be taken. My father raised me to believe that to love something is to stand between it and the world and never once let the world see you flinch. Protect, and do not break — and if you must break, break alone and in the dark." I turned my hands over. "I had been very good at it my whole life. And it has been entirely useless for the only matter that ever mattered."

She was quiet. When she finally spoke she was careful with me, and I felt it as plainly as the night air.

"Can I tell you what I think strength actually is? I have eleven years of opinions. Consider yourself warned." She waited for my nod. "Anybody can harden. It's the easiest thing in the world. Something hurts you, so you grow a callus over it and call yourself tough. Pretty soon you can't feel anything through all that callus, including whatever you grew it to protect. That's not strength. It's just scar tissue." Her mouth bent.

"Real strength is staying soft on purpose. It's walking into the worst room in the building and keeping your hands open when every nerve you've got is screaming at you to make fists. Your dad is not going to be roused by the strongest person in the room, Ryhn. He's going to be roused by the bravest one. And the bravest thing in that whole sickroom, every single day, is your gentleness. You were just never taught to call it that."

I had stood in war councils and held my face still while men I trusted argued for things that would cost lives. I could not hold my face still against this. I felt something give way that I had spent thirty years bracing, and my purr surfaced — low and helpless, entirely beyond my control. She heard it, and she did the kindest cruelty anyone had done me since mother. She pretended she had not.

"For what it's worth," she added a bit gentler, while I gathered myself, "you're better at this than you think. The slow blink? Day one you looked like you were having some kind of medical event. Now your father blinks back at you. That's important, Ryhn. That's a whole language you taught yourself in a week — for him." She bumped my shoulder with her good one, careful of the strapped arm. It was a small human gesture I found I treasured. "Most people never learn a second language for anybody. You went and learned for him."

I didn't tell her that wasn't the only tongue I'd been learning in that sickroom. I didn't have the courage. I let the purr say what I could not.

Her scent had changed while she spoke. I had been trying not to notice it for days, how the steady patience of her warmed at the edges when she looked at me too long, a faint sweetness threading up beneath the soap and the animal-musk. It was there now, unmistakable. She would not know I could read it. She could not know that to a Kaithran a shift in scent was a confession the body made without its owner's consent. Nor could she know that hers was confessing exactly what mine had been confessing for days, in a language she did not even know her body spoke.

I sat in the dark beside a woman who smelled, very quietly, of wanting me. I understood that I was in a great deal of trouble, and that for the first time I did not especially wish to be saved from it.

"You should not look at me like that," I said. My voice had gone rough.

"Like what?"

"Like I am someone worth the trouble of being gentle with." I made myself hold still. "In nine days I am to be a king, or a regent's puppet, or a man burying his father. There is no ending in which the soft human from Ohio is permitted to stay. You should guard yourself against me. You are better at guarding frightened creatures than anyone I have met. Begin with yourself."

"I noticed," she said quietly. "I'm just bad at taking my own advice." She did not move away though, and neither did I.

The chamberlain came at the rise of the moon, his scent arriving before his words — stiff formality stretched thin over dread. The high houses had convened, early and in secret. Vaelin had seen to it. They were already seated in the throne hall, and they had decided the way frightened powerful people always decide — in favor of the answer that asked the least of them.

I went. She came with me, because I no longer had it in me to forbid her anything. We crossed the long cold hall together while the assembled houses watched the prince of the realm walk in with an alien and her arm in a sling. Vaelin rose to deliver the verdict he had spent three weeks building toward. His voice was heavy with a grief his scent did not carry.

"The realm cannot wait forever on a miracle," he said. "We grant the prince what mercy we can. The king has until the moon stands full again, nine nights hence, to wake, and to rise, and to stand before this hall and speak as a king must speak." He let the next part fall softly, which was how he let his cruelest things fall.

"Should he do so, the matter is closed, and every one of us will rejoice that we ever doubted. Should he not, the regency passes to me, to hold in trust. The prince ascends under its terms. And the alien is returned to her own world, her contract void. The realm will not be ruled from a sickroom. It will not be mended by a beast-handler's lullabies one day past the patience of the houses that hold it."

The hall did not erupt — that was the worst of it. The high houses nodded gravely, relieved to be handed a number to hold instead of grief. I saw Doran at the back with his jaw set hard, and Nila against a pillar with her claws out and tears bright in her eyes — sixteen and forbidden to speak in the hall. And I stood among the oldest blood of my world and understood that not one of them had asked the only question that mattered.

Not one of them had asked whether a frightened creature could be commanded to wake on a schedule by the very court whose fear had helped to trap him. They had set my father a deadline to stop being afraid. I had learned these past days exactly how fear answers a command.

But I had also learned to keep the teeth behind my lips, and so I said nothing.

She did not flinch beside me. She lifted her chin and studied the assembled houses of a world that was not hers, every one of them taller and harder and more frightened than she would ever be. I felt her arrive at a decision, and I knew her well enough by now to dread it before she spoke.

"Nine days," she said, for me alone, in that low even voice she used on everything that wanted to bolt or bite. "Okay. Then I'd better stop being so gentle about how fast I work."

7

Tabby