He looks at himself in the polished obsidian mirror and sees a tired boy in a borrowed dress with flowers wilting in his braid and fear sitting plainly in his grey eyes. Not a princess. Not even a convincing approximation of one, now that he's looking at himself honestly in decent lighting for the first time since he left Everen. The dress is wrinkled from the carriage. His jaw is too strong. His hands, resting on the edge of the basin, are too large and too rough from years of work a prince shouldn't have been doing.
He straightens the dress. He smooths his hair. He re-pins the flowers that have slipped loose during the journey and tucks a strand of gold behind his ear and tells his reflection to pull itself together, because falling apart is a luxury he has never been able to afford and today is not the day he starts.
The wardrobe he can see through an open door holds gowns and robes in dark fabrics, all of them cut for a Drekian woman. Someone a full foot taller than him and built with the broad shoulders and long limbs that seem standard in this kingdom. He'd drown in any of them and look ridiculous doing it.
So. The dusty blue dress it is. Travel-worn, wrinkled, smelling faintly of carriage leather and his own nervous sweat. The princess of Everen, presented to the most powerful court on the continent in a hand-me-down linen frock and boots that don't match. It is, if nothing else, an honest representation of Everen's current state: underdressed, underprepared, and hoping no one looks too closely.
A knock at the door. Counselor Verath, smooth and unreadable as before.
"The court is assembled, Princess. Are you ready?"
No. He is not ready. He is not even remotely ready. He is a boy in a dress standing in a volcano pretending to be his twin sister so that she doesn't have to marry a dragon, and there is no version of this in which he is ready.
"Yes," he says.
He pulls his cloak around his shoulders and lifts his chin and follows Verath out the door and down the corridor toward the great hall where a dragon prince is waiting to meet the bride he was promised eighteen years ago. He's going to get Bryn instead, which is not an upgrade by any definition of the word, but it's what's available.
Bryn thinks of Mithri on the east road with the wind in her golden hair and freedom stretching out ahead of her, and he holds onto that image and lets it steady him the way the numbers usually do. She's safe. That's what matters. Everything else is just details, and Bryn has always been good with details, even the ones that might kill him.
He steels himself and walks forward into whatever comes next.
Chapter 3
The great hall is carved from the interior of the volcano itself.
Bryn knows this because Counselor Verath told him on the walk over, moving briskly ahead while he tried to keep pace on legs that had gone numb somewhere between the suite and the third corridor. She explained that the chamber was hollowed out over centuries, that the original formation was natural and the Drekians shaped it the way a sculptor shapes stone, with patience and fire and the understanding that some things are worth the time they take. Bryn thought that was a lovely sentiment. He was still thinking about it when the doors opened and he stopped thinking entirely.
The hall is massive in a way that makes the word massive feel inadequate. The ceiling vaults so high above him that the carved stone disappears into shadow, and the walls curve inward with the natural shape of the volcanic chamber, dark rock shot through with veins of glowing amber and deep violet crystal that pulse with a faint, living light. Columns of obsidian line the central aisle, each one carved with dragons in various stages of flight, their wings spread and their mouths open and their eyesinlaid with gemstones that catch the light and throw it back in fractured color across the polished floor. The floor itself is basalt, heated from below, and Bryn can feel the warmth of it through his boots, through the thin soles that were made for Everen's cold stone corridors and not for a hall that breathes heat from its foundations.
And the court. Gods, the court.
Hundreds of Drekians fill the hall, standing in tiered galleries along the curved walls and gathered in clusters on the main floor. Some are in fully human form, tall and striking, dressed in dark silks and leathers and metals that catch the amber glow and make them look as if they've been dipped in firelight. Some are partially shifted, and this is where Bryn's composure nearly cracks, because he has never seen anything so unsettling and so beautiful in his life and he wasn't prepared for both at once. A woman with human features and scales cascading down her bare arms in patterns of copper and gold, each one catching the light independently so that she shimmers when she moves. A man whose eyes are slitted and reflective, catching the light and throwing it back green. Another with horns curving from his temples, small and elegant, polished to a dark shine that matches the obsidian columns. Wings folded against backs. Tails curling around ankles. Claws tipping elegant fingers that hold goblets and gesture in conversation as though none of this is remarkable, because to them it isn't.
The heat of hundreds of bodies presses against him from every direction. The weight of ancient magic sits in the stone and hums against the soles of his feet, a low vibration that he can feel in his teeth. The air smells of sulfur and cedar and something else, something alive and electric that he doesn't have a name for, and every instinct he possesses is telling him to turn around and run back down the aisle and out the doors and keep running until hereaches Everen or the sea or wherever it is that people go when they've made catastrophically poor decisions.
He doesn't run. He's never had that luxury. Running has always been Everen's specialty, and someone has to stand still.
Counselor Verath announces him. Her voice carries through the hall with a clarity that silences the murmuring crowd, and Bryn feels every eye in the room shift to him at once, hundreds of gazes landing on his skin with a weight that is nearly physical.
"Princess Mithri of Everen, presented to the Court of the Drekian Sovereignty in accordance with the Treaty of Ash and Ember, for formal betrothal to His Royal Highness Prince Ithyris, Crown Heir to the Drekian Throne."
The silence that follows is enormous. Bryn stands at the far end of the central aisle with the full length of the hall stretching out before him, every inch of it polished and lit and filled with creatures who could end him without effort, and he has never felt smaller in his life. He is a lie wrapped in linen and wilting flowers, standing in the most magnificent room he has ever seen, and the distance between who he is and who they think he is has never been wider.
He lifts his chin and walks.
The aisle is long. Every step echoes against the basalt in the silence and the sound bounces off the vaulted ceiling and comes back to him, amplified, so that his own footsteps sound louder than they should. He keeps his gaze fixed forward and his hands folded and his spine straight, and he does not look at the faces turning to watch him pass because if he sees their expressions he will lose whatever fragile hold he still has on his composure. He is Mithri. He is a princess. He is walking to meet the prince who will be his husband and he is not afraid.
He is so afraid he can taste copper in his mouth, hot and metallic, and his jaw aches from clenching it.
The dais rises at the far end of the hall, three broad steps of polished obsidian leading to two thrones carved from the same dark stone. The thrones are enormous, scaled for beings who are larger than human even in their smaller forms, and the sheer size of them makes Bryn feel as though he's approaching an altar rather than a seat of governance. The throne on the left holds the king.
King Thalryn is old in the way mountains are old, the way the volcanic stone of this hall is old, the way things are old when they have been shaped by forces that operate on a timescale humans can barely comprehend. His hair is silver-white and his face is lined and hard, and even seated he radiates a density of presence that makes the air around him feel heavier, denser, as though the space he occupies has more gravity than the rest of the room. His eyes are dark, nearly black, and they track Bryn's approach with the flat, patient attention of something that has seen centuries pass and found most of them wanting. He wears no crown. He doesn't need one. Everything about him communicates authority so completely that a crown would be redundant.
And beside him, on the right throne, is the prince.
Bryn forgets how to walk.
It's only a stutter, half a step lost and recovered, barely noticeable to anyone who isn't looking for it. But something happens in his chest when he looks at Prince Ithyris, some violent rearrangement of his internal organs that he was wholly unprepared for and that no amount of strategic planning could have accounted for.
