Page 18 of Accidentally Vital

She fell asleep on my chest with her hand over the purr. I lay awake a long while in the dark, counting her breaths, memorizing what I already knew I would not be allowed to keep. I would have bargained the throne and my own name and every false star my father ever gave me for forty years of exactly this.

I should have known better.

The knock came at the grayest hour before dawn, soft and apologetic. Something in Kesh's voice through the door put me on my feet with my heart already falling.

"My prince. Forgive me. The king."

Tabby was up and pulling on her scrubs before I had the door open. The old handler stood in the corridor with his ears flat to his skull. His scent was grief again, the grief I had let myself forget for the length of one stolen night.

"He has slipped back," Kesh said. "Badly. The waking in the hall, before all of them, it took more from him than he had to give. He has not held a man's shape since they carried him out, and an hour ago he stopped taking water." His old eyes found mine, and then Tabby's. What was in them was almost worse than the words.

"And there is more. Vaelin has gone to the houses in the dark. He is telling them the public waking proves the king can rise on command, and that the healer simply will not let him, that she prolongs the sickness to extend her stay near the throne. He has called for the deadline to be moved." Kesh swallowed. "To dawn tomorrow. They are deciding now."

11

Tabby

The king was dying again, and this time it was my triumph that was killing him.

I knew it the second I got back into the sickroom, before Doran said a word, because I could smell it. The fear-musk was thick and sour again, the den-scent gone stale, and under it the flat cold note of an animal that's stopped trying. He was jammed into his corner with his eyes shut. He didn't rouse when I came in, didn't track me, didn't do any of the small ordinary business he'd started doing again. The public spectacle had cost him every reserve he had. I'd asked a starving man to sprint, and he'd done it, for his son, in front of his whole court. Now there was nothing left in the tank.

"He stopped taking water in the night," Doran said quietly. "He has not held the man's shape since they carried him from the hall. I have seen this before, healer, in the very old and the very wounded. The body decides the fight is no longer worth the cost." His eyes were wet. "I do not know how to argue a body out of that decision."

"I do," I said. I got down on the floor and started over.

Because that's the job when it goes bad. You don't get to be tired. You don't get to grieve yet.

You get down on the cold floor and you become the most patient boring safe object in the world again. You do the small slow work that doesn't photograph and doesn't impress anyone. I dribbled water past his teeth on my fingertips. I sang the three notes until my voice cracked. I read every tell he had left. There weren't many, and I fought for every single one.

There is nothing worse than fighting for an animal that has decided to stop. There's no enemy in front of you, no wound to close, nothing your hands can do but be present and patient and refuse to agree with him that it's over, hour after hour. I'd done it before, on clinic floors over a creature everyone else had already written off. A Rottweiler with a spite streak. A parrot that drew blood on principle. A diabetic ferret with strong opinions about everybody.

I'd lost some of those and won some. Not one of them, I couldn't help noting, had been four hundred pounds — or a head of state. Losing never got easier and winning never came fast, so I settled in for the long ugly version. I didn't let myself think about the man two floors up I was going to lose no matter what. I just poured eleven years of refusing-to-quit into a king who had run clean out of reasons to stay.

The worst part, the part I couldn't say out loud to anyone, was the clock. The moon had come and gone, and by the letter of the verdict, we had already lost.

All that stood between me and a Bureau ship was the grace the houses had granted over Vaelin's head, and in the dark he had moved to take it back. He'd wanted the regency declared at dawn. The houses — frightened, and tired, and tired of being frightened — had very nearly given it to him.

Ryhn had fought them off, spending whatever he had left of his standing to hold them to the three days they'd promised on the throne-hall floor.

So we had two more days now, two more days to do something that needed weeks, and a king who'd quit. I lay on that floor and I did the math again. For the first time since I'd landed I couldn't find the answer.

Nila came and sat with me. She didn't say anything. She'd learned that, the gift of just being there, from me. She brought her lessons and did them on the floor by her father's head and let him smell his cub nearby. Kesh kept the den-scent fresh. Doran charted what little there was to chart. We kept that vigil in shifts because none of us would leave.

I understood somewhere in the long gray hours that I had done something I'd sworn, after last time, never to do again. I'd let them become mine. The whole impossible family — a furious teenager, a gruff old cat-wrangler, and a court physician who two weeks ago had called me something that crawls and now kept topping up my water like I might crack. If you'd told me a month ago I'd find a family four hundred light-years from Ohio, I'd have checked you for a fever. And in another two days, I was going to lose every one of them at once, whether the king lived or died.

I'd like to tell you I took that knowledge gracefully. I didn't. For a while I lay on a cold stone floor four hundred light-years from a clinic that had surely already replaced me, with a dying king's breath under my hand and a sleeping cat-girl's head on my shoulder. I let myself cry for a minute, in silence, where nobody would be troubled by it. Then I wiped my face on my filthy sleeve and went back to work. Crying is for later. Later was a place I'd always been very, very good at putting things.

It was Nila, of all of them, who told me the rest of it. She didn't mean to gut me. She was sixteen and she'd assumed I already knew.

"At least when Ryhn's king," she said, drowsy, her head against my good shoulder, "he can change the stupid laws. He can make them let you visit. Can't he?"

"What laws, sweetheart?"

She went quiet all at once, like a kid who realizes she's said too much. "I thought you knew. I'm sorry, I thought—" She swallowed. "The heir has to marry inside the high houses. It's the oldest law we've got. To keep the line and hold the houses together. Especially now, after — after everything Vaelin's stirred up, the houses will want it sealed fast, with a daughter of one of the great families, to prove the throne is theirs again and not—" She couldn't finish it. She didn't have to.

Not an alien's.

I sat there on the floor with the dying king and the sleeping girl and felt the last piece drop into place, the one I'd been too busy to look at. There had never been a version where I stayed. I'd known that. But I'd let myself believe, somewhere in the stolen dark, that if the king woke, if Ryhn took the throne, he might find a way to bend the world around us.