Page 3 of Accidentally Vital

And then, on top of the fear, riding it the same as it always rode, the other reflex stood up too. The one I couldn't switch off if you paid me. The one that had kept me on a clinic floor past quitting time for a cat with a red-marker death sentence.

Because I knew that posture. I knew those pinned shoulders and that peeled lip and that gone-hard stare. I'd been reading them off bodies a tenth this size for my whole adult life. Whatever he was, however far from home I'd just been dropped, the creature standing over me with his teeth showing wasn't doing what he believed he was doing.

He thought he was threatening me.

He was terrified.

"Hi," I heard myself say, from the floor, in the low even voice I used on everything that wanted to bolt or bite. Boring as old paint. "Hi. It's okay. Nobody's going to touch you."

The lip came down off the tooth, half a degree.

A low sound moved through the tall ones, more felt than heard, the noise a roomful of big cats made when one of them had seen something it couldn't understand. The nearest one went very still. He hadn't expected the small crawling creature to speak to him as though he were the one who needed gentling. I watched him fail to know what to do about it. Offense, and underneath the offense, fighting it for the same square inch of his face, was something else.

The air to my right folded. A person who wasn't a person blinked into it. A tidy blue figure, edges humming, no taller than a child, holding a slate that also wasn't quite there. It beamed at me with the bright, blameless cheer of pure paperwork.

"Welcome, welcome," it said. "On behalf of the Bureau of Intergalactic Resource Acquisition, congratulations on your selection. Your contract runs thirty standard days. Transport home is guaranteed upon resolution of the assignment. There is a non-interference clause, which you have already technically violated"—it consulted the slate that wasn't there—"twice. That's quite good for the first minute, actually. Please sign here, here, and here."

"Wait, what? And sign with what?" I asked, confused.

"Intent is sufficient." A line of light slid across the not-slate where my name apparently now lived. "Lovely. The realm thanks you for your service. Do try to keep the mortality to a minimum this rotation."

"The mortality?" I asked.

Somewhere beyond the chamber, past a set of doors I hadn't let myself look at yet, an enormous body in agony threw itself against stone. The whole frightened hall of predators flinched as one.

The roar that came after them was nothing any cat on Earth had ever made. All of it, every raw terrified decibel, told me exactly one fact I understood completely. That was the patient, and they had pulled me across the galaxy to walk into the room with it.

2

Ryhn

They carried the surgeon out feet first. He was still breathing, which the court counted as a victory.

I stood at the chamber doors and let the litter pass. I smelled the failure from the air before my eyes confirmed any of it. Blood first, the thin bright thread of it where my father's claws had opened the man's shoulder to the bone. Under the blood was the surgeon's fear, gone stale and sour now that the danger was behind him, the reek a body leaves when it has been certain of death and then been spared. And under that, the faint truth none of them would name aloud, because to name it was treason against the throne. My father's scent, twisted. Wrong. A great cat in agony with no king left in him to answer when I spoke.

I had spoken. An hour past, through the gap in the doors, I had said Father in the voice he taught me to command with, and the only reply was a sound that belonged to no person.

He had been the largest presence in any hall he entered for the whole of my life. Thirty years a king, and before that a warrior whose name the border clans still used to frighten their young.

I had never once seen him afraid, because a king is not permitted that luxury, and my father wasted nothing on luxuries. Now he crouched in his own sickroom behind a door we barred from the outside, shifted into his predator shape and unable to climb back out of it, savaging anyone who came close enough to help.

The strongest creature I had ever known, reduced to the most frightened. There was no arrangement of those facts I could hold without it trying to become rage, so I did what he had taught me. I pressed it flat and stood up straight and let no one smell it on me.

"That is the fourth," Vaelin said.

He had come up on my left, downwind — which was a courtesy and an insult folded together, as most things he did were. My cousin smelled of confidence with not a note of grief. That absence told me more about him than a confession would have. He had styled his mane for show. A man did not dress his mane to mourn.

"The fourth healer," he said, "and the regenerance closes in twenty-six days. After that his body stops trying to knit and begins, instead, to forget it was ever a body that ruled. You know the law as I do, cousin. A king who cannot wake cannot reign, and a throne cannot be left to a beast. The high houses will not kneel to an empty chair past the turning of the moon. They have told me so. They would tell you so, too, if you would stop barring yourself in this corridor long enough to hear them."

"Then they can say it to my face when the moon turns, not before."

"And when it turns, and he has not woken?" Vaelin asked, not expecting an answer. "You take the throne, or I take the regency in trust for it. Either way the beast-handler the Bureau sold us goes back where it came from, and either way you will have spent the bloodline's last coin proving you would rather gamble than grieve. I am trying to spare you that, Ryhn. A son should be allowed to mourn his father. He should not be made to wager a kingdom on a creature from an uncharted world while he does it."

It was the cruelest of it, because it was dressed as kindness — and because a sliver of it was true. I did not strike him, though I'd have liked to. The purr that lived under my ribs had gone to a low warning hum without my leave, the sound my body made when it wanted to change shape and end an argument with teeth. I pressed that flat as well. A prince who could not govern his own throat had no business governing a realm. My father had taught me that too, though with fewer words.

"The Bureau is sending a specialist," I said. "A master of exactly his affliction. A healer of the high feline lineages, their dispatch promised. The finest physician our coin could reach."

"Our coin." Vaelin's mouth moved without warmth. "We emptied four seasons of the treasury into an agency that steals its physicians off worlds no one has charted, because no surgeon born under our own sun will enter that room a second time. And you have hung the bloodline on it." He inclined his head, the courtesy a swordsman offers before he draws. "I hope it is very good, cousin. The houses are counting the days."