3 #2
"You told them you were the only one in this room unafraid of him.
" Ryhn moved to the bar, and for the first time I heard something under the formality, something raw and nineteen-nights-deep.
"You were wrong. There are two of us. I only hide it better.
I will not cower behind a door while a stranger does what I could not.
" His hand settled on the bar. "Tell me where to stand. "
"Behind me. Low. And whatever happens, whatever he does — you do not rush him. Can you promise me that? Because if you can't keep that promise, then you're the danger in there, not him."
That cost him. I watched it cross his face. "I promise."
I believed him, which was probably stupid. I crouched down small by the door the same as I'd crouched for eleven years. I made my voice soft, those boring three notes, and I nodded at the bar.
He lifted it.
The door swung in on a dark, warm, reeking space. There in the far corner, packed into the angle of two walls with the whole shaking bulk of himself, was the King.
He was enormous — black-furred and barred with a darker pattern you could only catch when he moved. One entire flank was a ruin of a half-knit wound, the new tissue shiny and raw. The regeneration was doing its slow patient work whether the rest of him agreed to or not.
His head swung around the instant the door moved.
His ears flattened to nothing. His lips peeled off teeth as long as my hand.
The sound that came up out of him filled the room and the inside of my skull and every animal nerve I owned.
All of which were screaming that I was looking at four hundred pounds of apex predator that could end me before the prince behind me finished one breath.
I lowered myself the rest of the way to the floor.
I just sat, folded right down onto the filthy warm stone with my hands loose in my lap. And my eyes turned soft and sideways, fixed on the wall a foot to the left of him, making myself the smallest, slowest, most boring object in a room that had shown him nothing but threats for nineteen days.
"Hi," I said. "Hi, big guy. There you are. Nobody's going to touch you. I promise."
He roared again. I let him. I didn't move, didn't flinch, didn't so much as turn my head. Behind me I heard Ryhn's breath stop and hold, keeping his promise with everything he had.
I'd come four hundred light-years to see what no surgeon in that grieving court had noticed, because you can't read an animal you're busy being afraid of.
The roar was wrong.
It was enormous, and it was terrifying. But it was, underneath all of it, purely defensive.
He wasn't coming off the wall. A cat that wants you dead closes the distance.
This one had jammed himself so hard into the corner that the stone should have bruised him, every muscle bent on getting further from me, not nearer.
The bared teeth, the pinned ears, the blown black pupils drowning all that gold — I had read this exact body a thousand times in a cage the size of a microwave.
The wound on his flank was closing. That's not what was killing him.
So I tested it.
Slowly, narrating the whole time in my dull sing-song, I took the heavy blanket they'd left inside the door.
I pushed it across the floor toward him — not at him, just into the empty middle of the room, something soft arriving without hands.
Then I did the same with the water. I never reached and I never rose.
I poured every minute of eleven years into the most boring half hour of that king's life, blinking slow at the wall, breathing slow, asking nothing.
Until the roar that had no one to fight wore itself down to a rumble, and the rumble down to a low broken growl.
His great head sank by a single degree off its high alarmed carriage.
I'd done this in clinics with the clock against me and a doctor sighing in the doorway.
The hardest part was never the animal. It was holding my own nerve still for long enough.
So I counted my breaths and let the silence do the work no instrument could.
After a while I slid the meat across the floor the same as I'd slid the blanket — halfway, no nearer.
I left it sitting in the lamplight as a fact he could investigate on his own terms or ignore.
I didn't watch him take it. Watching is pressure.
I kept my eyes on my wall and listened. Somewhere in the next long stretch of quiet I heard the wet enormous sound of a starving king finally eating.
I could have wept at it, because an animal that eats is an animal that has decided, for the moment, that it's safe enough to stop guarding its own death.
Behind me, the prince had gone so still that his breathing had dropped to match mine, the warrior in him learning through his own body what his pride would have argued with for a week.
That the bravest thing either of us could do in that room was nothing at all.
The fear-stink began, very faintly, to thin.
The king's tail, clamped flat and rigid along his ruined flank, loosened by an inch and lay quiet on the stone.
One ear swiveled toward my voice. Just one. Just for a second.
It was nothing. It was everything. It was a four-hundred-pound terrified king deciding, for one heartbeat, that the small calm shape on his floor might not be the next attack.
"Oh," I breathed. My own eyes stung, because it's a terrible thing to be this frightened, at any size, on any world. "Oh, you poor, poor thing. It's not your fault. None of this was ever your fault."
Behind me, very quietly, the prince said, "He has not killed you. And he — that, with his ear. I have not seen him do anything but rage in nineteen days."
"No." I didn't turn around. I kept my eyes on the wall and my voice on the king and let the whole truth of it sink into me, the truth that was going to save this kingdom, or get me killed inside it.
"He doesn't want to kill anybody, Ryhn. He's not angry.
The wound's already healing on its own. What's wrong with your father isn't in his body.
" I watched the enormous frightened creature in the corner watch me back, that single ear still tipped my way.
"He's just so scared he's forgotten how to be a person.
And I know exactly how to fix that. It just isn't going to look anything like medicine. "