The hall erupts in murmurs. The elder's eyes bore into his, cold and furious, and when she speaks, her voice carries to every corner of the chamber with the ringing clarity of a verdict.
"We have been deceived."
The murmurs become a roar. The elder's grip tightens on his arm and he can feel the bruise forming already, deep and hot beneath his skin. She hauls him forward, up the steps of the dais, dragging him to the center of it directly before the king's throne. Another elder joins her, a tall male with deep bronze scales along his jaw and cold, efficient eyes, and between them they hold Bryn in place with the kind of grip that suggests they've restrained things far stronger than a human boy and don't consider this much of an effort.
"This is no princess," Syreth announces, her voice cutting through the noise. "This creature is male. Everen has sent us a boy in a dress."
The sound that moves through the hall is not quite outrage and not quite laughter. It is something in between, something collective and offended, and it crashes over Bryn and he stands in the middle of it and thinks: well. That lasted longer than he expected. He'd given himself until the curtsy, honestly.
On the dais, the king's expression has not changed. Thalryn watches him with those dark, ancient eyes and Bryn cannot read a single thing in his face.
The prince has not moved. The prince has not moved, and that is the strangest thing in a room full of strange things, because the rest of the court is in motion and noise and fury but Ithyris sits on his throne with his hands clenched white on the arms and his blown-dark eyes fixed on Bryn and he is vibrating with something so barely leashed that Bryn can feel it from where he stands. It isn't anger. Bryn has spent his entire life around anger, has become an expert in its flavors and textures and warning signs, and what's coming off the prince is not anger. It's something else entirely.
"The court must see the extent of Everen's deception. They sent us a male dressed as a princess. Let the court see what they sent."
Bryn opens his mouth to protest and then Syreth's hands are at the collar of the dress, and she pulls.
The linen tears. It's a cheap dress, the plainest thing his sister owned, not built to withstand Drekian strength, and it comes apart in a long, ripping sound that echoes through the hall and seems to go on forever. The bodice gives way first, then the skirt, and the fabric falls from his body in pieces and puddles at his feet and he is standing before the king and the court and the prince in nothing but his smallclothes.
The air touches his skin. Warm air, volcanic and close, but he feels cold. He feels exposed in a way that goes beyond the physical, stripped not just of fabric but of the fragile fiction he'd built around himself, the last layer of protection between who he is and what they're going to do to him. He is not Mithri. He is not a princess. He is a thin, angular boy with too-visible ribs and bruises forming on his arm and a braid that's coming undone, and there is nowhere in this hall to hide and nothing left to hide behind.
The court stares. Hundreds of Drekian eyes on his bare skin. He can feel their assessment, clinical and dismissive, and he knows what they see: a body built for endurance rather than beauty, all lean muscle and sharp edges honed by years of physical labor a prince shouldn't have been doing, narrow-hipped and flat-chested and unmistakably, undeniably male.
Syreth fists a hand in his hair and forces his head up. His scalp screams. She wrenches him around to face the king and he stumbles, nearly falling, catching himself at the last moment on legs that are trembling badly enough that the effort of staying upright takes everything he has.
"Look at your king, boy," she hisses. "Look at what you've done."
He looks at the king. Thalryn's expression is impossible to read. Stone and shadow and ancient, patient eyes that give him nothing to work with.
Syreth addresses the court, her hand still in his hair, her voice ringing with righteous fury. "The boy is virginal. This much is confirmed. Our prince's instincts have recognized as much." She pauses, lets that sink in, and Bryn feels heat crawl up his neck at the implication, shame blooming bright and hot even through the fear. "But he is male. He cannot carry a child. He cannot continue the Drekian bloodline. He is unfit for our prince, unfit for this court, and unfit for the honor of standing in this hall."
She releases his hair and he staggers forward a step before catching himself. His eyes are burning but he will not cry. He will not cry in front of these people. He has cried in exactly one place in his life and it is his bedroom in Everen with the door shut and the lights out, and this hall with its hundreds of watching eyes is not going to change that. He locks his jaw and breathes through his nose and plants his feet on the heated stone and refuses to fall.
"Everen has violated the Treaty of Ash and Ember," Syreth continues. "The appropriate response is clear. We should make an example of this boy that Everen, and any other kingdom foolish enough to try, will not soon forget."
Death. She means death. Public, probably. Painful, certainly. A message written in his blood and sent back to his father's court, which will receive it with the same indifference it has shown every other disaster Bryn has tried to prevent. Viktor will probably pour himself a drink, comment on the inconvenience of losing his remaining son, and go back to whatever he was doing, which is nothing.
He's made his peace with this. He has. He made it in the carriage and the corridor and the long walk down the aisle and in every moment since. He is going to die and Mithri is safe and that is the only equation that matters. His hands are shaking behind his back but no one can see them and that's all that matters.
Then a voice from the gallery. Male, deep, carrying an amusement that makes Bryn's skin crawl in a way that fear alone hasn't managed.
"He's pretty enough for a human girl. Perhaps we shouldn't waste him. Gift him to one of our warriors. A prize for the fighting pits."
Laughter. Scattered, but present, and the sound of it is uglier than anything Bryn has heard in a hall full of ugly possibilities.
He had considered death. He had prepared himself for execution, for a quick end on the floor of this beautiful, terrible hall, and he had made his calculations and accepted the numbers. What he had not considered, what he had been too focused or too naive to imagine, was this. A prize. A plaything. A warm body handed off to whatever brute wanted one, used until he broke and discarded when he stopped being entertaining.
He is eighteen years old. He has never been kissed. He has never been touched with anything approaching tenderness except by his sister, and now he is standing half-naked before a court of dragons and a man is suggesting they hand him off as a prize and there is laughter and the laughter is the worst part because it means this is acceptable to them, this is what happens to creatures who are small and pretty and powerless in a kingdom that has never had to be anything but strong.
The thought lands in his chest and sits there, heavy and cold and real, and something in him shifts. His hands stop shaking. They go still, and the stillness is worse, because Bryn knows himself well enough to know that stillness in him has never meant surrender. It has always meant he's stopped calculating and started deciding.
Then the temperature in the hall spikes so sharply that several courtiers step back from where they're standing.
Ithyris moves.
Everyone notices. Everyone. The laughter cuts off mid-breath. The murmurs die as though someone has drawn a blade across them. The entire hall goes silent with a swiftness that speaks to something deeper than courtesy or protocol, something instinctive and primal, because the being rising from the right-hand throne is the most powerful creature in this kingdom and every person in this room knows it, and it is by choice and by choice alone that he is not violent.
He's been still this whole time. Too still, vibrating with that barely leashed intensity that Bryn couldn't name, and now he moves and the air in the hall changes. The temperature spikes again. Bryn feels it against his bare skin, a sudden flush of heat that has nothing to do with the volcanic stone beneath his feet, and the amber lights in the walls flicker and dim and the crystal veins in the ceiling pulse brighter, as though the palace itself is responding to whatever is pouring off the prince in waves.
