Mithri squeezes his hand until the bones creak.
"Breathe," she whispers.
Bryn breathes.
They leave the hall together. Ithyris meets them in the corridor, still vibrating with unspent fury, and takes one look at Bryn's face and pulls him into his arms, right there, in front of Mithri and Lira and two courtiers who quickly decide to lookelsewhere. He holds Bryn against his chest with his mouth at his temple and his arms shaking and says nothing. Bryn says nothing. Mithri stands beside them with wet eyes and a jaw set in steel and they breathe.
Later, in the dark, the prince presses his mouth to Bryn's temple and says, quiet and absolute: "They will not take you from me."
Bryn believes him. Not as a hope. As a fact, carved into the same stone as the mountain that holds them, as permanent as the man whose arms are wrapped around him.
He doesn't sleep for hours. But this time, the wakefulness is not fear. It is the slow, disorienting process of feeling something shift inside him, a weight redistributing, a load he has carried alone for eighteen years being shouldered by someone strong enough to bear it and stubborn enough to insist.
He presses back against the prince's chest. Ithyris's arm tightens.
He stays.
Chapter 16
The days after the petition are supposed to be quiet.
That is the word Lira uses. A pause between crises, a held breath while the court recalibrates and Syreth regroups and Thalryn deliberates in his private chambers and the third trial looms somewhere ahead, unscheduled, a blade suspended overhead by a thread no one will tell Bryn the thickness of.
There is nothing quiet about what is happening to him.
The bond has changed since the dream. Before, it was a hum. A low, constant warmth in the center of his chest, noticeable but manageable, a background frequency he could tune out when he needed to think clearly. Now it is a pulse. It beats in time with his heart and carries information he did not ask for and cannot ignore: the precise location of Ithyris in the palace at any given moment, the texture of his mood, the rise and fall of his attention. When the prince thinks about him, Bryn feels it. A flare of warmth that blooms behind his sternum and radiates outward through his ribs and settles, heavy and liquid, in the pit of his stomach.
Ithyris thinks about him constantly. The warmth never stops. And the awareness has a quality Bryn is trying very hard not to name, because naming it would require admitting that the bond is not just transmitting presence. It is transmitting want. A steady, thrumming current of desire that runs beneath everything the prince does, pouring through the bond and into Bryn's body until he can no longer distinguish the prince's wanting from his own.
His want and Ithyris's want. The same substance flowing in both directions.
He is coming apart.
***
Ithyris spars in the mornings.
Bryn discovers this on the second day when he is walking to the library and the corridor passes the upper gallery that overlooks the training courtyard and he glances down and stops moving and does not move again for forty-five minutes.
The courtyard has been repaired since the prince's destruction of it. New practice dummies, the cracked pillar replaced, the sand raked clean. Ithyris is in the ring with two of his palace guard, both of them scaled and armed and moving with the fluid, dangerous efficiency of trained fighters. He is shirtless. His trousers sit low on his hips, belted loosely, and the violet scales on his shoulders and spine are raised and gleaming with sweat and his body is in constant motion, pivoting and striking and blocking with a controlled brutality that makes Bryn's mouth go dry.
He fights the way he does everything. With precision. With patience. With the knowledge that he could end it at any moment and the discipline to hold back, to let the bout play out.Bryn watches him feint left and drive right and catch the first guard's blade on his forearm, the steel ringing off his scales, and sweep the second guard's legs from under him with a low kick that is beautiful in its economy.
The scales ripple across his skin when he's exerted. The violet patterns spread from their usual territory at his shoulders and spine, creeping down his arms, across the ridges of his ribs, and the transition between scale and bare skin catches the light and catches Bryn's eye and catches something lower, something hungrier, that tightens in his gut every time the prince's body twists and the scales shift and the muscle beneath them flexes. Ithyris's stomach is flat and hard and the scales taper to a V below his navel that disappears beneath his waistband, and Bryn stares at that V and thinks about tracing it with his tongue and his hands grip the gallery railing until his knuckles go white.
Ithyris disarms the first guard with a move Bryn doesn't fully see, too fast, and the blade spins out of the guard's grip and clatters on stone. The second guard lunges. The prince catches the blow on crossed forearms, the impact ringing through the courtyard, and shoves the guard back three staggering steps with raw, negligent strength.
The heat in Bryn's stomach drops lower. His cock stirs and he grips the railing harder and thinks about cold water and grain tariffs and Drekian mineral rights law and none of it helps because the man in the ring is turning, chest heaving, sweat sliding down the channel of his spine, and his eyes lift to the gallery.
He finds Bryn instantly.
Across the distance, through the dust and the morning light, his gaze locks onto Bryn's and the impact is physical, a jolt that runs from his chest to his groin. Ithyris's eyes are dark. His mouth is parted. His chest is rising and falling with the exertionand the sweat on his skin catches the light and the bond between them detonates.
The want that has been building for days tears through the connection with a force that makes Bryn grip the railing with both hands. His want. The prince's want. A collision of need so acute it borders on pain, and Bryn sees the moment Ithyris feels it too because his jaw tightens and his hands curl into fists and the scales race up his throat and his eyes go black, the amethyst swallowed, and the distance between them feels like nothing, a membrane Bryn could reach through and touch him.
The guard says something. Ithyris doesn't hear it.
Bryn leaves the gallery. Not because he wants to stop looking. Because if he keeps looking he is going to walk down the stairs and across the courtyard and put his hands on the prince's sweat-slick skin in front of the palace guard and he has some shredded remnant of dignity left.
