Page 6 of Accidentally Vital

"He's not unguarded. He's the most dangerous animal in the building. I'm the one who needs guarding, and I'm volunteering, so that's my problem, not yours." I turned to the prince. He was the one who'd put his hand on that bar. A person who will touch what everyone else won't is a person I can work with. "Here's what's happening in there, and you can check me on every word once you've seen it. Your father isn't savaging people because he's vicious. He's savaging because he's cornered and in agony, and every single creature that has walked through that door has confirmed for him that he's surrounded. You keep sending him strength. He's a frightened animal. Strength is the one force in the universe guaranteed to make a frightened animal worse."

The prince looked at me for a long moment. Up close his eyes weren't only gold. There was a banded green in them, too. The slit pupils had widened a fraction in the low light. Pupils don't lie and his were telling me he was listening.

"Tell me what you need," he said.

"Ryhn." Vaelin's voice cracked across the hall. "You cannot —"

"I have buried this argument with four healers and a surgeon," the prince said, not loudly. The room stilled around it. "Every one of them did it the way you demand. Every one of them left on a litter, and my father is no closer to waking. She is the first creature to walk in here and describe what is wrong with him, rather than what is wrong with her odds." He didn't look away from me. "Tell me what you need, healer. And everyone unwilling to be quiet will leave my father's hall."

So I told him.

I needed the sconces down to almost nothing, because a terrified animal reads bright light as exposure, and exposure as the moment before teeth. I needed the restraints gone — all of them, the chains and the spiked collar some genius had tried to buckle on him. Nothing on this world or any other says you are safe now less than being pinned by the things that scared you. I needed the room to stop stinking of fear, which was going to be the hard part, since it reeked of nineteen days of it and so did every person who'd stood in it. Silence, most of all. I needed the guards outside the door, not in. And I needed someone to bring me, of all things, fresh raw meat, a wide shallow dish of water, and the largest, heaviest blanket in the citadel.

"A blanket," Vaelin repeated, with open contempt.

"A four-hundred-pound cat is still a cat. And there's not a cat alive that doesn't feel safer with something solid at its back and something warm to settle against. You've been treating your king like a king. I'm going to treat him like what he actually is right now, which is the most frightened creature in this kingdom. You can be offended, or you can have him back. You don't get both."

I might as well have asked to bridle the sun. I could read it on every face in the hall. To a Kaithran, who measured a person's worth by how he carried himself, by scent and posture and the refusal to bare a soft throat, what I was proposing wasn't treatment. It was the deepest insult their whole culture knew how to give.

I was asking them to agree, out loud, in front of the throne, that their towering warrior king had become a creature that needed coddling. Doran looked like he might be sick. Even Nila, who'd been on my side since I landed, had gone still and uncertain, her young face caught between hope and a lifetime of being taught that strength was the only language worth speaking.

Nobody had ever talked to them that way. I could see it. There's a silence that happens when you hand powerful people a truth they've spent a great deal of money not to hear. The hall filled up with it. Then Ryhn turned and gave a single low order in their own tongue, and the guards began to file out, stiffly and furiously.

Vaelin went last. He stopped beside me on the way, close enough that I got the full cold-stone smell of him. Low, in words he barely troubled to soften, he said, "If the king dies tonight under your hands, beast-handler, no clause in any contract will carry you home. Do you understand me?"

"Loud and clear," I said. "Now please stop sweating threat all over my patient's air. He can smell you, and you're not helping."

That, at least, got him out the door.

And then it was just me and the prince (who would not leave and whom I had no standing to make), and the bar — and what was behind it.

"You should go too," I told him.

"No."

"He could —"

"You told them you were the only one in this room unafraid of him." Ryhn moved to the bar, and for the first time I heard something under the formality, something raw and nineteen-nights-deep. "You were wrong. There are two of us. I only hide it better. I will not cower behind a door while a stranger does what I could not." His hand settled on the bar. "Tell me where to stand."

"Behind me. Low. And whatever happens, whatever he does — you do not rush him. Can you promise me that? Because if you can't keep that promise, then you're the danger in there, not him."

That cost him. I watched it cross his face. "I promise."

I believed him, which was probably stupid. I crouched down small by the door the same as I'd crouched for eleven years. I made my voice soft, those boring three notes, and I nodded at the bar.

He lifted it.

The door swung in on a dark, warm, reeking space. There in the far corner, packed into the angle of two walls with the whole shaking bulk of himself, was the King.

He was enormous — black-furred and barred with a darker pattern you could only catch when he moved. One entire flank was a ruin of a half-knit wound, the new tissue shiny and raw. The regeneration was doing its slow patient work whether the rest of him agreed to or not.

His head swung around the instant the door moved. His ears flattened to nothing. His lips peeled off teeth as long as my hand. The sound that came up out of him filled the room and the inside of my skull and every animal nerve I owned. All of which were screaming that I was looking at four hundred pounds of apex predator that could end me before the prince behind me finished one breath.

I lowered myself the rest of the way to the floor.

I just sat, folded right down onto the filthy warm stone with my hands loose in my lap. And my eyes turned soft and sideways, fixed on the wall a foot to the left of him, making myself the smallest, slowest, most boring object in a room that had shown him nothing but threats for nineteen days.

"Hi," I said. "Hi, big guy. There you are. Nobody's going to touch you. I promise."