Not because a trial requires it. Not because the bond compels it. Because Ithyris came for him. Because Ithyris always comes for him. Because the man who watches him breathe all night and loads his plate with food and leaves dents in furniture rather than cross a line Bryn hasn't drawn is the same creature who tore apart a fortress to reach him and the contradiction is not a contradiction. It is the whole truth of the prince. The patience and the fury. The gentleness and the devastation. The man and the dragon. Both of them Bryn's.
The dragon launches.
The ascent is smooth, careful, none of the explosive force of the departure from the Sovereignty. Ithyris climbs gently, banking in wide, easy curves that minimize the wind against Bryn's body, and the air up here is cold but the scales are warm and the cloak around Bryn's body is the prince's cloak and he is cocooned in warmth and cedar and smoke and the steady, rhythmic beat of wings carrying him home.
He keeps his eyes closed. He can feel the bond between them, wide open and blazing, flooded with the prince's relief and love and the fierce, primal satisfaction of a dragon carrying his mate home, and the feeling fills the hollow that the muted bond left in his chest and the hollow overflows and he is crying, silently, his tears soaking into the scales, and Ithyris feels it through the bond and his wingbeats slow, infinitesimally, as though he is trying to hold Bryn more gently with the sky itself.
The prince flies so gently.
The flight that should take an hour at full speed takes three. Ithyris is in no hurry. He carries Bryn through the morning sky at a pace that keeps the wind soft and the air warm and the ride smooth, and Bryn presses his forehead to the dragon's neck and listens to the heartbeat and thinks: this is what it feels like to be carried by someone who loves you. Not rescued. Not retrieved. Carried. Held. Brought home with the tenderness of someone who understands that the boy on his back has spent eighteen years carrying everyone else and has never been the one who was carried.
Bryn sleeps.
He doesn't mean to. But the warmth and the rhythm and the safety conspire against him the way they conspired the night after the pool, and he surrenders. He sleeps on the back of a dragon, three thousand feet above the ground, with his forehead against warm scales and his hands open and flat and the wind cradling him and he is not afraid of anything.
***
Ithyris lands on the palace steps.
Bryn feels the descent in his sleep, the gradual banking, the shift in pressure, and he opens his eyes to the familiar amber glow of the Sovereignty's crystal-veined walls catching the midday sun. The mountain. Home. The word settles into him with a weight and a warmth it has never had before, not in Everen, not anywhere, and he thinks: home is not a place. Home is the back of a dragon who flies gently because you are sleeping.
The prince shifts beneath him, the vast body contracting, and Bryn slides from the dragon's neck into arms that catch him, human arms, strong and soot-streaked, and Ithyris holds him against his chest with his mouth in Bryn's hair, saying his name over and over.
Then the fussing begins.
The prince sets him on the palace steps and his hands are on Bryn's face immediately, tilting his chin, examining the bruise on his jaw, the split lip, the swelling. His fingers are feather-light on the damaged skin and his expression is focused and devastated, the look of a man cataloging injuries and trying not to calculate the exact force required to produce each one.
"Your lip needs stitching." Clinical. Controlled. The composure reassembled hastily over the cracks. "The jaw is bruised, not broken. Your wrists..." He takes Bryn's hands and turns them over and the raw, abraded skin makes his jaw clench so hard Bryn hears his teeth creak. "Your wrists need cleaning and wrapping."
"Ithyris."
"You need to eat. When did you last eat? The chemicals suppress appetite and you've been..."
"Ithyris."
"Let me get you inside. The temperature out here is not adequate. You're in nightclothes, Bryn, you've been in nightclothes in a stone cell for hours and your core temperature..."
He is unraveling. The clinical inventory is a dam and the dam is cracking and behind it is the flood, the full, accumulated terror of waking to an empty bed and a muted bond, and the terror is only now catching up because the fury burned first and the fury is spent and what is left is a man who is very afraid and trying to contain it inside a checklist of injuries because if he stops listing things he will have to feel them.
The prince wraps another cloak around Bryn, layered over the first, and ushers him inside, his hand on the small of Bryn's back, the familiar gesture, his other hand gripping Bryn's elbow as though Bryn might vanish if the prince breaks contact. He steers them through the corridors and the palace guard stares and the servants stare and the courtiers stare and Bryn is bruised and bloody and wrapped in two cloaks and barefoot and the prince beside him is shirtless and soot-streaked and wild-eyed with his hand on Bryn's back and his jaw set in steel.
Ithyris takes him to his chambers. Sits him on the bed. Fetches water and cloths and a healing salve from a cabinet Bryn didn't know existed and kneels in front of him and begins cleaning the blood from his face with hands that are steady and precise and trembling at the edges.
Bryn lets him.
This is the terrifying thing. Not the cell, not the beating, not the hours in the dark. This. Sitting on a bed and letting someone take care of him. Letting someone clean his wounds and wrap his wrists and press a cup of warm tea into his hands and say drink and watch him until he drinks. Letting someone kneel in front of him and tend to the damage with the careful, devoted attention of a man who would burn the world to prevent a singlebruise on Bryn's skin and failed and is now trying to make amends with warm water and clean cloth.
Bryn has spent eighteen years taking care of everyone. His father, his mother, his sister, his kingdom. He has cleaned wreckage and balanced books and carried the weight of other people's failures and he has never sat still and let someone take care of him because letting someone take care of you requires trust, the bone-deep kind, the kind that says I believe you will not use my vulnerability against me.
He trusts Ithyris that much.
So he sits. He drinks the tea. He eats the bread the prince puts in his hands. He lets Ithyris clean the blood from his lip with a cloth dipped in warm water and wrap his wrists in clean linen and check his ribs for cracks, the prince's fingers pressing gently along each one, clinical and thorough and shaking. He lets the prince take care of him and the letting is harder than the cell and harder than the beating and harder than the dark because it requires him to be the thing he has never been: someone who receives.
The prince finishes wrapping his wrists. Sits back on his heels. Looks at Bryn, his hands resting on Bryn's knees, and the composure cracks.
Quietly. His eyes go glassy and his jaw works and his hands tighten on Bryn's knees and the dam is tissue and the flood is everything, every hour since the cold sheets, the fury and the flight and the fire and the wall and the cell and the sight of Bryn on the floor with blood on his face.
Bryn reaches up. Touches the prince's face.
