"Thank you," he manages.
"The purple root is sweet. You'll like it."
"You don't know what I like."
"Not yet."
The two words land with a quiet weight that is entirely out of proportion to their size. Not yet. As though learning what Bryn likes is a project the prince fully intends to undertake, as though it's a foregone conclusion that they will know each other well enough for preferences to be mapped and remembered, and the casual certainty of it makes something in Bryn's chest do something he is not going to name.
He eats the grain. Ithyris is right, it settles his stomach. He tries the purple root and the prince is right about that too, it's sweet and earthy and good, genuinely good, and Bryn hates that he's right. He eats and Ithyris watches him eat with a satisfaction that is entirely unreasonable for a man observing another man consume root vegetables at a dinner table, and Bryn refuses to acknowledge the warmth that blooms in his chest at being fed well by someone who noticed he was hungry. He has been feeding other people for years. He has spent six years calculating portions and negotiating supply and ensuring that everyone in Everen's castle ate before he did, and no one in that entire time thought to notice that the person doing the feeding was starving.
Ithyris noticed. On the second day.
The conversation around the table resumes as the court apparently decides that watching the prince feed his intended root vegetables is not sufficiently entertaining to sustain their attention. They discuss trade and territory and the upcoming seasonal rituals, and Bryn listens with half an ear and files away information out of habit because information is currency and he is always, always collecting. The Sovereignty is negotiatingnew trade terms with a kingdom to the north, and the terms being discussed are unfavorable and the Drekian negotiator doesn't seem to realize it. There's a dispute over mining rights in the eastern mountains that has been dragging on for months because neither party will concede the initial surveying costs. Someone's dragon form accidentally collapsed a bridge during a training exercise, which is apparently a common enough occurrence that it warrants mild exasperation rather than alarm.
Normal political business. Familiar territory, dressed in unfamiliar clothing. Bryn could contribute. He's been running a kingdom on his own for six years, and the trade dispute they're discussing has an obvious solution that no one at this table seems to see: split the surveying costs in exchange for a graduated royalty share that favors the party bearing the higher initial investment. It's a straightforward arbitration framework that Bryn used twice with Everen's border merchants and it worked both times. But he keeps his mouth shut because he is a human boy at a dragon's table and no one has asked for his opinion and no one ever asks for his opinion.
Ithyris's hand brushes his under the table.
Bryn goes rigid. The touch is light, the prince's fingers grazing the back of his hand where it rests on his thigh, and he doesn't know if it's deliberate or involuntary. Ithyris's hand lingers for a moment, warm and large, the pads of his fingers resting against Bryn's knuckles with a gentleness that sends a spike of something electric up his arm, and then it withdraws. Bryn stares at his plate and wills his pulse to slow and it will not slow because his pulse has defected to the enemy and takes its orders from a dragon prince now.
It happens again three minutes later. This time the prince's knuckles, dragging softly across the inside of Bryn's wrist as he reaches for his goblet, as though the path to the goblet necessarily passes through Bryn's personal space, which itdoesn't. The touch sends heat spiking up his arm and into his chest and he grips his fork so tightly the metal bites into his palm and leaves a mark.
And again. Ithyris's thigh pressing against his under the table, a slow, warm weight that settles and stays. That one is deliberate. Bryn can tell because the prince doesn't move away, doesn't adjust, just lets the contact remain, the heat of him bleeding through the fabric and into Bryn's skin, and Bryn is trying very hard to eat dinner and he is failing spectacularly because every point of contact with this man sends a current through his body that makes rational thought difficult and coherent chewing nearly impossible.
Ithyris leans in again, ostensibly to explain a dish. His mouth is close to Bryn's ear. Too close. Bryn can feel the shape of his words against his skin, can feel the warmth of each syllable landing on the sensitive spot just below his earlobe, and his hand tightens on his fork until his knuckles go white.
"The sauce on the left is spiced with something humans find overwhelming. Avoid it unless you enjoy not being able to feel your tongue for a week."
"I'll keep that in mind," Bryn says, and his voice comes out lower than it should, rougher than it should, and he hears it and is furious at himself for it.
The prince pulls back but not far. His arm settles on the table beside Bryn's and his little finger comes to rest against Bryn's wrist, a single point of contact that shouldn't register as significant and registers as a five-alarm fire in every nerve Bryn possesses. The prince knows exactly what he's doing. Bryn is certain of it now. The bond, Ithyris said, magnifies physical closeness. Bryn doesn't know if the magnification is mutual or one-sided but from where he's sitting it feels as though he's been set on fire from the inside and the source of the flame is the six-foot-something dragon prince who keeps finding excuses totouch his hand and explain dishes and lean close enough that Bryn can count the individual scales at his jaw.
The second course arrives. Bryn forces himself to eat. He forces himself to appear composed, because he is a prince, however diminished and however fraudulently he arrived at this table, and he knows how to sit through a formal dinner and not make a fool of himself. He has sat through Everen's disastrous state dinners with a straight face while his father slurred through toasts and knocked over candelabras. He can handle a dragon prince touching his knee.
Ithyris's thumb traces a slow circle on said knee under the tablecloth and Bryn reconsiders this assessment.
Then the courtier speaks.
He's seated four places down, a Drekian male with sharp features and bronze scales at his temples and the self-satisfied bearing of someone who has never been told no in his life and whose jaw has never made the acquaintance of a fist, though it very clearly should have. He's been watching Bryn all evening, Bryn has noticed, with an expression that hovers between amusement and disdain and settles comfortably in the territory of both.
He waits for a lull in the conversation. Then he raises his voice, just enough to carry to the head of the table, just enough to ensure everyone hears.
"Tell me, human. When you took your sister's place, did you intend to provide the same services? Bearing children, I mean. Or is that the one area where your little disguise falls short?"
Laughter. Not much, not from everyone, but enough. A few courtiers exchange glances. Someone covers a smile with their goblet. The comment is designed to humiliate, crafted with the casual precision of someone who has spent his life finding soft targets and pressing his thumb into them for sport, and it is effective. Bryn feels it land in the center of his chest, in thebruised place where Syreth's words are still festering, right next to the memory of the man in the gallery who wanted to gift him to the fighting pits.
Beside him, Ithyris goes very still. His hand tightens on Bryn's knee. Bryn can feel the shift in him, the coiling of something dangerous and hot, the prince's body tensing with the barely contained impulse to rise and do something that will terrify this man into silence. And he will be protected, Bryn knows. The prince will protect him. Ithyris will say or do something devastating and the courtier will cower and the court will file the incident away as further evidence that the prince is possessive of his mate, and Bryn will be safe and he will also be diminished, because the court will see a human who cannot fight his own battles and needs a dragon to do it for him.
He doesn't think about it. He picks up the bread roll from his plate and throws it.
His aim is excellent. It always has been. Years of hurling ledgers at dishonest merchants and spoiled vegetables at stray cats who got into the pantry and, on one memorable occasion, a candlestick at a debt collector who tried to force his way into the study, have honed a throwing arm that has no business being this accurate on a person of his stature. The bread roll crosses the distance between them in a clean arc and hits the courtier square in the center of his forehead with a solid, deeply satisfying thud that echoes in the sudden silence of the hall.
Silence.
Absolute, total, ringing silence. The kind of silence that only happens when an entire room full of people witnesses something so unexpected that their collective brains need a moment to process it before anyone can formulate a response.
The courtier stares at him. The bread roll has bounced off his forehead, traveled a short trajectory through the air, and landed in his soup with a small, dignified splash. A spatter of dark brothdots his immaculate tunic. His mouth is open. The entire table has frozen mid-bite, mid-sip, mid-sentence, and every pair of eyes in the room is fixed on Bryn.
