He stands there for a long time. Then he pushes off the wall and walks and doesn't stop until he finds somewhere to think.
***
He spends the rest of the day in the library.
It's an accident. He's wandering the corridors, trying to learn the layout, cataloging turns and staircases and the location of exits because old habits are survival habits and also because the alternative is going back to the suite and sitting on the too-large bed and thinking about Syreth's words until they eat through what's left of his composure. He pushes open a door that looks indistinguishable from every other door in this corridor and finds himself in a room that stops him where he stands.
The library is three stories tall. Shelves carved directly into the volcanic rock, rising from floor to ceiling, every surface covered in books and scrolls and bound manuscripts in languages he can and cannot read. The ceiling is open to a shaft of natural light that falls through a fissure in the mountain above, and the light catches the dust motes suspended in the warm air and turns them to gold. There are reading alcoves set into the walls, each one furnished with a cushioned bench and a small table and a glowing amber stone for light, and the whole room smells of old paper and leather and the faint mineral tang of the volcanic rock and it is, without question, the most beautiful room Bryn has ever entered, and he walked through the great hall yesterday.
In Everen, the library held forty-seven books. He knows because he read them all by the time he was thirteen and then read them again because there was nothing else, and by fifteen he could recite entire chapters of the kingdom's trade history from memory, which is both impressive and deeply sad depending on how you look at it.
This room holds thousands.
He pulls a book from the nearest shelf. It's a history of Drekian trade routes, written in Common, with detailed maps and annotations in a precise, elegant hand. He opens it and startsreading and he doesn't stop, because information is the only currency Bryn has ever had that couldn't be taken from him, and this room is a treasury beyond anything he's ever imagined.
He reads through the afternoon. He reads about the thermal river networks and how they're used for transport and agriculture, and the systems are so elegant and so efficient that he wants to weep for Everen's rotting irrigation and the canal that collapsed four years ago because his father wouldn't fund the repairs. He reads about the obsidian trade and the gem mines in the eastern mountains. He reads about the Sovereignty's military history, its alliances, its enemies, its internal politics, and he absorbs it all with the desperate, methodical focus of someone who knows that understanding the place you're trapped in is the first step toward surviving it.
He's deep in a chapter on Drekian succession law, which is both more complex and more interesting than he expected, when the air in the library changes.
He doesn't hear Ithyris approach. But he feels him. A warmth at his back, a shift in the quality of the silence, and the back of his neck prickles with that involuntary awareness that he has already learned to associate with the prince's proximity, and he knows, with a certainty he resents, that Ithyris has entered the room.
He doesn't look up. He turns a page and keeps reading and he wills his pulse to stay even and it does not listen, because his pulse has apparently decided it answers to the dragon prince and not to Bryn, which is a mutiny he intends to address at the earliest opportunity.
Ithyris doesn't speak. Bryn hears him settle into a chair nearby, hears the creak of wood under his weight, and then nothing. He sits. Bryn reads. The silence between them is full of everything unsaid, and Bryn refuses to be the one who breaks itbecause he has been breaking silences his entire life and for once he would like someone else to go first.
Several minutes pass. He's read the same paragraph four times and retained none of it.
"You should ignore the elder council."
The prince's voice is low and quiet and Bryn tenses at the sound of it, his shoulders drawing up before he can stop them. Ithyris knows about Syreth. Of course he does. In a palace full of creatures with heightened senses, nothing stays private for long. Bryn wonders if the prince can smell the encounter on him, whether Syreth's proximity left a scent on his skin the way Ithyris's cloak left cedar and smoke, and the thought makes something in him twist uncomfortably.
He still doesn't look up. "I'm reading."
"I can see that." A pause. Bryn can hear the prince choosing his next words with the same deliberateness he applies to everything. "Syreth is set in her ways. She is accustomed to tradition and she does not adapt easily to change, and she and the other elders no longer understand the severity of what it means to find a mate."
Bryn closes the book. The sound is louder than he intended in the quiet library, almost sharp, and he sets it down on the table and finally looks at Ithyris.
The prince is sitting in the reading alcove across from his, his long body folded into the cushioned bench in a way that would look uncomfortable on anyone else but on him just looks settled, as though he's used to fitting his frame into spaces that weren't designed for it. The shaft of natural light from the ceiling falls across his shoulder and illuminates the violet scales at his throat, and he looks less princely here than he did in the hall, more approachable, more real. His dark hair is slightly disordered, as though he ran his hands through it on the way here. His shirt is the same simple one from last night, sleevespushed up to the elbows, and Bryn can see the scales extending down his forearms, violet fading to a softer lavender where they meet the tanned skin at his wrists. His feet are bare again.
Bryn doesn't know why the bare feet keep catching his attention. Something about the vulnerability of it, maybe. The informality. The fact that the prince of the Drekian Sovereignty keeps showing up without shoes on, as though he sheds pieces of his armor when he comes to find Bryn and arrives a little less defended each time. Bryn doesn't know if that's deliberate or if it's just what Ithyris does, and he doesn't know which option unsettles him more.
"Explain it to me," Bryn says.
"Explain what?"
"The mate bond. What it actually means. What you think I am to you. Because right now I have the elder council telling me one thing and you telling me another and I don't know enough about Drekian biology to determine which of you is lying."
Something passes across Ithyris's face. Not offense. Recognition, maybe. As though Bryn's distrust is expected and deserved and the prince doesn't fault him for it, which is generous considering Bryn just accused him of potentially lying.
"I'm not lying."
"Convince me."
The prince is quiet for a moment. He looks at his hands, then at Bryn, and when he speaks his voice has the quality of something he's known his entire life and never said out loud, a truth so fundamental to him that putting it into words feels both necessary and inadequate.
"Dragons are born with half of their soul missing."
Bryn blinks. Of all the things he was expecting the prince to say, that was not among them. He was expecting biology. He was expecting an explanation that involved pheromones and instinct and the kind of clinical terminology that would confirm Syreth'sversion of events. He was not expecting the prince to sit across from him with bare feet and disordered hair and tell him about his soul.
