"I am not patient because I am saintly." Ithyris's voice drops. The shaking is more pronounced. "I am patient because you are worth every moment of waiting. I was patient when you threw bread at my courtiers. I was patient when you flinched from my touch. I was patient when you pulled away and built your walls back up and pretended that the corridor and the dream and the way you shake when I hold you meant nothing. Because I could feel, through the bond, what you couldn't say. And I would have waited a hundred years more."
The water glows brighter. The magic responding to truth, amplifying it, and the cavern is luminous now, every surface reflecting the light, and the prince's face in the glow is the most beautiful and the most vulnerable thing Bryn has ever seen.
"But I am not patient now." Ithyris swallows. His jaw works. And for the first time since Bryn has known him, the prince's composure doesn't just fray. It fails. His voice breaks. "I love you, Bryn. Not because of the bond. Not because of the magic. I love you because you argue about grain tariffs with the passionof a general at war. Because you read trade law for recreation. Because you throw bread at lords and steal food off my plate and wear my shirts with one shoulder bare and you don't even know you're doing it. Because you came here to die for your sister and instead you lived, and the living has been the bravest thing I have ever watched anyone do."
The cavern is silent except for the sound of water and the sound of two people breathing.
"I love you," the prince says again, quieter. "And I am asking you, in this water, where I cannot lie and you cannot hide, to tell me what is true."
The water presses in. The magic presses in. The truth Bryn has been carrying for weeks presses against the inside of his chest and it hurts, physically hurts, the pressure of an unsaid thing that has grown too large for the space he's been keeping it in.
He opens his mouth.
And the terror comes. All at once. A wave of ice in the hot water, the old fear, the hall fear, the certainty that has lived in him since he was a child: that he is not worth loving, that anyone who claims to love him is mistaken or deceived, that the words he is about to say will land between them and the prince will look at him and the expression on his face will change. Ithyris will realize. He will see through the bond and the heat and the proximity to the plain, unadorned truth: that Bryn is an angry boy from a dying kingdom with no magic and no title and nothing to offer a prince beyond a sharp tongue and a talent for arithmetic. He will be kind. He will say something gentle about how the bond creates strong feelings and those feelings are real but.
But.
The water says: tell the truth.
Bryn closes his eyes. Breathes.
He thinks about the hall. The empty hall where no one comes. He thinks about how it felt when Ithyris walked through the door. The prince's hands on his bleeding palms and the way the wreckage went still and the room became smaller and warmer and bearable. For eighteen years he was alone in that hall. Ithyris is the first person who didn't just visit. He stayed.
Bryn opens his eyes.
"I am going to say something," he tells the prince, and his voice is steady in a way that surprises him, "and you are going to let me finish before you react, because if you touch me or say my name in that voice I am going to lose my nerve and I have very little nerve left and I need all of it for this."
The prince nods. His hands are fisted at his sides beneath the water and his jaw is clenched and Bryn can feel through the bond the exact shape of his fear: that what Bryn is about to say is a version of thank you or I care about you or the bond is strong between us. Not the words he needs.
Bryn takes a breath.
"I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to stand in front of someone and say the thing I'm about to say because no one ever taught me. My father loved wine more than he loved his kingdom. My mother loved a version of herself that stopped existing before I was born. The only person who has ever loved me without condition is my twin sister, who I left sleeping in a dark room and walked out in a stolen dress to take her place."
The water pulses. The light shifts. The truth keeps coming because the water will not let him stop.
"I have been afraid my entire life that I am not enough. Not enough for my father to stay sober. Not enough for my mother to see me. Not enough for my kingdom to survive. And I have been afraid, every day since I arrived here, that I am not enough for you. That what you feel is the bond and what I feel is desperation and that one day you are going to look at me clearly and see whatthe elders see: a human with nothing to offer and no reason to stay."
The prince's face is doing something terrible. His eyes are bright and his jaw is rigid and Bryn can see the effort it is costing him not to move. Bryn holds up one hand, barely, wait, and Ithyris waits because he promised he would.
"But here is what is true." His voice cracks. He lets it. The water is stripping him and he is letting it and there is nowhere left to hide. "What is true is that you were my first. That I gave you something I had never given anyone because I trusted you with my body before I had the courage to trust you with the rest of me. And what is true is that it meant something. Not because of the act. Because of the choosing. Because I chose you, and I want you to be my only, and the wanting is not the bond. The wanting is mine."
The water is blazing. The bioluminescent light has intensified until the cavern is white with it, the walls and the ceiling and the surface of the pool all glowing, and Bryn can barely see the elders through the brilliance. But he can see Ithyris. He can always see Ithyris.
"What is true is that I love you."
The words leave his body and the water takes them and the magic takes them and the cavern rings with the truth of it, amplified, resonating, inescapable. But the water is not finished with him. There is more. The thing beneath the love, the thing the love is built on, and the water pulls it from him with the gentle, relentless force of a tide.
"And I want to marry you." His voice breaks on the word. Marry. A word he never thought he would say to anyone, a word that belongs to people who believe in futures, and he is saying it in a sacred pool in front of the elder council to a dragon prince who is looking at him as though he has just rearranged the constellations. "I want to be yours. Not the bond's. Not thetreaty's. Yours. I want to stand in front of your kingdom and your father and every elder who has ever looked at me and seen nothing and I want to choose you, publicly, permanently, and I want you to be my husband and I want to be yours."
The words hang in the luminous air between them. Love and marriage and forever and yours. Bryn stands in the sacred pool with his chest cracked open and every terrifying truth he owns laid bare in glowing water and he waits for the laugh. For the gentle correction. For the kind, devastating but.
Ithyris doesn't laugh. He doesn't correct. He doesn't say but.
What he does is make a sound. Small. Not a word. Not a sob. Something between the two, something that lives in the space where language fails and the body speaks instead, and his face crumples the way it crumpled in the morning after the dream when Bryn told him to stop putting the composure back on. His eyes close. His shoulders drop. And the tension that has been holding his body rigid since Bryn stepped into the pool releases all at once and what is left is a man who has just been given the thing he was afraid to need.
He crosses the pool.
Two steps. Three. The water parts around his body and the light moves with him and then his hands are on Bryn's face, both palms cradling his jaw, and his forehead presses against Bryn's and he is breathing hard, each breath a shudder, and his thumbs are stroking Bryn's cheekbones and his tears are falling into the pool and the water receives them and glows brighter.
