The king's voice fills the chamber and the words roll over them in the ancient tongue and Bryn does not understand all of them but the bond translates what language cannot. The words are about permanence. About choice. About the binding of two lives into a single thread that cannot be cut without cutting both.
Then silence. The lanterns pulse. The pool glows. And the rite arrives at its center, the act that makes the bond permanent and the marriage irrevocable.
The exchange of marks.
Ithyris goes first.
He steps close. His hands find Bryn's shoulders and his thumbs trace the line of his collarbones and his eyes are on Bryn's, asking, even now, even in a sacred rite before the full court.
Bryn tilts his head.
He bares his neck. The left side, the juncture where neck meets shoulder. He bares it to the prince the way he has bared everything, willingly, with his eyes open, and the gesture is not submission. It is invitation. The conscious act of offering the most vulnerable part of his body to a creature with the power to destroy him and trusting, with absolute certainty, that Ithyris will not.
The prince's mouth finds the juncture.
His lips first. A kiss, soft, and Bryn feels his breath, hot and unsteady, and his mouth opens and his teeth find the skin and the pressure builds, slowly, carefully, the bite deepening with the agonizing control of a man hyper-aware of his own strength and the fragility of the body beneath his mouth.
The bite breaks skin.
The pain is sharp and bright and clean and it carries with it a rush of something else, a flood of heat and light that pours through the bond and into Bryn's body and the sensation is the pool, amplified, the truth of the water concentrated into a single point of contact where the prince's teeth meet Bryn's blood. He gasps. His hands grip Ithyris's arms. He holds on as the mark sears itself into his body, not just skin but blood, bone, the cellular structure of who he is being rewritten by the dragon's claim.
The prince holds the bite. His mouth sealed over the wound, his body shaking with the force of the bond settling into its final configuration, and Bryn is crying, tears streaming down his face, not from pain but from the enormity of being permanently claimed by someone who loves him.
Ithyris releases. The wound closes, not fully, the mark remaining, a crescent of broken skin at the juncture of Bryn's neck and shoulder that will scar and will not fade. The dragon's bite on the human's skin.
Bryn's turn.
Lira steps forward. In her hands is the ceremonial blade. Small, ancient, the metal dark with age. The human's claim on the dragon. In a rite designed for creatures of scale and fire, this is the concession to the softer species, the acknowledgment that a human cannot bite through dragon scale and so the claim must be made with steel.
Bryn takes the blade. It is lighter than he expected. Warm from the chamber's volcanic air, and it sits in his hand with a weight that is not physical but ceremonial.
Ithyris bares his chest.
The skin over his heart is one of the few places where the scales thin to nothing, where the skin is bare and human and vulnerable. This is where the mark goes. Over the heart.
Bryn looks at the blade. He looks at the bare skin over the prince's heart. He looks at Ithyris's face and his eyes are dark and wet and he is shaking so hard his whole body vibrates and the shaking is not fear. It is the shattering truth that someone is choosing him, not the prince, not the crown, but him, and the choosing is about to be carved into his skin.
Bryn's hands are steady.
They have always been steady. In crisis, in wreckage, in the dark of a cell. His hands are the part of him that never shakes, built for the careful, precise work of holding things together, and now they are going to do the most careful, precise work of his life.
He places the tip of the blade against the skin over the prince's heart. Ithyris inhales.
Bryn draws the mark.
A single line. Curved, deliberate, the shape of the human claim, which is not a symbol but a scar, a mark of breaking and healing, the acknowledgment that to be claimed by a human is to be marked by something mortal, something that will change and end but that is no less permanent for its impermanence.
The blade parts skin. Blood wells, dark and warm, and it is the first time Bryn has seen the prince's blood, the first proof that beneath the scales and the fire and the four hundred years there is a body that bleeds, a heart that can be cut.
Ithyris's eyes are locked on Bryn's face and the tears are falling and he is not hiding them and the restraint of standing still while a blade cuts his skin is visible in every tendon.
Bryn finishes the mark. Lifts the blade. Looks at the wound over the prince's heart and leans forward and presses his mouth to it. He tastes Ithyris's blood. Warm, metallic, carrying the faint mineral edge that is uniquely the prince's, and the bond surges, the human's claim settling into the dragon's body the way the prince's bite settled into Bryn's.
He lifts his head. Looks at the prince. Holds the blade in one hand and the prince's blood on his lips and says, clearly, so that the chamber hears:
"You're mine too. Not just the other way around."
The prince's composure shatters.
