Mithri grabs his arm. "He's angry enough to crack stone and you're going to walk up to him?"
Bryn looks at his sister. He thinks about the dream, the corridor, the prince's hands on his face in the grey morning light. "He would never hurt me," he says. The certainty in his own voice surprises him. It surprises Mithri too. He can see it register, the shift from worry to something closer to wonder, because Bryn has never in his life spoken about another person with that kind of absolute conviction, not even about her.
He walks out of the kitchen.
***
The training courtyard is a ruin.
Three practice dummies reduced to kindling. A stone pillar cracked from base to midpoint. The sparring sand churned with boot prints and claw marks. Ithyris is standing in the center of it, shirtless, the scales on his shoulders and spine fully raised, dark violet and ridged, his fists clenched at his sides.
Bryn steps into the courtyard. His boot crunches on debris and the prince's head turns, fast, predatory, and his eyes find Bryn and they are blazing.
Not at him. The distinction is immediate and instinctive. The rage is for Syreth. For the petition. For the centuries of tradition that reduce a bond to a calculation and a person to a variable. When the prince's gaze lands on Bryn, the rage doesn't disappear. It shifts, parts, and behind it is something desperate and fierce and so nakedly protective that Bryn's chest constricts.
"You heard," Ithyris says.
"I heard."
"I will not let them..."
"I know."
Bryn crosses the courtyard and puts his hand flat against the prince's chest, over his heart. The frantic rhythm hammers beneath his palm. The scales under his fingers are warm and vibrating with the effort of containment.
Ithyris looks down at Bryn's hand. Looks at his face.
"They want to sever us." His voice is low, shaking at the edges. "They want to take you from me using my father's own law and I am trying very hard not to set something on fire."
"I can see that." Bryn looks at the cracked pillar. "You missed."
A breath escapes the prince. Not quite a laugh. The tension in his body shifts by one degree, and his hand comes up and covers Bryn's on his chest and presses it harder against his skin.
"The session is tonight," Ithyris says. "Full court. My father will adjudicate." His eyes are dark. "I will end it."
"How?"
"By telling them the truth. If they sever this bond, they sever me from this court. I will renounce the throne before I let them touch you."
The words land and detonate. Renounce the throne. His crown, his birthright, his kingdom. He would give it all up for a boy from a dying kingdom who showed up in a stolen dress and threw bread at a lord and can't stop arguing about grain tariffs.
"You can't do that," Bryn says. His voice is not steady.
"Watch me."
"Ithyris. You cannot abandon your kingdom for..."
"For what?" The prince's eyes bore into his. "For the person I chose? For the man who walked into my fear and knelt on the floor and answered a question I've been asking for four hundred years?" He dips his head until his forehead nearly touches Bryn's. "There is nothing they can offer me that is worth more than you. Let them take the crown. Let them take the palace and the Sovereignty itself. I will have you, and the rest of it can burn."
Bryn grips the waistband of the prince's trousers because his shirt is gone and Bryn needs something to hold onto and his hands are shaking.
"Don't burn anything," he says. His voice is wrecked. "Not yet. Go to the session. Say what you need to say. And I'll be there."
The prince's eyes search his face. Looking for the retreat. The deflection. The walls going up.
He doesn't find them. Bryn has nothing left to hide behind. The dream took it. The morning took it. The sight of the prince standing in the wreckage of a training courtyard, shaking with the effort of not burning his kingdom down for him, took the last of it.
Bryn rises onto his toes and presses his mouth to the prince's. Brief. Firm. It says: I'm here and I'm not running and they will not take me from you either.
