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. "
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.