He pushes past the formal gowns and digs toward the back of the wardrobe where the forgotten things live. There. A simple traveling dress in dusty blue, linen with a modest neckline and a skirt that falls straight rather than flaring at the hip. It's the plainest thing she owns, probably worn once to some country outing and never thought about again. It'll do.
He strips in her room and pulls the dress on. The fabric settles against his body, loose in the chest where it was meant to have something to hold onto, but otherwise passable. The length is right. He turns to the mirror and examines himself with a critical, dispassionate eye, which is the only kind of eye he's ever been able to turn on himself.
The face that looks back at him is fine-boned and fair, framed by gold hair that falls past his shoulders. Wide grey eyes. A mouth that is, admittedly, prettier than it has any right to be on a man, which is something he's been told more times than he cares to count and in varying degrees of kindness. He's spent his whole life being mistaken for a girl at first glance, which had stung terribly when he was younger and now just strikes him as the single most useful thing about himself. From a distance, in this dress, with his hair down, he could pass. Up close is where it falls apart. No chest. No hips. Hands too large, jaw a fraction too strong, the line of his throat too visible where a woman's would be softer.
He'll need a cloak. A heavy one, with a hood. Something to keep the illusion intact until he's far enough away from Everen that it won't matter what they see when they look at him.
He braids his hair the way Mithri wears hers, loose and threaded with small flowers from what's left of the garden. Hefinds her simplest jewelry, a thin chain with a pendant that sits right at the hollow of his throat, and clasps it in place. He keeps his own boots because hers are too narrow, but the dress is long enough to hide them and he's not about to try navigating a foreign court in shoes that pinch.
One last look in the mirror. Not Mithri. Not quite Bryn. Something in between, something fragile and temporary that won't survive close inspection, and he decides that's fitting. He's spent his whole life being something in between. At least now it serves a purpose.
He sits at her desk and writes her a letter. He tells her he loves her. He tells her not to come after him, no matter what she hears. He tells her to stay with Aunt Elowen and that when the dust settles, if there's anything of Everen left standing, it's hers to rule. She'll be better at it than anyone in their bloodline has been in generations, and that's not flattery. It's the honest truth, which is something Bryn deals in so rarely these days that it feels almost foreign to put it to paper.
He doesn't write a letter for his father. Viktor wouldn't read it. He's not even sure his father would notice he's gone, not until the wine runs out and there's no one there to negotiate with the merchants for more.
He doesn't write one for his mother. She wouldn't open her door to receive it.
There's no one else. It's a thought that should probably sting more than it does, but Bryn has never been one for self-pity. It's a waste of time that he could spend on something more productive, and right now the most productive thing he can do is fold the letter, seal it with plain wax since they haven't had proper sealing wax in months, and leave it on Mithri's pillow where she'll find it when she arrives at Elowen's estate and unpacks the things she's certain to have forgotten.
He pulls the cloak tight around his shoulders, lifts the hood, and walks out of the castle he's held together with his bare hands for six years without a single word of thanks from anyone in it.
The envoy is waiting in the courtyard. Two Drekian guards, tall and broad and radiating the kind of contained, effortless power that makes the air itself feel heavier. Their armor is dark and polished and worth more than everything Bryn is currently wearing combined, including the jewelry. Their eyes pass over him without pause, without suspicion, and he's not sure whether to be relieved or insulted that the disguise works this easily.
"Princess Mithri?" one of them asks.
"Yes," Bryn says.
His voice doesn't crack. His hands don't shake. He has been lying to keep this kingdom alive for six years and he is, if nothing else, exceptionally good at it.
He is his father's greatest work of fiction and his sister's last line of defense, and he climbs into the carriage with his borrowed dress and his stolen name and doesn't look back. There's nothing behind him worth seeing.
Chapter 2
The carriage smells of leather and something faintly metallic that Bryn can't identify, and the seats are built for bodies much larger than his. Everything about the interior is scaled up in a way that makes him feel small, which is not a sensation he's unfamiliar with but is certainly more literal than usual.
He sits with his knees together and his cloak pulled tight and his hands folded in his lap in a posture he's watched Mithri hold a thousand times. Spine straight, chin level, fingers laced. The picture of a composed young woman traveling to meet her intended. Beneath the cloak, his heart is beating so hard he can feel it in his teeth, and he's fairly certain that if either of the guards looked closely enough they'd be able to see the pulse hammering at the base of his throat where the pendant sits.
The two Drekian guards ride ahead on mounts he can't get a good look at through the carriage window. Something large. Something that moves with the wrong number of legs and makes a sound against the road that is distinctly not hooves. He decides not to investigate further and focuses instead on the landscape sliding past, cataloging details with the sharp, strategic mindthat no one has ever given him credit for and that he has never once been thanked for using.
They cross the border at midday.
He knows the exact moment it happens because the air changes. In Everen, the air tastes of nothing. Dust, sometimes. Woodsmoke in winter. The general ambient flavor of a kingdom slowly rotting from the inside out. But the moment they cross into the Sovereignty, the air thickens and warms and carries the taste of sulfur and cedar, ancient and mineral, and his lungs feel heavy with it in a way that isn't entirely unpleasant. It's the kind of air that has weight to it, that has history in it, that suggests the land beneath it has been alive and powerful for longer than Everen has existed.
The land changes too. Everen is grey stone and tired fields and forests that have been logged well past the point of recovery because his father's father's father apparently shared the family talent for short-term thinking. The Sovereignty is something else entirely. The mountains here are volcanic, dark stone veined with rivers of thermal water that steam in the cool air and catch the light in ribbons of white against the black rock. Obsidian towers rise from the peaks, connected by sky bridges so high they disappear into the low-hanging clouds. Everything is enormous. The roads are wide enough for three carriages to ride abreast with room to spare, the bridges built with arches that could accommodate something with a forty-foot wingspan passing beneath them without so much as tucking a wing. The architecture doesn't just allow for dragons. It assumes them. It was built around the expectation that enormous, fire-breathing creatures would need to move through these spaces freely, and it treats that fact with the same casual practicality that Everen applies to making sure the stable doors are wide enough for horses.
Bryn presses his face closer to the window and takes inventory, because that's what he does. That's what he's always done. Two guard towers at the border crossing, manned by four soldiers each, which means a minimum standing border force that already outnumbers Everen's entire royal guard. Thermal rivers running parallel to the road, which means natural heating infrastructure and most certainly geothermal energy for forges and industry. The obsidian is volcanic glass, which means weapons, building material, and trade goods all from a single geological resource. The forests on the lower slopes are dense and old-growth, untouched. Resources they haven't needed to exploit because they have enough of everything else.
Everen has been starving for a decade. The Sovereignty looks as though it has never once in its history known want.
He sits back and closes his eyes and runs the numbers the way he runs the numbers on everything, because numbers don't lie and numbers don't have feelings and numbers are the one language Bryn has always been fluent in. Military outposts every six miles along the road. Supply lines that follow the thermal rivers for efficiency and natural defense. Trade routes marked by the sky bridges, connecting mountain settlements that would be functionally impregnable to any kind of ground assault. No visible poverty. No visible neglect. No crumbling infrastructure patched with cheaper materials and hope. The roads alone tell him more about this kingdom's strength than any intelligence report Everen has ever produced, which, to be fair, is none, because his father dissolved the intelligence office seven years ago to pay for a new wine cellar.
He is going to die in a very well-organized country. That's the thought that settles into his chest and makes itself comfortable there, curling up next to the fear and the grief and the stubborn, burning refusal to regret what he's done.
The thought should terrify him more than it does. Instead he feels a strange, hollow calm that he suspects is shock wearing a more dignified costume. He's made his calculations. Mithri is safe, or will be soon, tucked away in the Lowlands where the Sovereignty has no reason to look and no interest in looking. If they discover his deception and execute him, Everen loses a second son that no one wanted in the first place. The kingdom will mourn him for exactly as long as it takes to pour the next glass of wine, and then it will carry on collapsing without him, which it was going to do eventually anyway.
If they discover his deception and demand the real princess, they'll have to find her first, and Aunt Elowen's estate is remote enough to buy Mithri time to disappear further. Elowen is their mother's sister and she's sharp and practical and she's never liked Viktor, which means she'll hide Mithri without asking too many questions.
If they discover his deception and decide to burn Everen to the ground, well. It's half-burnt already. His father will have no one to blame but himself and no one to mourn but his wine collection, and Bryn finds that he can't summon much guilt about that.
