5
Tabby
It took the prince exactly one day to defy his entire court for me — which was either very romantic or very alarming. In my experience, they're usually the same.
I spent the day in a stone room with an actual window, which was a step up from a sickroom, and a step down from going home.
A Kaithran healer had strapped my shoulder to my chest after popping the joint back into its socket with a competence that told me these people had a great deal of practice putting warriors back together.
It hurt enormously. I didn't let it show.
Nila had planted herself at the foot of the cot and watched me with her father's gold eyes. She was sixteen and frightened, but she was looking for permission to hope. You don't show a frightened young creature your pain when she's watching your face to decide how scared to be.
"Does it hurt?" she asked.
"Like the dickens," I said. "But shoulders are dramatic. It'll be fine in a week." I gave her the not-quite-smile that works on nervous owners. "Tell me something good. Tell me your favorite thing about your dad. The real him, not the king him."
So she did.
She told me he used to carry her on his shoulders through the high market until she was far too old for it.
She told me he couldn't sing a note but did it anyway, loudly, to embarrass her.
And she told me that when she had nightmares as a cub he'd lie across her doorway so nothing could get past him to her. She cried a little, telling me that.
I let her, because grief that gets felt is grief that doesn't curdle. Somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped being the alien they'd bought by mistake and became a person she could cry in front of. That mattered way more than my shoulder.
I was going to need allies in this place. You don't get a better one than a clever girl who's decided she trusts you.
I got my second ally an hour later. I almost missed him, because he came in the way the good ones always do — quietly and with his hands full.
He was old, gray through the muzzle, and he smelled of hay and animals.
The smell made my chest ache with homesickness.
Kesh, his name was. He had run the royal hunting cats for forty years.
He set a bundle down by my cot without ceremony — a flat dish, a folded hide, and a small clay pot of something that turned out to be a scent-marker, the smell of a contented Kaithran den.
He'd been making these, he told me, slipping them into the king's room at night against the council's orders.
He'd watched enough frightened animals in his life to know one when his whole court was calling it a monster.
We understood each other immediately. He was the first person on the entire planet who didn't think I was either a miracle or a fraud.
He just thought I was right, and I could have kissed him for it.
The prince came at nightfall, and the set of his shoulders told me he'd spent the day at war.
"It is done," he said. "I have overruled the captain and the council both.
They are furious. Vaelin is delighted, which means he believes my defiance will be enough to hang me at the convening.
" He stood in the doorway, too large for it.
There was something underneath the formality I was learning to hear.
"I should not have left the room. The relapse was not your method.
It was the absence of it, the instant strength walked back in.
I have said so to the whole court, on the record. It did not make me popular."
"No," I agreed. "True things rarely do."
He didn't sit. He never sat in my presence. I think standing was the last formality he had left, and he held onto it. But some of the fight went out of his shoulders. He looked at my strapped arm with an expression I couldn't quite read through all that alien stillness.
"You were hurt in my house," he said, "doing what my house could not.
And my first act afterward was to let them carry you out and bar the door behind you.
That was not honorable. It will not happen again while I draw breath.
" It wasn't a courtly speech. It was a vow, plain and a little furious, and nobody had made me one of those in a very long time.
"Then come back to my father with me," he went on, "if you are willing. I cannot order it, and I will not. You have bled for this house once already. But he has not eaten since they carried you out. He will not let me near him. And I do not know how to be in that room without you."
I'd been wanted for my hands plenty of times. I had never once been wanted in the room. It did something to me I didn't have time to examine right now.
That was the dangerous part, and I knew it.
I'd spent a lot of years being careful about where I spent myself.
Caretaking has a price, and I'd learned to pay it only on creatures who couldn't break my heart back.
A scared cat takes everything you've got and gives you one slow blink. It's a clean trade.
But these people were starting to feel like mine — the stubborn girl, the gruff old handler, the proud terrified prince who made vows on sickroom floors.
And caring about people who can leave, or who you will leave, has never once ended well for me.
I noticed the danger, and I walked straight into it anyway. Same as I always did.
"I'll come back," I said. "On one condition, and it isn't for me.
It's for him. You have to learn to do it without me.
All of you. I'm here for thirty days, and your father's going to need this the rest of his life.
If the only creature in the galaxy who can keep him calm is a temp from Ohio, then I haven't fixed anything.
I've just made myself the new restraint. "
That is how I came to run the strangest training session of my career. I taught a warrior prince and a furious court physician to baby-talk a king.
Doran did not want to be there. He had thirty years, a shelf of credentials, and the humiliation of having watched an unqualified foreigner do what he could not. I knew that humiliation on sight, because I'd been carrying its twin for eleven years.
I didn't fight him. I handed him what he actually wanted, which was to matter.
"You're a physician," I said. "Which is good, because I need one.
I can read this animal's fear, but I can't read his bloodwork.
Somewhere in this room is the line where my job ends and yours starts.
You tell me what's healing and what isn't. I genuinely can't do this without you.
" It had the great advantage of being true.
His ears came up off his skull half an inch, and I watched a proud man decide to be useful instead of insulted.
It was, as near as I could tell, the first time in the history of the Kaithran court that anyone had ordered the high physician and the crown prince to stop slouching so aggressively.
The problem was that they sat too well. They squared their shoulders and lifted their chins, every line of them announcing rank, because that was how a Kaithran said I am someone.
And it was the exact silhouette a frightened animal reads as a threat about to land.
I made them round their backs and tuck their chins, going soft and uninteresting.
A passing steward looked in, saw the crown prince of the realm hunched on the floor cooing at his father like a man gentling a kitten, and dropped a full tray.
I didn't laugh. It cost me, but I didn't laugh, because the second you laugh at sincerity you lose the respect.
"Slow blink," I said. "Both of you. At the wall, not at him.
No — slower. You look like you're flirting at a bar.
Better." Two enormous apex predators sat cross-legged on a sickroom floor blinking sleepily at a blank stretch of stone while I corrected their technique.
"Now the voice. Low and boring. You want to be the least interesting object in the room.
Ryhn, that's a battle command, soften it.
Pretend he's a sleeping child you're trying not to wake. There. There. Did you feel that?"
He had. The king's tail, clamped tight along his flank, had eased by a finger's width the second the prince's voice dropped into that register. Ryhn stared at the change he'd made with his own gentleness like I'd shown him he could pull water out of stone. "He heard me," he said quietly.
"He heard you. You've been roaring at a terrified animal for three weeks because roaring was all anyone gave you. Turns out you had this in your chest the whole time."
Doran, to his great credit, had stopped being offended and started taking notes.
"The respiration," he said, low. "It slows the moment the prince lowers his register.
I would not believe the correlation if I were not watching it occur.
" He looked almost angry about it, which I understood completely.
It's what a careful man feels when he's shown that the work he dismissed is real.
In my experience that particular anger comes right before he changes his mind.
Kesh slipped in halfway through with one of his clay pots and set it by the blanket.
The den-smell of it did more in five minutes than my voice had done in twenty.
The king's nostrils worked. Something in that huge frame eased a notch it hadn't reached before, some animal recognition of home arriving on the air.
Between the four of us — the prince's lowered voice and the physician's steady read and the handler's den-scent and my boring patient nothing — we built that frightened king the safest half hour he'd had in three weeks.
And the king took meat from Ryhn's own hand at the end of it.
That was the first time the whole job hadn't rested on me alone. Exactly what I'd asked for.
At one point Ryhn glanced up from his father and caught me watching them work.
Something passed between us that had nothing to do with the patient.
He'd spent three weeks being the strongest person in every room and failing at the one task that mattered.
I'd worked eleven years as the most capable hands in every room and the least credited.
For one quiet moment on that filthy sickroom floor we recognized each other all the way through, two people who had found the place their impossible competence finally counted.
He didn't smile. Kaithran don't, much. But his purr rose, that low warm engine, and he didn't try to stop it.
I went warm to the roots of my hair over a man who sounded like an idling truck.
I was so busy being glad about all of it that I nearly missed what changed everything.
It was the meat that did it. Ryhn offered it, and the king reached.
For one second, one single second, the great black predator shape flickered around its own edges, like heat coming up off a summer road.
Underneath the fur and the four hundred pounds I saw the suggestion of something smaller and grayer, person-shaped, straining toward the surface.
Then a guard shifted his weight out in the corridor, and the king's fear spiked.
The flicker snapped shut, and the predator slammed back down over him.
I sat very still. "Doran. His shifting. You've been treating it as a symptom of the wound. What if it isn't?"
"It must be. The trauma triggered the regenerative state, and the regenerative state holds the body in its strongest form to —"
"You told me this morning the wound is almost closed.
His body's nearly done healing." I kept my eyes on the corner, on the place where, for one second, a frightened man had almost climbed back into his own skin.
"He's not stuck in that shape because he's injured.
Not anymore. He's stuck because he's terrified, and the shift runs on fear.
Every single time he calms down enough to start coming back, something startles him, and the fear shoves him into the only shape that's ever kept him alive.
The predator isn't the sickness." I felt it lock into place, terrible and hopeful in the same breath.
"It's the hiding place. He isn't trapped in the beast. He's hiding in it.
And he is not going to come out until he believes, all the way to the bone, that it's finally safe to be a person again. "
Doran was quiet for a long moment, and I braced for the credentialed man to tell the beast-handler she was a fool.
Instead he said it slowly, like the words cost him.
"In thirty years I have never heard it described so.
And I have never once seen it work, either, until now.
" He looked at the king, then at me, and inclined his head a single degree.
From a Kaithran physician, that was very nearly a bended knee.
The room had gone silent. Ryhn was staring at me with his father's untouched meat still resting in his open palm.
I watched him do the same calculation I'd just done.
It cost him. Ten days until the houses convened.
Twenty-five until the Bureau dragged me home.
And I had just told him, in not so many words, that what his father needed most was time.
Time was the one commodity nobody in this room had any of.
"Then how," he said, "do we make a frightened king believe he is safe?"
I looked at the enormous terrified animal in the corner that had once ruled half a continent, and I gave him the truth, which was the only currency I'd ever had.
"Slowly," I said. "And I don't think thirty days is going to be anywhere near enough."