But tonight it is quiet. And for now, that's enough.
Chapter 10
Bryn wakes alone.
The bed is still warm where Ithyris was. The sheets are ruined, stained and tangled, and the pillow beside his holds the indent of the prince's head and the faintest trace of cedar. Ithyris has left a clean shirt folded on the chair by the bed, one of his own, dark fabric that will hang past Bryn's thighs because nothing the prince owns will ever fit him properly and this has apparently become a feature of their arrangement rather than a flaw. Beside the shirt, a cup of tea that's still steaming, which means the prince left minutes ago and brought Bryn tea before he went, and Bryn doesn't know what to do with a man who ruins him at night and brings him tea in the morning. There's no column in any ledger for that. There's no framework for categorizing someone who fucks you until you can't walk and then folds you a shirt and heats water before dawn because he knows you'll need both.
He sits up and his body announces itself in explicit, comprehensive detail. The soreness between his legs has deepened into a persistent, bone-level ache that flares when heshifts his weight and sends bright little sparks of reminder up through his hips and lower back. His hips are bruised where the prince's fingers gripped him, dark purple marks in the exact shape of Ithyris's hands, and the specificity of the bruises is both mortifying and, if he's being honest with himself, which he would prefer not to be this early in the morning, slightly intoxicating. His thighs are tender. His throat and collarbone are a map of the prince's mouth, a constellation of bruises and bite marks in varying shades of red and violet, and when he looks at them in the obsidian mirror while pulling on Ithyris's shirt he feels a complicated tangle of shame and satisfaction that he refuses to examine because examining it would require acknowledging that part of him wants to be marked and that is a realization he is not prepared to have before breakfast.
The shirt smells of the prince. He buttons it to the throat and it doesn't cover everything but it covers enough if he doesn't move too much or turn his head too sharply. He drinks the tea. He sits on the edge of the wrecked bed and takes inventory of himself the way he takes inventory of kingdoms: assets, liabilities, vulnerabilities.
Assets: he is alive. The prince wants him. His sister is safe. He has access to a library with thousands of books and a kitchen run by a woman who feeds him without asking for anything in return.
Liabilities: he is a human male in a court that considers him an abomination. The elder council wants him removed with a fervor that borders on religious conviction. He has almost certainly broken several Drekian customs he was never informed of, and the evidence of at least one broken custom is currently blooming across his neck in shades of violet.
Vulnerabilities: he is falling for the dragon prince and Ithyris knows it and the elder council probably knows it and Bryn is wearing the prince's shirt and sitting in sheets that smell ofsex and cedar and he is so far beyond strategic calculation that the very concept has become theoretical. The boy who held Everen together with arithmetic and sheer stubbornness has been dismantled by a man with bare feet and amethyst eyes and a tendency to bring tea, and the ledger is no longer a useful metaphor because the numbers don't apply to this. Nothing adds up. Nothing balances. The columns don't align and Bryn is starting to suspect they were never going to.
He finishes the tea and goes to find breakfast.
***
The summons comes before he reaches the kitchens.
A messenger, young and nervous, intercepting him in the east corridor with a scroll bearing the elder council's seal. Bryn is requested, the scroll says, which means required, to present himself before the council for formal questioning regarding his intentions toward the crown prince. Requested. As though he might decline. As though the word requested is not doing the same work that polite language always does, which is to dress a command in something softer so that the person receiving it feels as though they had a choice when they never did.
Bryn tucks the scroll into the pocket of his borrowed trousers and follows the messenger through corridors he's beginning to recognize, past the library and the training hall and down a staircase he hasn't used before, to a chamber in the lower levels of the palace. The room is circular and austere, dark stone and no windows, lit only by the ambient glow of the volcanic rock, and the temperature is cooler here than in the rest of the palace, which Bryn suspects is deliberate. The warmth of the Sovereignty is a comfort, and this room has been designed to deny it. Five chairs are arranged in a semicircle on a raisedplatform, and the five members of the elder council sit in them and look down at him as he enters.
Syreth is in the center. Of course she is. She has positioned herself at the focal point of the semicircle with the practiced ease of someone who has been the most important person in every room she's entered for the past several centuries and sees no reason to pretend otherwise.
The others Bryn knows by sight if not by name. Two males he's seen at formal dinners: one ancient with faded green scales and a face that looks as though it was carved from driftwood, and one younger with sharp features and copper markings along his jaw. A third male, broad and stone-faced, with deep bronze scales along his jaw and the bearing of someone who considers silence a form of authority. And a fourth, a woman with deep brown skin and gold scales at her temples who has been watching Bryn at meals with an expression he has never been able to read, which bothers him because he is usually excellent at reading people.
There is no chair for him. He is expected to stand.
He stands. His body aches and his legs are sore and every step sends a fresh reminder of last night through his hips and he stands with his spine straight and his hands behind his back and he looks at the council and waits. He has stood in rooms full of people who wanted him gone before. He has been standing in rooms full of people who wanted him gone since he was twelve years old, and the technique is the same regardless of whether those people are human creditors or Drekian elders: spine straight, face neutral, hands where they can't see them shake.
Syreth speaks first. Her voice is cool and formal and carries the weight of centuries of authority and the absolute certainty that everything she's about to say is correct.
"You are Bryn of Everen. Second son of King Viktor. Twin brother of the princess who was promised to our prince."
"You know who I am."
"I am establishing the record." Her eyes are flat and patient, the eyes of someone who has conducted proceedings of this nature hundreds of times and approaches each one with the same methodical thoroughness. "You came to this court under false pretenses, disguised as your sister, with the intent to deceive the Sovereignty."
"With the intent to protect my sister. The deception was the method, not the motive."
"The distinction is irrelevant."
"It's relevant to me."
Syreth's mouth thins. She continues.
"The council has convened to assess your fitness as the prince's intended. You are human. You are male. You carry no dragon blood, no political value of note, and no capacity to bear heirs. These are not insults, boy. They are facts. And the council must weigh them against whatever biological compulsion the prince has experienced in your presence."
Bryn lets the words land. He lets each one arrive and settle and he doesn't flinch at any of them because flinching is what she wants and he stopped giving people what they wanted years ago. Biological compulsion. She's still pushing that frame and she'll keep pushing it because it's the version that makes him smallest, the version where he's not a mate but a trigger, not chosen but accidental, not wanted but endured.
"What do you want with our prince?" the ancient green-scaled elder asks. His voice is dry and rasping, a sound that has been worn thin by centuries of use until there's barely enough of it left to carry across the room. "What could a human boy, with no army and no kingdom and no dowry of any worth, possibly want with the heir to the Drekian Sovereignty?"
Bryn looks at him. The elder is old enough that his scales have lost their color and his eyes are clouded and his hands on the arms of his chair are thin and spotted, and he is asking thequestion with genuine curiosity underneath the condescension, as though he actually wants to know the answer and not just hear the one he expects.
