Page 4 of Accidentally Vital

He left me at the doors with the smell of his certainty trailing behind him. I breathed my father's ruin and did the math I had been doing for nineteen nights. Four healers down. No fifth one in the realm would come, and I had begged at the foot of every one of them.

Behind that barred door waited every method my house knew. We had tried them all. We had tried restraints, and he had broken them and broken the arms that fastened them. We had tried numbing draughts blown in on smoke, and they only made him slower to savage and no gentler about it. We had tried my own voice, and my grandmother's old border-songs, and the home-scents that should have told any Kaithran in his bones that he was safe and surrounded by his own.

None of it had reached him. Every instrument of strength and rank and blood my house possessed. The room behind the door had swallowed all of it and gone on screaming. I had begun, in the worst hours before dawn, to wonder whether strength was simply the wrong key, and to hate the thought, because strength was the only key my father had ever given me.

Kesh, the old handler who had run the royal hunting cats since before I was whelped, had quietly said as much to me three nights past, where the court could not hear it. A frightened animal could not be commanded out of its fear, he had told me. It could only be waited out of it. I had nearly had him flogged for setting the king beside a beast in the same breath. I had not, because some cold and exhausted part of me had already begun to suspect he was right.

So when the air at the center of the chamber folded and lit from within, the cold Bureau light spilling up out of the floor stones, I went toward it instead of away. Because hope and dread had become the same animal in me and I no longer troubled to tell them apart.

The light set something down on my father's floor and withdrew.

I had braced for size. A master who could pin a maddened king would need reach and mass, and a throat that could force a command into a body past listening to commands. What knelt on the stones was none of that. It was small. Smaller than my sister, soft-furred only on its head, wrapped in thin pale cloth marked with the dried fluids of some other creature's care. It crouched on all fours with its blunt face turned to the ground and did not so much as lift its head to measure the room it had been delivered into.

I scented it before I had finished being insulted by it.

That was when the night came apart.

Every creature that had crossed my father's threshold for nineteen days had arrived smelling of one truth above all others, no matter how steady their hands or how proud their lineage. Fear. The sharp copper warning of it, the body betraying the brave face, the message that travels faster than any word. This one knows it might die here. I had come to expect it the same as I expected the sun. Fear was the truth under every bow in my father's hall. I had stopped despising people for it, because there was nothing in that room not worth fearing.

The small creature on the stones smelled of no fear.

I stood very still and read it again, certain I had erred. What I was reading could not be. Soap, plain and dull. The musk of many animals layered into its skin over what smelled like years of them. A thin salt of tiredness. And under all of it, broad and even, entirely unbothered, a patience so settled it might have been carved from rock. It had been set down three paces from what had opened four throats, and its body had not sounded a single alarm. Either it was too witless to understand where it knelt, or it understood something the rest of us did not. I could not yet say which would frighten me more.

I wanted, against every law of sense I owned, to step between it and the doors. To put my body in the path of whatever was coming for it. The urge arrived whole and unbidden. I had no account of why a useless soft-skinned human should call it up out of me. I distrusted it at once, the same as I distrusted anything in myself I had not placed there on purpose. Protection was something a man deliberately chose for his own. It was not something a stranger's smell reached into his chest and switched on without his leave.

"It does not understand," the physician Doran said from the wall, where he had retreated after the surgeon fell, his own fear still pouring off him in waves I could taste. He had served my father thirty years and had not been permitted to lay a hand on him in nineteen days. The shame of that had curdled into spite. "Look at it. We have spent the realm's last hope on a creature that crawls."

The creature lifted its head.

Its face was flat and strange, the eyes round and dark and forward-set, a predator's eyes set in a body that had plainly never needed to hunt for anything. It looked at me. Not at my rank, not at my claws, not at the barred doors. At me. And its small mouth opened. It made a low, even sound, three soft notes laid down one after another, the call a creature offers another creature it has decided not to frighten.

I did not know the words. The Bureau's translation crawled in a breath later. It is all right. Nobody is going to touch you.

It was speaking to me.

The insult of it should have lifted my lip. I felt the old reflex try, the peel of the canine, the warning my kind had carried since before we first wore this shape. And I felt, underneath it, the warning fail.

The creature had not used the words a healer uses on a patient. It had used the words one offers a frightened animal, low and slow and sure. Some part of me older than my pride had begun to listen before the rest of me could forbid it.

My purr shifted. I heard it happen and could not stop it. The warning hum sliding down into a register I had not made on purpose since I was a cub, a low warm roll that meant, in the oldest tongue my body knew, safe. I clamped my jaw. It rolled on regardless, traitorous beneath the bone, telling the whole hall a truth I had not agreed to tell.

Across the chamber, my sister Nila made a small startled sound. She had crept in along the far wall against every order I had given, sixteen and stubborn and unwilling to be kept from her own father's door. She was staring at me with her ears straight up.

"Ryhn," she whispered. "You're purring."

"I am not."

"You are. At the—" She had no word for it either. "At the human."

I turned from her. There was nothing in the realm I could say to that. The human had not moved. It knelt where the Bureau had dropped it and watched me with its strange patience. The cloth at its shoulder carried three orange hairs of some small beast it had been tending in the moment before it was stolen. I caught myself counting those three hairs as though they were evidence that anything about this soft crawling creature might matter to the survival of my house.

A blue figure shimmered into the air beside it, the Bureau's clerk — bright and bloodless, pleased with itself.

"Specialist successfully placed," it announced to no one. "Assignment: subject of royal feline lineage, temperamental. Thirty-day term. The Bureau wishes you a productive resolution." It beamed at the room full of armed and grieving predators as if it had handed us a gift, and folded out of the air before any of us could lay claim to its throat.

Temperamental was the word the translator had reached for, when our own dispatch had begged the greatest physician of the high feline afflictions in reach of our coin.

Behind the doors, my father woke and screamed, throwing four hundred pounds of what had once been a king against stone that had held six generations. The whole chamber flinched as one body. Doran pressed himself to the wall. Nila's claws came out. Every guard in the hall dropped low and ready.