"Your sister is safe," Ithyris says. "I give you my word. No one from the Sovereignty will pursue her. Whatever happens between us, whatever you decide about the trials, that is not conditional. She's safe because you love her enough to have done what you did, and that deserves to be honored regardless of what comes next."
Bryn looks at him. He searches the prince's face for the lie, for the catch, for the hidden clause that will reveal this is justanother transaction dressed up in prettier language, the way his father's promises always were. He looks for the trap because there is always a trap, because nothing in his life has ever come without strings, and he has been burned often enough to know that the kindest-looking offers tend to have the sharpest teeth.
He doesn't find it. He looks and he looks and there is nothing in Ithyris's face but sincerity, open and unprotected, and that terrifies Bryn more than anything else that has happened tonight.
"Goodnight, Bryn."
The prince leaves. The door closes softly behind him, with none of the weight or finality that Bryn expected, and the room is quiet.
Bryn sits on the bed for a long time. He sits there and he stares at the closed door and he doesn't move and he doesn't think, because if he starts thinking he's going to have to process what just happened and he's not ready for that yet. Then he lies down on the too-large mattress in the too-large shirt in the too-large room and pulls Ithyris's cloak over himself because the blankets are cold and unfamiliar and the cloak still smells of cedar and smoke and he is too exhausted to pretend he doesn't find comfort in it. The weight of it settles over him and the scent wraps around him and his body, traitorous and desperate, relaxes by one degree.
He doesn't sleep. He lies in the dark and he thinks about his sister on the east road and his kingdom crumbling without him and the prince who wants him and the trials he's agreed to face and the fact that for the first time in his life, someone has told him he doesn't have to earn the right to exist.
He believed him. He believed Ithyris, and that's the most dangerous thing that's happened to him today, and he walked into a dragon court in a dress and got stripped in front of hundreds of people, so the bar was already extraordinary.
The cloak is warm. The bed is warm. The whole palace is warm, heated from beneath by the volcano's slow, patient heart, and Bryn lies inside it and feels very small and very tired and very far from home and very quietly, in a way he will never admit to anyone, grateful for the warmth.
He closes his eyes.
He doesn't sleep.
Chapter 5
Bryn wakes confused and aching and tangled in a cloak that isn't his.
For a disoriented moment he thinks he's in Everen, that he's fallen asleep at his desk again and the crick in his neck is from the ledger and the warmth is from the fire and Mithri will knock any moment with tea and that look she gives him when he's worked through the night. The quiet, exasperated fondness that says I love you and you're an idiot in equal measure. Then the ceiling comes into focus, vaulted and carved and glowing with amber light, and the memory of where he is drops through him and settles in his stomach and stays there, heavy and cold and real.
He sits up. The cloak falls from his shoulders and the cedar smell rises and he pushes it away, then pulls it back, then pushes it away again and leaves it in a heap on the bed and stands up and decides he is finished being pathetic about a piece of fabric. He's been wearing other people's things his entire life. A cloak is just a cloak. The fact that this particular cloak belongs to a dragon prince who declared Bryn his mate in front of severalhundred people and smells of cedar and smoke in a way that apparently short-circuits Bryn's higher reasoning is irrelevant.
The borrowed clothes are wrinkled from the few fitful hours of something that wasn't quite sleep but wasn't quite wakefulness either. He smooths them as best he can, rolls the sleeves again where they've come unrolled during the night, and splashes water on his face from the basin. The obsidian mirror shows him the same pale, tired boy as last night, with the addition of dark circles under his eyes that could house small animals and a crease on his cheek from the pillow that makes it look as though someone has drawn on him in his sleep. Stunning. Truly fit for a prince. The Drekian Sovereignty must be thrilled with what Everen has sent them.
He should go to the dining hall. That's what's expected. He should sit beside Ithyris at breakfast and perform the role of his intended and let the court assess him over their morning meal, and the thought of it makes his throat close so tightly he can't swallow. He can picture it with perfect, horrible clarity: the long table, the watching eyes, the elders cataloging his every movement, the courtier from the gallery looking at him and remembering what he said and smiling that smile that made Bryn's skin crawl. Syreth sitting somewhere nearby with her pale scales and her cold certainty and the memory of her hand in his hair and her fingers on his chin and the sound of linen tearing.
He can't do it. Not today. Not yet. Yesterday he was stripped bare and thrown on the floor and threatened with things he hasn't stopped thinking about since, and if he sits at that table and feels the weight of the court's eyes on his body he will shatter, and Bryn does not shatter where people can see. He has shattered exactly once in his life, the day Alder died, and he did it alone in his bedroom with the door locked and he put himself back together before anyone noticed he'd been in pieces. He will afford himself the same courtesy today.
So he goes to find the kitchens instead.
***
It takes him twenty minutes and three wrong corridors. The palace is a labyrinth, hallways branching and splitting and connecting in ways that suggest it was designed for beings who navigate by scent or thermal sense rather than by sight, which is deeply inconvenient for a human who relies primarily on his eyes and his sense of direction, both of which are proving inadequate. He passes libraries and training halls and open-air galleries where the volcanic wind sweeps through, hot and mineral, ruffling his hair and carrying sounds from elsewhere in the palace that he can't identify. He catalogs every turn and landmark the way he catalogs trade routes and fortifications back home, building a map in his head out of habit and necessity. Survival through information. The only kind he's ever had access to.
The kitchens are in the lower levels, carved into the rock near the thermal vents, and he smells them before he finds them: bread baking, meat roasting, something sweet and spiced that makes his empty stomach cramp with want so sharply he has to stop walking and press a hand against his abdomen and breathe through it. He follows the smell down a wide staircase and through an archway and into a room that is, miraculously, the first place in this palace that feels familiar.
It's enormous, of course. Everything here is enormous and Bryn is beginning to suspect that the Drekians do not build small anything, ever, as a matter of cultural principle. But the chaos of the kitchen, the clatter of pots and the shouting across counters and the clouds of flour and the organized disorder of people who are very good at feeding a great many others, is soachingly familiar that something in his chest unclenches for the first time since he left Everen. This is something he understands. This is the language of logistics and supply and the practical magic of turning raw ingredients into something that keeps people alive. He has spoken this language for years, negotiating with merchants and rationing grain and calculating how many mouths the castle could feed and for how long, and hearing it spoken fluently in this enormous kitchen feels, absurdly, more welcoming than any suite of rooms could.
A woman at the nearest counter spots him and stops mid-chop. She's Drekian, broad and strong, with copper scales along her forearms and flour dusted through her dark hair and a cleaver in her hand that could take his head off at the neck. Her expression as she looks at him is not hostile, not welcoming, but assessing, the way a cook assesses an unfamiliar ingredient and decides what to do with it.
"You're the prince's intended," she says.
Word travels fast in a palace. Even a palace carved into the interior of a volcano.
"I'm Bryn," he says. "I was hoping for some breakfast. Something simple, if you have it."
She stares at him for a long moment, during which Bryn becomes acutely aware that he is standing in the busiest kitchen he has ever seen in his life wearing clothes three sizes too large for him with pillow creases still on his face, asking for food the way he used to ask Everen's cook for scraps when the formal meals had already been served to people who mattered more than him. She sets down the cleaver and wipes her hands on her apron and says, "Sit."
He sits.
Within minutes he has been installed at a small table in the corner of the kitchen, away from the main bustle but close enough to the ovens that the warmth wraps around him, and infront of him is a bowl of plain broth and a round of soft bread and a pot of tea that smells of chamomile and something herbal he doesn't recognize. The head cook, whose name is Theryn, stands over him with her arms crossed and watches him eat with the same critical attention she probably gives her sauces, and there is something so deeply, unexpectedly comforting about being watched over by a large woman with a cleaver and an opinion about his eating habits that Bryn has to look down at his broth to keep his composure.
