Page 21 of Accidentally Vital

And I put my hands on him.

I had spent two weeks learning never to loom, never to seize, never to force. I took my father's great head in both of my hands and tried to drag a terrified animal back into kingship by the raw strength of my will. I could not endure my own helplessness one moment longer, and my cousin had handed me a way to feel powerful instead of afraid.

It was the last of what my father needed in this universe.

He came up off the floor screaming.

The sound was every nightmare the court had carried for a month given throat all at once, pure animal terror with no king anywhere inside it. The single creature he had allowed himself to trust had just become the largest threat in a room already drowning in them. He reared up out of his corner, four hundred pounds of cornered and betrayed panic, his claws unsheathing. He struck at whatever had seized him in the dark — me.

Tabby threw herself between us.

What she did next I would never be able to stop seeing. She was a third his size. Her shoulder was barely healed, but she did not hesitate for the length of a single breath. She flung her small body into the narrow space between my father's claws and my throat. Even then, even falling, she did what her entire life had built her to do. She tried to gentle him. It's okay, it's okay, nobody's going to hurt you. His terror, in that instant, did not know her from any other threat in a room full of them.

The blow caught her across the chest and the side of the head and flung her into the stone wall.

She slid down it and did not get up. For a moment, my whole world went silent.

I had been in battles. I had heard men die, some of them even at my own hand. And I had believed all my life that I knew what the worst sound in the world was. I had been wrong about that though, the same as I had been wrong about everything that mattered.

The worst sound in the world was no sound. None. It was the absence where a small brave voice had been singing three soft notes for weeks, and had suddenly stopped.

Then the room erupted. Guards poured through the door with their blades drawn. My father had the space in front of him suddenly empty. The shapes that had reared over him and seized him were gone. Only the small crumpled shape of her on the floor existed where his eyes could find it.

He made a sound I had never heard from him in my life, as man or beast. He keened, low and broken, and the sound climbed the walls. He pressed himself back into his corner with his terrible gaze fixed on what he had done. I understood, watching him, that somewhere beneath all that terror he knew, exactly as I did, what had truly happened and whose hands had caused it.

Mine. I had caused it — not her methods, not his sickness, not the deadline or the houses or even my cousin, in the end.

Me and my pride, the oldest lie my people ever taught their sons, was that love is something you prove with strength.

I reached her first. There was blood in her hair. Her breathing was shallow and wrong, and her eyes could not fix on my face. I gathered her against my chest, the very body she had spent two weeks teaching to be gentle. I made every sound and word I knew and not one of them reached her.

I had her blood on my hands. The same hands I had just used to seize my father. The same hands she had spent two weeks teaching to be careful, to stay open, to never once close into a fist around someone frightened. I had failed every lesson she ever gave me in the space of a single breath.

The price of the failure was bleeding in my arms. Across the room my father keened and keened in his corner and would not be comforted. The realm I had been so terrified of losing stood and watched me lose the one life in it that had ever truly mattered.

Behind me, into the ringing silence of a court that had finally seen what it came to see, my cousin Vaelin said what remained to be said. He had waited, long and patient for this, and he had won.

"There," he said. "Now the houses have seen the truth of it with their own eyes. Take the creature to the ship before she does the realm any further harm. And someone draw the prince away from the beast, before it finishes what it has begun."

13

Tabby

I surfaced into a bright room that smelled of antiseptic, and for one merciful second I didn't remember.

Then all of it came back at once. I tried to sit up and the whole world tilted sideways.

"Easy." Doran's voice, somewhere to my left. "You have a wound to the head and three cracked ribs. You were unconscious for most of a day. Lie still, healer. For once in your life, be the patient."

"The king." My mouth wasn't working right. "Doran. Is he—"

"Alive. Back in the deep terror, worse than when you came. But he's alive." There was a long pause, and I heard everything he wasn't saying in it. "They will not let me treat him your way anymore. They will not let anyone near him your way anymore. It's finished, Tabby. I am sorry. I am so very sorry."

I lay there and let it sink in, the whole catastrophe of it. The worst part wasn't the ribs, or the way my skull split with every heartbeat. The worst part was that I'd seen it coming. I'd watched Vaelin reach into Ryhn and find the single place I hadn't healed yet. I'd known what was going to happen, and I hadn't been fast enough or strong enough to stop it.

Two weeks of the most important work of my life, and I had almost brought a frightened king home. It had come undone in the space of one man's pride. Now a creature I loved was back in a corner in the dark, more afraid than ever — and they weren't going to let me fix it.

I tried to get up. There was a frightened animal in a corner two floors away, and I was the only one who knew how to reach him. A cracked rib and a concussion have never once stopped me from going to a patient who needs me. I got my feet onto the cold floor. The room swung hard.