He is tall. Even seated, Bryn can tell he's tall, with broad shoulders and a lean, powerful build that speaks of a body made for both elegance and violence in equal measure. His skin is tanned and warm, and along his throat and temples there are faint violet scale patterns that trace the lines of his bones,delicate and iridescent, catching the amber light of the hall and refracting it in soft purple so that he seems to glow faintly from within. His hair is dark, nearly black, cut short at the sides and longer on top, and it falls across his forehead in a way that would look careless on anyone less devastating. On him it looks deliberate. Everything about him looks deliberate.
His eyes are amethyst. Not violet, not purple, but the deep, fractured color of the gemstone itself, luminous and layered with depth, and they are fixed on Bryn with an intensity that makes his skin prickle from twenty feet away. There is something in that gaze that Bryn can't identify, something that goes beyond curiosity or scrutiny, something that feels almost physical in its weight.
His mouth. Bryn shouldn't be looking at his mouth. But he is, because it's the kind of mouth that could deliver a death sentence or a kindness with equal ease, full-lipped and expressive, and right now it's set in a firm line that gives nothing away.
Prince Ithyris is the most breathtakingly handsome person Bryn has ever seen, and Bryn is suddenly, acutely, painfully aware that he is wearing his sister's worst dress and he hasn't slept in two days and there are wilted flowers in his hair and he is about to deceive this creature and his entire court and almost certainly die for it. It's not the dying that bothers him in this moment, which is unexpected. It's the idea that this prince is going to look at him and see the deception and the disappointment and not whatever it was that just passed across his face, that focused, startling intensity that Bryn felt in his sternum.
He reaches the base of the dais. He curtsies the way Mithri would, bending his knees and lowering his eyes and holding the pose for a count of three while his thighs tremble and his heart pounds so hard he's certain the entire hall can hear it. When herises, he lifts his gaze to the king first, because that is protocol, and inclines his head.
Then he looks at the prince.
Something is wrong.
Ithyris has gone still. Not the composed stillness of a prince at court, but the rigid, locked stillness of a predator who has caught a scent he wasn't expecting, and the difference is unmistakable. His nostrils flare. His pupils blow so wide the amethyst nearly disappears, swallowed by black, and the effect is startling and animal and deeply, inexplicably intimate in a way that makes Bryn's breath catch. His hands grip the arms of the throne and Bryn can see his knuckles going white from here, can see the faint protrusion of claws pressing out from beneath his fingernails, and his whole body has gone taut with something Bryn cannot name and is not entirely sure he wants to.
The prince is staring at him. Not at the dress, not at the braid, not at the careful performance of a princess that Bryn has been maintaining since he left Everen. He's staring at Bryn. At his face, his throat, the line of his jaw, the hollow beneath his ear, and the hunger in his gaze is so raw and so focused that it hits Bryn in the sternum and stays there, a physical impact that he feels in his bones.
He doesn't understand it. He is standing before the prince of the most powerful kingdom on the continent in a wrinkled linen dress with dirt on his hem and fear running through every vein in his body, and this creature, this beautiful, terrifying creature, is looking at him as though Bryn has walked into his hall carrying something he's been searching for his entire life. No one has ever looked at Bryn with anything approaching this level of attention. No one has ever looked at Bryn as though he were something worth finding.
His pulse hammers. He holds the prince's gaze because looking away feels impossible, because something in thatamethyst stare has hooked into something behind his ribs and won't let go, and for a stretched, airless moment the hall and the court and the heat and the hundreds of watching eyes fall away and it is just Bryn and this stranger on his throne with his blown-black eyes and his white-knuckle grip and whatever is happening between them that neither of them seems to have expected.
Then movement. A figure to Bryn's left, descending from the gallery.
He breaks the gaze and turns, and the world rushes back in, loud and hot and overwhelming, and the loss of that connection feels so abrupt that it takes him a moment to reorient himself. The hall. The court. The hundreds of Drekians watching him with expressions he can't read. Right. He's still here. He's still pretending. He's still about to die.
The woman approaching him is old. Drekian old, which means her face is barely lined but her eyes hold the flat weight of centuries behind them. She's tall and angular, with silver hair pulled back from a severe face, and the scales at her temples are pale, almost white, faded with age in a way that somehow makes her look more formidable rather than less. She wears the robes of the elder council, dark fabric with violet trim, and she moves through the crowd with the confidence of someone who has never once in her very long life been questioned or contradicted.
She stops in front of Bryn. Close. Too close. Her nostrils flare in the same way the prince's did, a quick, deliberate intake of air, but the expression that crosses her face is not hunger.
It's suspicion.
Bryn's blood goes cold.
She circles him. Slowly, deliberately, and he can feel her gaze on his shoulders, his neck, the shape of his body beneath the cloak, cataloging every angle and every absence with the clinical precision of someone who knows exactly what she's lookingfor and is not finding it. The court watches. He can hear the silence thickening around them, can feel the shift in the room's attention from curiosity to something sharper, and he knows with absolute certainty that something has gone wrong. Something fundamental. Something that no amount of quick thinking is going to fix.
She stops in front of him again. Her eyes narrow.
"Remove your cloak," she says.
His throat closes. "I beg your pardon?"
"Your cloak. Remove it. Now."
The hall is silent. Bryn can feel the prince's gaze on him still, a physical weight against the side of his face, but he doesn't look at Ithyris. He looks at this elder with her ancient eyes and her cold suspicion and he knows. She can smell it. Whatever Drekians detect when they identify sex, whatever pheromone or marker or biological signature distinguishes male from female to their senses, she has caught it on him, and no amount of linen and flowers and careful posture is going to disguise it.
He has options. He runs through them quickly, the way he runs through columns of figures in a ledger, calculating odds and outcomes with a speed born of years of practice. He can refuse and escalate the confrontation, which will only confirm her suspicion faster. He can run, which is laughable given the number of beings in this room who could snap him in half without standing up. He can faint, which would be a believable response and might buy him time except that he's never fainted in his life and he's not entirely confident his body would cooperate even if he tried.
Or he can hold his ground and see what happens, which is what he's always done when the numbers don't add up and there's nothing left to negotiate with.
He unclasps the cloak and lets it fall.
The dress does its best. It was never going to be enough. Not here, not under this kind of scrutiny, not in front of a creature who can smell the difference between him and his sister from three feet away. The elder's gaze drops to his chest, his hips, his shoulders, cataloging the absence of curves and the presence of angles that no dress in the world can soften. To a human eye, he might still pass. He and Mithri share the same delicate features, the same gold hair, the same wide grey eyes. From a distance, in poor lighting, in a kingdom that doesn't have creatures with predatory senses, they are interchangeable.
But this woman is not human, and she is not looking from a distance, and the lighting in this hall is excellent.
She grabs his arm.
The grip is crushing. He feels the bones grind together beneath her fingers and he clenches his jaw against the sound that wants to escape, because he will not give her the satisfaction. She wrenches him forward, pulling him off balance, and her other hand seizes his chin and turns his face to the light with a roughness that makes his eyes water.
