He doesn't know what's happening to him. He doesn't know what any of this means. He came here to die for his sister and instead a dragon prince is walking him out of the great hall with his hand on Bryn's neck and the word mate hanging in the heated air behind them, and the numbers don't add up and the situation has no precedent and for the first time in his life his strategic mind has nothing useful to offer him.
But he is alive, and the dragon prince smells of cedar and smoke, and the hand on his neck is the only steady thing in this shaking, burning world, and Bryn holds onto that because holding on is what he does. It's what he's always done.
Chapter 4
The chambers are the same ones they gave him before. The same suite with the cushioned chairs and the thermal bath and the bed large enough for four people and the flowers on every surface. Except now the flowers feel funereal and the bed feels obscene and the whole beautiful, lavish suite feels exactly what it is.
A cage.
Ithyris brings him to the door. His hand leaves the back of Bryn's neck and Bryn feels the absence of it immediately, a sudden cold spot where the warmth had been, and he hates himself for noticing. The prince says something. Bryn doesn't hear it. His ears are still ringing from the hall and his skin is still burning and his brain is running several minutes behind the rest of him, stuck in a loop somewhere between the moment the dress was torn from his body and the moment the prince draped a cloak over his shoulders and called him mate. Ithyris says something else and Bryn nods, because nodding seems safe, and then he walks into the suite and closes the door behind him andstands in the center of the room and the latch clicks shut and he is alone.
He paces.
He paces the length of the sitting room, which takes twelve steps, and he paces it back, and he does this seventeen times before he realizes he's counting and stops counting and keeps pacing. The cloak is still around his shoulders. The prince's cloak. It smells of cedar and smoke and something underneath that he can't identify, warm and animal and distinctly Ithyris, and he should take it off. He should throw it on the floor and rid himself of every trace of the dragon prince who just publicly declared him his mate in front of a court that wanted to kill him or worse.
He pulls it tighter around his shoulders instead.
His skin is still burning where Ithyris touched him. The back of his neck, the hollow of his throat, the collarbone where the prince's fingers brushed when he fastened the cloak. Each point of contact pulses with a residual heat that won't fade no matter how many times Bryn presses his own hand against the spot and tries to will it away. He presses his palm against his throat and feels his own pulse hammering beneath his fingers and he is furious. Furious at this situation. Furious at his father for signing a treaty he didn't read. Furious at the elder who stripped him bare in front of hundreds of strangers and fisted her hand in his hair and called him unfit with a certainty that suggested she'd made up her mind about his worth before she'd finished circling him. Furious at the man in the gallery who looked at his body and saw something to be used, something to be gifted and passed around and discarded, and said so out loud in a hall full of creatures who laughed.
Furious at the prince, who touched him with such devastating gentleness that his body is still reeling from it, and Bryn doesn't know what to do with that. He doesn't know what to do withany of this. He has been angry before. He is intimately familiar with anger, has lived inside it for years the way other people live inside their homes, and he knows its rooms and its corridors and its drafty corners. But this anger is different. This anger has something else braided through it, something warm and frightening and entirely new, and he can't separate the two and he can't name the second thing and that makes it worse.
He doesn't know what a mate is. He doesn't know what a dragon means when he says it, what obligations it carries, what rights it confers, what it demands of the body or the heart or whatever part of a person it claims. The word sits in his chest with a weight that is either a promise or a sentence and he can't tell the difference. In Everen, a betrothal is a transaction. A bride is a commodity. He understands those terms. He was raised on them, watched his father barter his sister's future away for whatever short-sighted gain he could squeeze from it, and Bryn knows the shape of that kind of arrangement even if he despises it.
He knows what a bride is expected to provide: a body, an heir, a warm bed, a political alliance sealed in flesh. He came here expecting to play that role badly until they discovered him and killed him for it, and instead the prince has looked at him with hunger and reverence in equal measure and called him his and shielded him with his own body and Bryn does not know what to do with a man who protects the thing he was supposed to consume. He doesn't have a framework for it. There's no column in his ledger for this, no figure he can run, no calculation that accounts for the way Ithyris's thumb brushed the hollow of his throat and made every thought in his head go quiet.
He sits on the edge of the bed and puts his head in his hands.
The prince is going to tear him apart. Not with violence. Ithyris hasn't shown him violence, not directed at him, and that's almost the problem. He's shown Bryn the opposite, and Bryn iseighteen years old and he has never been touched with care by anyone other than his sister and he has no defenses against it. None. He has defenses against cruelty. He was raised on cruelty the way other children are raised on fairy tales, steeped in it so thoroughly that he knows its texture and its weight and its particular shade of cold. He knows how to survive a room where no one wants him. He has been doing it his entire life. He does not know how to survive a room where someone does, where someone looks at him and sees something worth claiming, worth protecting, worth draping a cloak over with hands that could crush stone but chose instead to be gentle.
That is the thing he has no defense against. That is the thing that is going to ruin him.
***
A knock at the door.
He stands too fast and his vision swims, grey at the edges, because he hasn't eaten properly in days and the adrenaline that's been keeping him upright is starting to withdraw and leave the bill. He steadies himself and crosses the room and opens the door and it's not the prince.
It's a girl. Young, maybe his age, with warm brown skin and close-cropped dark hair and eyes that are large and liquid and studying him with open, unapologetic curiosity. She's Drekian, but small for one, only a few inches taller than Bryn, and the scales at her wrists are a pale, pearlescent green that shimmers when she moves, catching the amber light of the corridor and throwing it back in soft jade. She's carrying a stack of folded clothing and balancing a tray of food on top of it with the practiced ease of someone who has done this many times andnever dropped anything, and she is smiling at him as though he is the most interesting thing that has happened to her all year.
"You're the human boy who wore a dress to court," she says.
Not the introduction he was expecting.
"I'm Lira. I've been assigned as your attendant." She walks past him into the suite without waiting to be invited, sets the tray on the low table with a clatter that makes the porcelain rattle, and deposits the clothing on the nearest chair. "The kitchens are in an uproar, by the way. Everyone's talking about you. The prince's mate, a human, a male, and apparently very pretty. I can see that last part's true, at least."
"Thank you," Bryn says, because he doesn't know what else to say. "I think."
"It's a compliment. I don't give them freely, so do with it what you will." She surveys the suite with her hands on her hips, assessing it with the critical eye of someone whose job it is to make sure rooms are suitable and who has opinions about whether this one qualifies. "They've put you in the consort's wing. That's significant. The elders wanted you in the guest quarters, which is their polite way of saying they consider you temporary and expect you to be gone before the month is out. But the prince overruled them." She glances at him. "He does that a lot, I'm told. Overrule people. Usually more quietly than he did today."
Bryn looks at the clothing she's brought. Dark fabric, simple construction, and even from across the room he can tell they're too large for him. Drekian sizing, which apparently assumes everyone is a minimum of six feet tall and built with the proportional breadth to match. He picks up the shirt on top and holds it against his chest and the shoulders hang past his own by several inches and the hem falls to mid-thigh and he looks, he imagines, approximately as dignified as a child wearing hisfather's clothing. Which is fitting, given that wearing things that don't belong to him seems to be a recurring theme in his life.
"I know," Lira says, watching him with an expression that is sympathetic enough to acknowledge the problem and amused enough to find it entertaining. "You're very small."
He sets the shirt down and looks at the food. Rich, heavy dishes: roasted meat in a dark sauce, dense bread with a crust that looks thick enough to use as a weapon, some kind of root vegetable glazed in something sweet that smells of honey and spice. His stomach turns. He hasn't eaten properly in days, running on fear and adrenaline and the dried meat from the road, and the richness of the food in front of him is overwhelming enough that his nausea spikes just from looking at it.
Lira sees his face and her expression softens, just slightly, beneath the cheerful bluntness. The shift is small but Bryn catches it, because he has spent his entire life reading the small shifts in people's faces to determine whether they're about to be kind or cruel, and this one reads as genuine.
"I'll bring you something simpler in the morning," she says. "Broth. Plain bread. Maybe some fruit if you think your stomach can handle the excitement. You look as though you'd collapse if I breathed on you wrong."
