Page 12 of Accidentally Vital

By the fifth morning after the houses set their clock, the king would let me sit close enough to touch him. And I still didn't, because not touching was the whole point. You don't earn an animal's trust by collecting on it. You earn it by proving, over and over, that you'll never make him pay.

We had four days left. I'd stopped saying the number out loud. A frightened animal can smell a deadline on you the same as he smells everything else. And the king did not need to feel us start to hurry.

So I didn't hurry. I worked as slowly as I always had, and let the court believe I was failing. Underneath the performance I pushed harder than I'd ever pushed a patient in my life. Four days was not enough time to undo a month of terror, and I knew it.

Knowing that sat heavy in my stomach.

We'd built a strange little family in that room. Doran arrived each dawn with his quiet commentary on respiration and pupil response, a professional who had decided, somewhere in the last week, that being right mattered more than being proud. Kesh kept the den-scent fresh and the meat coming. He said almost nothing, which is the highest form of help there is. Nila smuggled herself in past all the guards and sat in the corner doing her lessons so she could be near her father.

The king had begun to drowse easier when she was there. We weren't a court anymore. We were a family keeping vigil. I had become the unlikely center of it, the temp from Ohio that a kingdom had started to lean on. If I let myself feel the weight of that, it threatened to knock the wind out of me.

So mostly I didn't. I just did the work.

The king let me clean the half-healed wound on his flank now, so long as I sang the whole time and Kesh kept the den-scent close. One afternoon he rolled over. He actually rolled, four hundred pounds of apex predator flopping over to bare his belly like a house cat.

A visiting house-lord who'd come to scoff made a strangled noise and had to sit down on the floor. Nila laughed so hard she had to leave the room. It was the first time anyone had laughed in that chamber in a month. The king's tail thumped once against the stone, content. I added Gets funnier the longer you watch him to the growing list of what I knew about a king I was only technically there to keep from dying.

Ryhn worked beside me now, not behind me anymore. We'd found a rhythm without ever discussing it, the way it is with the rare person whose hands you trust as much as your own. He'd lower his voice the instant I dropped mine, mirroring my stillness. He held the meat while I managed the room. Twice already he'd caught a tell before I did and softened for it without being told.

Watching a warrior learn gentleness in real time was the most attractive sight I had ever witnessed. I was a grown woman with a job to do and absolutely no business noticing how his hands learned. I noticed anyway. I noticed constantly.

It was becoming a problem.

Then, on the fifth afternoon, the king came back.

Ryhn had been talking to him, telling him some small story about a hunt from his cubhood, the words unimportant, only the voice. The king's huge head was down, his breathing slow, his eyes half-lidded in the gold light.

Then his eyes opened all the way and changed.

I'd spent eleven years learning to read what lives behind an animal's eyes, and I knew exactly what I was watching. For a heartbeat, there was a person in there. The terror cleared like fog burning off glass. And something older and sadder, entirely aware, looked out through the king's slitted eyes, and found his son's face.

"Ryhn," the king said.

It wasn't a roar. It wasn't a beast's sound. His own voice, cracked and disused and unmistakably a man's, his son's name spoken with a tenderness that undid me where I sat.

Ryhn made a sound I would not wish on anyone, a month of grief breaking. "Father. Father, I'm here. I'm right here, I have you —"

A door slammed somewhere down the corridor — some servant about ordinary business — and the fog rolled back. The fear climbed up, and the man was gone. The great predator shuddered and pressed into his corner with a low broken whine. The King of the Kaithran was a frightened animal again. His son knelt on the stone with his empty hands still reaching, tears cutting silent tracks through his face.

I did the only useful work available to me. I kept us both steady. I kept my voice going, low and even. It's okay. He's still here. You heard him. He's still in there, until the king settled and Ryhn's breathing came back to him. Only then, when the danger had passed, did I let myself feel what we'd just watched.

"He knew me," Ryhn said, scrubbing the heel of his hand across his face. "Tabby. He knew me."

"He knew you," I agreed. My own voice wasn't entirely steady either. "That's the proof. The person isn't gone. He's buried under the fear, and every time we make it safe enough, he climbs a little closer to the surface. We are not failing." I had to look away from his face, because there was too much in it and not enough of me left to guard against it. "We're so close. We just need more days than they're willing to give us."

We sat with that a while, the enormous unfair hope of it, in the near dark.

"Four days," Ryhn said finally. I heard him not say the rest. Four days to take a man who could surface for a single heartbeat and teach him to stand, to speak as a king in front of a hall of people who terrified him. It was the cruelest possible distance, close enough to see the shore and much too far to swim it on somebody else's schedule. I wanted to promise him we'd make it.

I wouldn't lie to him. I just shifted close enough that our shoulders touched, my injured one against his, and let him feel that he wasn't in this alone. He leaned into the contact the same as his father had leaned into his palm, helpless and grateful — a strong creature remembering it was allowed to be held. Neither of us said a word.

It was the kindest thing we knew how to do for each other.

"Why do you do that?" Ryhn asked eventually.

"Do what?"

"Make yourself small. Just a tech, you said that first day, like an apology. Only a handler. You have done what every professional healer in my realm could not. You reached my father where the finest minds of two worlds failed him, and you say it as though you were reporting a flaw." His gold eyes found mine in the dim. "I do not understand it. Explain it to me, because in my world a creature who could do what you have done would be honored at the high table, and you flinch from honor as though someone had drawn a blade."