He is coming because Bryn is his husband and Ithyris is Bryn's and the bond between them is a sealed, ratified, sacred thing and the man who would renounce his throne before he let the elders touch Bryn will not sit in a war room and negotiate while Bryn bleeds in a cell. He will not be reasonable. He will not be the patient, careful prince the court knows.
He will be the dragon.
Bryn sits in the dark and bleeds and breathes and holds onto the bond with everything he has and waits.
Not because he is brave. Not because he is strong. Because he is loved, and the person who loves him is four hundred years old and has wings and breathes fire and said you are mine, you will always be mine with his mouth against Bryn's skin in the dark, and Bryn believed him.
He still believes him.
The dark holds him. The cold presses in. The bond whispers, faint and far.
He waits.
Chapter 21
Ithyris wakes to cold sheets.
His hand reaches across the bed before his eyes open, the motion instinctive, automatic, the muscle memory of a man who has spent weeks falling asleep with his arm across another body and waking to the warm, solid weight of it against his chest. His fingers find fabric. His palm finds the impression in the mattress where a body lay, the shallow curve of a hip, a shoulder, still holding the ghost of warmth. But the warmth is fading. Has been fading. The sheets are cool in the way that speaks of absence measured not in minutes but in hours.
He opens his eyes.
The bed is empty.
The bond tells him before his mind has assembled the evidence. The steady, warm pulse that has lived in his chest since the great hall, since the first breath of Bryn's scent across the distance, is wrong. Not absent. Muted. Thin. Stretched to a frequency so faint it registers less as a feeling and more as an ache, the phantom pain of a limb that has been severed and the nerves have not yet accepted the loss.
He is on his feet before the thought completes. The cold of the stone floor registers against his bare feet and is dismissed. He pulls on trousers. Does not bother with a shirt. The scales on his shoulders and spine are already rising, an involuntary response to the wrongness in the bond, his body preparing for something his mind has not yet named.
Bryn went to Mithri's chambers last night. Ithyris knows this because Bryn told him, because he said I'm going to see my sister, I'll come to you after, and kissed him at the door with the casual, devastating ease of a man who has stopped treating affection as a tactical risk and started treating it as a reflex. Ithyris said I'll be here and watched him walk down the corridor in that borrowed cloak that drowns his frame and thought, with a fierceness that never diminishes: mine.
He goes to Mithri's chambers.
The corridor is quiet. The sconces flicker. His bare feet are silent on the heated stone and the scales on his arms are fully raised now, dark violet and ridged, and the air around him is warmer than it should be, his body radiating heat the way it does when the dragon is close to the surface, when the ancient machinery of instinct is spinning up and the human form is becoming an inconvenience rather than a choice.
He knocks.
The door opens. Mithri is awake. She is wearing a sleep shift and her light hair is tangled and her eyes are puffy with interrupted sleep and she looks at him in her doorway, shirtless and scaled and radiating heat, and her face changes.
"Is Bryn here?"
The question is calm. His voice is level. The control it requires to keep both of those things true is a physical effort, a clenching of every muscle in his jaw and his throat, because the bond is screaming now, not screaming with information but screamingwith absence, and the absence is louder than any sound he has ever heard.
Mithri's face goes white.
"He left," she says. Her voice is small. "At midnight. He said he was going to your chambers. He..." She stops. She reads his face. The scales and the heat and the controlled, rigid stillness of a body holding itself together through will alone. "He didn't come to you."
"He didn't come to me."
Mithri's hand flies to her mouth. Her eyes fill. The sound she makes is the raw, animal sound of a twin who knows, in the marrow of her bones, that something has happened to the other half of her. Ithyris watches the color drain from her face and the fear flood in and he wants to reach for her, wants to offer comfort, wants to be the steady, patient prince who handles crises with measured calm.
He cannot.
The patient prince is gone. He left the moment Ithyris's hand found cold sheets and the bond went thin and the scent of his mate began to fade from the pillow. What is left is older than the prince. Older than the man. Older than the four hundred years of accumulated wisdom and restraint and the hard-won discipline of a creature who has learned, over centuries, to hold the fire in check.
What is left is the dragon.
"Stay here," he tells Mithri. His voice is different now. Lower. Vibrating at a frequency that makes the stones hum. "Lock your door. Do not open it for anyone but Lira."
"Ithyris." Mithri's voice cracks. Tears are streaming down her face and her hands are shaking and she is eighteen years old and her twin is gone and the man in front of her is not the man she dragged through the market three days ago, the man who laughed and ate honey cakes and let himself be pulled bythe hand through a crowd. This man has fire behind his eyes. "Please. Bring him back. Please bring him back."
