Page 16 of Accidentally Vital

Yet the attack did not come.

He swung his huge terrified head, and instead of four hundred threats he found four hundred lowered gazes and softened spines and quiet, patient, unfrightened faces. He found his son kneeling on the floor with his palms turned up. He found a room of warriors being brave enough to be gentle.

I knelt in the middle of it and gave him the boring three notes, the same as the first day, There you are, big guy. Nobody's going to touch you. I watched the terror in the great cat's eyes flicker, and thin. For the space of ten held breaths in front of the entire court, the predator shape loosened, and a gray-furred man surfaced inside it, blinking.

He looked at his son. And in his own cracked and disused voice he said, "Ryhn. You kept them soft for me. All of them. You kept them soft."

The hall didn't cheer. It was somewhere past cheering. Four hundred warriors knelt in absolute silence with tears standing in their slitted eyes while their king looked out at them from his own face for the first time in a month. Then the enormous effort of it took him, and he slid back under, gently this time, into a sleeping man instead of a snarling beast. Not roused for good. Not standing. Not yet all Vaelin had demanded of me. But seen, by every soul that mattered, as exactly what I had said he was, and the lie that I was some kind of spell died right there on the throne-hall floor.

It cost me everything I had in me. By the end I was shaking so hard I couldn't have stood if my life depended on it. But I had won, and I had shown a court its king. I had done it with eleven years of patience and not a single ounce of anything that needed a diploma or a wand. Vaelin knew it, and the houses knew it. It was the proudest I had ever been of the work that nobody back home would have bothered with.

What happened next happened fast, like it does where power lives. By the letter of the verdict, we had lost. The king had risen, but he hadn't stood, and ten breaths in a cracked voice was not speaking as a king. The regency should have been declared right where we all knelt. But four hundred witnesses had just watched their king look at them, and not one house in the realm was willing to be the first to stand up off that floor and vote him dead.

The eldest of the great houses called for three days' grace — for the whole hall had now seen the king healing with its own eyes. The rest of them granted it before Vaelin could regain his control. He objected coldly once.

He was refused, just as coldly, by the same houses that had been his all month.

Vaelin didn't kneel or beg pardon. He had sworn to, in front of every house in the realm, and he simply turned and walked out of the hall while the court was still on the floor.

The exact moment a cornered animal stops pretending — a man who breaks his own public word in front of his peers — has decided the rules no longer apply to him. A man like that is never more dangerous than in the moment just after he loses.

I was too wrung out to do anything about it, but I watched him go. I knew that he wasn't finished. Men like Vaelin are never finished.

Ryhn found me afterward in the small dark room behind the dais, where I had gone to quietly come apart alone. He didn't say a single word. He crossed the room in three long strides and took my face in his hands. There was nothing patient left in his eyes. Every last scrap of restraint the two of us had been holding for two impossible weeks gave way at once.

"Tabitha," he said, wrecked, like my name was the only word he had left in any language.

"Don't you dare be gentle with me right now," I told him. I pulled him down to me by the front of his tunic, and let the last of my gentleness burn to the ground.

10

Ryhn

"Not here," I managed against her mouth, with the last coherent thought I owned. "Tabitha. Not on the floor behind my father's throne."

She laughed breathlessly, her good hand already fisted in my hair. "Nobody has ever said anything that romantic to me."

"My quarters." I pulled us upright, her body warm against mine. I did not so much walk her there as carry her in my arms down corridors I had walked ten thousand times. I didn't see any of it. My whole body had narrowed to the scent of her, the warm sweet want pouring off her skin. It was undeniable now. I had read it for days and was finally, recklessly, allowed to answer. My purr had climbed to a register I had not made since I was a cub, loud and helpless. I gave up trying to govern it somewhere on the second stair.

She should have been afraid of me. I was a head and a half taller than her and so much bigger. I was carrying her through a sleeping palace with my control in tatters. Any sensible creature would have feared me.

She did not. She had never once feared me, not in the worst room in my world, not now. I think it was that, more than any touch, that broke me. She looked at my size and my sheathed claws and saw the safest place she had stood since the light tore her out of her own world.

My door closed behind us and I had her against it, careful even then, my forearm braced so the stone took none of her weight. I made myself stop and look at her in the low light. Her hair was a wreck. Her eyes were enormous. She smelled of triumph and exhaustion and want — and underneath all of it, steady as ever, patience.

"We should say it out loud," I said. My voice had gone to gravel. "What this is. My people do not hide their want. We cannot — our bodies tell on us." I set my brow to hers. "I want you. Not your hands, not your gift, not the cure you have given my house. You."

"Ryhn." Her hand came up and flattened over the purr beneath my breastbone. "I have spent my whole life being the one who takes care of everybody else. Nobody's ever—" She stopped. "Take care of me tonight. Just once. Let me be the one somebody chose. Can you do that?"

"Yes," I said. "Tell me if anything frightens you, and I will stop." I drew back enough to see her face. "And Tabitha. If you want me to keep my voice down so the purring does not embarrass us both, you should ask now, because I have very little dignity left and it's fading fast."

"Don't you dare keep it down," she whispered. "I want to hear it. I want to know exactly what I'm doing to you."

So I let her hear it.

What I had not told her, because there is no graceful way to tell a creature who lives by her eyes, is that to a Kaithran, the act of love is mostly scent and sound and heat. She had been overwhelming all three of my truest senses since the moment my door shut.

I could smell the want in her grow with every breath, smell the caution finally put down. I could hear her heart climb and the small involuntary sounds she didn't know she made. She was a whole language being spoken straight into my body. I had spent two weeks learning to read her. Now at last I could answer in kind, and I was half undone before I had truly touched her.