2 #2
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.
The human stood up.
It did not flinch. It turned its blunt face toward the doors, toward the sound that had sent four healers out feet first. I watched its body do the opposite of everything a sane creature's body should have done.
The shoulders came down. The breath slowed.
It tilted its head and listened to my father's agony the same as a tracker listens to weather, reading it and taking its measure.
When it spoke again the translator gave me the words a half-beat late, and I wished, at once and fiercely, that it had not.
Oh, the small creature said. Oh, you poor thing. You're not angry, are you? You're just scared out of your mind.
It took a step toward the doors that no one in my father's realm would open.
I stood rooted between the certainty that the Bureau had sent us a fool who would be dead inside the hour, and the colder, stranger certainty rising under it like floodwater.
That this ridiculous soft accident had walked into my father's hall and, in the space of three breaths, understood him better than I had in nineteen days.
I could not say which one would shame me more.
Every instinct I had been raised to trust told me to take this in hand.
To command the room, to set guards at the creature's flanks, to master the moment as I had been taught to master everything that frightened me, with force enough to make the fear beside the point.
And every one of those instincts had already failed, four times over, and been carried out feet first. The small creature on my father's floor was offering me the one skill I had never once been taught.
From where I stood, with my hand a breath from the bar, it looked dangerously close to surrender.
So I did what was left to a prince with no healer, no time, and a damned throat that would not stop purring. I went to the doors, set my hand on the bar four healers had begged me never to lift, and looked back at the creature who smelled of no fear.
"If you go in there," I said, "you will die, and I will have spent my house's last hope on a thing that crawls. Tell me why I should open this door."
The translator carried my words across to it. It looked up at me, and its strange mouth bent at one corner, not a snarl, but something gentler.
Because, it said, I'm the only one in this room who isn't afraid of him. And he can smell that. Same as you can.