He is alive and he is shaking and his face is wet and he doesn't know when he started crying but he can't stop. The tears are coming from somewhere deep and they are not tears of fear, not entirely, not anymore. They are the tears of a person who has been holding on for six years without anyone to hold on to and has just, for the first time, felt what it is to be carried.
Ithyris levels out. His flight becomes smooth, gentle, the massive wings beating in slow, even strokes that carry them through the calm air above the peaks. He is bringing Bryn down. Bryn can feel the gradual descent, the careful deceleration, and the dragon's neck curves slightly, just enough that the ridge Bryn is clinging to tilts back and cradles him rather than requiring him to hold on. The dragon is carrying him now, not flyingwith him. There is a difference. The difference is that flying with someone requires their participation. Carrying someone requires only that they allow it.
Bryn allows it. He presses his face against the dragon's neck and breathes. Cedar. Smoke. Heat. The smell of the prince is the same in this form, just more, amplified, surrounding him on all sides, and the dragon's heartbeat against his cheek is steady and strong and slowing back to its resting rhythm and Bryn closes his eyes and lets it hold him up because his arms have nothing left and his hands have nothing left and for the first time in as long as he can remember, he lets someone else be the one who holds things together.
***
Ithyris lands in a forest clearing.
Not the platform. Not the palace. A clearing in the old-growth forest below the mountain passes, ringed by enormous trees with dark trunks and canopies so dense the light filters through in shafts of green and gold. The ground is soft with moss and fallen leaves and the air is cool and damp after the heat of the dragon's body, and it smells of earth and living things and the mineral tang of a stream running nearby.
The dragon settles onto the ground with a grace that belies his size, tucking his wings against his flanks and lowering himself until the distance to the ground is manageable. Bryn slides off the dragon's neck on legs that have no structural integrity remaining. His feet hit the moss and his knees buckle and he catches himself on the dragon's foreleg, hand splayed against warm scales, and he stands there propped against a dragon's leg and breathing hard and trying to remember how gravity works and how legs work and how any of this works. His thighs areshaking. His arms are shaking. His hands are cramped into claws from gripping the ridge and he has to flex them several times before his fingers will straighten.
The shift happens behind him. He feels it more than sees it, the compression of air, the rapid reduction of heat, the displacement of something vast condensing back into something human-sized, and he turns and Ithyris is standing where the dragon was.
The prince is flushed. His skin is dark with blood, the violet scales at his throat and temples vivid against the flush, and his chest is heaving with deep, uneven breaths and his hair is wild from the wind and his eyes are blown almost completely black, the amethyst reduced to a thin ring around pupils that are huge and dark and fixed on Bryn with an intensity that makes the air between them ignite. Every line of his body is taut and his hands are clenched at his sides and the muscles in his forearms are corded and he is visibly, unmistakably, aggressively aroused in a way that is impossible to miss and that he is making no effort to conceal.
The bond, Bryn remembers. The bond magnifies physical closeness. And what they just did, Bryn's body pressed against the dragon's neck for fifteen minutes of sustained, intimate, full-body contact, the heat and the fear and the adrenaline and the trust and the physical reality of Bryn's thighs wrapped around him and his chest pressed flat against warm scales, has wound the prince so tight he is shaking with it. He is standing five feet from Bryn in a forest clearing with his hands clenched at his sides and his chest heaving and every line of his body rigid with the effort of control and Bryn can see, clearly and undeniably, what that flight did to him.
It did the same thing to Bryn. The heat between his own hips, the tightness in his own chest, the racing of his own pulse that has nothing to do with the altitude and everything to do with thememory of the dragon's heartbeat thrumming against his inner thighs. He is not going to think about that. He is going to file it away in the category of things he processes later, alone, in his room, where no one can see him confronting the fact that his body responded to the dragon prince with an enthusiasm that his brain was not consulted about.
Ithyris's voice comes out shredded. Rough and low and scraped raw, nothing resembling the smooth, controlled tone he uses at court. It's the voice of a man who is holding himself together by the very last thread and knows it.
"I need a moment. Don't... you should step back."
Bryn should step back. The prince is right. He is giving Bryn the choice, again, the way he always does, the way he gave him the choice about the trials and the choice about the marriage and every other choice that should have been Ithyris's to make unilaterally and that he handed to Bryn instead. And the right choice, the safe choice, the choice that Bryn's strategic mind is screaming at him to make, is to step back and give the prince the space he needs to regain control and they can return to the palace and sit in the library and pretend that the flight didn't do what it did to both of them.
Bryn doesn't step back.
He is looking at Ithyris. He is looking at this enormous, powerful, devastating creature who just carried him through the sky with more care than anyone has shown him in his entire life, who navigated a mountain gauntlet at lethal speed while making constant adjustments to protect a human boy on his neck, who landed in a forest clearing instead of the palace platform because he knew Bryn would need privacy to fall apart, who is now shaking with want so intense it's visible in every line of his body and is still asking for distance, still giving Bryn the choice, still holding himself back with a restraint that must be costing him everything he has.
Something in Bryn ignites.
Not the slow burn of the dinner table, the creeping warmth that built over bread rolls and hand-holding. Not the confused flutter of the library, the tentative awareness that he didn't mind the prince's presence. Something fiercer and simpler and more honest than either of those, a heat that starts in his chest and drops through his stomach and settles between his hips and stays there, heavy and certain and undeniable.
No one has ever wanted him. Not once in his entire life. Not his father, who wanted a different son. Not his mother, who wanted a dead one. Not the court of Everen, who wanted anyone but the second prince with the pretty face and the sharp tongue and the numbers that always added up. He has been overlooked and undervalued and invisible for eighteen years and he is standing in a forest clearing with a man who is physically trembling with how much he wants him and Bryn is done stepping back. He is done being the one who retreats and calculates and keeps a safe distance and protects himself from things that might hurt by never letting them close enough to matter.
He steps forward.
Ithyris's breath catches. His eyes widen, the blown-black pupils contracting slightly with surprise, and his whole body goes taut with the effort of not moving, of not closing the distance himself. "Bryn."
"Shut up," Bryn says, and he surges up on his toes and he kisses him.
Chapter 8
Bryn kisses him first.
Or he tries to. He surges up on his toes and his mouth finds the corner of Ithyris's jaw because the prince is too tall and Bryn has misjudged the angle entirely and for one mortifying second he is fairly certain he's just kissed the dragon prince of the Drekian Sovereignty on the chin. Which is not where he was aiming. Which is, in fact, about four inches from where he was aiming, and the miscalculation is so thoroughly Bryn, so perfectly representative of his entire experience in this kingdom, that he almost wants to laugh except that his mouth is on a dragon's jawbone and laughter seems inadvisable.
Then Ithyris moves.
His arms wrap around Bryn's waist and he lifts him clean off the ground. Bryn's feet leave the moss and he is airborne for the second time today except this time there are no wings, just the prince's hands and his arms and the sudden, shocking strength of him holding Bryn up as though he weighs nothing, as though the effort required to lift a full-grown human to eye level is so negligible it doesn't even register on whatever scale Drekians useto measure exertion. Ithyris brings him to his height, Bryn's face level with his, and his mouth finds Bryn's and the world ends.
Bryn has never been kissed.
He doesn't know what he expected. Something gentle, maybe. Something tentative and careful, the polite negotiation of two mouths meeting for the first time, the kind of first kiss that belongs in one of the three romance novels in Everen's forty-seven-book library. What he gets is not that. What he gets is consuming. Ithyris's mouth is hot and sure and he kisses Bryn with a focus that makes the flight through the Ashveil Pass look casual by comparison, his lips parting Bryn's, his tongue sliding against Bryn's, slow and deep and deliberate, tasting him. And the sound Bryn makes, a low, broken thing from somewhere behind his ribs that he did not authorize and would not have approved if consulted, is involuntary and embarrassing and he feels it vibrate against the prince's mouth. Ithyris's arms tighten around him and the prince groans back, a sound that resonates through his chest and into Bryn's, and the knowledge that Ithyris is making that sound because of a noise Bryn made sends a bolt of heat straight through his stomach and lower and his brain, which has been running the show for eighteen years without interruption, quietly abdicates its position.
His hands. He doesn't know what to do with his hands. They find Ithyris's shoulders, then his neck, then the short dark hair at the back of his head, and he fists them in it and holds on because the ground is gone and Ithyris is the only solid thing in the world and Bryn is kissing him back with a desperation he didn't know he had in him, biting at the prince's lower lip, licking into his mouth, clumsy and hungry and graceless and entirely without technique. He is, by any objective measure, terrible at this. He has no experience and no finesse and his teeth keep catching and his nose is in the way and he doesn't care because Ithyris responds to every fumble as though it's exactly what he wanted,as though Bryn's inexperience is not an obstacle but an offering, and the prince meets each clumsy attempt with patience and heat and a thoroughness that makes Bryn's toes curl.
