Bryn catches her watching him from across the great hall one evening while he is arguing with Therron about mineral rights and Ithyris is beside him, one hand on the small of his back, and Mithri is across the room making Melith laugh again, and the court is warm and full and alive with the specific energy of a kingdom discovering that change is not the same as loss.
Syreth's eyes meet his across the distance.
She does not look hostile. She does not look convinced. She looks as though she is standing on a shore, watching the tide come in, knowing it cannot be stopped and refusing to move.
Bryn holds her gaze. He does not smile. He does not challenge. He simply looks at her and lets her see what is true: that he is here, that he is staying, that the man beside him chose him and he chose back and the choosing has been ratified by magic older than her convictions and confirmed by a court that is learning, slowly, to see what the prince saw.
She looks away first.
It is not a victory. Syreth looking away is not the same as Syreth stepping back. But it is a pause. A held breath. The smallest possible acknowledgment that the tide is real and the shore is shifting.
Bryn turns back to the conversation. The prince's hand presses warm against the small of his back. Mithri's laugh carries across the hall. The bond hums, steady and whole, and happiness sits in his chest, warm and solid and bewildering, and he lets it stay.
He lets it stay.
Chapter 20
The corridors are quiet at this hour.
It is past midnight and the palace has settled into its nighttime hush, the amber sconces dimmed to a low glow, the thermal vents breathing their steady exhale of warm air through the carved stone passages. Bryn is walking from Mithri's chambers to his own, his bare feet silent on the heated floor, and he is smiling.
He doesn't smile in corridors. Or he didn't, before. The boy who arrived at the Sovereignty in a stolen dress did not smile in corridors because corridors were spaces to traverse, not to enjoy, and enjoyment was a luxury reserved for people whose lives were not a series of controlled emergencies. But tonight he and Mithri talked for three hours about nothing, about everything, about honey cake recipes and whether Ithyris's formal voice is deeper than his private voice (it is, Bryn confirmed, and Mithri shrieked and threw a pillow at him) and whether the chestnut stall on the lower terrace is better than the one near the eastern gate, and the normalcy of it, the utter, unremarkable normalcy of lying on his sister's bed and arguing about chestnuts, has lefthim with a warmth in his chest that has nowhere to go except his face.
He is wearing his nightclothes and one of the prince's cloaks, pulled on as an afterthought because the corridors cool at night and Ithyris's cloak was the closest thing to hand and it smells of cedar and smoke. The cloak is too large. It pools at his feet and the hood sits loose around his face and in the dim light of the corridor he is a shape, a silhouette, a figure in an oversized cloak with delicate features and light hair and nothing about him, from behind, in the dark, distinguishes him from his twin.
He is thinking about going to the prince's chambers instead of his own because his own chambers have become a formality, a place where his clothes live but he does not, and the prince's bed is where he sleeps now and the distance between Mithri's door and Ithyris's door is shorter than the distance to his own and he is already calculating the route when the hand closes over his mouth.
It happens fast.
One moment he is walking, smiling, thinking about cedar and smoke and the weight of arms around him. The next there is a hand over his mouth, leather-gloved, smelling of horse and road dust and something chemical, something sharp and acrid that burns his nostrils. An arm locks around his chest, pinning his arms to his sides. He is lifted off his feet. His back hits a body, broad and hard, and he thrashes, instinctive, his heels kicking backward, connecting with a shin. A grunt. The grip tightens.
A second pair of hands. His wrists, seized and bound with rope so fast the burn of it registers before the comprehension does. The hood of the cloak is yanked forward over his face, blinding him. The chemical smell intensifies, pressed against his nose and mouth through the glove, and his vision swims and his muscles loosen and he fights it, fights the dissolution of his own consciousness with every scrap of will he possesses.
The bond.
He reaches for it. Through the haze, through the chemical fog descending over his mind, he reaches for the bond the way a drowning man reaches for a rope. It is there, thrumming in his chest, Ithyris's presence warm and distant, and he pushes against it, hard, a flare of panic and fear and help, something is wrong, come find me.
The chemical takes him.
The last thing he feels before the dark closes is the bond, still pulsing, still there, and he clings to it the way he clings to everything that matters: desperately, stubbornly, with the grim refusal to let go that has kept him alive for eighteen years.
Then nothing.
***
He wakes in the dark.
The first thing he registers is cold. Not the volcanic warmth of the Sovereignty, not the heated stone and mineral air that he has acclimated to over weeks. Cold. Damp. The kind of cold that seeps through clothing and into bone and speaks of underground places built for containment rather than comfort.
The second thing is pain. His wrists are raw from the rope. His shoulders ache from the position, arms bound behind his back, the joints pulled at an angle that sends sharp, lancing pain through his upper arms every time he shifts. His head throbs with the residue of whatever they used to put him under. His mouth tastes of chemicals and blood.
The third thing is the absence.
The bond is muted. Not gone. He can feel it, faint and distant, a thread stretched thin across a vast distance, but the warmth that has lived in his chest for weeks, the constant thrummingpresence of Ithyris, has dimmed to a whisper. The absence is physical. A cold hollow where the warmth should be, and the hollow aches with a depth that has nothing to do with the rope or the bruises and everything to do with the fact that he is, for the first time since the bond formed, alone.
He opens his eyes. The dark resolves into shapes. A stone room, small, windowless. A heavy door with iron fittings. A thin line of torchlight seeping beneath it. The floor is damp stone. The walls are rough. The air smells of mildew and earth and the faint, distant tang of the sea.
Not the Sovereignty. Not the mountain. Somewhere far enough away that the bond has stretched to its limit and the connection that has been his compass, his anchor, his proof that he is wanted, is barely there.
