He sits up. The pain in his shoulders flares and he breathes through it, slow and steady, the way he has breathed through pain his entire life: by acknowledging it, cataloging it, and then setting it aside in favor of information.
Where he is. Who took him. What they want.
The door opens.
Three men. The torchlight from the corridor spills in and Bryn squints against it and catalogs them in the seconds before his eyes adjust. The first is broad, heavy-set, with a soldier's build and a soldier's face, blunt and scarred and professionally disinterested. The second is thin, angular, with quick eyes that move over Bryn with an assessment that is more commercial than personal. The third is younger, nervous, hovering behind the other two with the energy of someone who has not done this before and is not sure he wants to.
The broad one steps forward. He looks at Bryn. He looks at the cloak, Ithyris's cloak, pooled around his bound body. He looks at Bryn's face, his light hair, his delicate features, and something shifts in his expression.
He reaches down and pulls back the cloak.
The nightclothes beneath are thin. The fabric clings to Bryn's chest, his arms, the flat plane of his body that is unmistakably, undeniably not female. The broad man's eyes travel downward and stop and his expression changes.
"This isn't the princess."
The thin one pushes forward. Looks at Bryn. His face tightens.
"You said blonde hair, fine features, in the prince's cloak. This was supposed to be Princess Mithri."
"This is not Princess Mithri." The broad man's voice is flat. "This is a boy."
Bryn looks up at them from the floor. His wrists are bound. His head is throbbing. The bond is a whisper in his chest and the cold is seeping through his nightclothes and he is afraid, deeply and fundamentally afraid, in the way he has not been since the great hall when the elders stripped him bare and he waited for an execution that did not come.
But he has been afraid before. He has been afraid his entire life. Fear is the water he swims in, the background radiation of an existence defined by not having enough and not being enough and never knowing when the next blow is coming. He is an expert in fear, and expertise breeds competence, and competence breeds control, and control is the only weapon he has ever owned.
He straightens his spine against the wall. Lifts his chin. Looks the broad man in the eye.
"I'm not the princess," he says. His voice is steady. Hoarse from the chemicals but steady. "I'm her twin brother. And I am the dragon's husband."
Silence.
The broad man looks at the thin man. The thin man looks at the broad man. The younger one shifts his weight from foot to foot.
Then the broad man laughs. Not a kind laugh. The laugh of a man who has been given information that does not fit his model of the world and has chosen to reject it rather than revise the model.
"The dragon's husband." The broad man crouches in front of Bryn. His face is close. His breath smells of ale and something sour. "A human boy. The dragon prince's husband."
"That's what I said."
The first blow catches him across the jaw.
The force of it snaps his head sideways and stars explode behind his eyes and the taste of blood fills his mouth, bright and metallic. He has been hit before. Not often, not routinely, but enough to know the particular quality of pain that comes from a closed fist meeting a human face, and the knowledge is useful because it means he does not panic. He breathes. He spits blood on the stone floor. He turns his head back to face the man.
"Where is the princess?"
"I told you. I'm the one who..."
The second blow is to his stomach. It drives the air from his lungs and doubles him over and he retches, dry, the chemicals and the blood and the emptiness of his stomach conspiring into a spasm that leaves him gasping on the cold floor.
"King Pliath paid for the princess." The thin one's voice, cold and precise. "The dragon's bride. A valuable hostage. Not a..." He looks at Bryn on the floor with distaste. "Not this."
Not this. The dismissal is so casual it almost doesn't register. But the elder council has trained Bryn well in the specific vocabulary of worthlessness and he hears the subtext clearly: you are not valuable enough to have taken.
The broad man hauls him upright by the front of his nightshirt. The fabric tears at the collar. He pins Bryn against the wall and his face is close and his hand is fisted in the torn fabric and his expression has shifted from amusement to somethingharder, the frustration of a man whose job has gone wrong and who needs someone to blame.
"The princess. Where is she? You tell us where to find her and this gets easier for you."
Bryn looks at him. He thinks about Mithri, asleep in her chambers, safe behind the walls of the Sovereignty. He thinks about what would happen if he told them. If he traded his sister's safety for his own, the way the old Bryn might have calculated, the Bryn who weighed everything in terms of survival and the equation always balanced in favor of whoever was most likely to live.
