Page 13 of Accidentally Vital

And there it was, the question nobody had ever once bothered to ask me, put plainly by a man who genuinely couldn't understand.

"Because where I'm from, nobody sees it that way," I said. "It's the part that doesn't need a degree. Eleven years I've been the most skilled person in the room and the lowest paid, doing the work that saves the animal while somebody more qualified signs the chart and takes the credit. There was a cat last month — I sat on a cold floor with her for days, and when she finally came around the discharge notes thanked the doctor for her patience. I wasn't in them. I'm never in them." I laughed — it came out crooked. "I'm really good at exactly one job, Ryhn, and I've spent my whole life being told it barely counts. Just a tech. It's a hard habit to break."

I'd never said all of that out loud to anyone. It's not something you say to people. It sounds like fishing for comfort, and I'd sooner chew glass. But it was dark, and he'd asked like he genuinely wanted the answer. And there's something about a man who has just heard his father's voice for the first time in a month that makes a person reckless with the truth.

He was quiet a moment. Then he reached over, slow enough that I could stop him if I wanted to. He didn't quite touch my face but he came close, his claws sheathed, the warmth of his hand a breath off my cheek.

"In my language," he said quietly, "there is no word that divides the healer from the one who holds. We have only one word, for the one who makes a frightened creature well again. It does not come in degrees of lesser and greater. There is the one who can, and there is everyone else." His thumb moved, still not quite touching me. "You are the one who can. I have watched you be the one who can for eleven days, with my father's life as the proof. Whoever taught you to call that small was a fool, and I will not have it spoken in my hearing again. Not even by you."

Nobody had ever taken this simple belief and simply refused it on my behalf. The almost-touch of his hand had more force in it than anything else in that room. I'd meant a lot to many patients over the years, the help — the hands. The one who stayed late.

I had never once been someone a person looked at like that — like I was something worth keeping, not something you use and set back down. I turned my face the smallest fraction toward the heat of his palm. He went very still. Four days and the deadline and the whole grieving court fell away to nothing. I was about to do something genuinely, gloriously unwise —

The door opened. Vaelin filled it. Behind him were two of the high physicians and a gray elder of one of the great houses, all of them taking in the picture we made. It was the crown prince of the realm kneeling in the dark with his hand at an alien's face.

"Forgive the intrusion," Vaelin said, although he didn't look sorry in the slightest. He looked like a man whose timing had been flawless. "I came to confirm a concern the houses raised, and I find it confirmed past any doubt. They wished to know whether our prince's judgment may still be trusted in this matter. Or whether the creature has worked some influence upon him." His gaze moved over us.

"Observe it," he continued. "A healer gentles the king into docility and the prince into devotion, and bids us wait — and wait while her contract runs its course and our king does not wake. You see how it appears. You see why the houses now ask whether she ought to be permitted near either of them, in these last days, or whether the kindest mercy would be to send the enchantment home early."

Ryhn rose. I felt the room change as he did, the temperature of it — the old warrior coming up through the gentle man. For one second I thought he might simply kill his cousin and be done with it. His scent had become sharp and dangerous.

The two physicians stepped back.

I watched him understand the trap, the same as I had. If he defended me, he proved Vaelin's point. The prince besotted, the prince enchanted, the prince unfit to judge. If he defended me coldly, he fed me to the houses to keep his own footing.

Vaelin had built a snare with no clean way out of it. He'd built it precisely because he'd seen what was between us before either of us did. He'd watched us the same as I watched animals. He'd found the tell, and now he was using it. So Ryhn said nothing in my defense. He held himself rigid and cold and kingly, and he didn't even look at me. That was how I knew exactly what it cost him.

8

Ryhn

I found her on the high wall an hour before moonrise, because I could not sleep with my own silence still in my mouth.

The walk there had given me time to feel the whole of it. I had crossed half my father's citadel in the dark, past guards who would not meet my eyes because they had heard, past the council chamber where my cousin was no doubt already drafting whatever came next.

And with every step I turned over what I had become in that sickroom. I had become a man who could be gentle with a dying king and a coward with a living woman inside the same hour. My father would not have known the gentleness. He would have known the cowardice on sight, and called me on it. That was the worst of the whole night, that the only part of me my father would still recognize was the part I had come to despise.

She sat in an embrasure with her knees drawn up and her injured arm in her lap, looking out at a city that was not hers and never would be. Her scent told me what her face would not. She had been crying, quietly and alone, where no one would be troubled by it.

I had done that to her.

For a moment I only stood at the head of the stair and looked at her, small against the enormous dark, the wind off the heights pulling at the loose hair she never troubled to bind. And I understood that I had crossed my whole citadel in the night for the privilege of standing before this woman and being honest at last. Princes did not do this. My father had conducted his apologies through chamberlains and grants of land. I had nothing to offer but the truth, from my own mouth, and so I gave her that.

"You should be resting," she said, not turning. "Big day tomorrow. Lots of not rushing the king."

"I came to ask your forgiveness."

That turned her head. In my world, a prince does not ask forgiveness. He confers it or withholds it, and asking is itself a baring of the throat that my father would have called weakness. I had come to call something else.

"In the chamber," I said, "when Vaelin named you a spell and named me a fool, I let him. I held my tongue to protect my standing with the houses. I let you kneel there alone and bleed for it. It was the act of a coward, and I have hated myself for it since the door closed. I will not pretend it was strategy. It was fear. I was afraid that if I defended you the way I wished to, every creature in that room would see how much you have come to mean to me, and they would use it to take you from me sooner. So I said nothing. They saw it regardless, and I bought nothing with my silence but your tears." I made myself hold her gaze. "I am sorry. You walked into the worst room in my world and kept your hands open, and the least I owed you was to keep mine open beside them. I failed it. I will not fail it twice, not if it costs me the throne itself."

She looked at me a long moment. Her scent did something extraordinary. The grief in it eased. Rising beneath it came that warm sweetness I had spent days pretending not to read. It was stronger now, and entirely unguarded.

"You know what the worst part is," she said softly. "I get it. I understood it while it happened. You did the smart thing — the survivable thing. I've spent my whole life doing the unglamorous survivable thing while everyone else gets to be loud and brave about it." She huffed. It was almost a laugh. "So here I am, furious at you for being careful, when that's all of who I am. Turns out it's a lot easier to forgive in a patient than in a person you—"

She stopped. I waited. I could not bear to leave it unfinished.

"Than in a person you what?" I asked.