14
Ryhn
I sat outside my father's sickroom in the dark and listened to him keen. I didn't go in, because every creature I went near, I broke.
My father had loved me and become a beast. Tabby had loved me and nearly died. The common thread in both ruins was me — my hands, my strength, my certainty that a strong man fixes what he loves by force.
The kindest act left to me was to stop reaching for any of them. I would let my human go home where I could not hurt her. I would let the houses take the throne. I would sit in the dark outside my father's door and harm nothing further.
Penance.
Love.
I had spent a month watching my father, locked in his shape that felt safer.
I had pitied him for it. Now I sat doing the same, locked in a grief that felt nobler than the terrifying work of trying again.
He keened on the far side of the door, every cry a reproach.
Still I did not move. Moving meant reaching, and reaching meant risking.
Nila found me there an hour before dawn, and she was not gentle.
"Get up," she said.
"Nila—"
"Get up." Her claws were out. Her face was a wreck.
"She's leaving. At first light, they're putting her in the white light and sending her back, and you're sitting here in the dark feeling sorry for yourself.
I went to say goodbye to her, Ryhn. To the only person on this whole world who treated our father like he was still our father.
Do you know what she did, with three cracked ribs, on the worst night of her life?
She held me. She was comforting me. And you—" Her voice cracked all the way through.
"You're out here protecting everyone by doing absolutely nothing.
It's the most you-and-Dad thing I have ever seen. "
"I hurt her, Nila. I hurt him. If I reach for her again, I—"
"You're doing it RIGHT NOW." She was crying and furious and magnificent.
"Listen to yourself. You're deciding, all by yourself, what she needs.
You're forcing her onto a ship to keep her safe whether she wants it or not — exactly like you grabbed Dad's head to make him wake up whether he could or not.
She told you not to become the fear, and you became it, and now she's telling you to fight for her and you're sending her away.
And you call it love. You think you're protecting everyone.
You're not. You're protecting yourself from how much it hurts to love something you might lose. "
She wiped her face with the back of her hand, furious.
"Dad did it with his body and turned into a beast. You're doing it with that throne and your noble face, and you're going to turn into something worse.
You're going to turn into Vaelin. A creature so afraid of losing that he stopped letting himself want anything he couldn't control.
" She crouched down in front of me so I had to see her, our father's eyes in her small fierce face.
"She taught you the lesson. She nearly died teaching you the lesson.
And the second it got hard, you threw it in the fire and picked your coward's strength back up, because soft is braver than strong, and you got scared.
So I'll ask you one time, big brother. Are you going to be strong? Or are you finally going to be brave?"
I felt like I'd finally let go of a breath I'd been holding. She was right.
They were both right, my small fierce sister and the woman I was sending away.
She had walked into the worst room in my world and kept her hands open and showed me, every single day for two weeks, that the bravest thing a strong creature can do is refuse to use its strength.
I had learned it. And at the first true test, the only test that ever mattered, I had reverted, because being soft when you are terrified is the hardest thing there is. I had been so terribly afraid.
And this was what two weeks in a sickroom had taught me that thirty years of training never had.
The fear was not the enemy. The fear was only fear — my father's and mine and the whole court's.
You do not conquer it by being strong, the same as you do not quiet a panicking animal by being louder.
You sit down inside the fear, you refuse to add to it, and you wait.
You stay soft, and you let the frightened creature discover for itself that the danger has passed.
I had watched a small woman do exactly that to a king.
I had let her do it to me. And now, with the dawn coming and everything I loved about to be lost, I understood that I was finally going to have to do it to myself.
I got up.
I did not go to the throne hall, and I did not go to the platform where they were readying her ship. Not yet. There was something I had to do first. For once in my life I understood the order they had to come in.
I went into my father's room first, alone.
No guards, no court, no performance. I let the door close behind me.
The great terrified beast in the corner swung his head up snarling.
For the first time in a month I did not try to be strong for him.
Instead, I did the opposite. I walked to the center of that dark reeking room, and I sank down onto the floor in front of my father.
I did what no Kaithran male of my blood had ever willingly done before another. I bared my throat. Head tipped back, I showed him the most vulnerable part of me, the gift that can be taken. I let him see, and smell, and hear every broken piece I had spent my whole life hiding.
It was the most dangerous act of my life, and I knew it.
A bared throat to a terror-locked predator is an invitation his body might answer before his mind could stop it, the same as it had answered when I seized him.
I knew that. I did it anyway, because she had taught me the one truth my whole warrior culture had gotten exactly backward.
Safety is not the absence of danger. It's someone choosing, over and over, not to hurt you even when they could.
I could have crushed my father a hundred times in that room and never once had.
Now I needed him to know, in the only language fear understands — which is not words or strength but the soft undefended underside of a throat, offered freely in the dark.
"Father." My voice shook, the voice of a frightened boy.
"It's Ryhn. I'm so scared. I've been so scared this whole time and I never let you see it, because you taught me not to.
I think that's why I couldn't reach you, because I kept walking in here pretending to be strong and you could smell the lie.
So I'm done lying." The tears came. "I'm not a strong heir right now.
I'm just your son, and I'm terrified, and I miss you, and I'm sorry.
I'm so sorry I grabbed you. I hurt you when you trusted me, and I will carry that forever.
But I'm not here to make you do anything.
I'm just here to be scared with you, for as long as it takes.
You don't have to be a king. You don't have to be anything.
Just don't make me do the rest of this alone.
Please, Dad. Please come back. I can't do it without you.
I can't do any of it without the people I love, and I keep sending them away to keep them safe.
I am so tired of being safe and alone. Come back to me. Come back."
I could not have said how long I knelt there with my throat bared, weeping, asking nothing, offering only my own honest terror to a creature lost in his.
And my father came back to me.
Not all at once. Not the way the court would have demanded.
But the keening stopped, and a great warmth came and pressed against my bared throat, not teeth — never teeth.
It was the broad scarred brow of the king, laid against the most vulnerable part of his son in the oldest answer our kind knew.
The rumble that rose between us was not terror or command.
It was a sire, telling his cub, I am here.
You are safe. I have you. And then a voice, cracked and exhausted, entirely his own, breathed into the dark against my skin.
"My brave boy," the King of the Kaithran said. "There you are."
I had no words in any language for what it was to hear my father's voice come back to me out of a beast I had given up as lost. It was a frightened man deciding, because his son had finally started telling the truth, that the world might be safe enough to come back into.
It was everything Tabby had promised it would be, from the first hour, when she sat down on a filthy floor and called a king big guy.
She had been right about all of it. And she was about to be put on a ship before she could ever see that.
I held my father and I wept like the child I had not been allowed to be in twenty years.
He held me back, a man again in the dark, reached at last not by strength but by its surrender.
When I could speak, when I lifted my head, I saw my father's eyes looking back at me out of his own tired face.
He lifted his nose first, and scented the room, and frowned.
"Where is she?" he asked. "The one who sang to me. The small one with no fear in her. I have been swimming up toward that voice for weeks." His brow furrowed. "Why can I not smell her on you anymore, my son? What have you done?"
I told him, all of it. The deadline and the deportation and my own unforgivable cowardice.
My father, who had been a beast in a corner an hour before, listened like a king.
When I had finished he put his great weak hand on the back of my neck as he had when I was small.
Then he gave me the first command of his return.
"Then why," he asked, "are you still here talking to me instead of out there stopping that ship?
Go. Bring her home. A king does not let the one who saved his life be carried off into the dark.
" His mouth bent down in a not-quite-smile.
"That is your father's order, and your king's.
The throne can wait the hour. She cannot. Go."
I went.
I came through the doors of that sickroom at a dead run, and the guards Vaelin had posted fell back from me. Doran was in the corridor and took one look at me and started shouting for the houses to be woken. The king had spoken. The king was awake.
Vaelin met me at the head of the great stair.
He had a sense for the exact moment something was slipping out of his hands.
He had the regency writ in one fist and two house-lords at his back.
He stepped into my path. "The houses have not ratified any waking.
You will not go chasing an alien while the throne sits empty and—"
"Move, cousin." I didn't slow, and I didn't bare my teeth, nor did I reach for a single weapon he would have understood.
I think that frightened him more than if I had drawn on him.
"My father is awake. His first command as king was to send me after her, and I am going to obey it in front of every house you have spent a month poisoning.
You taught this whole court that strength is the only language worth speaking.
Watch what gentleness does to your little coup before the sun is properly up.
" I pushed past him, close enough to feel him flinch. "You have lost. "
I did not stop. I ran through my father's citadel toward the platform and the white light and the ship, with the dawn coming up gray in the high windows.
My throat was still bare to a world I no longer cared to hide from.
I prayed to every false star my father ever named me that I was not already too late.