Page 23 of Accidentally Vital

I told her not to make promises she couldn't keep. I should have taken my own advice.

She was a Kaithran, after all. The Kaithran do not give up on the people they love, even when they've given up on themselves.

I had spent eleven years fighting a certain stillness in other creatures, the one that comes over an animal when it finally decides to stop, that stillness that looks almost like peace but is its exact opposite. I had never once felt it in myself. That night, I felt it.

I lay in the dark and did the same math the king had done, and it came out the same way. Wanting something this much, and losing it anyway, is a wound the body would rather not have to survive twice.

I didn't sleep. I lay in the dark and waited for the light to come and take me. For the first time in eleven years of walking into rooms full of frightened things, I couldn't find anything in me that was brave.

14

Ryhn

I sat outside my father's sickroom in the dark and listened to him keen. I didn't go in, because every creature I went near, I broke.

My father had loved me and become a beast. Tabby had loved me and nearly died. The common thread in both ruins was me — my hands, my strength, my certainty that a strong man fixes what he loves by force.

The kindest act left to me was to stop reaching for any of them. I would let my human go home where I could not hurt her. I would let the houses take the throne. I would sit in the dark outside my father's door and harm nothing further.

Penance.

Love.

I had spent a month watching my father, locked in his shape that felt safer. I had pitied him for it. Now I sat doing the same, locked in a grief that felt nobler than the terrifying work of trying again. He keened on the far side of the door, every cry a reproach. Still I did not move. Moving meant reaching, and reaching meant risking.

Nila found me there an hour before dawn, and she was not gentle.

"Get up," she said.

"Nila—"

"Get up." Her claws were out. Her face was a wreck. "She's leaving. At first light, they're putting her in the white light and sending her back, and you're sitting here in the dark feeling sorry for yourself. I went to say goodbye to her, Ryhn. To the only person on this whole world who treated our father like he was still our father. Do you know what she did, with three cracked ribs, on the worst night of her life? She held me. She was comforting me. And you—" Her voice cracked all the way through. "You're out here protecting everyone by doing absolutely nothing. It's the most you-and-Dad thing I have ever seen."

"I hurt her, Nila. I hurt him. If I reach for her again, I—"

"You're doing it RIGHT NOW." She was crying and furious and magnificent. "Listen to yourself. You're deciding, all by yourself, what she needs. You're forcing her onto a ship to keep her safe whether she wants it or not — exactly like you grabbed Dad's head to make him wake up whether he could or not. She told you not to become the fear, and you became it, and now she's telling you to fight for her and you're sending her away. And you call it love. You think you're protecting everyone. You're not. You're protecting yourself from how much it hurts to love something you might lose."

She wiped her face with the back of her hand, furious. "Dad did it with his body and turned into a beast. You're doing it with that throne and your noble face, and you're going to turn into something worse. You're going to turn into Vaelin. A creature so afraid of losing that he stopped letting himself want anything he couldn't control." She crouched down in front of me so I had to see her, our father's eyes in her small fierce face. "She taught you the lesson. She nearly died teaching you the lesson. And the second it got hard, you threw it in the fire and picked your coward's strength back up, because soft is braver than strong, and you got scared. So I'll ask you one time, big brother. Are you going to be strong? Or are you finally going to be brave?"

I felt like I'd finally let go of a breath I'd been holding. She was right.

They were both right, my small fierce sister and the woman I was sending away. She had walked into the worst room in my world and kept her hands open and showed me, every single day for two weeks, that the bravest thing a strong creature can do is refuse to use its strength. I had learned it. And at the first true test, the only test that ever mattered, I had reverted, because being soft when you are terrified is the hardest thing there is. I had been so terribly afraid.

And this was what two weeks in a sickroom had taught me that thirty years of training never had. The fear was not the enemy. The fear was only fear — my father's and mine and the whole court's. You do not conquer it by being strong, the same as you do not quiet a panicking animal by being louder. You sit down inside the fear, you refuse to add to it, and you wait. You stay soft, and you let the frightened creature discover for itself that the danger has passed. I had watched a small woman do exactly that to a king. I had let her do it to me. And now, with the dawn coming and everything I loved about to be lost, I understood that I was finally going to have to do it to myself.

I got up.

I did not go to the throne hall, and I did not go to the platform where they were readying her ship. Not yet. There was something I had to do first. For once in my life I understood the order they had to come in.

I went into my father's room first, alone. No guards, no court, no performance. I let the door close behind me. The great terrified beast in the corner swung his head up snarling. For the first time in a month I did not try to be strong for him. Instead, I did the opposite. I walked to the center of that dark reeking room, and I sank down onto the floor in front of my father.

I did what no Kaithran male of my blood had ever willingly done before another. I bared my throat. Head tipped back, I showed him the most vulnerable part of me, the gift that can be taken. I let him see, and smell, and hear every broken piece I had spent my whole life hiding.

It was the most dangerous act of my life, and I knew it. A bared throat to a terror-locked predator is an invitation his body might answer before his mind could stop it, the same as it had answered when I seized him. I knew that. I did it anyway, because she had taught me the one truth my whole warrior culture had gotten exactly backward.

Safety is not the absence of danger. It's someone choosing, over and over, not to hurt you even when they could. I could have crushed my father a hundred times in that room and never once had. Now I needed him to know, in the only language fear understands — which is not words or strength but the soft undefended underside of a throat, offered freely in the dark.

"Father." My voice shook, the voice of a frightened boy. "It's Ryhn. I'm so scared. I've been so scared this whole time and I never let you see it, because you taught me not to. I think that's why I couldn't reach you, because I kept walking in here pretending to be strong and you could smell the lie. So I'm done lying." The tears came. "I'm not a strong heir right now. I'm just your son, and I'm terrified, and I miss you, and I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I grabbed you. I hurt you when you trusted me, and I will carry that forever. But I'm not here to make you do anything. I'm just here to be scared with you, for as long as it takes. You don't have to be a king. You don't have to be anything. Just don't make me do the rest of this alone. Please, Dad. Please come back. I can't do it without you. I can't do any of it without the people I love, and I keep sending them away to keep them safe. I am so tired of being safe and alone. Come back to me. Come back."