"I didn't come here wanting anything from your prince," Bryn says. "I came here to die in my sister's place. Whatever has happened since was not part of my calculation."
"And yet you remain."
"And yet I remain."
The gold-scaled woman tilts her head. She hasn't spoken yet and her gaze moves over Bryn with an attention that is clinical but not hostile, cataloging, assessing, reading him the way Bryn reads ledgers and trade reports, with precision and without sentiment. Her gaze catches on his throat.
His throat, which is covered by Ithyris's shirt buttoned to the top, except that the shirt is too large and the collar has shifted and the top button has slipped during the walk here and the marks are visible. The bruises. The bites. The evidence of the prince's mouth mapped across Bryn's skin in vivid, unmistakable detail.
She sees them. Her eyes widen by a fraction.
Syreth follows her gaze. The temperature in the room, already cool, drops further.
"Stand forward," Syreth says. Her voice has changed. The cool formality is gone. What's underneath is sharp and cold and controlled in the specific way that things are controlled when the person controlling them is very close to losing that control entirely.
Bryn doesn't move. "I am standing."
"Closer. Now."
He steps forward. The raised platform puts the council at eye level with his neck, which Bryn suspects is not how the architecture was intended to function but is serving Syreth's purposes admirably. She leans forward in her chair and hergaze fixes on the marks and Bryn watches her expression cycle through recognition, fury, and something close to triumph.
Triumph. That's worse than the fury. Fury is reactive. Triumph is strategic.
"Those marks," she says. "Those are mating bites. Claiming marks." She turns to the council. "The intended was confirmed virginal upon arrival. He is no longer."
She looks back at Bryn and there is satisfaction in her ancient eyes, cold and gleaming, because she thinks she's won. She thinks the marks on his neck are the evidence she's been waiting for, the proof that the human boy has disqualified himself through the oldest and most predictable failing available, and Bryn can see her assembling the case in real time behind her eyes.
"You have broken your chastity," she announces, and her voice rings through the circular chamber with the practiced resonance of a verdict being delivered. "The intended is required to remain pure until the courtship trials are complete. This is sacred law. This is binding tradition. You have given yourself to another and in doing so you have invalidated the marriage."
The council stirs. The bronze-scaled elder's expression hardens. The green-scaled elder shakes his head slowly, more in weariness than disapproval. The copper-marked male looks at Bryn with open contempt. The gold-scaled woman is watching Bryn with that unreadable attention, waiting.
"Who was it?" Syreth presses. She is leaning forward in her chair, hands gripping the arms, and the satisfaction is building in her voice with each word. "One of the guards? A servant? Some opportunistic courtier who saw a pretty human boy alone in the corridors and took what was available?" She turns to the council. "This is precisely the danger I warned of. A human of low moral character, incapable of honoring even the most basic requirement of..."
"It was Ithyris."
Silence.
The word lands in the chamber and detonates. Syreth's mouth stops mid-sentence. Her jaw hangs open for a fraction of a second before she recovers, and in that fraction Bryn sees something he has never seen on her face before: genuine shock. Not the calculated disapproval she performs so well. Not the cold fury she wears with such practiced ease. Shock. Pure, unguarded, unscripted shock, and the sight of it is so deeply satisfying that Bryn files it away to revisit later when he needs something to sustain him.
"What did you say?"
"I said it was Ithyris." His face is burning. He can feel the heat climbing from his collar to the roots of his short hair and there is no part of this that is not mortifying, standing in front of five ancient creatures and telling them that the prince of their kingdom fucked him so thoroughly that the evidence is visible above his collar. But he holds Syreth's gaze and he keeps his voice steady because he has been keeping his voice steady while delivering terrible news for six years and this is just one more entry in the ledger. "I have not broken chastity with another. I have not been with anyone else. The marks on my neck are from the prince. I have known only his touch."
The chamber explodes.
If the council was upset at the thought of Bryn giving himself to a guard or a servant, they are incandescent at the truth. Syreth is on her feet. The bronze-scaled elder is on his feet. The green-scaled elder is speaking in rapid Drekian, his reedy voice suddenly sharp and urgent. The copper-marked male is shouting over him and the gold-scaled woman has pressed her fingers to her temples as though staving off a headache that has been building for several centuries and has finally arrived.
Bryn stands in the middle of it and lets it wash over him. They are angrier about this than they would have been about a servant. He can see why. A servant would have been Bryn's failing, his weakness, his moral disqualification, a human who couldn't keep his hands to himself and who proved through his actions that he was unfit for the prince. That would have been clean and simple and would have resolved in Syreth's favor without complications. This is not that. This is the prince's failing. This is the crown heir of the Drekian Sovereignty breaking sacred law with his own intended, and the implications are far more damaging to the institution than Bryn's chastity ever was, because you can remove a disqualified intended from the court but you cannot remove the prince.
Syreth rounds on him. She is standing, towering, nearly a foot taller and visibly shaking with fury, and the faded scales at her temples are flushed a shade paler than Bryn has ever seen them, which he suspects is the Drekian equivalent of going white with rage.
"The prince bedded you before the trials are complete."
"Yes."
"There is to be no physical intimacy before the completion of the courtship trials. This law has stood for a thousand years. It is sacrosanct. It is the foundation upon which the entire courtship rite is built."
"Then I suggest you take it up with your prince," Bryn says. "The prohibition is yours, not mine. I'm not Drekian. I didn't swear to your customs. I didn't know about your customs. No one informed me of this law before, during, or after my arrival, and I would submit that if the Sovereignty considers this tradition sacred enough to invalidate a marriage over, perhaps the tradition should be communicated to both parties before the trial begins. Particularly when one of those parties is a humanwho has never heard of your courtship rites and was not given a manual."
