Epilogue
Tabby
Four months later I stood in a sunny courtyard at the heart of the Kaithran citadel, teaching six enormous warriors how to fall in love with doing absolutely nothing. Not one of them was very good at it yet.
"You're staring again," I told the biggest of them, a scarred old border captain who could have bitten me in half — and who flinched every time the practice cub hissed at him.
"You're looming. Lower your shoulders. You're not trying to win.
You're trying to be boring. Boring is the whole job.
" He rounded himself down, grumbling, and the cub stopped hissing.
The captain's face was that stunned soft wonder of a creature discovering that what it was most afraid of had been waiting all along to be gentled instead of fought.
I never got tired of that face. I had a school full of them now.
That was the part I still couldn't quite believe on the good mornings.
I had a school. There was a doorway, and over the doorway my name was carved in flowing Kaithran script.
Under it was the word for what I did, which they'd had to invent, because before me they hadn't had one.
Royal Healer. Master of the fear-free disciplines.
My unglamorous hands-on work that had never earned a title, finally given one in letters tall enough to read from across a courtyard.
Some days I'd catch sight of it and have to stop and breathe. There had been eleven years of cold clinic floors where I'd told myself it was fine that nobody wrote my name down. It turned out it had never been fine. It turned out a person could be unmade and remade by the simple act of being seen.
Ryhn found me there in the late afternoon, as he always did when the day's work let him.
I felt him before I saw him. His warm low purr was humming through the bond, that steady wordless pressure against my chest that said safe, near, mine, glad.
I would never get used to that. It was the end of a lifetime of wondering whether I was wanted, answered now in a language that couldn't lie, every hour of every day.
"The captain wept," he observed, watching the old warrior cradle the cub like spun glass.
"They all weep eventually. Turns out three hundred years of being told to be strong leaves a lot backed up." I leaned into his side, and his arm came around me. We watched my impossible students be gentle in the sun. "How's your dad?"
"Insufferable." The purr deepened with the warmth in his voice.
"He held two full audiences today, and then he made me sit with him in the garden and tell him the entire story of the woman who called him big guy — which he insists on hearing at least once a week so that he never forgets how close he came — and how foolish his pride had made him. " Ryhn's lips quirked up.
I laughed, feeling it move through both of us through the bond, his joy and mine running together until I genuinely couldn't tell whose was whose. That was the strangest and best part of being bonded to someone. You stopped having to carry the good parts all by yourself.
There was a sound from the corner of the courtyard then, an aggrieved and familiar yowl.
A small orange streak of pure fury launched off a sun-warmed wall and stalked across the flagstones with his tail straight up, eleven pounds of Earth tomcat looking deeply unimpressed by an entire alien civilization.
"Mango," I warned. "Be nice."
He was not nice. Mango was never nice. I'd spent my first month at court badgering the Bureau through every clause in that ridiculous contract until they'd agreed, just to be rid of me, to retrieve one specific cat from a clinic in Ohio.
That clinic had been about to put him down.
They'd set him on my new doorstep in a flash of white light with a tag that read one (1) temperamental feline of common lineage.
The dispatcher had wished me luck with a sincerity I chose to find touching.
He'd hated the citadel for a week. Then he'd discovered that the largest, most dangerous predators in the galaxy would scatter at the swat of one small orange paw.
He had appointed himself, with total confidence, the most terrifying creature in the kingdom.
The King of the Kaithran, four hundred pounds of resurrected apex predator, adored him.
They napped together. I had a portrait of it I planned to be buried with — the fiercest predator in the realm and the smallest, asleep in the same sunbeam, nose to nose.
If that wasn't the whole point of everything I'd ever done with my life, I didn't know what was.
"Your savage is harassing my students," Ryhn said, with a deep contentment, having long since given up pretending he wasn't fond of the cat.
"My savage taught me everything I know." I scooped Mango up.
He grudgingly allowed it, purring despite himself.
He was the reason I'd been standing on a clinic floor singing three soft notes on the afternoon the light came and took me four hundred light-years to the rest of my life.
Funny how you never know which of the small unglamorous saves is the one that's going to save you back.
We were almost inside when the air at the center of the courtyard folded and lit that white Bureau light. We both went still, and for half a heartbeat my whole body remembered being unmade on a clinic floor.
It was just the dispatcher, the cheerful blue shape, flickering into the air to deliver a parcel of citadel paperwork and, apparently, to gossip.
"Delightful news," it announced, to nobody and everybody.
"We have a placement with the Avalyn mediation corps, several systems over.
Two peoples on the edge of war over a single insult, and every formal remedy has made it worse.
" It consulted its slate, and I would swear the clerk looked pleased with itself.
"They have requisitioned a Stiller of Storms among the Gathered Multitudes.
We have located one. At temp rates. We dispatch at the next alignment. "
I felt Ryhn go still beside me, fighting very hard not to laugh.
"What's his actual job," I asked. "On Earth. What does the description say, under the title."
The dispatcher brightened. "He settles arguments on a public forum," it read.
"Voluntarily. For no payment of any kind.
" A pause. "Whatever that is. Surely close enough.
" And it folded itself out of the air, serene and bloodless and utterly unbothered, off to abduct another wrong human into being exactly right.
I stood in my own doorway and thought about two whole civilizations about to be saved by a man who talks furious strangers down for free and has never once been told it counts as anything.
"Should we warn them?" Ryhn asked.
"Nah." I turned my face up for a kiss, home in a way I'd stopped believing I'd ever get to be. "Let them find out the way we did."
The End