"Your bedside manner is extraordinary."
She grins. It's quick and sharp and startled out of her, and for one disorienting moment she reminds him of Mithri. Not in appearance but in the ease of it, the way she occupies space without apology, the way she grins without checking first to see if it's appropriate. Mithri does that. Did that. Bryn hasn't seen his sister grin without checking in a long time, because there hasn't been much in Everen worth grinning about, and the memory of it sits in his chest and aches.
"Eat what you can," Lira says, moving toward the door. "Sleep if you're able. I'll be down the corridor if you need anything." She pauses in the doorway and turns back. "And Bryn?"
He looks at her. She used his name. Not boy, not human, not princess. His actual name, spoken with a casualness that suggests she considers him a person rather than a political incident, and that alone is enough to make something in his throat tighten.
"For what it's worth, the prince has never done anything close to what he did in that hall today. Not in his life. Not for anyone. Whatever you are to him, it's not small."
She leaves. Bryn stands in the center of his gilded cage and stares at the closed door and feels sick for reasons that have nothing to do with the food.
***
He manages to eat some bread. He tears it into small pieces and chews slowly and swallows carefully and his body accepts it with the grudging tolerance of a system that has been neglected for too long and doesn't entirely trust that sustenance is being offered in good faith. He changes into the too-large clothes, rolling the sleeves three times and cuffing the hem of the trousers until he doesn't look entirely absurd, though the word entirely is doing considerable work in that sentence. He washes his face and unpicks the remains of the braid and combs his hair with his fingers and stares at his reflection in the obsidian mirror.
A pale boy in borrowed clothes. Always borrowed. Always too large or too small, never quite fitted to the shape of him, never quite his. He wore his brother's hand-me-downs as a child, then darned his own clothes when there was no one left to hand themdown, and now he's wearing a Drekian shirt that hangs off his frame and a prince's cloak that he can't bring himself to take off. The common thread running through his entire life, Bryn thinks, is that nothing he wears has ever actually belonged to him. Not the clothes, not the crown's responsibilities, not the name he stole from his sister to walk into this palace.
He sits on the bed. He should sleep. He should try, at least, because he hasn't slept properly in days and his body is making its complaints known in increasingly creative ways: his hands won't stop trembling, his vision keeps going soft at the edges, and there's a persistent ringing in his left ear that started somewhere during the great hall and hasn't stopped since. Instead of sleeping he thinks of Mithri. He wonders if she's reached Aunt Elowen's estate, wonders if she's safe, wonders if she's thinking of him the way he's thinking of her. He pictures her on the east road with the wind in her golden hair and a purse of coins in her hand and no idea that her brother is sitting in a dragon's palace in a stranger's shirt with the phantom heat of a prince's fingers still burning at his throat.
He hopes she's sleeping. Someone in this family should be.
The knock comes late.
He knows who it is before he opens the door. He knows because his pulse spikes and his skin tightens and the back of his neck grows warm as though the prince's hand is already there, which is a physical response so immediate and so involuntary that Bryn despises every single component of it. They are absurd responses. They are the responses of a body that has apparently decided to operate independently of the brain that's supposed to be running it, and they are happening anyway.
He opens the door.
Ithyris stands in the corridor. He's changed since the hall. The formal court attire is gone, replaced by a simpler shirt, dark and unlaced at the throat so that the violet scale patternsalong his collarbones are visible in the amber light, and trousers, and his feet are bare. His feet are bare, and Bryn's brain snags on this detail and holds it up for examination as though it's significant, because the prince of the Drekian Sovereignty is standing outside his door in bare feet and there is something so unexpectedly human about it that Bryn's chest does something complicated and unhelpful.
He knocked. He's standing in the corridor outside Bryn's door waiting for permission to enter, and an hour ago he had his hand around an elder's throat and the entire court was afraid to breathe. The distance between those two versions of the same person is vast enough that Bryn can't quite reconcile them, and yet here they both are, contained in one body, standing in the hallway without shoes on.
"May I come in?" Ithyris asks.
His voice is different here. Quieter. Stripped of the authority it carried in the hall, the way a weapon is stripped when it's set down. He sounds almost careful, as though he's aware that the wrong word or the wrong step will send Bryn retreating and he is trying, with visible effort, not to be the thing Bryn is afraid of.
Bryn steps aside and lets him in, because he doesn't know what else to do, and also because some treasonous part of him wants to know what the prince looks like in the amber light of this room, and he is too exhausted to argue with that part of himself right now.
Ithyris enters the suite and Bryn watches him take it in. His gaze moves over the untouched food and the too-large clothes hanging off Bryn's frame and the bed that hasn't been slept in, the sheets still pristine and tucked. Something crosses the prince's face as he catalogs these details. Not pity. Bryn would close the door on pity. He would shut it down so fast the hinges would crack. What crosses Ithyris's face is something closer to recognition, as though he's reading the evidence ofBryn's discomfort and filing it away for future correction. The untouched food says this person hasn't been cared for properly. The too-large clothes say no one thought to account for his actual size. The pristine bed says he hasn't let his guard down enough to sleep. Bryn can see the prince processing each piece and he doesn't like being this legible, this transparent, but he's too tired to hide it and the shirt keeps slipping off his shoulder and he can't fix it and look dignified at the same time.
Ithyris doesn't sit on the bed. He doesn't move toward Bryn. He crosses to the chair by the window and sits, and the chair is far too small for him, built for a guest suite rather than a prince's frame, and his knees angle upward and his shoulders hunch slightly to fit and he looks, frankly, ridiculous. He looks as though someone has asked a large, powerful, potentially lethal creature to sit in a child's chair, and he is doing so without complaint because the alternative is sitting somewhere that might frighten the boy on the bed.
Bryn almost laughs. Almost. He doesn't quite get there, but something in his chest loosens by a fraction, and he sits on the edge of the bed, as far from Ithyris as the room allows, and folds his hands in his lap and waits.
The prince watches him with those amethyst eyes and the hunger is still there, banked but present, a low heat in his gaze that he doesn't try to hide. But it's tempered by something else. Patience, maybe. Or the effort of restraint, which is a different thing and arguably harder.
"I owe you an explanation," Ithyris says.
"No kidding."
His mouth twitches. Not quite a smile, but close enough that Bryn can see where a smile would go on that face, and the knowledge that the prince is capable of amusement does something to him that he refuses to examine. "Fair."
He tells Bryn about the courtship trials. Three trials, he says, ancient and binding, designed to test the worthiness of a bride before the marriage is formalized. Each trial tests a different quality: trust, vulnerability, truth. They are sacred to the Sovereignty and they cannot be bypassed or shortened, not even by the prince, not even for a mate. The word comes out of his mouth with a weight that suggests it means something more to him than a title, something deeper and more permanent, and Bryn watches his face when he says it and tries to read what's underneath.
"If I pass them?" Bryn asks.
"The marriage proceeds. You become my consort. Prince Consort of the Drekian Sovereignty."
The words are enormous. Prince Consort. Bryn lets them sit in the air between them and tries to imagine himself in that role, tries to picture the boy who was darning his own sleeves a week ago standing beside this creature in a crown, and the image is so absurd it almost hurts.
