Page 22 of Accidentally Vital

Doran caught me before I went down with the careful hands he had finally learned to use. "You cannot help him from the floor of a corridor with a head wound," he scolded, easing me back.

"I've discharged myself against medical advice before."

He didn't look up from the strap he was refastening. He'd already had the door watched for exactly that reason. God help me, I liked him. "And they will not let you help him," he went on. "I have argued myself hoarse. The houses have decided, and Vaelin has the houses. There is nothing left to win in that room tonight." He drew a stool to my bedside and stayed. It was the kindest act anyone could have offered me on such a terrible day, that the physician who had once called me a creature that crawls sat up the night so a beast-handler would not be alone.

They came for me that afternoon.

Vaelin didn't come himself. He sent it through a chamberlain. Powerful people always send others when they don't want their own scent on something. The verdict was tidy and total. The healer's methods had been given every chance and had ended in the king's worst relapse and the healer's own injury.

And so the experiment was concluded. The contract was void, the problem unresolved by its terms, and the Bureau had been summoned to retrieve their specialist at first light. I was to be kept comfortable until then. I was not, under any circumstances, to be permitted near the king.

By then the story had already been set. I heard it through the door, in the comings and goings. The foreign methods had been indulged far too long. They had ended exactly where any sensible person always knew they would, in blood and a worse relapse. That the poor grieving prince had at last been forced to see it. Nobody in the story had seized a terrified animal and dragged him by force. Nobody had been goaded into it on purpose by a patient warrior counting the days. In the story the houses told themselves that night, the gentleness had simply failed, exactly as they'd expected it to. The alien was the cautionary tale. I'd spent two weeks proving them wrong. It had taken Vaelin one single morning to set the lie back precisely where he wanted it.

"He's my patient," I said. The chamberlain wouldn't look at me. "You can't just— He's in there terrified and I'm the only one who— Please. Let me at least make him calm. Not for the court; for him. He's so scared in there and I know how to help. You're going to leave him like that—"

"Those are not my orders," the chamberlain said, leaving.

I heard the bolt go across the door from the outside.

That was the answer to the question I'd never quite let myself ask out loud, the one underneath all the others. I'd spent two weeks making myself essential to these people, but at the first excuse they'd bolted me into a room. I'd let myself believe, somewhere in the stolen dark, that this place was different. That I was different here. That a man with gold eyes had looked at me and seen something worth keeping. That it might, for once, be allowed to mean something.

I'd been wrong before about being wanted. I was just out of practice at how much it cost.

Ryhn came in the deep of the night, when the palace was asleep and the guards had been sent off. It was just the two of us. I knew the second I saw his face that he hadn't come to fight for me. I knew it from his body language, the set of his shoulders, and how he couldn't quite look at me. The hope I'd been holding together since I woke up came quietly apart.

"Don't," I said, before he could speak. "Whatever you came to say, if it isn't I'm getting you back to my father, then don't. I can't — I don't have it in me right now, Ryhn. I can't be brave tonight."

"I came to say I am sorry." His voice was barely there, completely wrecked. "For all of it. For what I did to my father, and to you. You told me not to become the fear in the room, and I became it. You nearly died putting your body in front of mine, and I will carry that until I am ash." He stood by the door a careful distance back. It was the same distance he kept from anything he was afraid of hurting. "And I came to say that you are going home at first light. I am not going to stop it."

There it was. I'd known it was coming and it still felt like a knife.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because every time I reach for what I want, someone I love bleeds for it." His hands were shaking. "My father took a blade for me and became a beast. You stepped in front of me and they carried you off on a litter. I am a danger to the people I love, Tabitha. It is the one truth I have always known about myself and let you talk me out of. Look what it cost you. The strongest act left to me is to send you somewhere I cannot hurt you again."

He believed it. That was the part that undid me. He wasn't being a coward, not in his own heart. He thought he was being strong for me, sacrificing his own happiness to keep me safe. It was the noblest sacrifice a Kaithran male knew how to make. He had wrapped the oldest mistake of his life in the prettiest paper his people owned, and he was holding it out to me like a gift. He couldn't see, wouldn't see, that it was the same fist that had closed around his father's head that morning, only aimed at me this time, gentler and slower — yet still a cage.

I understood him. God help me, I always understood him.

He thought he was protecting me. He thought letting me go was brave and loving. Strong. He couldn't see, even here, now, that he was doing exactly what he'd done to his father in that room. He was deciding, all by himself, what a frightened creature needed, and forcing it on them in the name of strength.

"You're doing it again," I said. My voice broke. "You're standing between me and the world and calling it love. That's not surrender, Ryhn. That's what put your dad in a corner. You learned the lesson, and the second it got hard, you threw it away. Now you're going to send me four hundred light-years home to keep me safe. You're going to lose your father and your kingdom and me, all three, because you'd rather be strong than be brave."

I was crying now and I didn't care. "Being brave would be fighting for it. Being brave would be walking into that throne room and that sickroom and refusing to let go of one single person you love. But that's the soft thing, isn't it? Your father never taught you the soft thing, and I had two weeks and it wasn't enough. Besides, I'm just the tech, and I'm so tired. I want to go home."

The last part was a lie and we both knew it. There was no home. There was a terrible apartment and a clinic that had replaced me, and a whole life of being the hands and never the heart. I'd found the one place in the galaxy that felt like being chosen. It was bolting me out at first light and the man I loved was holding the door.

He didn't argue. That was the worst of it. He didn't argue, because some part of him knew I was right and some deeper part of him couldn't move past the shame. He just stood there, shaking by the door he wouldn't fight his way through, and let the silence say what neither of us could survive saying.

"I would have stayed," I told him quietly, when I had nothing left. "If you'd fought for me. If anyone in my whole life had ever once fought to keep me instead of using me up and letting me go. I would have given you everything. I was already giving you everything." I turned my face to the wall. I couldn't watch him hold that door for one more second. "Go away, Ryhn. You got your wish. I'm going home. Please just go away."

I heard him stand there for a long time. His breath came ragged, and once I heard the low broken start of his grieving purr — the one he had for love he knows is ending. I almost turned around. I almost did. But then I heard the door, and the bolt going back across it, this time with him on the other side of it.

The small dark room was mine alone. At first light they would come and the white Bureau light would take me apart cell by cell and put me back together again in Ohio, four hundred light-years from the only family I'd ever let myself have. My contract was voided, my patient was screaming in a corner, and my heart was left behind in a sickroom I would never be allowed to enter again.

Nila came once, near dawn. She wasn't supposed to. She'd slipped past a guard, the same as she'd been slipping past them since the day I landed. She climbed onto the cot beside me without a word and put her head on my good shoulder one last time, and she cried. I held her while my cracked ribs screamed. I didn't make a sound, because she was sixteen and losing the only person who had ever treated her father like a person instead of a problem. The least I could do on my way out the door was be steady for her one more time.

"I'm going to fix it," she whispered fiercely. "I don't know how yet. But I'm going to make my stupid brother fix it."