Lira cuts again and another strand falls. And another. The weight lifts from his neck, from his shoulders, strand by strand, and with each cut something loosens in him that he didn't know was tight. The hair collects on the floor around the chair in soft, golden curls and he watches it accumulate and he thinks: that's Everen. That's the boy who held the walls up. That's the prince who darned his own clothes and forged the ledger and fed everyone before he fed himself and never once asked for help because there was no one to ask.
That boy got him here. That boy kept Mithri safe and held the kingdom together long enough for it to matter and walked into a dragon's court in a dress and didn't flinch. He is grateful for thatboy. He will always be grateful. But that boy was surviving, and Bryn is tired of surviving. He has been surviving for six years and it has cost him everything and he is sitting in a chair in a volcano letting a girl with green scales cut away the last physical thing that ties him to the person he was, and it hurts and it's necessary and he is not going to cry about it.
His eyes are stinging. He blinks hard and stares at the far wall and breathes through his nose.
Lira works in silence. She is careful and precise and she takes her time, trimming the length down to something that falls just above his ears, shorter at the sides and slightly longer on top. She doesn't try to fill the silence with conversation and he is grateful for that too, because if she said something kind right now he would lose his composure and he has already lost enough today.
The last cut. Lira brushes the loose strands from his neck and shoulders with her hand and steps back.
"There," she says. Her voice is softer than usual. "Go look."
He stands and crosses to the obsidian mirror and the person looking back at him is not the person who left Everen.
The long gold hair is gone. What remains is short and fine and frames his face in a way that changes the geometry of it entirely, sharpening the cheekbones that were always there but were softened by the curtain of hair, exposing the line of his jaw and the length of his neck and the shape of his ears. He looks younger in some ways and older in others. He looks less like Mithri. He looks less like his mother. He looks, for the first time in his life, entirely and unmistakably like himself, and the sight of his own face without anything to hide behind is disorienting and raw and frightening and, underneath all of that, something that feels unexpectedly close to relief.
He doesn't look like a princess anymore. He doesn't look like a substitute or a stand-in or something in between. He looks like aboy with sharp cheekbones and tired grey eyes and a mouth that is still, admittedly, prettier than it has any right to be, but it's his face. Just his. Not borrowed. Not stolen. Not worn on behalf of someone else.
"Better?" Lira asks from behind him. Her voice is careful, which is unusual for her, as though she understands that this moment is more fragile than it appears.
"Yes," he says, and his voice comes out rough and he doesn't bother trying to fix it. "Better."
She nods. She doesn't comment on the roughness or the stinging in his eyes or the gold hair still scattered on the floor around the chair. She just picks up the shears and tucks them into her belt and says, "Good. Now you look like you belong to yourself. The court can deal with that."
She sweeps the hair from the floor and discards it without ceremony, which is exactly right, because ceremony would have broken him. Then she adjusts the collar of his shirt one more time, smooths the shoulders, steps back and examines the full picture: the altered clothes, the short hair, the grey eyes that are still a little too bright.
"You'll do," she says, and this time it sounds different. This time it sounds like she means it.
"Your enthusiasm is overwhelming."
"I'm saving my enthusiasm for when you survive the first course without causing an international incident."
He follows her through the corridors to the dining hall and he does not think about the last time he walked through these passages toward a room full of Drekians. He does not think about the dress being torn from his body or the stone beneath his knees or Syreth's hand in his hair, his old hair, the hair that is now swept up and discarded and no longer available for anyone to grab. He thinks instead about the bread he ate in the kitchen this morning and the book he read in the library thisafternoon and the look on Ithyris's face when Bryn told him to stop staring and the prince said no, simply and without apology, as though the request was unreasonable and he had no intention of honoring it. He wonders what the prince will think of the hair. He wonders and then he stops wondering because it doesn't matter what the prince thinks. He didn't cut it for Ithyris. He cut it for himself, and that's the first thing he's done for himself in six years.
The dining hall is smaller than the great hall, though smaller is a relative term in a palace carved from a volcano and nothing in this kingdom qualifies as small by any standard Bryn is familiar with. The table is long and dark and set with plates and goblets that catch the amber light, the tableware alone worth more than Everen's entire treasury at current valuation, and there must be forty or fifty Drekians already seated when he arrives. The conversation dips as he enters, not to silence but to a lower register, and he feels the weight of their attention settle on him from every direction, assessing, curious, openly hostile in some cases and merely indifferent in others. He is a novelty. A spectacle. The human boy who wore a dress to court and got claimed by the prince and threw the entire succession into chaos, and they are watching him the way people watch something they haven't decided is dangerous or pathetic yet.
Ithyris is at the head of the table. He sees Bryn and stands.
He doesn't need to stand. No one stands when an intended enters a dining hall. Bryn knows enough about court protocol from his years of running Everen's dying version of it to know that this is not required, and the fact that Ithyris does it anyway, rising to his full considerable height with a fluid motion that draws every eye in the room, says something that Bryn doesn't have the emotional bandwidth to process right now.
Then the prince's gaze reaches his hair, and he goes still.
Not the dangerous stillness of the great hall. Something different. Something that looks, from across the room, almost stricken, as though the sight of Bryn with short hair has done something to him that he wasn't braced for. His lips part slightly. His eyes travel the new line of Bryn's jaw, the exposed length of his neck, the way the short gold hair frames his cheekbones instead of hiding them, and whatever the prince sees makes his expression crack open for just a moment before he puts it back together. The hunger is still there, open and unashamed, but there's something new layered through it. Something that looks, impossibly, almost reverent, as though Bryn has walked into the dining hall and presented him with something he didn't ask for and doesn't know how to hold.
Bryn's chest tightens. He didn't cut it for the prince. He reminds himself of that as he makes his way to the empty chair at the right hand. He cut it for himself.
"Bryn." The prince says his name the way other people say prayers. Low. Deliberate. Full of something private and intent that has no business being spoken aloud in a room full of people. But there's a new note in it tonight, something rough at the edges, and his gaze keeps returning to the short hair and the exposed line of Bryn's throat and the place behind his ear where the gold strands are shortest and the skin is pale and has never seen daylight before today. Bryn grits his teeth against the shiver it sends down his spine and refuses to let it show on his face, though he suspects the effort is visible and possibly amusing to anyone paying close attention.
"Your Highness," he says, and sits.
Ithyris sits beside him. Close. The chairs at the head of the table are large by Drekian standards, which means they're enormous by human standards, but the distance between them is negligible and Bryn is immediately, acutely aware of the heat of the prince's body next to his. Ithyris radiates warmth the waythe volcanic stone of this palace radiates warmth, constant and ambient and inescapable, and his thigh is inches from Bryn's thigh and his arm, resting on the table, is close enough that the fine hair on his forearm catches the candlelight and the scales at his wrist shimmer violet in Bryn's peripheral vision and the warmth coming off him is a physical presence that Bryn can feel through his clothes.
The first course arrives. Something roasted, dark meat in a rich sauce, accompanied by grains and vegetables Bryn doesn't recognize. He picks up his fork and realizes he has no idea what half the dishes are or how they're meant to be eaten and a thread of panic tightens in his chest because he has spent his entire life performing competence in rooms where he was the least powerful person present and he cannot perform competence when he doesn't know what the food is. In Everen, he knew the meals because he planned them, calculated their cost, negotiated with the merchants who supplied them. Here he is confronted with a table full of dishes he can't identify and cutlery he's not certain he's holding correctly and the acute, humiliating awareness that for all his intelligence and all his strategic ability, he is completely out of his depth at a dinner table.
Ithyris leans toward him.
His mouth is near Bryn's ear. His breath is warm and Bryn feels it against the side of his neck and the fine hairs there stand up and his fork stops halfway to his mouth and his entire body goes still with an attention that is involuntary and total.
"The dark meat is wyvern. It's rich and it'll sit heavy if you eat too much of it at once. Start with the grain, it'll settle your stomach." His voice is low, pitched for only Bryn, and the intimacy of it, the warm breath and the proximity and the deliberate care of the advice, makes Bryn's skin flush from the collar up. The new, higher collar that Lira altered specifically tocover this exact stretch of skin, and the flush is going to be visible above it anyway and there is nothing he can do about it.
