Bryn realizes what he's done.
He has just assaulted a member of the Drekian court with baked goods. At a formal dinner. While seated at the right hand of the crown prince. On his second day in the palace. His hand is still extended from the throw and he lowers it slowly and his face is hot and his heart is hammering and he has absolutely no idea what happens now and every possible outcome ranges from terrible to catastrophic and he is going to be executed over a bread roll and Mithri is going to be so angry with him. She is going to be furious. She is going to come back from Aunt Elowen's estate specifically to tell him what an idiot he is, and she'll be right, and he won't even be alive to hear it.
Ithyris looks at the bread roll, floating gently in the courtier's soup. He looks at the courtier's stunned face, the broth dotting his tunic, the perfect round imprint of flour already fading from his forehead. He looks at Bryn.
He laughs.
Not a polite laugh. Not the restrained exhale of a prince maintaining decorum at his own dinner table. A real laugh, startled out of him, genuine and delighted and utterly uncontrolled, and it transforms his face so completely that Bryn's stomach drops out from under him. Ithyris's head tips back and his throat is bared and the scales along his jaw shimmer in the candlelight and his eyes crinkle at the corners and his mouth curves wide and open and he is laughing with his whole body, shoulders shaking, the sound of it rich and warm and ringing through the silent hall, and he is beautiful. He is the most beautiful thing Bryn has ever seen and the realization arrives with the subtlety of a thrown bread roll and the impact of something considerably heavier.
The court doesn't know what to do. The prince is laughing. Their formidable, controlled, dangerous prince who took an elder by the throat yesterday and silenced a man with a look is laughing at his dinner table over a bread roll, and several courtiers exchange bewildered glances and one or two of them start to smile, tentatively, as though checking with their neighbors that this is permitted, that it's safe to find this funny, that the world hasn't ended just because the prince of the Drekian Sovereignty is showing his teeth for a reason other than threat.
Ithyris leans toward Bryn. Close. Closer than he's been all evening, close enough that his lips nearly brush Bryn's ear, and Bryn feels his breath warm against his skin and the vibration of his laughter still humming in his chest, a resonance that Bryn can feel in his own ribs because they're that close, and the proximity is making it very difficult to maintain the fiction that he is unaffected by this man.
"Your aim is sharp, my intended."
The low vibration of his voice goes straight down Bryn's spine and settles at the base of it and stays there, hot and liquid, and the possessive warmth of the words my intended lands on him and sinks in and he can feel the flush spreading down his neck and there is nothing he can do about it. His hand tightens on his fork. His face is burning. Every nerve in his body is lit and humming and the prince is so close that if Bryn turned his head their mouths would touch and the thought arrives uninvited and devastating and he shoves it away with both hands and every ounce of willpower he possesses and it doesn't go far enough.
"You're insufferable," he says.
It comes out rough. Breathless. Not at all the cutting dismissal he intended. It sounds, if he's being honest with himself, which he would prefer not to be, almost fond, and that's worse thananything else that has happened at this table including the bread-throwing.
Ithyris smiles. Warm and wanting and completely unrepentant, the smile of a man who has just watched someone do something absurd and found it not just amusing but endearing, and the combination of warmth and want on that face is so potent that Bryn has to look away or risk doing something he can't take back.
"Possibly," the prince says. "But you're the one who threw bread at a lord of the court, so I think we're well matched."
Bryn looks away. He has to. If he keeps looking at Ithyris's face with that smile on it he's going to do something inadvisable, and he doesn't know what that something is but he can feel it building in his chest with a pressure that is becoming unmanageable, and they are at a dinner table surrounded by fifty Drekian courtiers who are watching them with open fascination and this is not the place and he is not ready and the prince needs to stop smiling at him immediately.
The courtier, to his credit, has recovered enough to fish the bread roll out of his soup with what remains of his dignity. He looks at it, sodden and dripping. He looks at Bryn. He looks at the prince, who is still smiling in a way that suggests the courtier's next words should be chosen with extraordinary care and that no choice is the safest choice of all.
The courtier says nothing. He sets the bread roll on his plate and returns to his meal and does not look at Bryn again for the rest of the evening, which is the most satisfying result Bryn has achieved through violence since the time he threw the candlestick at the debt collector and the man tripped over his own feet running out the door.
The court returns to its conversation, but the energy in the room has shifted. Something has cracked open, some rigidity in the way the court perceives him, and Bryn can feel the edges ofit giving way. The prince laughed. The prince laughed because of his strange, undersized, bread-throwing human intended, and the court doesn't know what to do with that information but it is filing it away in whatever mental category it keeps for things that are unexpected and possibly significant. Bryn is no longer just the human boy who was stripped and thrown on the floor. He's the human boy who threw a bread roll at a lord of the court and made the prince laugh, and that is a different thing entirely.
Under the table, Ithyris's hand finds his. Not brushing this time. Not the light, plausibly deniable grazes of earlier. He takes Bryn's hand in his and his fingers thread through Bryn's and his palm is warm and rough and calloused and his grip is steady and sure and Bryn should pull away. He knows he should pull away. He should reclaim his hand and his composure and the distance he needs to maintain if he's going to survive this arrangement with his heart intact, because the walls are already cracking and every point of contact with this man weakens them further.
He doesn't pull away.
He sits at the dragon prince's table with Ithyris's hand wrapped around his and he eats his dinner and he pretends he is fine and he is not fine. He is the furthest thing from fine that a person can be while still maintaining upright posture and the appearance of calm. Because the truth, the terrible, inconvenient, structurally compromising truth that he has been trying to outrun since the moment Ithyris draped a cloak over his bare shoulders, is that he doesn't want the prince to stop touching him.
He doesn't want him to stop looking at him. He doesn't want him to stop saying his name in that voice. He doesn't want him to stop finding him in libraries and explaining dishes and laughing at his violence and holding his hand under the table while a room full of dragons pretends not to notice and fails at it entirely.
He wants him to keep going. He wants him to never stop. And that want is a fissure in every wall he's ever built, running through the foundation of the architecture he's spent eighteen years constructing, and he can feel the cracks spreading, and he doesn't know how to stop them and he's not entirely sure he wants to, and that second uncertainty is the most frightening thing of all.
Ithyris's thumb traces a slow line across his knuckles. Back and forth. Back and forth. Patient and warm and constant, the same steadiness that Bryn felt in the great hall, the same steadiness he felt in the library, the same steadiness the prince seems to carry with him everywhere and offer freely and without condition.
Bryn is in so much trouble.
Chapter 7
The first trial is trust.
Lira tells him this the morning of, delivering the information along with a tray of plain bread and broth that Theryn has been sending up daily since Bryn found the kitchens. He's been in the Sovereignty for five days. He's eaten every meal in either the kitchens or his chambers except for that first dinner, which he counts as a victory of self-preservation even if the court counts it as cowardice. He has also read fourteen books from the library, memorized the layout of two-thirds of the palace, and developed what he suspects is a genuine friendship with the head cook, which is more meaningful relationships than he formed in the last three years in Everen combined.
"The Trial of Sky and Storm," Lira says, perched on the arm of the chair with her legs crossed, delivering catastrophic information with the casual energy of someone discussing the weather. "You'll fly with the prince. On his back. In his other form."
Bryn sets down the bread.
"His other form."
