"You're too thin," she declares.
"I've been told."
"Humans are too thin in general, from what I've seen, but you're thin for a human. When's the last time you ate a proper meal?"
He thinks about it. The answer is embarrassing enough that he considers lying, but she has the kind of face that suggests she'd know, and also she's still holding the cleaver. "Define proper."
She makes a sound that transcends language. Disapproval, sympathy, and the immediate intention to correct the problem, all compressed into a single exhale through the nose. She disappears and returns with a small pot of honey and a dish of soft cheese and sets them beside the bread with the decisive placement of someone who considers this a prescription rather than a suggestion.
"Small bites. Don't rush it. Your stomach needs to remember what food is."
The broth is warm and mild and sits in his stomach without protest. The bread is fresh and soft and the honey is sweet in a way that is gentle rather than cloying and the cheese is creamy and mild and he eats slowly, the way she told him to, and for a few minutes the fear recedes to a manageable distance and he is just a hungry person having breakfast. Just a body being fed. Just a boy sitting in a warm kitchen being looked after bysomeone who doesn't seem to want anything from him except for him to finish his bread.
The kitchen staff are kind. This is the thing he wasn't prepared for. Not the grandeur of the palace or the beauty of the prince or the hostility of the court, but the simple, unremarkable kindness of the people who work here, offered without ceremony or expectation. A young cook brings him a second cup of tea without being asked and sets it down with a nod and moves on. Another pauses to ask if he has any food sensitivities, and the question is so thoughtful and so mundane that Bryn almost doesn't know how to answer it. Theryn tells him the kitchen is always open to him, any hour of the day or night, and he should come whenever he needs to eat because she can tell he's the kind of person who forgets.
She's right. He is that kind of person. It's hard to remember your own hunger when you're busy calculating whether the grain stores will last the winter and whether the root cellar has flooded again and whether the cook has noticed that three of the silver serving spoons are missing because Bryn sold them to cover a debt his father doesn't know about.
He sits in the warm kitchen and drinks his tea and breathes. Just breathes. The steam rises from the cup and the sounds of the kitchen wash over him, the clatter and the voices and the hiss of something being dropped into hot oil, and he feels, for the first time since he put on that dress in Mithri's room, something other than afraid.
He feels tired. He feels sad. He feels homesick for a home that was never much of one, which is a particular kind of longing that doesn't make any sense and hurts all the more for it.
But he's breathing. And the broth is warm. And the kitchen doesn't expect anything from him.
***
Syreth finds him in the corridor outside the kitchens.
He doesn't see her coming. One moment he's walking, feeling almost steady on the foundation of warm broth and kindness, his step lighter than it's been since he arrived, and the next she's in front of him, stepping out from an alcove with the timing of someone who was waiting for him. Specifically. Deliberately. Her silver hair is pulled back from that severe face and her pale scales catch the amber light of the corridor and her expression is controlled, measured, nothing at all resembling the fury of the great hall. This is worse. The fury was honest. This is calculated, and Bryn has spent enough years around calculated people to recognize the difference and to know which one is more dangerous.
"You were not in the dining hall," she says.
"I had breakfast in the kitchens. I wasn't aware there was a mandate about where the prince's intended takes his meals."
"There isn't. I'm merely observing that an intended who hides in the kitchens rather than sit beside his prince is not exactly a portrait of devotion."
Bryn says nothing. He's learned, through years of dealing with his father's creditors and his mother's silence and the sycophants who circled Everen's dying court looking for any remaining scraps of influence, that sometimes the sharpest response is no response at all. Let them fill the silence with their own assumptions. It costs him nothing and it gives them nothing to work with.
Syreth steps closer. She's nearly a foot taller than him and she uses every inch of it, standing close enough that he has to tilt his head back to meet her eyes, and the posture is designed to make him feel small. It works. It would work on anyone. But Bryn has spent years standing in rooms with people who were taller andlouder and more powerful than him and refusing to be the one who looked away first, and he doesn't look away now.
"You should understand something, boy. The prince's reaction to you in that hall was biological. Involuntary. It is a response his body has to your scent and nothing more. It is not affection. It is not desire in any meaningful sense. It is hunger, and you would be wise not to mistake it for something more flattering."
The word hunger lands in him and detonates.
"You are a warm, pliant body for the prince's taking," she continues, her voice measured and almost gentle in the way that a blade is gentle when it's very sharp and doesn't need force. "A vessel for a biological imperative he did not choose and does not want. He will use you as his body demands, and when the novelty fades and the compulsion dulls, you will be exactly what you were in Everen: nothing. A second son with no kingdom and no worth and no place in any court, Drekian or otherwise."
She pauses. Lets it settle. She is good at this, Bryn thinks with the detached part of his brain that is always assessing, always cataloging, even when the rest of him is absorbing a blow. She is very good at this and she has probably been doing it for centuries and he is not her first target and he will not be her last.
"You will never be sovereign. You will never be queen, or king, or consort, or anything else that carries weight. You will never be anything more than the body that happened to trigger a response in a prince who deserves far better than what Everen has sent him. And one day, perhaps soon, the prince will wake and the bond will have cooled and he will look at you and see what the rest of us see. A boy. A liar. A nothing from a nothing kingdom, wearing clothes that don't fit."
Bryn holds her gaze. His face is still. He knows it's still because he has spent years making it still, years learning to absorb cruelty without flinching, and this is cruelty of the most sophisticated kind, the kind that is tailored and precise andknows exactly where to cut because it has been watching and listening and learning where the soft places are. She found them. She found every single one.
It works. Not because she's wrong about all of it. But because she's right about enough. He doesn't know what the mate bond is, not really, not in any way he can verify independently. He doesn't know if what he saw in Ithyris's eyes was genuine want or involuntary reflex. He doesn't know if the gentleness was real or if it was a biological compulsion dressed in tenderness, an instinct wearing a kind face, and the doubt was already there. It had been there since the moment the prince touched him, a small, cold seed planted deep, and Syreth has just given it water and sunlight and a name.
"Thank you for the insight," he says, and his voice is even and dry and gives her nothing. He has been giving people nothing for years. He is excellent at it. "Is there anything else, or may I go?"
She smiles. It's thin and satisfied and it's the smile of someone who knows she's landed every blow she aimed for and doesn't need to throw another. She steps aside and Bryn walks past her and he doesn't look back and he makes it around two corners and out of her line of sight before his hands start shaking.
He presses them flat against the stone wall and closes his eyes and breathes. The wall is warm beneath his palms. Everything here is warm. And he is standing in a corridor in a borrowed shirt with Syreth's words sitting in his chest next to the hollow space where his certainty used to be, and he cannot tell the difference between a prince who wants him and a dragon who is simply hungry. He cannot tell and there is no ledger for this, no column of figures he can run, no calculation that will give him the answer, and the not-knowing is its own kind of cruelty.
