11
Tabby
The king was dying again, and this time it was my triumph that was killing him.
I knew it the second I got back into the sickroom, before Doran said a word, because I could smell it.
The fear-musk was thick and sour again, the den-scent gone stale, and under it the flat cold note of an animal that's stopped trying.
He was jammed into his corner with his eyes shut.
He didn't rouse when I came in, didn't track me, didn't do any of the small ordinary business he'd started doing again.
The public spectacle had cost him every reserve he had.
I'd asked a starving man to sprint, and he'd done it, for his son, in front of his whole court. Now there was nothing left in the tank.
"He stopped taking water in the night," Doran said quietly.
"He has not held the man's shape since they carried him from the hall.
I have seen this before, healer, in the very old and the very wounded.
The body decides the fight is no longer worth the cost." His eyes were wet.
"I do not know how to argue a body out of that decision. "
"I do," I said. I got down on the floor and started over.
Because that's the job when it goes bad. You don't get to be tired. You don't get to grieve yet.
You get down on the cold floor and you become the most patient boring safe object in the world again.
You do the small slow work that doesn't photograph and doesn't impress anyone.
I dribbled water past his teeth on my fingertips.
I sang the three notes until my voice cracked.
I read every tell he had left. There weren't many, and I fought for every single one.
There is nothing worse than fighting for an animal that has decided to stop.
There's no enemy in front of you, no wound to close, nothing your hands can do but be present and patient and refuse to agree with him that it's over, hour after hour.
I'd done it before, on clinic floors over a creature everyone else had already written off.
A Rottweiler with a spite streak. A parrot that drew blood on principle.
A diabetic ferret with strong opinions about everybody.
I'd lost some of those and won some. Not one of them, I couldn't help noting, had been four hundred pounds — or a head of state.
Losing never got easier and winning never came fast, so I settled in for the long ugly version.
I didn't let myself think about the man two floors up I was going to lose no matter what.
I just poured eleven years of refusing-to-quit into a king who had run clean out of reasons to stay.
The worst part, the part I couldn't say out loud to anyone, was the clock. The moon had come and gone, and by the letter of the verdict, we had already lost.
All that stood between me and a Bureau ship was the grace the houses had granted over Vaelin's head, and in the dark he had moved to take it back. He'd wanted the regency declared at dawn. The houses — frightened, and tired, and tired of being frightened — had very nearly given it to him.
Ryhn had fought them off, spending whatever he had left of his standing to hold them to the three days they'd promised on the throne-hall floor.
So we had two more days now, two more days to do something that needed weeks, and a king who'd quit. I lay on that floor and I did the math again. For the first time since I'd landed I couldn't find the answer.
Nila came and sat with me. She didn't say anything.
She'd learned that, the gift of just being there, from me.
She brought her lessons and did them on the floor by her father's head and let him smell his cub nearby.
Kesh kept the den-scent fresh. Doran charted what little there was to chart.
We kept that vigil in shifts because none of us would leave.
I understood somewhere in the long gray hours that I had done something I'd sworn, after last time, never to do again.
I'd let them become mine. The whole impossible family — a furious teenager, a gruff old cat-wrangler, and a court physician who two weeks ago had called me something that crawls and now kept topping up my water like I might crack.
If you'd told me a month ago I'd find a family four hundred light-years from Ohio, I'd have checked you for a fever.
And in another two days, I was going to lose every one of them at once, whether the king lived or died.
I'd like to tell you I took that knowledge gracefully.
I didn't. For a while I lay on a cold stone floor four hundred light-years from a clinic that had surely already replaced me, with a dying king's breath under my hand and a sleeping cat-girl's head on my shoulder.
I let myself cry for a minute, in silence, where nobody would be troubled by it.
Then I wiped my face on my filthy sleeve and went back to work.
Crying is for later. Later was a place I'd always been very, very good at putting things.
It was Nila, of all of them, who told me the rest of it. She didn't mean to gut me. She was sixteen and she'd assumed I already knew.
"At least when Ryhn's king," she said, drowsy, her head against my good shoulder, "he can change the stupid laws. He can make them let you visit. Can't he?"
"What laws, sweetheart?"
She went quiet all at once, like a kid who realizes she's said too much.
"I thought you knew. I'm sorry, I thought—" She swallowed.
"The heir has to marry inside the high houses.
It's the oldest law we've got. To keep the line and hold the houses together.
Especially now, after — after everything Vaelin's stirred up, the houses will want it sealed fast, with a daughter of one of the great families, to prove the throne is theirs again and not—" She couldn't finish it. She didn't have to.
Not an alien's.
I sat there on the floor with the dying king and the sleeping girl and felt the last piece drop into place, the one I'd been too busy to look at.
There had never been a version where I stayed.
I'd known that. But I'd let myself believe, somewhere in the stolen dark, that if the king woke, if Ryhn took the throne, he might find a way to bend the world around us.
And now I understood that even total victory ended the same place.
The king wakes, Ryhn stays a prince instead of a regent's puppet, and a prince marries a Kaithran daughter of a great house within the season.
That's the law, that's duty, that's the entire pull of a culture that taught the man I loved that love means protecting your people even from your own heart.
Win or lose, I went home. Win or lose, he married someone with the right blood.
The only difference was whether his father was alive to watch.
I'd spent my whole life being the person who does what's necessary without acknowledgement, and I'd made my peace with it.
But this was a new one, even for me. It was to save a man's life knowing that he would marry someone else.
To pour everything I had into handing a kingdom back its king, a girl back her father, a prince back his future — knowing the future had no room in it for me anywhere.
Ryhn found me that night, and he took one look at my face.
"Nila told you," he said.
"She thought I knew." I was too tired to be angry.
There was no one to be angry at anyway. "It's not a secret you kept from me.
It's just true. It was always going to be true.
" I made myself say it, because somebody had to.
"Even if it all works, Ryhn. Even if he wakes and you keep the throne and Vaelin loses, you marry a high-house daughter and I get on a ship. There's no version where that changes."
He crossed the room. He didn't argue, because he was done lying to me.
That was its own kind of devastating. He just gathered me in against him.
His purr came up low and grieving, a register I hadn't heard before.
I realized he had a sound for this too, for love that knows it's ending.
Nobody in the universe would ever make me feel as known as a man who couldn't lie to me with his own body if he tried.
"There is something I have not told you," he said into my hair, his voice gone quiet.
"How he fell. The realm believes it was a border skirmish, a stray blade.
It was not. It was meant for me. An old blood-debt from my grandfather's wars, a blade at my back I never saw, and my father did.
He put himself between me and it as he had told me my whole life a strong man must. He took the wound that should have been mine, and the shock of it dropped him down into the healing-sleep, and the healing-sleep into the terror, and the terror into the corner of that room. "
His arms tightened around me. "My father is a frightened animal because he loved me the one way he knew how — with his body between me and the world. I have told no one that. Every hour I have knelt in that room has been me trying to give back what cannot be given back."
I kissed him. It wasn't like the first night. I kissed him slowly, sad and certain, and felt his grieving purr change under my hands.
He stopped with his fingers at my waist. His claws were sheathed so completely I felt only the warm blunt pressure of them through my clothes. "Tabitha. Are you certain?"
"Yes." I put my forehead against his. "I know what tomorrow is. I'm choosing tonight."
His eyes closed. The purr deepened until I could feel it in my sternum. He let me lead him to the bed.
I undressed him in the dark, learning him as he'd learned me, because I was greedy now.
I wanted to remember all of him when I went home.
I pulled his tunic over his head and ran my hands over the faint raised patterns across his chest and stomach.
His skin was hotter than mine. His purr changed pitch when I found a sensitive line beneath his ribs.
"There?" I asked.
"Everywhere you touch me," he said. There was nothing polished or princely left in his voice.
He reached for my clothes. I caught his hand.
"Let me take care of you this time."
For half a breath the old refusal tightened his face. Then he lay back with his hands open beside his head.
I bent and pressed my jaw to his, the Kaithran gesture he'd taught me on the high wall. I didn't have the glands or the senses to do it properly, but his body understood mine. He shuddered beneath me.
"Mark me again," I whispered. "Not the bite — you. I want to carry something of you home."
His purr stumbled. Then he drew his jaw along mine, over my throat and down to my shoulder. Heat lingered everywhere he touched. By morning every Kaithran who came near me would know whose bed I'd left.
I opened his trousers and wrapped my hand around him.
He was smooth and impossibly warm, and his purr made my breath catch.
It didn't stop at his chest. The vibration traveled through the hard length of him into my palm, low and steady until my fingers tightened and the sound broke rough from his throat.
"Tabitha." My name broke on the last syllable.
I slipped the rest of my clothes off and straddled him. His hands settled at my hips, claws still safely hidden. He could have moved me anywhere he wanted. He waited instead.
I guided him to me and sank down slowly. The vibration came with him, a deep pulse tied to his breath. Every change in his pleasure moved through me. My eyes closed.
"Look at me," he said softly.
His pupils had gone wide, the gold reduced to a thin bright rim.
He watched my face while I moved over him, holding himself still until I gave him more, then meeting me with a slow roll of his hips.
He waited for me to set the pace. I learned what made his breath stop, the stroke that brought the purr up through both of us, the small helpless flex of his fingers when I leaned down and put my mouth to his throat.
His arms closed around me. He turned us only far enough to settle me beneath him, keeping his weight on one forearm, his other hand cradling the back of my head.
His sheathed claws combed carefully through my hair.
His forehead stayed against mine while he moved, so I could watch what I did to him and he could watch what he gave me.
"I have you," he whispered.
The purr climbed inside me until my body tightened around him.
I cried his name, broken and too loud, and the answering vibration stuttered through us both.
He held me through it, moving slowly until the last tremor passed.
Then I pulled him closer and matched each slow thrust until his control gave way.
When he came, his whole body shook against me while he said my name. I almost said it. I love you. I'd never said it to anybody, but I would have meant it.
I didn't say it. That would be one more thing we'd have to bury in two days, and I didn't know if I could survive that. So I held onto it and gave him everything else — the way he'd held back the claiming bite and given me everything else.
He gathered me against his chest, smoothing my hair back from my damp face. The purr softened, but it never stopped. I lay over his heart and listened until my breathing matched it.
"One more day," he whispered into my hair.
"One more day." Then, because I was who I was, because work was the only place I'd ever been brave.
"So let's not waste it grieving. Your father isn't gone yet.
I've pulled patients back from worse than this, and I have one more day and the stubbornest man in the galaxy to help me do it.
" I sat up and wiped my face. "We don't get the ending we want.
Fine. But the king is not dying on my watch, and you're not taking the throne believing your gentleness failed.
We're going to wake your father, Ryhn. And then I'm going to go home and fall apart privately like a professional. "