"I'll try to be more subtle."
"Please."
The prince does not try to be more subtle. He does not try at all. He watches Bryn with those amethyst eyes and the light shifts as the afternoon passes and the shaft of sunlight moves across the library floor and eventually Bryn stops pretending it bothers him and just reads, and the prince's presence at his back is warm and constant and steady, and he finds, to his quiet, private horror, that he doesn't mind it.
He doesn't mind it at all. And that, he suspects, is how it begins.
Chapter 6
Bryn cannot avoid the dining hall forever, much as he'd like to make a genuine attempt.
Lira is the one who tells him, arriving at his chambers the following evening with an armful of clothing she's clearly altered herself. The stitching is uneven in places and the thread doesn't quite match the fabric, but the intent is sound and the effort is considerable: she's taken in the shoulders and hemmed the trousers and adjusted the waist so that the result is something that almost fits him, dark fabric that doesn't hang off his frame in quite so tragic a fashion as the clothes from last night. She's also brought a fresh shirt with a collar that sits higher, which Bryn suspects is deliberate. It covers the spot on his collarbone where Ithyris's fingers brushed, and he is grateful for that in a way he is not going to examine.
"The court expects you at dinner tonight," she says, tossing the clothes on his bed with the casual precision of someone who has delivered clothing to difficult people before and has no patience for ceremony. "The prince's intended, seated at his right hand. Formal. Mandatory. Not optional, before you ask."
"I wasn't going to ask."
"You were absolutely going to ask. I could see it forming behind your eyes the moment I said the word dinner. You were already composing your excuse. Something about feeling unwell, probably, or needing to continue your research in the library."
She's right. He was composing exactly that excuse, and the fact that she's known him for one day and can already predict his avoidance strategies is either a testament to her perceptiveness or an indictment of his transparency. Possibly both.
He changes into the altered clothes and Lira stands in the doorway with her arms crossed and studies him with the critical eye of a person who takes presentation seriously and is not entirely satisfied with the materials she's been given to work with. She adjusts the collar. Smooths the shoulders. Steps back and tilts her head and examines him from two different angles and makes a small sound that could be approval or could be resignation.
Then her gaze moves up to his hair and she frowns. It's still long, still gold, still falling past his shoulders in the same style he's worn it his entire life because Mithri wore hers that way and their mother wore hers that way and in Everen a prince's hair was a statement of lineage, of belonging, of the bloodline it represented. Bryn has been wearing his hair for his family since before he can remember.
"The hair's a problem," Lira says. "It still looks like hers."
She means Mithri's. She means the braid he threaded with flowers and the loose golden curtain he hid behind in the carriage and the hair that Syreth fisted her hand in and used to wrench his head back on the dais. She's right. It does still look like his sister's. That was the point, once. It's not the point anymore.
"Cut it," Bryn says.
Lira blinks. "What?"
"My hair. Cut it. Do you have scissors, or a knife, or anything sharp enough to get through it?"
She stares at him for a moment, reading his face the way she seems to read everything, with a directness that doesn't bother with tact. Whatever she finds there makes her expression shift from surprise to something quieter, something that almost looks like understanding.
"I have a blade. Hold on."
She disappears down the corridor and comes back less than a minute later with a pair of shears that look like they belong in a tailor's kit, which they probably do given the alterations she's been doing. She pulls the chair out from the writing desk and positions it in the center of the room and gestures at it.
"Sit."
He sits. Lira moves behind him and he feels her hands gather his hair, lifting it away from his neck, testing the weight of it. It's heavy. He's never noticed how heavy it is because he's never been without it, the same way he never noticed the weight of the ledger or the weight of the crown's debts or the weight of any of the things he's been carrying until he imagines what it would feel like to set them down.
"How short?" she asks.
He thinks about it. He thinks about Mithri's golden hair catching the afternoon light in the ruined garden. He thinks about his mother's hair, the same shade, the same length, the hair of Everen's women, the hair of a lineage he was born into and never quite belonged to. He thinks about the mirror in Mithri's room where he stood in a borrowed dress and saw something in between, something fragile and temporary, and he thinks about the fact that he is not in between anymore. He is here. He is in this palace and he is the prince's intended and he is not Mithri and he is not pretending to be Mithri and the hair thathelped him pass as his sister is not something he needs to hide behind anymore.
"Short," he says. "Short enough that no one looks at me and sees her."
Lira is quiet for a moment. Then she combs her fingers through his hair, separating it into sections with a gentleness that he wasn't expecting from her, and he feels the cool edge of the shears against the back of his neck.
"You're sure?"
"Yes."
The first cut is the loudest. The shears close and a thick strand of gold falls past his shoulder and lands on the heated stone floor, and the sight of it there, pale and bright against the dark rock, does something to Bryn's chest that he wasn't prepared for. That hair has been with him his entire life. It was there when Alder died and when his mother closed her door and when he sat up through the night forging numbers in the treasury ledger. It was there when he held Mithri in the servants' passage and breathed in the smell of her and tried to memorize the shape of her against him. It was there when he put on her dress and became someone else to save her.
