Page 8 of Accidentally Vital

That had done what all my strength could not. My purr surfaced again while she spoke. This time, when her gaze caught on my throat, she said gently, "You don't have to stop that on my account." She walked away, leaving me undone in the cold beside her.

Later, when the silence had stretched, I started talking. I had not meant to. "He taught me to hunt in country like this," I said, my voice low and my eyes on the far drop of the city. "High rock, thin air. He would not let me carry a blade until I could cross a herd without one animal lifting its head. He said the truest warrior is the one the prey never knows is there." I had spoken of him only as my king — never as my father — to anyone in twenty-three days. The words came out cracked. "I do not know how to be quiet in a room and call it strength. He never taught me that. I am not sure he knew it himself."

She did not fill the quiet with comfort, which I was learning was its own mercy. After a while, she said, "He's teaching you now." She tipped her head back toward the room where he slept. I understood what she meant. I had to study the ceiling for a moment so she would not see what it did to me.

"Can I ask you one now," she asked, "since we're trading?" I inclined my head. "The purring." She said it without teasing, only curious. "Back home, cats purr when they're happy. But also when they're hurt or scared. It's how they soothe themselves, and how they ask to be cared for. Which one is it for you?"

No one had ever asked me what my own body meant. I considered lying. "Both," I said at last. "It means safety. It is not something we choose. It tells the truth about us whether we wish it told or not." She nodded slowly, having only had a guess confirmed. I did not point out that mine had not stopped since the hour she arrived.

I was grateful.

And then, an hour later, she said good boy to a king who had ruled half a continent. The old offense came up my spine so fast it whitened my vision. I was ashamed of the reverence, and ashamed of the offense, and could set down neither one.

Awe and outrage ran those four days, trading the same square inch of my chest, while a creature I had no business needing taught me my father one breath at a time.

Vaelin was waiting for me in the antechamber later. He chose his moments to be seen as other men chose their weapons.

"You guard her like a mate," he said.

"I guard the only healer in the realm making progress."

"Progress." He let the word rot in his mouth. "The king eats from a bowl and sleeps like a fed beast, and the court is told to call that a cure because the alien hums at him. Ryhn." He dropped the performance, and for a breath he almost sounded like the cousin I had wrestled as a cub. "The high houses convene in eleven days. I have held them off this long on the promise of a miracle. I cannot hold them on the promise of a contented pet. Give me a date — the day your father stands and speaks as a king — or I name the day the regency begins. You will not like which of us names it."

"You would set a clock on my father's life to win a chair."

"I would set a clock on it to spare the realm a worse war later." His tail lashed once. "Eleven days. After that the houses set the clock, not me, and they will not care how gently your creature handles him on the way to his grave."

I left him there, because I had no answer that didn't involve teeth. I had promised her, and myself, that I was learning to keep my teeth behind my lips.

It was the noise that undid everything, and the cruelty of it was that I was not even in the room.

I had stepped out to carry Vaelin's deadline to my father's old advisors. Inside, the human was doing what she always did, the patient nothing. My father was as near to peace as he had come in twenty-three days. And the captain of the household guard made the choice every warrior in that hall would have called correct. He was a good man, a loyal one who had watched a foreign creature crouch unprotected beside his king for four days and could no longer stand it.

He sent two armed guards in to stand over her. To keep her safe. Strength, arriving to help.

I heard it before I reached the door — not my father, but the wrong sound inside his room, heavy square boots on stone, two sets of them. I came around the last turn of the corridor at a run and stopped in the doorway. The ruin laid itself out in a single breath.

Two of the household guard stood over her in the dim, in the exact place I had spent four days teaching everyone never to stand. Tall, armored, hands resting at their blades, backs straight, certain they were doing their duty. And on the floor between them and the corner, small and folded down, Tabby had gone the wrong kind of quiet — not her working calm, but the flat alert hold she dropped into a breath before an animal broke.

She had her eyes on my father, already talking, low and fast and even. "Okay. Okay, big guy, they're going, nobody's going to — look at me, not at them, look right at me —"

He was not looking at her. His eyes had blown black and fixed on the two armored shapes rearing up out of the dark he had only barely learned to trust. I smelled his terror climb from a smoulder to a detonation. I smelled her alarm go sharp for the first time since she landed. I opened my mouth to give the one command that might have caught him.

He came off the wall.

Four hundred pounds of resurrected panic, off the wall for the first time in days. He did not go for the guards. He went for the smallest creature nearest him, because that is what a cornered animal does. It strikes whatever is closest, and the closest creature was her.

"DOWN," she shouted — not a scream but an order, the first time I ever heard her lift that low voice — and she dropped flat and small. The paw meant to open her throat caught her across the shoulder instead and flung her into the wall.

I had no memory of crossing the room. I remembered only my hands on my father, and his teeth, and the old fact of us, son and sire, locked together in the dark while the guards dragged her out by her ankles. Then forcing him back into his corner. I remembered that the blood on her pale cloth, this time, was her own.

Every instinct I owned screamed to answer the violence with more of it, to put my body between her and the danger and end the danger with my hands, as I had been built and bred and raised to do. And kneeling there, my father's blood and hers mingled on my arms, I understood that this, exactly this, was the error. The guards had brought strength to protect her, and strength had nearly killed her. Every answer my house knew was wrong. The one right answer had just been flung into a wall for the offense of being gentle in a room full of warriors who could not bear to watch that.

And I remembered the hall when I carried her from it. The whole court assembled by the noise, Vaelin at the front of them with his face arranged into a grief that never reached his scent.

"There it is," he said softly, so all of them would hear. "The beast-handler's gentle method. Four days she has been alone with him, and the first time we send strength to protect her, look what her kindness has trained him to do." He turned to the gathered houses, the regency already in his voice. "He savages his healers still. Nothing has changed, except that now an alien has taught him there is prey in the room to be had. Enough. No one enters that chamber again."

She was bleeding in my arms and trying, even then, to tell me it had not been the king's fault. It had been the guards, the way they reared up over him, the strength — the very danger she had warned us against from the first hour.