Page 5 of Accidentally Vital

The human stood up.

It did not flinch. It turned its blunt face toward the doors, toward the sound that had sent four healers out feet first. I watched its body do the opposite of everything a sane creature's body should have done. The shoulders came down. The breath slowed. It tilted its head and listened to my father's agony the same as a tracker listens to weather, reading it and taking its measure. When it spoke again the translator gave me the words a half-beat late, and I wished, at once and fiercely, that it had not.

Oh, the small creature said. Oh, you poor thing. You're not angry, are you? You're just scared out of your mind.

It took a step toward the doors that no one in my father's realm would open.

I stood rooted between the certainty that the Bureau had sent us a fool who would be dead inside the hour, and the colder, stranger certainty rising under it like floodwater. That this ridiculous soft accident had walked into my father's hall and, in the space of three breaths, understood him better than I had in nineteen days. I could not say which one would shame me more.

Every instinct I had been raised to trust told me to take this in hand. To command the room, to set guards at the creature's flanks, to master the moment as I had been taught to master everything that frightened me, with force enough to make the fear beside the point. And every one of those instincts had already failed, four times over, and been carried out feet first. The small creature on my father's floor was offering me the one skill I had never once been taught. From where I stood, with my hand a breath from the bar, it looked dangerously close to surrender.

So I did what was left to a prince with no healer, no time, and a damned throat that would not stop purring. I went to the doors, set my hand on the bar four healers had begged me never to lift, and looked back at the creature who smelled of no fear.

"If you go in there," I said, "you will die, and I will have spent my house's last hope on a thing that crawls. Tell me why I should open this door."

The translator carried my words across to it. It looked up at me, and its strange mouth bent at one corner, not a snarl, but something gentler.

Because, it said, I'm the only one in this room who isn't afraid of him. And he can smell that. Same as you can.

3

Tabby

The first thing I had to do was convince a room full of grieving panthers that I was not a surgeon.

This turned out to be harder than it sounds.

I'd been on their world for all of an hour. Long enough to be marched down a corridor that smelled of sun-warmed stone and frightened cat, past guards who tracked me with slit eyes, into a vaulted hall where a dozen enormous people stood around arguing over my head about a door none of them would open. My scrubs still had Mango's hair on the sleeve. Somewhere unimaginably far away, a dental drill was probably still running. And here I was, the wrong woman entirely, about to bet my life on the one skill nobody on this planet believed in.

"The royal physician will require her instruments," the tall cold one was saying. Vaelin, someone had called him, the one whose grief I couldn't find anywhere on him. That told me everything I needed to know about who to watch. He had a habit of speaking about me while looking just past me, the same as men had done my whole career. "Bring the cutting trays. The Bureau's dispatch named her a master of the high feline afflictions. Let her cut, and let us see whether four seasons of treasury bought us anything but a smaller corpse."

"I'm not a master of anything," I said.

The little blue translator-light by my ear turned that into something. I watched it land to no avail. They went on looking at me like I was a doctor being modest.

"I'm a vet tech," I tried again, the same as I'd walk a scared owner through a diagnosis. "A veterinary technician. I don't cut. I don't operate. What I'm good at — the only thing I'm good at — is getting frightened animals calm enough that somebody else can. That's it. That's the whole job. I handle the patients nobody else can touch. Back home that's a cat that weighs nine pounds and wants to peel your face off. I have never in my life been handed a four-hundred-pound one."

The translator did its work. I knew the exact moment it failed. The prince's sister was the young one — Nila, ears like a pair of satellite dishes, who hadn't taken her eyes off me since I arrived. She tilted her head. "But the dispatch said you specialize in temperamental felines of royal lineage."

And there it was.

I felt the whole misunderstanding slot into place, a key I hadn't known I held finally finding its lock. Somewhere between a dispatcher's cheap software and a desperate king's court, aggressive-cat handler had been polished into specialist in treating temperamental felines of royal lineage. A kingdom that needed a miracle had heard the exact miracle it wanted. They thought they'd bought a surgeon.

They'd bought me.

There was a joke in there — the cosmic kind — and on a better day I might have laughed at it. A whole court of warriors had scraped the floor of a treasury and reached clear across the charted galaxy for the grandest healer money could buy. What the universe had shipped them was the woman who mops up after the real doctors. The one whose name never makes the chart. Eleven years of being just the tech. And it turned out just the tech was the only job in the building that could save a king. If I hadn't been so busy being terrified, I think it might have broken my heart a little, in a good way.

"Okay," I said carefully. I'd learned long ago that the worst move in a room that needs you was to tell it that its only hope was a clerical error. "Okay. Let's go with — yes. Temperamental felines. That part's true. That part I can actually do." I looked at the barred door, at whatever was breathing behind it, and made the only decision that mattered. "But I am not going to cut your king open. Cutting him is the last of what he needs. Whoever's been treating this like a wound has been making it worse, and I can prove it. You'll have to let me in there. My way."

"Your way." Vaelin's tail moved once, slowly. "And what is your way, healer?"

"First? Everybody gets out."

It went about as well as you'd expect.

Kaithran, I was learning fast, do not whisper. When they're upset the whole room drops half an octave and you feel it in your bones. They were very upset now, a low rolling rumble of objection with the prince standing silent at the center of it. They had spent nineteen days and four healers proving that the only answer to the king was more — more guards, more restraints, more bodies between the danger and the throne. And here I was, the smallest, asking them for less of everything, alone, behind a closed door.

"You are asking us," Doran started. He was the physician, the one who'd called me a thing that crawls. His pride sat on him like a coat two sizes too small. "To leave our king unguarded with an alien we cannot vouch for. The answer is no. It is obscene."