Page 20 of Accidentally Vital

When he came, his whole body shook against me while he said my name. I almost said it. I love you. I'd never said it to anybody, but I would have meant it.

I didn't say it. That would be one more thing we'd have to bury in two days, and I didn't know if I could survive that. So I held onto it and gave him everything else — the way he'd held back the claiming bite and given me everything else.

He gathered me against his chest, smoothing my hair back from my damp face. The purr softened, but it never stopped. I lay over his heart and listened until my breathing matched it.

"One more day," he whispered into my hair.

"One more day." Then, because I was who I was, because work was the only place I'd ever been brave. "So let's not waste it grieving. Your father isn't gone yet. I've pulled patients back from worse than this, and I have one more day and the stubbornest man in the galaxy to help me do it." I sat up and wiped my face. "We don't get the ending we want. Fine. But the king is not dying on my watch, and you're not taking the throne believing your gentleness failed. We're going to wake your father, Ryhn. And then I'm going to go home and fall apart privately like a professional."

12

Ryhn

The houses came for my father the following morning.

I had not slept. I had spent the night on the sickroom floor beside Tabby and my father, watching her fight for a king who had stopped fighting for himself. All night I watched her dribble water into his mouth and sing until her voice gave out. I had felt, hour by gray hour, what I most feared closing its hand around us. He was not coming back fast enough. Two days of her best and most patient work, but the throne room had taken so much out of him that he had barely climbed back to where we had started. The clock did not care.

Somewhere past the middle of that long night I had begun, for the first time, to be afraid that gentleness was simply going to lose. We were going to do everything and watch my father die anyway, on schedule to the sound of my cousin counting days.

In the dark, Tabby had felt the slow turn toward despair in me. She had taken my face in her hands and told me to hold the line one more day, that the king's body still wanted to live, that she could feel it under her palms. I had learned to believe her. But belief is strongest in daylight, and the dawn that came was not kind.

When the dawn brought my cousin's boots in the corridor, I was already hollowed out and brittle. That is the only condition in which a man does what I was about to do.

They filled the passage outside the sickroom, Vaelin at their head, the great families ranked behind him in their formal grays. The scent of two dozen predators in their power rolled in through the open door and struck my father. I felt his fear spike from across the room. Tabby was already down on the floor, already working, already murmuring in her soft voice. But the king had been failing for two days and the air was suddenly thick with threat.

I watched the fragile progress of the dawn come apart in seconds.

"This has gone on long enough," Vaelin said, gentle as a drawn knife. "Look at it, cousin. Two days since your healer's great triumph in the hall, and the king is worse than he was before it. The houses have indulged the experiment past all reason. The experiment has failed. We are here to be merciful at last, which is to end the spectacle, declare the regency, and let the realm grieve a king with dignity instead of pinning its honor on a foreigner's tricks while he rots in a corner."

"He is not failing because of her," I growled under my breath. "He is failing because every time he begins to mend, this is what happens. A room fills with fear, and the fear sets him back. You are watching the disease walk in on its own two feet, cousin, and calling it the cure's defeat. Give her three more days and clear this corridor, and I will show you a waking king."

"I am watching a beast in a corner, Ryhn." Vaelin let his words fall and lie there. "We all are. And I am watching the heir of the realm kneel in the filth beside an alien and call his father's animal terror something too subtle for the rest of us to grasp."

He came a step closer, and the houses leaned in behind him. I felt the whole world's attention settle onto me. "Do you know what they see when they look at you now? They see a prince so unmanned by a soft creature who weighs nothing that he will let his own father die by inches sooner than do what a king is born to do. They pity you. They have begun to pity the throne."

Behind him the great families said nothing. That was a verdict of its own. I looked down that long gray rank of the oldest blood of my world. I did not find one face that met my eyes with anything but pity or judgment. Doran stood at the edge of them, and even he could not look at me. Even Doran, who understood, could see where this was going and had no power to stop it. The only creature in that entire corridor who still believed in what we had built was kneeling on the floor at my feet with her hands on my dying father.

I was about to stop believing in it myself.

I should have walked away then. I knew what he was doing. I had watched him do it to better men. But I was hollow and I had not slept, and I had spent a night learning to be afraid that everything I had become was going to fail. He saw all of it. He always saw the tell. He set his thumb on the one wound that had not yet closed.

"Your father would be ashamed of what you have let him become," Vaelin said softly. It sounded almost kind. "He spent his whole life making you strong. And at the single moment his life required your strength, you knelt down in the dark and learned to be soft from a creature, from a world no one has charted. You have let him rot into this. He took a blade meant for you, Ryhn. He gave you his own body to stand behind. And you have repaid him with lullabies."

The corridor held its breath. Nila made a small wounded sound, because she was sixteen and she saw her brother standing at the edge of a cliff. On the floor, Tabby went still and alert, the same stillness she fell into when an animal in her care was about to bolt. The two people in that corridor who loved me knew what was coming before I did, and neither of them could reach me in time.

Tabby looked up at me from the floor, and she saw it coming in my face before I had moved a muscle. "Ryhn," she said. "Ryhn, look at me. Whatever he just put in your head, don't. He's the fear in this room. Don't you become it too. Please. You taught yourself better than this. Stay with me—"

But I had stopped hearing her. I heard my father when I was a cub, louder than ever, telling a small son that a strong man stands between his blood and the world and never lets the world see him flinch. I heard a corridor full of the high houses deciding I was unfit for the chair I was born to. I heard the clock my cousin had been counting against me for a month.

And under all of it I heard an old voice, one that does not reason. It said Do something. Be strong. Save him. A son does not kneel in the dirt while his father dies in front of him. The terrible seduction of it was that it felt like love. It felt like the only real love I knew how to give. After weeks of the unbearable patience of doing nothing, here at last was a way to be large, to be strong, to feel like a son fighting for his father instead of a man watching him fade.

That was the worst of the deception. It did not feel wrong. It felt like courage. It felt like finally, after weeks of unbearable stillness, doing right by him. Every lesson of my childhood stood up in me at once, calling the gentleness cowardice and calling strength love.

I was too hollow and too frightened, too publicly shamed to hear the small steady voice that had spent two weeks teaching me the two were exactly reversed. Vaelin did not make me do it. He only opened the door, and I walked through it on my own. Some buried part of me had been aching to.

I rose up off that floor with two weeks of hard-won gentleness burning away like mist off morning stone. I went to my father not as the creature she had taught me to be but as the prince Vaelin had dared me to become.

"Father." It came out of me as a command, the voice I had been raised to fill a room with — the voice that bends a hall to its will. "Enough. You are the King of the Kaithran. You will rise. You will stand and be true to who you are. I am your son and I am ordering you to come back to us."