He opens his eyes and watches the Sovereignty roll past the carriage window and he thinks: at least it's beautiful. At least the last thing he sees won't be the inside of that mildewed study with its bare walls and its lying ledger and its smell of candle wax and slow decay. There are worse places to go to die.
***
The guards don't speak to him.
They stop twice for the mounts to rest, the creatures settling into the roadside with heavy, reptilian sighs that Bryn can hearfrom inside the carriage, and he's offered water and dried meat that he accepts with a murmured thanks. He keeps his voice soft and his hood up and his hands tucked inside his cloak where no one can see how large they are. The guards are enormous, both of them, easily six and a half feet tall with the broad, dense build of creatures who carry more weight than their frames suggest, as if their bones are made of something heavier than bone. One of them has faint copper-colored patterns along his forearms that catch the light when he moves. Scales. Not armor. Scales that are part of his skin, rising and receding with some rhythm Bryn can't parse, and the sight of them sends a complicated shiver through him that is equal parts fascination and the very reasonable desire to not be anywhere near something that can grow scales at will.
He eats the dried meat and tries not to stare and fails at both. The meat is gamey and rich and seasoned with something that burns pleasantly at the back of his throat, and he's eaten more in this single serving than he typically allows himself in a full day back at the castle because someone has to ration and it's never going to be his father. He hasn't eaten this well in months. The irony of receiving his best meal from the people he's actively deceiving is not lost on him, and neither is the uncomfortable realization that if this is how they feed prisoners and brides-to-be on the road, he doesn't want to know what an actual Sovereignty dining table looks like. It would probably make him weep.
At the second stop, the guard with the copper scales looks at him for a long moment. Long enough that Bryn's stomach drops and his mind starts cataloging exits that don't exist, because they're on a mountain road in a foreign kingdom and there is nowhere to run even if he could outrun something with scales and a stride twice the length of his.
But the guard only says, "We arrive before nightfall, Princess. You should rest."
Princess. The word lands on his skin and sits there, ill-fitting and uncomfortable. He resists the urge to brush it off.
"Thank you," he says, and climbs back into the carriage and doesn't rest at all. He spends the remaining hours watching the landscape change and memorizing every detail of the route in case he ever needs to find his way back, which is optimistic to the point of delusion but Bryn has always been better at planning than he is at accepting when there is no plan to be made.
***
The castle is not a castle.
Bryn doesn't know what to call it. Fortress, maybe. Monument. Cathedral of dark stone and living heat. The carriage rounds a final bend in the mountain road and there it is, carved directly into the interior of a dormant volcano, and the scale of it punches the air from his lungs so completely that he forgets for a moment to be afraid.
The outer walls are obsidian, polished to a black mirror finish, rising hundreds of feet from the volcanic basin and reflecting the sunset in dark, liquid ripples of orange and gold. Towers and parapets jut from the cliff face at irregular intervals, connected by bridges and walkways and open-air galleries where he can see figures moving, some of them human-sized and some of them very decidedly not. The main gate is an arch tall enough for a dragon in full form, flanked by carved obsidian pillars depicting winged figures in flight, their wings spread wide enough that the carvings alone are taller than any building Bryn has ever stood in. Thermal rivers cascade down the exterior walls in controlled waterfalls that have been engineered into the architecture itself,the steam rising to mingle with the low clouds that hang perpetually around the volcanic peak and giving the entire structure the appearance of something breathing.
It is the most magnificent thing he has ever seen, and he grew up in a palace. Granted, a palace held together with lies and creative accounting and the desperate determination of one eighteen-year-old who refused to let it collapse on his watch, but still. A palace.
The carriage passes through the gate and into a courtyard large enough to hold every building in Everen's capital town with room left over for the town's modest cemetery. The stone beneath the wheels is smooth and dark, heated from below. Bryn can feel the warmth radiating up through the carriage floor and into his boots, which are still his own boots and are still the wrong boots and are still, mercifully, hidden beneath the hem of the dress. Servants are waiting in neat, organized rows. More Drekians, dressed in dark violet livery that is better made than anything Bryn has ever owned, and they move with a fluid, unhurried grace that makes him feel clumsy just watching through the window. No one is rushing. No one looks harried or underfed or like they haven't been paid in three months. The Sovereignty, apparently, treats its servants the way Everen treats its promises: Bryn's kingdom breaks them, and this one keeps them.
The carriage stops. A servant opens the door and offers a hand.
Bryn takes it and steps out and the heat hits him immediately. Not unpleasant. Warm, constant, radiating from the stone and the walls and the air itself, wrapping around him in a way that makes every cold night he's ever spent hunched over his desk in Everen's drafty study feel suddenly and acutely offensive. After eighteen years of cold hearths and corridors that hold the chill even in summer, the warmth feels indecent. It feels wonderful. He pushes that thought down immediately because he is nothere to enjoy himself. He is here to not die, and if that fails, to die slowly enough that Mithri has time to vanish completely.
A woman approaches. She's tall, dark-haired, with deep brown skin and faint silver scale patterns at her temples that catch the light in a way that is, objectively, quite beautiful, and Bryn files that observation away in the category of things he is absolutely not going to think about right now. She bows, which surprises him. He wasn't expecting anyone to bow to him. He's not sure anyone has ever bowed to him in his life, unless they were trying to get past him in a narrow corridor.
"Princess Mithri. Welcome to the Sovereignty. I am Counselor Verath. I will see you to your chambers so that you may refresh yourself before your presentation to the court."
"Presentation," Bryn repeats, and the word lands heavy and ominous in his mouth.
"To His Majesty the King and His Royal Highness Prince Ithyris. It is customary for the intended to be presented upon arrival." She smiles. It's polite and practiced and reveals absolutely nothing, which Bryn can respect because he's been wearing that exact smile in front of creditors for the past three years. "You must be tired from your journey. We've prepared a suite for you in the east wing."
He follows her through corridors that are wide and warm and lit by stones set into the walls that glow with a soft amber light. No torches. No candles. No dripping wax or guttering flames or smoke stains on the ceiling. The light comes from the stone itself, volcanic rock infused with some kind of magic or geothermal property he doesn't understand, and it gives everything a warm, honeyed quality that makes the obsidian walls look less severe and more elegant. The ceilings are vaulted and carved with intricate patterns: dragons and flowers and geometric shapes that repeat in fractal spirals so precise they must have taken years to complete. The floors are heatedbeneath his feet. The air smells of cedar and something floral he can't name and there is not a single cobweb or patch of mildew or pale rectangle on the wall where a tapestry used to hang before it was sold at market.
Every surface is immaculate. Every detail is intentional. Every stone and carving and glowing light is placed with the kind of care and resources that Bryn has spent six years desperately pretending Everen still possesses. His castle is a testament to what Everen used to be. This palace is a statement of what the Sovereignty still is, and the distance between those two things is so vast it makes his chest ache.
He is so far out of his depth that he can't even see the surface anymore.
***
The suite they give him is larger than his father's entire wing back home.
Bryn stands in the center of it and turns a slow circle and feels something complicated and unwelcome twist in his gut, because he is not going to cry over a room. He is not going to stand here in a borrowed dress and weep because someone gave him a nice place to sleep. He has more dignity than that. Probably.
A sitting room with cushioned chairs upholstered in dark fabric and a low table set with a tea service made of porcelain so fine he can almost see through it. A bedchamber beyond, visible through an open archway, with a bed large enough for four people and draped in dark silk that looks cool and heavy and expensive enough to fund Everen's grain supply for a month. A bathing room with a sunken pool fed by a thermal spring, the water steaming gently and smelling of minerals and something vaguely herbal. Fresh flowers on every surface, arranged with the kind of effortless artistry that takes actual effort to achieve. A writing desk stocked with paper and ink of a quality that Bryn has never been able to afford, the paper thick and cream-coloredand smooth beneath his fingertips when he touches it without meaning to.
This is what they prepared for a bride. For a princess. For someone who matters, someone whose comfort is worth investing in, someone who is expected and wanted and valued before she's even arrived. Bryn has never been any of those things and the contrast sits in his throat and burns there.
He sets his jaw and crosses to the basin and washes his face. The water is warm and clean and smells faintly of minerals and his hands are shaking just slightly, which he decides to attribute to the journey and not the fact that he's standing in the most beautiful room he's ever seen and lying about who he is to people who could kill him without breaking stride.
