"I have an idea," he tells Mithri. "But I need more time in the library."
"Then go to the library. Actually go to the library. Not the gallery above the training courtyard. Not the corridor outside the library. The actual library, with actual books."
"How do you know about the gallery?"
"Lira told me."
"Lira told you."
"Lira tells me everything. We have an arrangement." Mithri sips her tea with the serene satisfaction of someone who has built an intelligence network in a foreign court in under a month. "She also told me about the corridor. Both times."
Bryn's face goes hot. "I am going to have a conversation with Lira about professional discretion."
"You are going to do no such thing. Lira is the most valuable asset we have in this palace and I will not have you embarrassing her." Mithri sets down her cup. "Go to the library. Find your argument. Win this. And then you can go back to being occupied as much as you want."
Bryn looks at his sister. Eighteen years old, sharp as a blade, sitting in a dragon's kitchen giving him strategic advice with one hand and protecting his heart with the other. He came here to save her. She is saving him.
"Thank you," he says. Quietly. Meaning it.
Her face softens. The blade banks and she is his little sister, the girl he carried through the corridors of a dying kingdom, and she reaches across the table and squeezes his hand.
"Go," she says. "You've got this."
He goes.
Chapter 17
The third trial finds Bryn in the library.
He has been there for six hours. The texts are spread across the table in the order he has arranged them: founding statutes on the left, elder precedents in the center, bond law on the right, and the thin, fragile thread of an argument winding through all of them, growing stronger with every clause he cross-references and every footnote he chases into the margins of crumbling Drekian manuscripts that have not been opened in decades. The argument is this: the Clause of Unfitness was written to protect the crown from bonds formed under coercion, deception, or magical corruption. It was never intended to dissolve a bond that the magic itself has confirmed through three completed trials. Using it to sever a confirmed bond doesn't protect the crown. It violates the very law the clause was written to uphold.
It is a good argument. It might even be a winning one. But he hasn't had time to finish building it because Lira is standing in the doorway and her expression is the one that means something important is happening and he is not going to like the timing.
"The third trial," she says. "Now."
"Now?" He looks at the texts spread across the table. The thread of his argument, half-woven, fragile, critical. "Right now?"
"The sacred pool has been prepared. The elders are assembled. The prince is waiting." She pauses. "The trials are not scheduled at the convenience of the intended, Bryn. They come when the bond is ready."
The bond. He feels it now, thrumming in his chest with a fullness that has been building since the dream, since the petition, since the afternoon in the prince's bed when the bond blew open and they felt each other's pleasure through the connection and Bryn came with Ithyris's name in his mouth and an understanding in his body that he has been circling for weeks and landed on three days ago in the kitchen with Mithri, between bites of bread, without fanfare or ceremony.
He is in love with Ithyris.
The knowledge sits in him the way all the truest things sit in him: quietly, without drama, with the plain solidity of a fact that has been true for longer than he's been willing to look at it. He is in love with the man who pauses in doorways and leaves dents in chair arms and walked through the wreckage of his fear without flinching and threatened to burn his kingdom for him and holds him afterward with hands that shake and has never, not once, made him feel as though wanting was something to be ashamed of.
He is in love with him and he has not said it.
Not to Ithyris. Not out loud. Not in any form that exists outside the privacy of his own skull, where he can control the shape of it and examine it from a safe distance and pretend it is a hypothesis rather than a conclusion. Because saying it out loud makes it real in a way that thinking it does not, and real thingscan be broken, and Bryn has spent eighteen years learning that the surest way to lose something is to admit you need it.
And now there is a trial. A trial that takes place in a sacred pool where you cannot lie, cannot deflect, cannot hide. A trial that will strip him bare in every way that matters and hold him in water that reads the truth in his blood and he will have to stand there, face to face with the man he loves, and the water will not let him keep it to himself.
He is terrified.
Not of the trial. Not of the pool or the magic or the elders watching. He is terrified of saying I love you to a man who is bound to him by ancient magic and having Ithyris look at him and realize that what the prince feels is the bond. Not love. Not choice. The bond doing what bonds do, manufacturing affection from proximity, and the tenderness and the want and the way Ithyris says his name are all just the magic working as intended and Bryn is a fool who mistook the architecture for the architect.
He is terrified that he will say it and the prince will be kind about it. That Ithyris will take his face in his hands and press his mouth to his forehead and say something gentle and devastating about how the bond creates strong feelings and those feelings are real but they aren't the same as love and he cares for Bryn, of course he cares, but.
But.
