12
Ryhn
The houses came for my father the following morning.
I had not slept. I had spent the night on the sickroom floor beside Tabby and my father, watching her fight for a king who had stopped fighting for himself.
All night I watched her dribble water into his mouth and sing until her voice gave out.
I had felt, hour by gray hour, what I most feared closing its hand around us.
He was not coming back fast enough. Two days of her best and most patient work, but the throne room had taken so much out of him that he had barely climbed back to where we had started. The clock did not care.
Somewhere past the middle of that long night I had begun, for the first time, to be afraid that gentleness was simply going to lose. We were going to do everything and watch my father die anyway, on schedule to the sound of my cousin counting days.
In the dark, Tabby had felt the slow turn toward despair in me.
She had taken my face in her hands and told me to hold the line one more day, that the king's body still wanted to live, that she could feel it under her palms. I had learned to believe her.
But belief is strongest in daylight, and the dawn that came was not kind.
When the dawn brought my cousin's boots in the corridor, I was already hollowed out and brittle. That is the only condition in which a man does what I was about to do.
They filled the passage outside the sickroom, Vaelin at their head, the great families ranked behind him in their formal grays.
The scent of two dozen predators in their power rolled in through the open door and struck my father.
I felt his fear spike from across the room.
Tabby was already down on the floor, already working, already murmuring in her soft voice.
But the king had been failing for two days and the air was suddenly thick with threat.
I watched the fragile progress of the dawn come apart in seconds.
"This has gone on long enough," Vaelin said, gentle as a drawn knife.
"Look at it, cousin. Two days since your healer's great triumph in the hall, and the king is worse than he was before it.
The houses have indulged the experiment past all reason.
The experiment has failed. We are here to be merciful at last, which is to end the spectacle, declare the regency, and let the realm grieve a king with dignity instead of pinning its honor on a foreigner's tricks while he rots in a corner. "
"He is not failing because of her," I growled under my breath.
"He is failing because every time he begins to mend, this is what happens.
A room fills with fear, and the fear sets him back.
You are watching the disease walk in on its own two feet, cousin, and calling it the cure's defeat.
Give her three more days and clear this corridor, and I will show you a waking king. "
"I am watching a beast in a corner, Ryhn." Vaelin let his words fall and lie there. "We all are. And I am watching the heir of the realm kneel in the filth beside an alien and call his father's animal terror something too subtle for the rest of us to grasp."
He came a step closer, and the houses leaned in behind him.
I felt the whole world's attention settle onto me.
"Do you know what they see when they look at you now?
They see a prince so unmanned by a soft creature who weighs nothing that he will let his own father die by inches sooner than do what a king is born to do.
They pity you. They have begun to pity the throne. "
Behind him the great families said nothing.
That was a verdict of its own. I looked down that long gray rank of the oldest blood of my world.
I did not find one face that met my eyes with anything but pity or judgment.
Doran stood at the edge of them, and even he could not look at me.
Even Doran, who understood, could see where this was going and had no power to stop it.
The only creature in that entire corridor who still believed in what we had built was kneeling on the floor at my feet with her hands on my dying father.
I was about to stop believing in it myself.
I should have walked away then. I knew what he was doing.
I had watched him do it to better men. But I was hollow and I had not slept, and I had spent a night learning to be afraid that everything I had become was going to fail.
He saw all of it. He always saw the tell.
He set his thumb on the one wound that had not yet closed.
"Your father would be ashamed of what you have let him become," Vaelin said softly.
It sounded almost kind. "He spent his whole life making you strong.
And at the single moment his life required your strength, you knelt down in the dark and learned to be soft from a creature, from a world no one has charted.
You have let him rot into this. He took a blade meant for you, Ryhn.
He gave you his own body to stand behind.
And you have repaid him with lullabies."
The corridor held its breath. Nila made a small wounded sound, because she was sixteen and she saw her brother standing at the edge of a cliff.
On the floor, Tabby went still and alert, the same stillness she fell into when an animal in her care was about to bolt.
The two people in that corridor who loved me knew what was coming before I did, and neither of them could reach me in time.
Tabby looked up at me from the floor, and she saw it coming in my face before I had moved a muscle. "Ryhn," she said. "Ryhn, look at me. Whatever he just put in your head, don't. He's the fear in this room. Don't you become it too. Please. You taught yourself better than this. Stay with me—"
But I had stopped hearing her. I heard my father when I was a cub, louder than ever, telling a small son that a strong man stands between his blood and the world and never lets the world see him flinch.
I heard a corridor full of the high houses deciding I was unfit for the chair I was born to.
I heard the clock my cousin had been counting against me for a month.
And under all of it I heard an old voice, one that does not reason.
It said Do something. Be strong. Save him.
A son does not kneel in the dirt while his father dies in front of him.
The terrible seduction of it was that it felt like love.
It felt like the only real love I knew how to give.
After weeks of the unbearable patience of doing nothing, here at last was a way to be large, to be strong, to feel like a son fighting for his father instead of a man watching him fade.
That was the worst of the deception. It did not feel wrong. It felt like courage. It felt like finally, after weeks of unbearable stillness, doing right by him. Every lesson of my childhood stood up in me at once, calling the gentleness cowardice and calling strength love.
I was too hollow and too frightened, too publicly shamed to hear the small steady voice that had spent two weeks teaching me the two were exactly reversed. Vaelin did not make me do it. He only opened the door, and I walked through it on my own. Some buried part of me had been aching to.
I rose up off that floor with two weeks of hard-won gentleness burning away like mist off morning stone. I went to my father not as the creature she had taught me to be but as the prince Vaelin had dared me to become.
"Father." It came out of me as a command, the voice I had been raised to fill a room with — the voice that bends a hall to its will. "Enough. You are the King of the Kaithran. You will rise. You will stand and be true to who you are. I am your son and I am ordering you to come back to us."
And I put my hands on him.
I had spent two weeks learning never to loom, never to seize, never to force.
I took my father's great head in both of my hands and tried to drag a terrified animal back into kingship by the raw strength of my will.
I could not endure my own helplessness one moment longer, and my cousin had handed me a way to feel powerful instead of afraid.
It was the last of what my father needed in this universe.
He came up off the floor screaming.
The sound was every nightmare the court had carried for a month given throat all at once, pure animal terror with no king anywhere inside it.
The single creature he had allowed himself to trust had just become the largest threat in a room already drowning in them.
He reared up out of his corner, four hundred pounds of cornered and betrayed panic, his claws unsheathing.
He struck at whatever had seized him in the dark — me.
Tabby threw herself between us.
What she did next I would never be able to stop seeing.
She was a third his size. Her shoulder was barely healed, but she did not hesitate for the length of a single breath.
She flung her small body into the narrow space between my father's claws and my throat.
Even then, even falling, she did what her entire life had built her to do.
She tried to gentle him. It's okay, it's okay, nobody's going to hurt you.
His terror, in that instant, did not know her from any other threat in a room full of them.
The blow caught her across the chest and the side of the head and flung her into the stone wall.
She slid down it and did not get up. For a moment, my whole world went silent.
I had been in battles. I had heard men die, some of them even at my own hand. And I had believed all my life that I knew what the worst sound in the world was. I had been wrong about that though, the same as I had been wrong about everything that mattered.
The worst sound in the world was no sound. None. It was the absence where a small brave voice had been singing three soft notes for weeks, and had suddenly stopped.
Then the room erupted. Guards poured through the door with their blades drawn. My father had the space in front of him suddenly empty. The shapes that had reared over him and seized him were gone. Only the small crumpled shape of her on the floor existed where his eyes could find it.
He made a sound I had never heard from him in my life, as man or beast. He keened, low and broken, and the sound climbed the walls.
He pressed himself back into his corner with his terrible gaze fixed on what he had done.
I understood, watching him, that somewhere beneath all that terror he knew, exactly as I did, what had truly happened and whose hands had caused it.
Mine. I had caused it — not her methods, not his sickness, not the deadline or the houses or even my cousin, in the end.
Me and my pride, the oldest lie my people ever taught their sons, was that love is something you prove with strength.
I reached her first. There was blood in her hair. Her breathing was shallow and wrong, and her eyes could not fix on my face. I gathered her against my chest, the very body she had spent two weeks teaching to be gentle. I made every sound and word I knew and not one of them reached her.
I had her blood on my hands. The same hands I had just used to seize my father. The same hands she had spent two weeks teaching to be careful, to stay open, to never once close into a fist around someone frightened. I had failed every lesson she ever gave me in the space of a single breath.
The price of the failure was bleeding in my arms. Across the room my father keened and keened in his corner and would not be comforted. The realm I had been so terrified of losing stood and watched me lose the one life in it that had ever truly mattered.
Behind me, into the ringing silence of a court that had finally seen what it came to see, my cousin Vaelin said what remained to be said. He had waited, long and patient for this, and he had won.
"There," he said. "Now the houses have seen the truth of it with their own eyes. Take the creature to the ship before she does the realm any further harm. And someone draw the prince away from the beast, before it finishes what it has begun."