He is the most terrifyingly beautiful thing Bryn has ever seen. He is the most terrifyingly beautiful thing anyone has ever seen, probably, in the entire recorded history of seeing things, and Bryn is supposed to climb on him and hold on while he flies through a mountain pass and not think about the fact that this creature declared him his mate in front of the entire court.
The platform trembles under the dragon's weight. The wind changes direction, redirected by the sheer mass of him, and heat pours off his body in waves that distort the air between them. Bryn can feel it from thirty feet away, the furnace of his internal fire, the metabolic output of a body that could level castles and fly through storms and apparently also sit in library alcoves in human form with his bare feet up and watch Bryn read about succession law.
Ithyris lowers his head. Slowly, carefully, with a deliberateness that tells Bryn the prince is aware of every inch of his size relative to Bryn's. He brings his massive head down to Bryn's level and those amethyst eyes, each one larger than Bryn's torso, find him and hold him and in them Bryn sees the same thing he sees in the prince's human eyes: want, worry, the desperate hope that Bryn won't run.
He doesn't run.
He approaches the dragon on legs that are shaking badly enough that the court in the galleries can probably see it and count the individual tremors. He doesn't care. Let them see. Let them watch the human boy tremble and walk forward anyway, because that's what trust is. Not the absence of fear. The decision to move despite it. Bryn has been making that decision his entire life, in cold studies and empty corridors and rooms full of people who didn't want him, and this is just one more time.
He reaches the dragon's neck. The scales here are smaller, finer, layered in overlapping rows that create a natural grip, and ridges run along the spine, each one as tall as Bryn's forearm, spaced evenly for what he realizes with a lurch is exactly this purpose. Someone is meant to sit here. Between the ridges, against the thick muscle of the neck, legs braced on either side. The realization that this body was designed, at least in part, to carry a rider, to carry a mate, sends something through Bryn that he doesn't have the time or the emotional bandwidth to process.
He reaches up and grips the nearest ridge. The scale is warm under his hand, almost hot, smooth on the surface but textured underneath with a grain that provides traction. He pulls himself up. It is graceless. He scrambles and slips and hauls himself upward with the kind of undignified physical effort that would make his old etiquette tutor weep, and he finally manages to swing a leg over the crest of the dragon's neck and settle into the natural saddle between two ridges, and the position is intimate in a way that he was not prepared for and that no one warned him about.
He becomes immediately, viscerally, comprehensively aware of the intimacy of it.
His thighs are pressed against the thick muscle of the dragon's neck, spread wide around the breadth of him. His hands grip the ridge in front of him, knuckles white. The heat of the dragon's body seeps into him everywhere they touch, through his trousers, through his shirt, into his inner thighs and his chest where he leans forward against the warm scales, and the warmth is deep and constant and overwhelming and present in places that are making it very difficult to maintain the fiction that this is simply a trial and not the single most physically intense experience of his life. He can feel the massive body beneath him shifting and flexing with each breath, the slow expansion of ribsthat are larger than he is, the play of muscle under scale, alive and powerful and warm and pressed against every inch of him from hip to chest.
He is straddling a dragon. He is straddling the dragon prince of the Drekian Sovereignty and the prince's body is hot between his legs and the dragon's heartbeat is thrumming against his inner thighs, a deep resonant pulse that he can feel in his bones, and he is suddenly, furiously, catastrophically aware of every single place their bodies are touching and there are a significant number of them.
He tightens his grip on the ridge and presses his forehead against the warm scale and breathes and tries very hard to think about literally anything else. Trade routes. Tax calculations. The forty-seven books in Everen's library. The three-eared rabbit on Mithri's handkerchief. Anything. Anything that is not the feeling of this body between his legs and the heartbeat drumming against his thighs.
Ithyris rumbles. The sound vibrates through his entire body and into Bryn's, a deep, resonant hum that Bryn feels in his bones and his teeth and his stomach and significantly lower than his stomach, a vibration that travels through every point of contact between them and settles in places that are going to make the return to the palace extremely uncomfortable. It's a question. Bryn doesn't speak dragon but he understands it: Are you ready?
"Yes," he says, and he is lying, but he says it anyway because he has been lying in one form or another since he arrived at this palace and at least this lie is productive.
The dragon launches.
The ground disappears.
The force of the takeoff pins Bryn against the dragon's neck and his fingers lock around the ridge and his thighs clamp and the world tilts, violently, and the platform is gone and thepalace is gone and there is nothing beneath him but air and the massive, churning body of the dragon carrying him into the sky. The transition from solid ground to open air is so absolute, so total, that his brain refuses to process it for several seconds and simply presents him with white noise and the sensation of his stomach relocating to somewhere in the vicinity of his throat.
The wind is immediate and brutal. It tears at his short hair and his clothes and his grip and the first wingbeat is a violent downdraft that drops them twenty feet before the upstroke catches and they surge upward and his stomach stays behind somewhere around his knees. He doesn't scream. He is proud of this. He also can't breathe, which may be contributing to the silence, but he'll take credit for the composure regardless.
Ithyris climbs. The mountains of the Sovereignty spread below them, dark volcanic peaks veined with thermal rivers that catch the dawn light and glow white against the black rock, connected by sky bridges that are suddenly, terrifyingly small, small enough that Bryn can barely see them from this height. The palace shrinks from an enormous fortress carved into a volcano to a dark smear on the mountainside. The court in the galleries becomes invisible. The world opens up in every direction, vast and borderless and indifferent to the small, terrified human clinging to a dragon's neck hundreds of feet above it, and Bryn is higher than he has ever been in his life and he is held up by nothing but the strength of a creature he has known for five days and the grip of his own shaking hands.
Trust. The trial is trust. He is supposed to surrender control and trust that the dragon beneath him will keep him alive, and the irony of this being the quality they chose to test first is not lost on him. Bryn has not trusted anyone with anything since he was twelve years old. He has not surrendered control of any situation he could maintain a grip on since the day Alder died and the world made it clear that the only person who was goingto keep Bryn alive was Bryn. And now he's supposed to let go of that, supposed to hand himself over to the sky and the wind and the enormous creature beneath him and believe that it will be enough.
Ithyris banks left and Bryn slides, his body shifting on the smooth scales, and his heart stops and he grabs at the ridge with both hands and presses his entire body flat against the dragon's neck, chest and stomach and thighs, every inch of him plastered against the warm scales, and the heat of the dragon envelops him and he is terrified and he is touching more of this creature than he's ever touched another living being and the two sensations tangle together in his chest until he cannot tell which is fear and which is something else entirely.
The Ashveil Pass opens before them. Twin peaks rising on either side, dark volcanic rock streaked with mineral deposits that catch the light, and the gap between them is narrow and dark and the wind howling through it is audible even from here. Ithyris folds his wings and dives.
The air becomes a howl. The pass walls streak by on either side, dark rock close enough that Bryn could reach out and touch it, and the crosswinds hit them and Ithyris rolls, his body twisting on its axis with a speed and precision that would be beautiful if Bryn weren't upside down, clinging to the dragon's neck with his arms and his legs and his whole body, every muscle locked and straining. Every instinct he possesses is screaming at him to let go and fall because at least falling is familiar, at least falling he understands, at least falling doesn't require him to trust that someone else will catch him.
He doesn't let go.
The dragon rights himself and surges through the narrowest part of the pass and the updraft catches them and they rocket upward so fast that Bryn's vision greys at the edges and he buries his face in the dragon's neck and holds on. The scales are hotagainst his cheek. The dragon's heartbeat drums against his jaw, fast and powerful, faster than it was on the platform, and Bryn matches his breathing to it because his own has stopped working and the dragon's rhythm is the only one available.
Through the pass. Out the other side. Another valley opens up beneath them, another set of peaks ahead, and Ithyris navigates them with a precision that is breathtaking when Bryn manages to open his eyes and devastating when he doesn't, because even with his face pressed against warm scales he can feel every adjustment, every correction, every slight shift of the massive body beneath him. The prince is in absolute control of his own form, every wingbeat and tilt and dive calculated with the same deliberateness he brings to everything, and he adjusts constantly. Bryn can feel it in the small shifts of the dragon's neck and shoulders, subtle movements that keep him balanced and centered and secure on the dragon's back. Ithyris is flying the gauntlet and protecting Bryn simultaneously, threading through mountain passes at devastating speed while making continuous, minute corrections to ensure that the small, fragile human on his neck stays exactly where he is. He is carrying Bryn through the sky with the focus and care of a creature transporting something precious, something irreplaceable, and Bryn can feel that care in every movement and it's doing something to him that the fear alone wasn't doing.
The last pass is the worst. A narrow chimney between three converging peaks, the wind screaming through it in a vortex that Bryn can hear from a quarter mile away, and Ithyris folds his wings completely against his body and drops.
Free fall.
Bryn is in free fall on the back of a dragon and the air is a roar and his stomach is in his throat and his hands are locked so tight around the ridge that the muscles in his forearms are cramping and his fingers are going numb and he is falling and falling andthe chimney walls are streaking past and the wind is screaming and he cannot do this, he cannot, this is beyond what his body can endure and his mind has gone blank with terror and all he can think is that he is going to die in this chimney between these mountains and no one will find him and Mithri will wait for a letter that never comes and she'll know, eventually, the way you always know, and she'll blame herself because that's what they do in this family, they blame themselves for the things they can't prevent.
Then the dragon's wings snap open.
The force is staggering. The freefall arrests so violently that Bryn is thrown forward against the ridge hard enough to bruise his ribs and then slammed back and the dragon catches an updraft and rides it, spiraling upward through the chimney in a tight, controlled corkscrew, and the precision of it is extraordinary, the walls of the chimney passing within feet of the dragon's wingtips. They burst out the top into open sky and the sun hits them and the world is gold and infinite and the mountains spread out below in every direction and the sky above is endless and pale and Bryn is alive.
