Page 24 of Accidentally Vital

I could not have said how long I knelt there with my throat bared, weeping, asking nothing, offering only my own honest terror to a creature lost in his.

And my father came back to me.

Not all at once. Not the way the court would have demanded. But the keening stopped, and a great warmth came and pressed against my bared throat, not teeth — never teeth. It was the broad scarred brow of the king, laid against the most vulnerable part of his son in the oldest answer our kind knew. The rumble that rose between us was not terror or command. It was a sire, telling his cub, I am here. You are safe. I have you. And then a voice, cracked and exhausted, entirely his own, breathed into the dark against my skin.

"My brave boy," the King of the Kaithran said. "There you are."

I had no words in any language for what it was to hear my father's voice come back to me out of a beast I had given up as lost. It was a frightened man deciding, because his son had finally started telling the truth, that the world might be safe enough to come back into. It was everything Tabby had promised it would be, from the first hour, when she sat down on a filthy floor and called a king big guy. She had been right about all of it. And she was about to be put on a ship before she could ever see that.

I held my father and I wept like the child I had not been allowed to be in twenty years. He held me back, a man again in the dark, reached at last not by strength but by its surrender. When I could speak, when I lifted my head, I saw my father's eyes looking back at me out of his own tired face. He lifted his nose first, and scented the room, and frowned.

"Where is she?" he asked. "The one who sang to me. The small one with no fear in her. I have been swimming up toward that voice for weeks." His brow furrowed. "Why can I not smell her on you anymore, my son? What have you done?"

I told him, all of it. The deadline and the deportation and my own unforgivable cowardice. My father, who had been a beast in a corner an hour before, listened like a king. When I had finished he put his great weak hand on the back of my neck as he had when I was small. Then he gave me the first command of his return.

"Then why," he asked, "are you still here talking to me instead of out there stopping that ship? Go. Bring her home. A king does not let the one who saved his life be carried off into the dark." His mouth bent down in a not-quite-smile. "That is your father's order, and your king's. The throne can wait the hour. She cannot. Go."

I went.

I came through the doors of that sickroom at a dead run, and the guards Vaelin had posted fell back from me. Doran was in the corridor and took one look at me and started shouting for the houses to be woken. The king had spoken. The king was awake.

Vaelin met me at the head of the great stair. He had a sense for the exact moment something was slipping out of his hands. He had the regency writ in one fist and two house-lords at his back. He stepped into my path. "The houses have not ratified any waking. You will not go chasing an alien while the throne sits empty and—"

"Move, cousin." I didn't slow, and I didn't bare my teeth, nor did I reach for a single weapon he would have understood. I think that frightened him more than if I had drawn on him. "My father is awake. His first command as king was to send me after her, and I am going to obey it in front of every house you have spent a month poisoning. You taught this whole court that strength is the only language worth speaking. Watch what gentleness does to your little coup before the sun is properly up." I pushed past him, close enough to feel him flinch. "You have lost. "

I did not stop. I ran through my father's citadel toward the platform and the white light and the ship, with the dawn coming up gray in the high windows. My throat was still bare to a world I no longer cared to hide from. I prayed to every false star my father ever named me that I was not already too late.

15

Tabby

They came for me at first light. I went with them, because I had nothing left to fight for.

The platform was high and cold, open to the dawn. At the center of it the Bureau's retrieval ring had begun to hum and brighten, the same white light that had taken me from the clinic floor in Ohio a lifetime ago. Two attendants in gray walked me toward it.

My ribs hurt. My head hurt. Everything hurt, and underneath the physical pain was the flat gray stillness I'd felt in the dark. I let them walk me toward the light because I couldn't think of a single reason worth the effort of resisting.

I wasn't being brave about it, or noble, or any of what people picture when they imagine someone walking quietly toward a fate they don't want. I was just empty. I'd poured eleven years of refusing-to-quit into that kingdom, and it had taken everything I had and bolted the door. I had finally, after a lifetime of being the one who stays, run completely out of stay. The light brightened. It would take me apart cell by cell, the same as it had on a clinic floor, and set me down again in my own small ordinary Ohio life. The worst part was that some exhausted piece of me was almost grateful, because at least in Ohio nobody could break my heart by needing me and then letting me go.

I was three steps from the ring when I heard my name.

Not the polished court version. Not Tabitha. My name, the real one, the one he only used when he forgot to be a prince about it, torn out of him at a dead run across the stones.

"TABBY. STOP. Stop the light! I command it, on the king's own order, STOP—"

I turned, and there was Ryhn, sprinting onto the platform with his throat bare and his court dignity gone and his face wide open for the whole dawn to see. Behind him, impossibly, came Doran shouting for witnesses, and Nila, and a tide of house-lords still in their night-grays. Somewhere in the confusion a guard slapped the retrieval ring down to a low idle and the white light dimmed. I just stood there, swaying, not daring to understand.

He reached me and didn't stop, didn't slow. He gathered me up so gently with my cracked ribs and put his bare throat down against my hair where anyone could see a prince make himself vulnerable to a soft-skinned alien. His whole body was shaking.

"I fought," he said into my hair. "Tabitha. I came to fight for you. I was wrong. I was a coward. I tried to keep you safe by sending you away. It was the same as the fist I closed around my father. I will spend my life being sorry for it, but right now I need you to hear me. I am not letting go. I will not decide for you what you need. I am only asking. Stay. Don't get on the ship. My father is awake. He is asking for you. I cannot finish it without you. I do not want to finish anything without you ever again." He pulled back just enough to look at me. "Be the one I fight for. Please. Let me be the one who finally fights."

I'd spent my whole life waiting to be the one somebody ran across a platform for, and I'd stopped believing it would ever happen.

For a second I couldn't speak. I'd been wanted for my hands a thousand times and wanted for myself exactly once, by him. Now here he was on a cold platform with his throat bared to a court that would tell the story for a hundred years. He was choosing me out loud, fighting to keep me, doing the one single act nobody in my whole life had ever managed. He hadn't decided what I needed, he only asked. He'd run the length of a citadel at dawn just to ask. And that undid me more completely than anything else ever could have.

"Your dad's awake," I said, because of course that was what came out of my mouth first. That's who I was. "Ryhn. Your dad is actually awake?"

"He sent me to bring you home." His not-quite-smile broke through the tears. "He woke because I finally did what you taught me. He is not safe yet, not roused all the way. He's not able to stand before the houses who need to see it. That part was always yours. Come finish it with me. Come finish what you crossed a galaxy by accident to do."