Not quietly. A full, visible, public dissolution, his face crumpling and a sound escaping him that is heard by every person in the chamber, a sound that is not a prince's sound but a man's, the sound of a man who has been answered after four hundred years of asking and the answer has been carved into his chest with steady hands.
The bond settles.
Bryn feels it the way he felt the pool's confirmation, except deeper, more structural. The bond, which has been a pulse and a hum and a warmth and a blaze, becomes something permanent. A second heartbeat, a presence living inside his chest alongside his own heart, and the presence is Ithyris. Not his thoughts. His shape. The emotional architecture of the prince taking up permanent residence inside Bryn's body.
He can feel Ithyris's joy. It is vast. It fills the chamber. It fills the mountain.
The prince pulls him against his chest. His arms close around Bryn and his face presses into Bryn's hair and the marks throbbetween them, the blood shared, and they hold each other in the glowing chamber and the rite is complete.
From the front row, Mithri breaks. The jaw unclenches. The composure fails. She presses both hands to her face and the sound she makes is the full, uncontrolled sobbing of a twin sister watching her other half be loved the way he deserves, and the sound fills the chamber and Bryn is crying too and the prince is crying and the chamber is full of light and tears and the oldest magic in the world.
Thalryn inclines his head. The smallest gesture. Barely perceptible. Not approval. Something warmer. Something that exists in the space between a king's duty and a father's heart, the closest thing to tenderness this ancient, grieving man can produce.
The chamber erupts. Not in applause. In sound, the low, resonant, harmonic hum that is the Drekian celebration, a vibration that begins in the chests of two hundred dragons and rises through the stone and the crystal and the water until the whole mountain is singing, and Bryn stands with his husband's blood on his lips and his husband's mark on his neck and the mountain singing around them and he thinks: this is what enough feels like.
***
That night, in their chambers, the mating bond completes.
The door closes and the ceremony falls away and it is just them. The bed that has become theirs. The warmth and the cedar and the amber light and the bond, which is a living thing now, a second heartbeat, and Bryn can feel the specific emotional topography of the man he married, vast and tender and trembling.
Ithyris undresses him slowly. The cloak first, unfastened with the same careful deliberation he used to fasten it. Bryn's shirt, buttons worked one by one, the prince's eyes following his hands as each inch of skin is revealed. The shirt falls and Ithyris's gaze finds the mark on Bryn's neck, the crescent of the dragon's bite, fresh and vivid, and his breath catches and his fingers trace the edge of it and the touch sends a current through the bond that Bryn feels in his teeth.
"Does it hurt?" Quiet. His thumb at the edge of the mark.
"No." The mark does not hurt. It throbs in synchrony with the bond, and the sensation is not pain. It is presence. "It feels like you."
The prince's eyes darken. His hand slides from the mark to the back of Bryn's neck and he pulls him in and kisses him, slow and deep, tasting of ceremony and salt and the metallic edge of blood. Bryn kisses him back. His hands find the prince's chest, seek the mark he made, the thin line over Ithyris's heart, and when he presses his palm flat against it the prince groans into his mouth and the bond flares, the feedback loop engaging.
They undress each other. Both bare, both marked, standing in the amber light with the bond wide open and the mating marks throbbing in synchrony and the want between them is not the urgent want of crisis. It is something older. The want of two people who have been permanently bound and are learning what permanence feels like in their bodies.
Ithyris lays him on the bed. The sheets are cool against Bryn's back and the prince's body is warm above him, and where the bite on Bryn's neck presses against Ithyris's skin the contact is electric, a current flowing between the marks, sacred and filthy in equal measure.
The prince's mouth finds the mark. He kisses the bite, his lips tracing the crescent, and the sensation is blinding, a bolt of pleasure so intense Bryn's back arches off the bed and his nailsdig into the prince's shoulders and the sound he makes has no language.
"Every time I touch it," Ithyris says against the mark, "you're going to feel that. For the rest of your life."
"Touch it again."
The prince's tongue traces the crescent and Bryn comes off the bed, his body lifting toward the prince's mouth, and Ithyris presses him back down with one hand and the other slides down Bryn's body and wraps around his cock and strokes once, slow, and the combination of the prince's mouth on his mark and his hand on Bryn's cock overwhelms every remaining thought.
Bryn reaches for the prince's mark. His hand finds the scar over Ithyris's heart and presses and the reaction is immediate, the prince's hips jerking, a groan vibrating against Bryn's neck, and the feedback loop spirals tighter. His mark under Bryn's palm and Bryn's mark under the prince's mouth and the bond screaming between them and they are caught in a circuit of shared sensation building toward something vast.
The prince prepares him with trembling hands. His fingers inside Bryn, gentle and thorough, the familiar stretch and the unfamiliar electric current flowing between their marks every time the prince's body presses against his. When Ithyris positions himself and pushes in, the stretch is slow and consuming and the marks press together as he covers Bryn's body with his, and the contact of mark against skin completes the circuit and the bond detonates.
Not the detonation of the balcony. This is the mating bond completing itself, the final lock engaging, and the sensation is not just pleasure. It is union. Bryn feels the prince inside his body and himself inside the bond and the two are the same thing, the physical joining and the metaphysical happening simultaneously, and for a moment he cannot tell where his body ends and the prince's begins.
Ithyris moves. Slow. Devastating. Long, rolling thrusts that feel, through the bond, the way prayer feels, devoted and reverent. His mouth is on Bryn's mark. Bryn's hand is on the prince's. The current flows between them in a closed loop and the climb is gradual and inexorable.
Bryn wraps his legs around the prince. Pulls him deeper. Ithyris's forehead drops to his and their eyes meet and they are as close as two people can be and the prince's eyes are dark and wet and blazing and the look in them is the look from the pool, from the cell, the look that says am I enough, except the question has been answered and carved into flesh and the answer is permanent.
"Husband," Bryn says.
The word, with the marks between them and the bond wide open and the prince's body inside his, hits Ithyris with a force that makes his rhythm falter. His jaw clenches. His hips drive forward, deep and grinding, and the marks pulse and the bond spirals and Bryn is close, the pleasure cresting.
"My husband," the prince says back. Broken. The claiming reciprocal. His hand finds Bryn's cock and strokes in time with his thrusts and the dual sensation combined with the marks combined with the bond combined with the word pushes Bryn over the edge.
The orgasm is not just his. Through the completed mating connection, his pleasure floods into the prince's body and the prince's pleasure floods into his and they come together, simultaneously, a shared detonation that blanks the world. The marks blaze between them, burning with a heat that is not pain, and the bond sings, one sustained note that fills the chamber and the mountain and the dark.
