Bryn is quiet for a moment. The answer is simple and the simplicity of it is the worst part. "Since I was twelve. Since Alderdied. Maybe before that, if I'm honest. Alder just made it less obvious."
Ithyris doesn't respond immediately. When he does, his voice is thick and careful in the way it gets when he's choosing words to carry something too heavy for language. "I wanted to burn it down. The hall. I wanted to take it apart stone by stone until there was nothing left for you to clean."
"I know. I felt it."
Silence. The bond pulses between them, raw and open.
"The silence," Bryn says. Quieter now. "In your chamber. You were kneeling and no one answered. How long have you been asking that question?"
The prince doesn't answer for a long time. Long enough that Bryn thinks he might not, that the vulnerability of the dream might not survive the waking world, that the doors they opened in the dark might be closing now that the dark is starting to thin.
"Since before your kingdom existed," Ithyris says. "Since I was old enough to understand that people kneel to me because of what I am and not because they want to be near me. Since the first time I realized that every person in the room would still bow if there was nothing behind the crown."
Bryn turns in his arms. He turns and faces the prince in the dark and Ithyris's face is close and wrecked and the tear tracks are still visible on his cheeks and his eyes are the dull, exhausted amethyst of someone who has been stripped to the foundation and hasn't started rebuilding yet.
Bryn puts his hand on the prince's chest. Over his heart. He can feel it beating, fast and unsteady, and the scales beneath his palm are warm and real.
"There is something behind the crown," Bryn says. "I've met him. He brings me tea and sits in chairs that are too small for him and takes his shoes off when he comes to find me. He's insufferable and he won't stop staring and he told me I didn'thave to earn my safety and he was the first person who ever meant it."
Ithyris's hand comes up and covers Bryn's where it rests on his chest. His fingers close around Bryn's and hold, tight, and something in the prince's expression cracks open in a way that is different from the dream, quieter, more real, because this is not the architecture of fear. This is a bed in a dark room and two people who have seen each other's worst and are still here.
"I would have come," Ithyris says. "To the hall. If I had existed in your life then. I would have come and I would have helped you clean and I would have stayed."
"I know," Bryn says, and he means it. "That's why I let you in."
The prince makes a sound against him. Not a word. Something deeper, a vibration that Bryn feels through his whole body, and his hand spreads wide across Bryn's stomach and presses flat, and Bryn lets himself be held because they are both shaking and the only solid thing is the place where their bodies meet.
They stay. The dark holds them. The mountain breathes around them. The bond pulses, steady and certain, the rhythm of something that was tested tonight and did not break.
Bryn doesn't sleep again. Neither does the prince. But they stay, tangled together in the dark, and the silence between them is not empty.
That is enough.
Chapter 15
Dawn comes and they are still awake.
The light enters the chamber in increments, grey to gold, filtering through the crystal-veined walls and casting the room in the warm amber glow that Bryn has come to associate with mornings in the Sovereignty. Mornings in the prince's bed. Mornings with the weight of Ithyris's arm across his stomach and the bond between them humming low and constant, the frequency of something that survived the night.
They have not spoken since the dialogue in the dark. The rest of the hours passed in the language of bodies, in the tightening of arms and the press of mouths to skin and the slow, deliberate act of holding on. The prince's thumb traced circles on Bryn's stomach for what might have been minutes or hours. Bryn pressed his spine against Ithyris's chest and matched his breathing to the prince's because it was the only thing he could give in the dark that didn't require him to open his mouth and say the things pressing against the inside of his ribs.
The light changes. The room warms. And Ithyris shifts behind him, his arm loosening, the slight pulling back, the fractionalincrease of space between his chest and Bryn's spine. Bryn recognizes it instantly because he has done it a hundred times himself. The prince is giving him room to leave.
He is expecting Bryn to leave.
Because that is what Bryn does. That is what he has done every time the vulnerability gets too close, every time the walls come down further than intended. He pulls back. He deflects. He retreats and reconstructs and pretends the breach never happened. Ithyris has learned this pattern and adapted to it, and now, in the grey-gold morning after a dream that stripped them both to the bone, the prince is performing the familiar choreography of making space for Bryn's retreat.
Bryn doesn't leave.
He rolls over.
He feels the moment it registers, the way the prince's body goes still, the way his breathing pauses. Bryn turns in his arms until they are face to face on the pillow, close enough that he can see the individual striations in the prince's eyes, the way the amethyst darkens at the edges and fractures into something warmer near the pupil. Ithyris's face is wrecked. Red-rimmed and slightly swollen and the composure he wears in public is nowhere in evidence. He looks the way he looked in the dream, stripped, and the fact that he is letting Bryn see this, that he hasn't reconstructed the mask, tells Bryn something about the cost of the night.
"You're still here," Ithyris says. His voice is rough. Underneath the observation there is a question he isn't asking, because asking it would reveal too much and the dream already took the last of his reserves.
"I'm still here."
Something moves across the prince's face. Not relief, exactly. Something rawer. Something that has been braced for impact and is trying to understand why the blow didn't land. His handlifts from the sheets and finds Bryn's face, his fingers settling along his jaw, his thumb at the corner of his mouth, and the touch is tentative in a way his touches haven't been for weeks. As though he is checking that Bryn is real.
