And Bryn realizes, with a clarity that is not new but is newly understood, that he is in love with his husband.
Not the realization of the pool, which was a truth dragged from him by magic and spoken under duress. Not the slow evidence of the weeks before, the corridor and the dream and the bond and the wanting. This is the realization that arrives after the crisis, after the fire, after the fear and the rescue and the flight home. The realization that happens when you are sitting on a bed holding your sister and the man who burned a kingdom for you is standing in the doorway with tears on his face and the look in his eyes is not I would die for you but I would live for you, every day, every ordinary day, for the rest of whatever time you give me.
That is the love that matters. Not the grand gesture. Not the fire and the fury and the wall punched through with bare hands. The living. The breakfast. The stolen food and the loaded plate and the honey cakes at the market and the forty minutes in the archive. The ordinary, relentless, daily act of choosing someone and being chosen back.
He is in love with his husband. Not because Ithyris rescued him. Because the prince will be there tomorrow morning, loading his plate, watching him with dark eyes, letting him steal his tea. Because the rescue was the exception. The breakfast is the rule.
Bryn holds Mithri. He looks at Ithyris.
He mouths two words across the room.
Come here.
The prince crosses the room. He sits on the bed beside them. Mithri shifts without releasing Bryn, making space, and Ithyris's arm comes around Bryn's shoulders, careful of the bruises, and Mithri reaches across Bryn and takes the prince's hand, fierce and certain, and they are three people on a bed in a dragon's palace, holding onto each other in the midday light, and the bond hums and Mithri's grip tightens and the prince's arm pulls Bryn closer and he closes his eyes and he is held.
He is held and he is home.
Chapter 24
Bryn finds the prince on the balcony.
It is late. The palace has settled into the deep quiet of the small hours, the amber sconces dimmed, the corridors empty. Mithri fell asleep in his bed an hour ago, curled on her side with her hand fisted in the front of his shirt the way she used to sleep when they were children and the storms came and she would crawl into his bed and hold onto him and he would lie awake and listen to the thunder and think: I will not let anything hurt you. He extracted himself gently, finger by finger, and tucked the blanket around her and pressed his mouth to her forehead and left her sleeping.
Ithyris is not in his chambers. The bed is made. The room is empty and it smells of cedar and smoke and the faint, lingering scent of soot that has not fully been scrubbed from the walls and Bryn follows the bond, the warm, steady pull of it, through the chamber and past the bed and through the open doors to the balcony that overlooks the kingdom.
The prince is standing at the railing.
The balcony is wide, carved from volcanic stone, and it juts out over the mountainside and the view is vast. The Sovereignty spreads below in the moonlight, the lower terraces and the market stalls and the residential wings and the training courtyard and beyond them, the slopes descending into the valley, forests and rivers and the distant shimmer of the border. The crystal veins in the stone glow faintly, amber and gold, and the sky above is clear and full of stars and the air is cool and clean.
Ithyris stands at the railing with his hands braced on the stone and his head bowed and his shoulders bare. He has bathed. The soot is gone, the ash, the residue of fire and violence. His hair is damp and loose around his face and the violet scales on his shoulders catch the starlight and his body is completely still with the particular quality of stillness that Bryn has learned means the prince is thinking about something he cannot solve by acting.
He is looking at his kingdom.
Their kingdom. The thought lands in Bryn with a weight that is not heavy but solid, foundational. He said husband in the sacred pool. He said forever. This is what forever looks like: a kingdom on a mountainside, a people learning to see him, a throne that will one day be the prince's and a place beside it that will one day be Bryn's. The life they are building out of a stolen dress and an accidental bond and the stubborn, infuriating refusal of two people to let go of each other.
Bryn steps onto the balcony. The stone is warm beneath his bare feet. The prince hears him, of course. The bond announces his presence before his footsteps do, and Ithyris's shoulders shift fractionally, the tension in them loosening by one degree, the way they always loosen when Bryn enters a room. The prince's body has been trained, over weeks, to relax in Bryn's presence.
Ithyris does not turn around.
Bryn crosses the balcony. The night air is cool against his skin and his wrists ache beneath the bandages and the bruise on his jaw throbs when the wind touches it and he doesn't care. He cares about the line of the prince's shoulders and the bow of his head and the white-knuckled grip of his hands on the railing and the way the bond is thrumming with something that is not calm, not settled.
The prince is shaking.
Bryn sees it when he gets close. The fine, continuous tremor in his arms, his hands, the muscles of his back. Ithyris is shaking the way he shook in the cell, the way he shook on the bed when the dam broke, and Bryn understands, standing behind him in the starlight, that the rescue is not over for the prince. Bringing Bryn home was not the end. The fear, the specific terror of waking to cold sheets and a muted bond and the knowledge that someone took the person he cannot live without and hurt him, has not let go. It is holding Ithyris the way the ropes held Bryn, tight and binding, and the prince is standing on this balcony looking at his kingdom and shaking because the kingdom is not what he almost lost.
Bryn puts his hand on the prince's back.
The scales are warm. Raised slightly, the involuntary stress response, and they smooth beneath his palm as he presses flat, the way they always smooth for him, the dragon recognizing the touch and standing down. The prince's breathing changes. The rigid, controlled rhythm loosens into something rawer and his head drops lower and his hands grip the railing harder.
"Come here," Bryn says.
Ithyris turns.
His face in the starlight is wrecked. Not the careful wreckage of the cell or the controlled grief of the bed. This is the unguarded version. The version that exists only when they are alone and the walls are down. His eyes are dark and wet and hollow withthe specific exhaustion of a man who has spent twenty hours running on fury and fear and is now, in the quiet, facing the cost.
Bryn kisses him.
He fists both hands in the front of the prince's shirt and drags his mouth down and kisses him the way he kissed him in the antechamber, with everything, with the furious, shaking, absolute totality of a man who almost lost this and did not and is now holding onto it with the kind of force that bruises. The kiss is not gentle. It is angry and desperate and it tastes of tears and the residue of fear and the fierce, primal insistence of a body that was separated from its other half and is demanding proof of reunion.
