"But the envoy is coming in three days. If I'm not here..."
"You won't need to be here."
She stares at him. He watches the understanding dawn, slow and horrified, her expression shifting from confusion to disbelief to something that looks a lot closer to grief than he's comfortable with.
"Bryn. No."
"It'll work. We're the same height, same coloring. The Sovereignty's envoy has never laid eyes on either of us. They're expecting a pretty blonde princess and that's exactly what they'll get."
"You cannot be serious."
"I am frequently serious. It's one of my many charms."
"This isn't funny!"
"I'm not laughing, Mithri."
She pulls her hands from his and stands, backing away from him. Her face is flushed and furious and terrified all at once, which is a combination he's only ever seen on her once before, and that was the night their father put his fist through the parlorwindow and Bryn had to pull the glass out of his knuckles while Viktor wept about Alder.
"They'll kill you," she says. "The moment they find out, they'll kill you."
"Probably."
"Probably?"
"There's a slim chance they'll find the whole thing amusing. Dragons are unpredictable. They might respect the audacity."
"You're insane."
"Also possible." He stands and closes the distance between them, because she's backed herself nearly to the wall and the look on her face is breaking his heart. "But here's what isn't possible, Mithri. You going to the Sovereignty. You standing before their court and being inspected and bartered over. You in some dragon's bed. That is not going to happen. Not while I'm still breathing and capable of doing something about it."
Her face crumbles. She's crying now, silently, the way they both learned to cry when they were children: soundlessly, so their mother wouldn't hear from behind her closed door and their father wouldn't be disturbed from his cups. He pulls her into his arms and holds her and she presses her face into his shoulder and her whole body shakes against him.
"I won't let you do this," she says into his shirt, muffled and damp.
"You can't stop me. You know that."
"Bryn."
"Mithri." He pulls back and holds her face in his hands, thumbs wiping the tears from her cheeks. She has their mother's eyes and their father's stubborn mouth and she is, without question, the only thing in this kingdom worth fighting for. "You are the best thing in this kingdom. The only thing in it worth saving. Let me do this for you."
She crumbles. She argues. She begs and bargains and threatens to tell their father, which they both know is an empty threat because their father would probably toast the Sovereignty with whatever bottle he's currently nursing and call it diplomacy. But in the end, she does what she's always done when Bryn sets his mind to something. She trusts him.
He helps her pack. He walks her to the servants' passage that leads to the east gate, the one that the staff uses for deliveries so they won't be seen from the main courtyard. He presses a purse of coins into her hand, the very last of what he's been squirreling away in the false bottom of his desk drawer, and he holds her one more time and breathes in the smell of her hair and tries to memorize the shape of her against him. He's not stupid. He knows the odds. This might be the last time he ever holds his sister.
"I love you," she says, fierce and broken.
"I know. Go."
She goes.
He stands in the dark passage until he can't hear her footsteps anymore, until the silence swallows the last echo of her and he's alone in the cold stone corridor with nothing but the sound of his own breathing. Then he goes to her chambers and opens her wardrobe.
***
The dresses are a problem.
Mithri favors gowns with structured bodices and sweeping skirts, intricate beadwork, layers of silk over linen. They're the kind of construction designed to accentuate a figure that Bryn does not possess and has never possessed. He's lean where she's soft, flat where she's curved, and no amount of creative tuckingis going to change the fundamental architecture of the situation. He's also fairly certain that showing up to the Drekian court in an ill-fitting ballgown would undermine the whole "convincing princess" angle he's going for.
