His arms close around Bryn. He pulls him against his chest in the glowing water and holds him and his arms are tight and his body is shaking and his face is pressed against Bryn's hair and the water blazes around them, white and blinding, and Bryn can feel the prince's heartbeat through his chest, fast and hard and alive, and the bond between them, wide open, and what flows through it is not want, not heat, not desire.
Relief.
The relief of a man who has been holding his breath for four hundred years and is finally allowed to exhale.
Bryn presses his face against the prince's chest. The water is at his waist and the prince's arms are around him and the bioluminescent light is dimming slowly, the blazing white softening to a gentle, breathing blue, and the cavern returns to its luminous stillness. On the stone ledge, the elders are silent.
Bryn doesn't care.
He closes his eyes. He listens to the prince's heartbeat. He feels the arms around him and the water holding them both and the bond between them, humming, sealed, whole.
Chapter 18
They climb out of the pool together.
Lira is waiting at the top of the steps with towels. Her face is carefully neutral but her green scales are bright, which Bryn has learned means she is feeling something she does not intend to show. She hands him a towel. She hands Ithyris a towel. She does not comment on their red eyes or their tangled hands or the fact that the prince of the Drekian Sovereignty is looking at Bryn as though he hung the stars and arranged them specifically for the prince's benefit.
"The trial is confirmed," she says. "All three completed. The bond is ratified."
Ratified. The word lands in Bryn and settles. Three trials. Three confirmations. The magic has tested them and found them sufficient and the bond is sealed in the eyes of Drekian law, which means the only thing standing between Bryn and marriage is the Clause of Unfitness and the elder council and the king and the entire weight of a kingdom's tradition, which is everything but is somehow, standing here in a towel holding the prince's hand, less frightening than it was an hour ago.
He is still dripping. The sacred water runs down his chest and his stomach and pools in the waistband of his trousers, warm and heavy. His hair is plastered to his forehead. His skin is flushed and his eyes are swollen from crying and he is standing in a towel in the bowels of a mountain holding the hand of a dragon prince who he just told, in front of the elder council, in water that cannot lie, that he loves him and wants to marry him and wants to be his forever.
The elders file past. Bryn feels Syreth's gaze on him, cold and appraising, but he does not look at her. He looks at Ithyris. The prince's hair is wet and dark and pushed back from his face and the water on his skin catches the amber light and the violet scales at his throat are muted and soft and his eyes have not left Bryn's face since they climbed out of the pool and he is holding Bryn's hand and his grip is tight and his fingers are trembling.
The elders pass. Lira follows, discreet, pulling the heavy door of the antechamber closed behind her. The latch clicks. The corridor goes quiet.
They are alone.
The antechamber is small and warm, carved from the same smooth volcanic stone as the pool chamber below, and the crystal veins in the walls pulse with a low amber glow. The air is thick with moisture and mineral heat and the smell of the sacred water, copper and salt, clings to their skin. They are standing two feet apart and they are both shaking and neither of them is moving.
The prince is waiting.
Bryn recognizes it now. The patience. The careful, measured stillness of a man who has spent weeks training himself to let Bryn set the pace, who has learned that the surest way to keep him is to never chase. Ithyris is standing there with his heart laid open in sacred water and his hands trembling and he is waiting for Bryn to decide what happens next because that is what hedoes. That is who he is. The most powerful man in the kingdom, waiting.
But Bryn is not running.
He said I want to marry you in the sacred pool and he meant it and the water confirmed it and the magic sealed it and he is standing here, dripping wet, with the truest words he has ever spoken still vibrating in his bones, and he is done waiting for the prince to come to him. He is done letting Ithyris be the brave one. He is done making the prince carry the weight of wanting them both.
He drops the towel.
He closes the distance.
He fists both hands in the front of Ithyris's shirt, the wet fabric bunching in his fingers, and drags the prince's mouth down to his and kisses him. Not the way Ithyris kisses him. Not slow, not careful, not the measured tenderness of a man who is always conscious of his own strength. Bryn kisses him the way he argued in the pool, with everything, with the accumulated force of every truth he kept locked inside his chest, and the kiss is open-mouthed and desperate and tastes of sacred water and salt and the word husband is sitting on his tongue and he lets it.
"Husband," he says against the prince's mouth.
Ithyris's whole body goes rigid.
The word lands in him and Bryn feels the impact through the bond, a detonation, a shockwave that radiates outward from the prince's center and crashes through the connection and hits Bryn in the chest. The prince's hands, which had been hovering at his sides in the careful restraint of a man waiting for permission, fly to Bryn's body. One at the back of his neck, fingers threading through his wet hair. The other at his hip, gripping hard, pulling him flush, and the full-body contact is electric, wet skin against wet skin through clinging fabric, chestagainst chest, the prince's cock already hardening against Bryn's thigh.
"Say that again." His voice is wrecked. His forehead is pressed against Bryn's and his breath is hot against Bryn's lips and his hand is shaking in Bryn's hair.
"Husband." Bryn runs his palms up the prince's chest, over the wet shirt, and grips his shoulders. The scales there are raised and slick with water and his fingers curl around the ridges of them and Ithyris's breath punches out of him. "My husband. That's what you're going to be. That's what I chose in that pool. I chose you."
The prince comes undone.
The patience, the steadiness, the infuriating, relentless control that has defined every interaction since the day Bryn arrived, dissolves. Ithyris's mouth crashes into his and his hands grip Bryn's body and he lifts him, effortlessly, except this time the energy behind it is different, charged and wild, and Bryn's legs wrap around the prince's waist and his arms wrap around the prince's neck and Ithyris turns and pins him against the wall of the antechamber and the stone is cool against Bryn's bare back and the heat of the prince's body against his front is staggering and they are pressed together from chest to thigh and Ithyris's cock is hard against him and Bryn grinds down onto it and the sound the prince makes into his mouth vibrates through Bryn's skull.
