"What was it?"
"A dream. We saw each other's fears."
Mithri is quiet for a moment. Then: "He saw yours."
Not a question.
"Yes."
"And you saw his."
"Yes."
"Was it terrible?"
Bryn thinks about Ithyris on his knees. The stripped scales. The centuries-old question echoing off empty walls.
"Yes. But not the way I expected."
Mithri looks at him for a long time. Then she reaches across the table and takes his hand and holds it and doesn't say anything else. They sit in the kitchen eating bread and not talking about the things that matter most, which is its own kind of intimacy, its own kind of language.
***
The petition arrives that afternoon.
Lira appears in the kitchen doorway with the expression she wears when something political has gone wrong and she's deciding how much to tell him. Mithri sees her first, straightens, and Bryn turns on the bench and reads the news in Lira's face before she opens her mouth.
"Elder Syreth has filed a formal petition with the king. The Clause of Unfitness. She's requesting dissolution of the bond on grounds that the intended is unsuitable for the crown."
The kitchen goes quiet. Theryn stops washing dishes. Mithri's hand tightens on Bryn's.
"What does that mean?" Mithri's voice is sharp. "If it succeeds?"
Lira looks at Bryn. He answers, because he has read the texts, because he has spent weeks in the library for exactly this reason.
"Bond severance. The connection between Ithyris and me is broken by force. For me, painful but survivable. For him, the bond is part of his physiology. Severing it is the equivalent of cutting out a piece of his nervous system. He would recover eventually, but the damage never fully heals."
Mithri's face goes white. "They would do that to their own prince?"
"To preserve the bloodline. A weakened prince with an intact bond to an unsuitable mate is worse, in their calculation, than a damaged prince with no bond at all."
"The petition requires a unanimous elder decree," Lira says. "All five."
"When is the session?"
"This evening. Full court."
Full court. The great hall. The same hall where he was stripped and exposed, where Ithyris claimed him, where five hundred Drekian courtiers will watch while Syreth argues for the destruction of his bond.
"Does Ithyris know?"
Lira's expression tightens. "The prince knows."
"How angry is he?"
Lira hesitates, which is unprecedented. "The training courtyard is empty because the prince's sparring session destroyed three practice dummies and cracked a stone pillar. I would characterize his emotional state as volcanic."
Bryn stands.
