"Bryn. Now."
Something in her voice makes him set down the book. She's not alarmed, exactly, but there's an urgency underneath the excitement that suggests this is not optional and that arguing about it will only delay whatever is happening without preventing it. He follows her through the corridors, his pulse picking up for reasons he can't identify, and when they round the final corner into the main entrance hall he stops walking.
Mithri is standing in the center of the hall.
His sister. His twin. Golden-haired and grey-eyed and travel-dusty, wearing a cloak that's seen considerably better days and carrying a single trunk, and she's looking around the volcanic palace with an expression that is equal parts awe and terror and stubborn determination, which is the expression she wears when she has decided to do something and is not going to be talked out of it regardless of how inadvisable it is.
Bryn forgets how to move. He forgets the library and the bond and the council and the bruises on his hips and the ache between his legs and the prince who put them there. He forgetseverything except that his sister is here, alive and whole and standing in front of him, and she wasn't supposed to come. He told her not to come. He sent her away to keep her safe and he wrote her a letter telling her not to follow and she's here, in the entrance hall of the Drekian Sovereignty, with a trunk and a dusty cloak and the same stubborn jaw she's had since they were children.
"Mithri."
She turns. She sees him. Her face crumples and reconstructs itself in the space of a heartbeat, grief and relief and fury cycling through her features so fast they blur, and then her gaze catches on his hair, the short hair, the hair that used to match hers and doesn't anymore, and something in her expression shifts into a sadness that is brief and deep before the fury reasserts itself.
"You absolute bastard," she says, and throws herself at him.
He catches her. He sweeps her into his arms and holds her so tight she squeaks, her feet leaving the ground, and he buries his face in her hair and breathes her in and she smells of road dust and horse and the lavender soap Aunt Elowen uses and home. She smells of home and he is holding her and for a moment every wall he's built comes down, every defense, every armor plate, every piece of composure he's constructed since he walked into this palace, and he is just a brother who has been scared and lonely and so, so glad to see his sister that his eyes are stinging and his chest is cracking open in a way that has nothing to do with the bond and everything to do with the simple, uncomplicated fact of being loved by someone who has loved him his entire life.
"You were supposed to stay in the Lowlands," he says into her hair.
"You were supposed to not impersonate me and walk into a dragon's court. We're both disappointments."
He sets her down and holds her at arm's length and looks at her. She's thinner than when he last saw her, the travel wearing on her, shadows under her eyes that weren't there before, but her eyes are sharp and her jaw is set and she looks at him with the fierce, stubborn love that has been the only reliable thing in his life for eighteen years.
Then her gaze drops to his neck.
The shirt has shifted. Of course it has. It's Ithyris's shirt and it's too large and the collar slips every time Bryn moves and the marks are there, fading now but still visible, the bruises and bites trailing from below his ear down the side of his throat and disappearing beneath the fabric. Mithri's eyes go wide.
"Bryn." Her voice has changed. Flat. Careful. The voice she uses when she's trying very hard not to panic and not entirely succeeding. "What happened to your neck?"
"It's not what you think."
"What I think is that someone put their mouth on you hard enough to leave marks and you're wearing a shirt that isn't yours and you've cut your hair and you've been in a dragon court for over a week." Her hands grip his arms and her fingers dig in. "Did someone hurt you? Did they force..."
"No." He takes her hands and holds them, firm, the way he held them in her chambers when he told her his plan, the way he's always held them when he needs her to hear him. "No, Mithri. No one forced anything. It's not that. I promise you, it's not that."
She searches his face. She knows him better than anyone alive, better than anyone who has ever lived, because they shared a womb and a childhood and a crumbling kingdom and the particular, intimate knowledge that comes from being the only two people in a family who actually look at each other. She can read his lies and his truths and the spaces in between, and whatever she finds in his expression now makes her brow furrowand her grip loosen and a different kind of confusion settle into her features.
"Then what is it?"
"It's complicated."
"Bryn."
"Let me show you to your room first. Then I'll explain everything."
She gives him a look that promises the explanation had better be forthcoming and thorough and soon, and he picks up her trunk and leads her down the corridor to the guest chambers beside his, and the weight of the trunk in his hand and the sound of her footsteps beside his are so familiar and so grounding that something in him settles for the first time in days.
***
He settles her in the room and she sits on the bed and looks at him and waits. Mithri has always been good at waiting. She learned it from watching him hold the kingdom together, from years of sitting beside him while he worked through problems, offering her quiet presence and her patience and the implicit promise that she would still be there when he was ready to talk. She knows that he'll speak when he's ready and that pushing him before then is counterproductive.
He sits in the chair across from her and he tells her.
Not everything. Not the details that would make her blush or make him combust on the spot. But the bones of it: the arrival, the unmasking, the elder who stripped him, the prince who stopped it. The mate bond. The trials. The fact that Ithyris wants to marry him, not her, and that Bryn has agreed to go through with it. He tells her about the library and the kitchen and Lira and Theryn and the bread roll he threw at a lord of the court.He tells her about the flight through the mountain passes and the way the prince carried him through the sky with more care than anyone has shown him in his life. He does not tell her what happened in the forest clearing afterward, but she's his twin and she can read the spaces between his words, and the flush that climbs his neck when he skips from "we landed in a clearing" to "and then I came back to the palace" tells her enough.
She listens without interrupting. Her face moves through a series of expressions, surprise and concern and confusion and something that might be reluctant fascination, and when he finishes she is quiet for a long moment, processing the way she processes everything, thoroughly and in her own time.
"So the marks on your neck," she says.
