Page 14 of Accidentally Vital

"Don't. Ryhn, we have four days. Don't make me say out loud what I'll have to un-feel."

"Perhaps I want to un-feel it slowly," I said. "Perhaps I have learned, this week, that a feeling you are given only four days to keep is not worth less than one you are given forty years for. Only rarer. And I have never in my life been handed something rare and chosen to set it down untouched, only because it would not last."

She closed her eyes. I watched the argument move through her, the careful handler weighing the risk against the cost. And I watched the moment she lost it.

I should have let it lie. A wiser man, a colder one — the man my father raised me to be, would have inclined his head and gone back down the stair and let the deadline do its merciful work of keeping us apart. But I had spent eleven days unlearning that man, one breath at a time in a darkened room, at the hands of the woman in front of me. And I was tired. The moon was rising, and her scent was telling a truth her words would not.

I slowly crossed the space between us, as she had taught me, so that she could stop me. She did not. I lifted my hand to her face, and this time I did not stop a breath short. I let the backs of my fingers, claws sheathed to nothing, brush the soft strange skin of her cheek. She turned into it as she had in the sickroom. A sound came up out of my chest that I had no hope of governing, the low warm rolling purr that means, in the oldest tongue my body owns, safe, mine, safe.

"That's cheating," she whispered. "You can't argue with the purr."

"I am not arguing," I said. I kissed her.

I had been told what it was to kiss. My people set the scent-glands of the jaw together first — a confession — before ever the mouths meet. And I had always thought it an excess of ceremony.

It was not ceremony. With my jaw against hers I could read all of it at once, her want and the grief and the deadline against us. Then her mouth found mine, soft and human, and the careful prince I had been holding together simply came apart. I gathered her in. I was so much larger than her, and I had spent my life being taught my size was a weapon. And for the first time it felt like the opposite, like the one safe place I had to offer anyone. My purr filled the embrasure. She laughed against my mouth and kissed me again.

The moon cleared the wall and laid its silver over both of us. For the length of that kiss I was no prince, and she was no temp, and there was no deadline anywhere in the sky.

When I drew back enough to breathe, my forehead against hers, I found I had been scenting her the whole while without knowing it. I had been setting my mark along the line of her jaw and her throat as my kind marks what it means to keep. I made myself stop. That gesture meant something among my people I had no right to in only four days. She felt me check myself.

"What was that?" she asked. "You went still."

"Nothing," I said. It was the first time I'd lied to her. "Something for another life. A longer one than we are allowed."

Then she drew back, her forehead against my jaw and her breath unsteady.

"We can't. Ryhn. In four days you'll be a king or a regent's puppet, and I'm on a ship back to Ohio — whether your father wakes or not. There's no version of this where I get to stay. You know it. I know it. We kissed anyway, like a couple of idiots, and now it's going to hurt so much worse. I knew it would, and I did it anyway." Her hand fisted in the front of my tunic, holding me there even as she said the words. "I'm so tired of being smart about it. I wanted one stupid, selfish choice for myself. Just once."

"Then we have four days," I said into her hair. I had nothing wise left in me. "My whole life I was told that something not built to last is not worth building. I no longer believe it. I have watched you give a frightened creature one good hour at a time and ask nothing of tomorrow, and I have watched those hours save my father's life. Give me four days of stupid, Tabitha. I will take them over a lifetime of being careful and count myself a rich man."

She made a wrecked sound and kissed me again. That was the turn, the moment the whole impossible business tipped over from resistance into something we had simply decided to be, for as long as the sky would allow it.

For a little while we stayed there, her tucked against my side in the embrasure, my arm around her and my purr rumbling low and stupid, content. And we talked about nothing, really. Her world. The cat she had been holding when the light took her, and whether anyone had thought to put him safely in his carrier after. The lizard her neighbor kept and overfed. I gave her the made-up star-names my father had invented, and she laughed at every one.

I thought, with a clarity that frightened me, that I would burn the throne to the waterline for more nights exactly like this one.

It was Kesh who came up the stair at a run, old Kesh who never hurried. The sight of him moving fast put me on my feet with my heart in my throat before he reached the top. But his scent, when it arrived, was not grief. It was something I had nearly forgotten the smell of.

It was joy.

"He spoke," Kesh gasped. "The king. He woke in the dark. He held it, Ryhn. He held the shape of a man for the length of a hundred breaths, and he asked for water. He asked for his son. And he asked who had been singing to him." The old handler's eyes were streaming into the gray of his muzzle. "He is sleeping again now, as a man sleeps. I have not seen my king sleep as a man in thirty days, my prince."

Every instinct I owned drove me toward the stair, toward my father's chamber, toward the man who had asked for me in the dark. I made it two steps before Kesh's hand closed on my arm, gentle and immovable. "He sleeps, my prince," the old handler said. "As a man. Let him. The kindest thing you can do for your father tonight is the hardest thing in the world, which is nothing at all."

I stopped. A week ago I would not have understood him, but tonight I did. I stood on a windy wall and did not go to my father. I let him sleep. It was the hardest work I had done all day.

The breakthrough I had prayed for and not let myself expect — my father, surfacing on his own in the dark, holding himself a man for a hundred breaths. I should have felt nothing but joy. I did feel it, fierce and bright and threatening to take my knees— but beneath it rose the cold knowledge that rode under everything good now, because I had learned at last to read my own court.

I knew what this gift would cost us before the sun was up.

"That's wonderful," Tabby said, already moving for the stair, lit up with it. "That's exactly what we needed. Why do you both look like someone died?"

"Because the houses will hear of it by dawn," I said, "and Vaelin will hear of it first. He has been waiting for proof that the king can surface. The verdict already commands everything he needs — in four nights my father must stand before the assembled hall and speak as a king, or the regency falls to my cousin. Until tonight that was a formality on the far side of a miracle. No one believed it could be met, and so the failure would have been a quiet one, a grief conducted in a sickroom."

The dread settled into me. "Now there is proof, and he will demand the letter of it. Not a physician's report. A public waking on command before the full court, at the hour of his choosing — to prove the king is healing and not enchanted. He will turn the houses' own deadline into a spectacle, in the most crowded, loudest, most frightening room in the realm."

I looked at the woman I had kissed under a borrowed moon. "He will take what your work needs above all else — the quiet, the safety, the slowness, and he will set it alight and ask you to work in the fire. With my father's life and your place in this world both riding on whether you can."