He comes in Bryn's mouth with a shattered cry, his cock pulsing against Bryn's tongue, and Bryn swallows and swallows and holds the prince's hips as they stutter and jerk, and Ithyris empties himself with a thoroughness that leaves him hollow, his body sagging, his hand loosening in Bryn's hair, and the sound of his breathing in the quiet antechamber is the most beautiful sound Bryn has ever heard.
Bryn rests his forehead against the prince's hip. Ithyris's hand strokes his hair, slow, rhythmic. Bryn presses his mouth to the hard ridge of the prince's hipbone and closes his eyes and they stay, Bryn on his knees and the prince standing above him, the warm stone beneath them and the mountain breathing around them, and the silence is the most full silence Bryn has ever known.
***
The prince takes him to bed.
Not carries. Takes. His hand in Bryn's, leading him through the corridors that Bryn now knows by heart, and the palace is quiet in the deep hours and the amber sconces cast long shadows and they are naked beneath the robes Lira left draped over the antechamber bench, which means she anticipated this, which means Lira anticipates everything, which is a thought Bryn files away without examining.
The prince's chambers. The familiar scent of cedar and smoke and the warmth of volcanic stone and the bed, wide and soft, the sheets cool and clean. Ithyris pulls back the covers and draws Bryn in and wraps his body around him, chest to back, his arm across Bryn's stomach, his mouth against the nape of Bryn's neck, and the position is so familiar now, so practiced, that Bryn's body settles into it the way water settles into a vessel, finding its shape.
Skin to skin. The prince's chest against Bryn's back, the scales at his sternum smooth and warm, the hard planes of his body cradling the leaner lines of Bryn's. His arm is heavy across Bryn's stomach. His hand spreads wide over Bryn's ribs. His breath is slow and warm against Bryn's hair.
"You are mine," the prince says. Quiet. Absolute. The words pressed into Bryn's skin through the press of his mouth.
Bryn closes his eyes. Feels the prince's heartbeat against his spine, steady and slow.
"You are mine," he says back.
The breath Ithyris takes is deep and shaking. His arm tightens. His whole body curls around Bryn fractionally closer. He has heard Bryn say I love you. He has heard husband. But this, the claiming given back, the possessive returned in kind, cracks something open in him that even the pool did not reach.
"Say it again," he whispers.
"You are mine. My husband. My mate. Whatever word this kingdom uses for the person you cannot live without. That is what you are to me."
The prince's face presses into Bryn's hair. Bryn feels the wetness on the nape of his neck and doesn't comment on it because some things don't need words. He finds the prince's hand on his ribs and laces his fingers through and squeezes once and Ithyris squeezes back.
Bryn falls asleep.
He doesn't mean to. The warmth of the prince's body and the weight of his arm and the steady rhythm of his breathing and the deep, settled certainty of the bond between them, sealed and whole, conspire against him. His body, which has been through a sacred trial and a wall and a stone floor and the most emotionally obliterating night of his life, surrenders. He sinks into sleep the way he sank into the pool, all at once, held and warm and unafraid.
He sleeps without nightmares for the first time in years.
The empty hall does not come. The wreckage does not come. The child with glass in his palms does not come. There is only warmth and dark and the steady pulse of the bond and the faint, distant sound of a heartbeat that is not his own but has become as essential to his body as his own, and the sleep is deep and dreamless and the sleep is a gift he did not know he needed.
***
Ithyris does not sleep.
Bryn learns this later, in pieces, from the way the prince looks at him in the morning light. From the shadows beneath his eyes that have nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with the specific, deliberate choice of a man who decidedthat sleep was less important than watching the person he loves breathe.
The prince held him all night. His arm across Bryn's stomach, his body curved around Bryn's, his mouth against Bryn's hair. He listened to Bryn's breathing slow and deepen and settle into the steady rhythm of dreamless sleep and he felt, through the bond, the absence of nightmares, the quiet, the unprecedented peace, and he stayed awake to guard it.
Not from threats. Not from the council or the agents of foreign kingdoms. From the fear that it might end. The irrational, bone-deep terror of a man who has waited four hundred years to be chosen and cannot quite believe the choosing has happened and is afraid that if he closes his eyes, if he sleeps, if he lets his attention waver for a moment, the boy in his arms will dissolve into the dream he has always feared this was.
He watched Bryn breathe. He counted his heartbeats. He held him the way you hold something that might disappear, carefully, desperately, with the full attention of every sense he possesses. His hand on Bryn's ribs tracked the rise and fall of his lungs. His nose in Bryn's hair catalogued every shift of his scent, the salt of the pool fading, the copper fading, until all that was left was the warm, clean smell of skin and sleep.
He did not sleep. He did not need to. He had the boy from the dying kingdom curled against his chest, breathing steadily, sleeping without nightmares, wearing his marks and his warmth and the word husband on his lips, and the boy was staying.
In the morning light, when Bryn stirs and turns and opens his eyes and finds the prince's face inches from his, tired and unguarded and luminous with a tenderness so vast it fills the room, he knows. He sees the shadows under Ithyris's eyes and understands that the prince chose this, chose wakefulness, spent the night holding Bryn the way a man holds the thing he haswaited centuries for. He presses his mouth to the prince's jaw and says, rough with sleep: "You didn't sleep."
"No."
"Why?"
Ithyris looks at him with those dark amethyst eyes and says, simply, as though the answer is obvious, as though it requires no explanation because it is the most self-evident truth in the world:
"I didn't want to miss any of it."
