7
Tabby
By the fifth morning after the houses set their clock, the king would let me sit close enough to touch him. And I still didn't, because not touching was the whole point. You don't earn an animal's trust by collecting on it. You earn it by proving, over and over, that you'll never make him pay.
We had four days left. I'd stopped saying the number out loud. A frightened animal can smell a deadline on you the same as he smells everything else. And the king did not need to feel us start to hurry.
So I didn't hurry. I worked as slowly as I always had, and let the court believe I was failing. Underneath the performance I pushed harder than I'd ever pushed a patient in my life. Four days was not enough time to undo a month of terror, and I knew it.
Knowing that sat heavy in my stomach.
We'd built a strange little family in that room.
Doran arrived each dawn with his quiet commentary on respiration and pupil response, a professional who had decided, somewhere in the last week, that being right mattered more than being proud.
Kesh kept the den-scent fresh and the meat coming.
He said almost nothing, which is the highest form of help there is.
Nila smuggled herself in past all the guards and sat in the corner doing her lessons so she could be near her father.
The king had begun to drowse easier when she was there. We weren't a court anymore. We were a family keeping vigil. I had become the unlikely center of it, the temp from Ohio that a kingdom had started to lean on. If I let myself feel the weight of that, it threatened to knock the wind out of me.
So mostly I didn't. I just did the work.
The king let me clean the half-healed wound on his flank now, so long as I sang the whole time and Kesh kept the den-scent close. One afternoon he rolled over. He actually rolled, four hundred pounds of apex predator flopping over to bare his belly like a house cat.
A visiting house-lord who'd come to scoff made a strangled noise and had to sit down on the floor.
Nila laughed so hard she had to leave the room.
It was the first time anyone had laughed in that chamber in a month.
The king's tail thumped once against the stone, content.
I added Gets funnier the longer you watch him to the growing list of what I knew about a king I was only technically there to keep from dying.
Ryhn worked beside me now, not behind me anymore.
We'd found a rhythm without ever discussing it, the way it is with the rare person whose hands you trust as much as your own.
He'd lower his voice the instant I dropped mine, mirroring my stillness.
He held the meat while I managed the room.
Twice already he'd caught a tell before I did and softened for it without being told.
Watching a warrior learn gentleness in real time was the most attractive sight I had ever witnessed. I was a grown woman with a job to do and absolutely no business noticing how his hands learned. I noticed anyway. I noticed constantly.
It was becoming a problem.
Then, on the fifth afternoon, the king came back.
Ryhn had been talking to him, telling him some small story about a hunt from his cubhood, the words unimportant, only the voice. The king's huge head was down, his breathing slow, his eyes half-lidded in the gold light.
Then his eyes opened all the way and changed.
I'd spent eleven years learning to read what lives behind an animal's eyes, and I knew exactly what I was watching.
For a heartbeat, there was a person in there.
The terror cleared like fog burning off glass.
And something older and sadder, entirely aware, looked out through the king's slitted eyes, and found his son's face.
"Ryhn," the king said.
It wasn't a roar. It wasn't a beast's sound. His own voice, cracked and disused and unmistakably a man's, his son's name spoken with a tenderness that undid me where I sat.
Ryhn made a sound I would not wish on anyone, a month of grief breaking. "Father. Father, I'm here. I'm right here, I have you —"
A door slammed somewhere down the corridor — some servant about ordinary business — and the fog rolled back.
The fear climbed up, and the man was gone.
The great predator shuddered and pressed into his corner with a low broken whine.
The King of the Kaithran was a frightened animal again.
His son knelt on the stone with his empty hands still reaching, tears cutting silent tracks through his face.
I did the only useful work available to me.
I kept us both steady. I kept my voice going, low and even.
It's okay. He's still here. You heard him.
He's still in there, until the king settled and Ryhn's breathing came back to him.
Only then, when the danger had passed, did I let myself feel what we'd just watched.
"He knew me," Ryhn said, scrubbing the heel of his hand across his face. "Tabby. He knew me."
"He knew you," I agreed. My own voice wasn't entirely steady either.
"That's the proof. The person isn't gone.
He's buried under the fear, and every time we make it safe enough, he climbs a little closer to the surface.
We are not failing." I had to look away from his face, because there was too much in it and not enough of me left to guard against it.
"We're so close. We just need more days than they're willing to give us. "
We sat with that a while, the enormous unfair hope of it, in the near dark.
"Four days," Ryhn said finally. I heard him not say the rest. Four days to take a man who could surface for a single heartbeat and teach him to stand, to speak as a king in front of a hall of people who terrified him.
It was the cruelest possible distance, close enough to see the shore and much too far to swim it on somebody else's schedule. I wanted to promise him we'd make it.
I wouldn't lie to him. I just shifted close enough that our shoulders touched, my injured one against his, and let him feel that he wasn't in this alone.
He leaned into the contact the same as his father had leaned into his palm, helpless and grateful — a strong creature remembering it was allowed to be held. Neither of us said a word.
It was the kindest thing we knew how to do for each other.
"Why do you do that?" Ryhn asked eventually.
"Do what?"
"Make yourself small. Just a tech, you said that first day, like an apology.
Only a handler. You have done what every professional healer in my realm could not.
You reached my father where the finest minds of two worlds failed him, and you say it as though you were reporting a flaw.
" His gold eyes found mine in the dim. "I do not understand it.
Explain it to me, because in my world a creature who could do what you have done would be honored at the high table, and you flinch from honor as though someone had drawn a blade. "
And there it was, the question nobody had ever once bothered to ask me, put plainly by a man who genuinely couldn't understand.
"Because where I'm from, nobody sees it that way," I said.
"It's the part that doesn't need a degree.
Eleven years I've been the most skilled person in the room and the lowest paid, doing the work that saves the animal while somebody more qualified signs the chart and takes the credit.
There was a cat last month — I sat on a cold floor with her for days, and when she finally came around the discharge notes thanked the doctor for her patience.
I wasn't in them. I'm never in them." I laughed — it came out crooked.
"I'm really good at exactly one job, Ryhn, and I've spent my whole life being told it barely counts.
Just a tech. It's a hard habit to break. "
I'd never said all of that out loud to anyone.
It's not something you say to people. It sounds like fishing for comfort, and I'd sooner chew glass.
But it was dark, and he'd asked like he genuinely wanted the answer.
And there's something about a man who has just heard his father's voice for the first time in a month that makes a person reckless with the truth.
He was quiet a moment. Then he reached over, slow enough that I could stop him if I wanted to. He didn't quite touch my face but he came close, his claws sheathed, the warmth of his hand a breath off my cheek.
"In my language," he said quietly, "there is no word that divides the healer from the one who holds.
We have only one word, for the one who makes a frightened creature well again.
It does not come in degrees of lesser and greater.
There is the one who can, and there is everyone else.
" His thumb moved, still not quite touching me.
"You are the one who can. I have watched you be the one who can for eleven days, with my father's life as the proof.
Whoever taught you to call that small was a fool, and I will not have it spoken in my hearing again. Not even by you."
Nobody had ever taken this simple belief and simply refused it on my behalf. The almost-touch of his hand had more force in it than anything else in that room. I'd meant a lot to many patients over the years, the help — the hands. The one who stayed late.
I had never once been someone a person looked at like that — like I was something worth keeping, not something you use and set back down.
I turned my face the smallest fraction toward the heat of his palm.
He went very still. Four days and the deadline and the whole grieving court fell away to nothing.
I was about to do something genuinely, gloriously unwise —
The door opened. Vaelin filled it. Behind him were two of the high physicians and a gray elder of one of the great houses, all of them taking in the picture we made. It was the crown prince of the realm kneeling in the dark with his hand at an alien's face.
"Forgive the intrusion," Vaelin said, although he didn't look sorry in the slightest. He looked like a man whose timing had been flawless.
"I came to confirm a concern the houses raised, and I find it confirmed past any doubt.
They wished to know whether our prince's judgment may still be trusted in this matter.
Or whether the creature has worked some influence upon him. " His gaze moved over us.
"Observe it," he continued. "A healer gentles the king into docility and the prince into devotion, and bids us wait — and wait while her contract runs its course and our king does not wake.
You see how it appears. You see why the houses now ask whether she ought to be permitted near either of them, in these last days, or whether the kindest mercy would be to send the enchantment home early. "
Ryhn rose. I felt the room change as he did, the temperature of it — the old warrior coming up through the gentle man. For one second I thought he might simply kill his cousin and be done with it. His scent had become sharp and dangerous.
The two physicians stepped back.
I watched him understand the trap, the same as I had. If he defended me, he proved Vaelin's point. The prince besotted, the prince enchanted, the prince unfit to judge. If he defended me coldly, he fed me to the houses to keep his own footing.
Vaelin had built a snare with no clean way out of it.
He'd built it precisely because he'd seen what was between us before either of us did.
He'd watched us the same as I watched animals.
He'd found the tell, and now he was using it.
So Ryhn said nothing in my defense. He held himself rigid and cold and kingly, and he didn't even look at me.
That was how I knew exactly what it cost him.