Page 9 of Accidentally Vital

Nila reached us first, shoving through the court with her ears flat and her claws bared. She pressed her small hands over the wound on the human's shoulder without being asked, and looked up at me with father's eyes. "Don't let him send her away, Ryhn," she said. "Don't you dare." She was sixteen. In four days she had understood what the whole grieving court could not. That the soft creature bleeding between us was all that stood between our father and the dark.

The human pushed herself up against Nila's hands, one arm hanging wrong, and found my eyes across a hall full of people who wanted her gone. "It wasn't him," she said, for the fourth time, louder enough for the whole court to hear it. "It was never him. You walked fear into a frightened animal, and it did what fear always does. Punish me if you have to. Don't you dare punish him for it."

I stood in my father's hall with the woman who smelled of no fear having gone suddenly, terribly afraid, and understood. The only person alive who could save my father had just been barred from the only room that mattered.

And the man who had done it had smiled while the whole house called it mercy.

5

Tabby

It took the prince exactly one day to defy his entire court for me — which was either very romantic or very alarming. In my experience, they're usually the same.

I spent the day in a stone room with an actual window, which was a step up from a sickroom, and a step down from going home. A Kaithran healer had strapped my shoulder to my chest after popping the joint back into its socket with a competence that told me these people had a great deal of practice putting warriors back together. It hurt enormously. I didn't let it show.

Nila had planted herself at the foot of the cot and watched me with her father's gold eyes. She was sixteen and frightened, but she was looking for permission to hope. You don't show a frightened young creature your pain when she's watching your face to decide how scared to be.

"Does it hurt?" she asked.

"Like the dickens," I said. "But shoulders are dramatic. It'll be fine in a week." I gave her the not-quite-smile that works on nervous owners. "Tell me something good. Tell me your favorite thing about your dad. The real him, not the king him."

So she did.

She told me he used to carry her on his shoulders through the high market until she was far too old for it. She told me he couldn't sing a note but did it anyway, loudly, to embarrass her. And she told me that when she had nightmares as a cub he'd lie across her doorway so nothing could get past him to her. She cried a little, telling me that.

I let her, because grief that gets felt is grief that doesn't curdle. Somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped being the alien they'd bought by mistake and became a person she could cry in front of. That mattered way more than my shoulder.

I was going to need allies in this place. You don't get a better one than a clever girl who's decided she trusts you.

I got my second ally an hour later. I almost missed him, because he came in the way the good ones always do — quietly and with his hands full. He was old, gray through the muzzle, and he smelled of hay and animals. The smell made my chest ache with homesickness. Kesh, his name was. He had run the royal hunting cats for forty years.

He set a bundle down by my cot without ceremony — a flat dish, a folded hide, and a small clay pot of something that turned out to be a scent-marker, the smell of a contented Kaithran den. He'd been making these, he told me, slipping them into the king's room at night against the council's orders. He'd watched enough frightened animals in his life to know one when his whole court was calling it a monster. We understood each other immediately. He was the first person on the entire planet who didn't think I was either a miracle or a fraud. He just thought I was right, and I could have kissed him for it.

The prince came at nightfall, and the set of his shoulders told me he'd spent the day at war.

"It is done," he said. "I have overruled the captain and the council both. They are furious. Vaelin is delighted, which means he believes my defiance will be enough to hang me at the convening." He stood in the doorway, too large for it. There was something underneath the formality I was learning to hear. "I should not have left the room. The relapse was not your method. It was the absence of it, the instant strength walked back in. I have said so to the whole court, on the record. It did not make me popular."

"No," I agreed. "True things rarely do."

He didn't sit. He never sat in my presence. I think standing was the last formality he had left, and he held onto it. But some of the fight went out of his shoulders. He looked at my strapped arm with an expression I couldn't quite read through all that alien stillness.

"You were hurt in my house," he said, "doing what my house could not. And my first act afterward was to let them carry you out and bar the door behind you. That was not honorable. It will not happen again while I draw breath." It wasn't a courtly speech. It was a vow, plain and a little furious, and nobody had made me one of those in a very long time.

"Then come back to my father with me," he went on, "if you are willing. I cannot order it, and I will not. You have bled for this house once already. But he has not eaten since they carried you out. He will not let me near him. And I do not know how to be in that room without you."

I'd been wanted for my hands plenty of times. I had never once been wanted in the room. It did something to me I didn't have time to examine right now.

That was the dangerous part, and I knew it. I'd spent a lot of years being careful about where I spent myself. Caretaking has a price, and I'd learned to pay it only on creatures who couldn't break my heart back. A scared cat takes everything you've got and gives you one slow blink. It's a clean trade.

But these people were starting to feel like mine — the stubborn girl, the gruff old handler, the proud terrified prince who made vows on sickroom floors. And caring about people who can leave, or who you will leave, has never once ended well for me. I noticed the danger, and I walked straight into it anyway. Same as I always did.

"I'll come back," I said. "On one condition, and it isn't for me. It's for him. You have to learn to do it without me. All of you. I'm here for thirty days, and your father's going to need this the rest of his life. If the only creature in the galaxy who can keep him calm is a temp from Ohio, then I haven't fixed anything. I've just made myself the new restraint."

That is how I came to run the strangest training session of my career. I taught a warrior prince and a furious court physician to baby-talk a king.

Doran did not want to be there. He had thirty years, a shelf of credentials, and the humiliation of having watched an unqualified foreigner do what he could not. I knew that humiliation on sight, because I'd been carrying its twin for eleven years.

I didn't fight him. I handed him what he actually wanted, which was to matter. "You're a physician," I said. "Which is good, because I need one. I can read this animal's fear, but I can't read his bloodwork. Somewhere in this room is the line where my job ends and yours starts. You tell me what's healing and what isn't. I genuinely can't do this without you." It had the great advantage of being true. His ears came up off his skull half an inch, and I watched a proud man decide to be useful instead of insulted.