3
Tabby
The first thing I had to do was convince a room full of grieving panthers that I was not a surgeon.
This turned out to be harder than it sounds.
I'd been on their world for all of an hour.
Long enough to be marched down a corridor that smelled of sun-warmed stone and frightened cat, past guards who tracked me with slit eyes, into a vaulted hall where a dozen enormous people stood around arguing over my head about a door none of them would open.
My scrubs still had Mango's hair on the sleeve.
Somewhere unimaginably far away, a dental drill was probably still running.
And here I was, the wrong woman entirely, about to bet my life on the one skill nobody on this planet believed in.
"The royal physician will require her instruments," the tall cold one was saying.
Vaelin, someone had called him, the one whose grief I couldn't find anywhere on him.
That told me everything I needed to know about who to watch.
He had a habit of speaking about me while looking just past me, the same as men had done my whole career.
"Bring the cutting trays. The Bureau's dispatch named her a master of the high feline afflictions.
Let her cut, and let us see whether four seasons of treasury bought us anything but a smaller corpse. "
"I'm not a master of anything," I said.
The little blue translator-light by my ear turned that into something. I watched it land to no avail. They went on looking at me like I was a doctor being modest.
"I'm a vet tech," I tried again, the same as I'd walk a scared owner through a diagnosis.
"A veterinary technician. I don't cut. I don't operate.
What I'm good at — the only thing I'm good at — is getting frightened animals calm enough that somebody else can.
That's it. That's the whole job. I handle the patients nobody else can touch.
Back home that's a cat that weighs nine pounds and wants to peel your face off.
I have never in my life been handed a four-hundred-pound one. "
The translator did its work. I knew the exact moment it failed.
The prince's sister was the young one — Nila, ears like a pair of satellite dishes, who hadn't taken her eyes off me since I arrived.
She tilted her head. "But the dispatch said you specialize in temperamental felines of royal lineage. "
And there it was.
I felt the whole misunderstanding slot into place, a key I hadn't known I held finally finding its lock.
Somewhere between a dispatcher's cheap software and a desperate king's court, aggressive-cat handler had been polished into specialist in treating temperamental felines of royal lineage.
A kingdom that needed a miracle had heard the exact miracle it wanted. They thought they'd bought a surgeon.
They'd bought me.
There was a joke in there — the cosmic kind — and on a better day I might have laughed at it.
A whole court of warriors had scraped the floor of a treasury and reached clear across the charted galaxy for the grandest healer money could buy.
What the universe had shipped them was the woman who mops up after the real doctors.
The one whose name never makes the chart.
Eleven years of being just the tech. And it turned out just the tech was the only job in the building that could save a king.
If I hadn't been so busy being terrified, I think it might have broken my heart a little, in a good way.
"Okay," I said carefully. I'd learned long ago that the worst move in a room that needs you was to tell it that its only hope was a clerical error.
"Okay. Let's go with — yes. Temperamental felines.
That part's true. That part I can actually do.
" I looked at the barred door, at whatever was breathing behind it, and made the only decision that mattered.
"But I am not going to cut your king open.
Cutting him is the last of what he needs.
Whoever's been treating this like a wound has been making it worse, and I can prove it.
You'll have to let me in there. My way."
"Your way." Vaelin's tail moved once, slowly. "And what is your way, healer?"
"First? Everybody gets out."
It went about as well as you'd expect.
Kaithran, I was learning fast, do not whisper.
When they're upset the whole room drops half an octave and you feel it in your bones.
They were very upset now, a low rolling rumble of objection with the prince standing silent at the center of it.
They had spent nineteen days and four healers proving that the only answer to the king was more — more guards, more restraints, more bodies between the danger and the throne.
And here I was, the smallest, asking them for less of everything, alone, behind a closed door.
"You are asking us," Doran started. He was the physician, the one who'd called me a thing that crawls. His pride sat on him like a coat two sizes too small. "To leave our king unguarded with an alien we cannot vouch for. The answer is no. It is obscene."
"He's not unguarded. He's the most dangerous animal in the building.
I'm the one who needs guarding, and I'm volunteering, so that's my problem, not yours.
" I turned to the prince. He was the one who'd put his hand on that bar.
A person who will touch what everyone else won't is a person I can work with.
"Here's what's happening in there, and you can check me on every word once you've seen it.
Your father isn't savaging people because he's vicious.
He's savaging because he's cornered and in agony, and every single creature that has walked through that door has confirmed for him that he's surrounded.
You keep sending him strength. He's a frightened animal.
Strength is the one force in the universe guaranteed to make a frightened animal worse. "
The prince looked at me for a long moment. Up close his eyes weren't only gold. There was a banded green in them, too. The slit pupils had widened a fraction in the low light. Pupils don't lie and his were telling me he was listening.
"Tell me what you need," he said.
"Ryhn." Vaelin's voice cracked across the hall. "You cannot —"
"I have buried this argument with four healers and a surgeon," the prince said, not loudly.
The room stilled around it. "Every one of them did it the way you demand.
Every one of them left on a litter, and my father is no closer to waking.
She is the first creature to walk in here and describe what is wrong with him, rather than what is wrong with her odds.
" He didn't look away from me. "Tell me what you need, healer.
And everyone unwilling to be quiet will leave my father's hall. "
So I told him.
I needed the sconces down to almost nothing, because a terrified animal reads bright light as exposure, and exposure as the moment before teeth.
I needed the restraints gone — all of them, the chains and the spiked collar some genius had tried to buckle on him.
Nothing on this world or any other says you are safe now less than being pinned by the things that scared you.
I needed the room to stop stinking of fear, which was going to be the hard part, since it reeked of nineteen days of it and so did every person who'd stood in it.
Silence, most of all. I needed the guards outside the door, not in.
And I needed someone to bring me, of all things, fresh raw meat, a wide shallow dish of water, and the largest, heaviest blanket in the citadel.
"A blanket," Vaelin repeated, with open contempt.
"A four-hundred-pound cat is still a cat.
And there's not a cat alive that doesn't feel safer with something solid at its back and something warm to settle against. You've been treating your king like a king.
I'm going to treat him like what he actually is right now, which is the most frightened creature in this kingdom.
You can be offended, or you can have him back. You don't get both."
I might as well have asked to bridle the sun.
I could read it on every face in the hall.
To a Kaithran, who measured a person's worth by how he carried himself, by scent and posture and the refusal to bare a soft throat, what I was proposing wasn't treatment.
It was the deepest insult their whole culture knew how to give.
I was asking them to agree, out loud, in front of the throne, that their towering warrior king had become a creature that needed coddling.
Doran looked like he might be sick. Even Nila, who'd been on my side since I landed, had gone still and uncertain, her young face caught between hope and a lifetime of being taught that strength was the only language worth speaking.
Nobody had ever talked to them that way.
I could see it. There's a silence that happens when you hand powerful people a truth they've spent a great deal of money not to hear.
The hall filled up with it. Then Ryhn turned and gave a single low order in their own tongue, and the guards began to file out, stiffly and furiously.
Vaelin went last. He stopped beside me on the way, close enough that I got the full cold-stone smell of him. Low, in words he barely troubled to soften, he said, "If the king dies tonight under your hands, beast-handler, no clause in any contract will carry you home. Do you understand me?"
"Loud and clear," I said. "Now please stop sweating threat all over my patient's air. He can smell you, and you're not helping."
That, at least, got him out the door.
And then it was just me and the prince (who would not leave and whom I had no standing to make), and the bar — and what was behind it.
"You should go too," I told him.
"No."
"He could —"