Chapter 1 #2
Bryn sets the scroll down with hands that are surprisingly steady.
It’s entirely possible the shock has not hit him yet and he’s not quite certain what the end result of that is going to be.
He presses his free hands flat on the desk to steady himself and breathes for just a moment, in through his nose and out through his teeth.
The logical thing to do here is think through every angle like he always does: the political calculation, the very real militaristic threat, the sheer astronomical impossibility of Everen refusing to honor a treaty they signed with the most powerful kingdom on the continent.
They can’t refuse. They just can’t. It’s not even a thought he entertains for longer than it takes to blink it away.
Everen no longer has the military power, or the allies, or the treasury to refuse.
The Drekian Sovereignty has a standing military that would outnumber their entire population and that’s not even considering that their forces are capable of literally flying overhead and setting them on fire.
The prince alone could level the castle and be home in time for supper.
The treaty is binding and his father signed it, whether drunk or sober doesn’t really matter anymore, and whatever he received in return has most certainly long since been spent on wine and poor decisions.
Bryn takes the scroll and goes to find his twin.
***
She's in her chambers, brushing her hair.
She looks up when he comes in and he watches her face change as she reads his, the way it always does when she knows he's about to tell her something that's going to hurt.
It's been happening more and more lately.
There was a time, years ago, when Bryn used to come to her with good news.
He can't actually remember the last time that happened.
"What's happened?" she asks.
He hands her the scroll without a word, because he doesn't trust his voice not to crack if he tries to explain it. He watches her read it. He watches the color drain from her face and the brush slip from her fingers and clatter on the stone floor, and something in his chest cracks clean in half.
"No," she whispers.
"Mithri."
"No, Bryn, I can't. I can't go there. They're..." She presses her hand over her mouth like she's trying to physically hold the panic in.
She's shaking. His sister, who has held herself together through every disaster this wretched family has thrown at her, who sat through their father's coronation anniversary dinner last year with a placid smile while Viktor knocked a candelabra into the soup course, is shaking so badly the scroll rattles in her grip.
He crosses the room and takes her hands. They're cold and small and trembling and he folds them between his and holds tight, because that's the only thing he knows how to do when the world is falling apart. Hold on.
"Listen to me."
"I can't do it. I know I should be brave, I know it's my duty, but Bryn, I can't. I don't even know what they want from me.
A bride? A hostage? A..." She can't finish.
Her eyes are wet and wide and terrified and she's trying so hard to be the composed princess she was raised to be, but she wasn't raised to be anything, really.
Neither of them were. They were raised to stay out of the way while their parents fell apart, and now she's being asked to walk into a dragon's court and smile about it.
Something in Bryn goes very still and very certain.
No.
Not her. Not this. He has let this family take almost everything from him.
He has let it take his childhood, his sleep, his future, the years he should have spent being young and foolish and free.
He has let it take his name and his worth and his right to be seen as anything more than a convenient stand-in for a dead brother.
But he will not let it take Mithri. She is the only good thing left in his life, the only person in this entire crumbling kingdom who looks at him and sees someone worth caring about, and he will not stand in this room and watch her be wrapped up and shipped off to warm some creature's bed because their father was too drunk and too stupid to read what he was signing.
"I'll take care of it," he says, and his voice comes out steadier than he expected.
She blinks at him. "What?"
"I said I'll take care of it. I always do."
"Bryn, you can't negotiate with the Sovereignty. Father tried, I'm sure he..."
"Father hasn't tried anything. Father doesn't know about this yet, and he won't, not until it's already done." He squeezes her hands once, firm enough that she focuses on him instead of the panic. "I need you to listen to me very carefully, Mithri. Can you do that?"
She nods. She always listens to him. It's one of the very few reliable things left in his life.
"You're going to pack a small bag. Only essentials, nothing heavy. You're going to take the east road to Aunt Elowen's estate in the Lowlands and you're going to stay there until I send word that it's safe to come home."
"But the envoy is coming in three days. If I'm not here..."
"You won't need to be here."
She stares at him. He watches the understanding dawn, slow and horrified, her expression shifting from confusion to disbelief to something that looks a lot closer to grief than he's comfortable with.
"Bryn. No."
"It'll work. We're the same height, same coloring. The Sovereignty's envoy has never laid eyes on either of us. They're expecting a pretty blonde princess and that's exactly what they'll get."
"You cannot be serious."
"I am frequently serious. It's one of my many charms."
"This isn't funny!"
"I'm not laughing, Mithri."
She pulls her hands from his and stands, backing away from him.
Her face is flushed and furious and terrified all at once, which is a combination he's only ever seen on her once before, and that was the night their father put his fist through the parlor window and Bryn had to pull the glass out of his knuckles while Viktor wept about Alder.
"They'll kill you," she says. "The moment they find out, they'll kill you."
"Probably."
"Probably?"
"There's a slim chance they'll find the whole thing amusing. Dragons are unpredictable. They might respect the audacity."
"You're insane."
"Also possible." He stands and closes the distance between them, because she's backed herself nearly to the wall and the look on her face is breaking his heart.
"But here's what isn't possible, Mithri.
You going to the Sovereignty. You standing before their court and being inspected and bartered over.
You in some dragon's bed. That is not going to happen.
Not while I'm still breathing and capable of doing something about it. "
Her face crumbles. She's crying now, silently, the way they both learned to cry when they were children: soundlessly, so their mother wouldn't hear from behind her closed door and their father wouldn't be disturbed from his cups.
He pulls her into his arms and holds her and she presses her face into his shoulder and her whole body shakes against him.
"I won't let you do this," she says into his shirt, muffled and damp.
"You can't stop me. You know that."
"Bryn."
"Mithri." He pulls back and holds her face in his hands, thumbs wiping the tears from her cheeks.
She has their mother's eyes and their father's stubborn mouth and she is, without question, the only thing in this kingdom worth fighting for.
"You are the best thing in this kingdom.
The only thing in it worth saving. Let me do this for you. "
She crumbles. She argues. She begs and bargains and threatens to tell their father, which they both know is an empty threat because their father would probably toast the Sovereignty with whatever bottle he's currently nursing and call it diplomacy.
But in the end, she does what she's always done when Bryn sets his mind to something. She trusts him.
He helps her pack. He walks her to the servants' passage that leads to the east gate, the one that the staff uses for deliveries so they won't be seen from the main courtyard.
He presses a purse of coins into her hand, the very last of what he's been squirreling away in the false bottom of his desk drawer, and he holds her one more time and breathes in the smell of her hair and tries to memorize the shape of her against him.
He's not stupid. He knows the odds. This might be the last time he ever holds his sister.
"I love you," she says, fierce and broken.
"I know. Go."
She goes.
He stands in the dark passage until he can't hear her footsteps anymore, until the silence swallows the last echo of her and he's alone in the cold stone corridor with nothing but the sound of his own breathing. Then he goes to her chambers and opens her wardrobe.
***
The dresses are a problem.
Mithri favors gowns with structured bodices and sweeping skirts, intricate beadwork, layers of silk over linen.
They're the kind of construction designed to accentuate a figure that Bryn does not possess and has never possessed.
He's lean where she's soft, flat where she's curved, and no amount of creative tucking is going to change the fundamental architecture of the situation.
He's also fairly certain that showing up to the Drekian court in an ill-fitting ballgown would undermine the whole "convincing princess" angle he's going for.
He pushes past the formal gowns and digs toward the back of the wardrobe where the forgotten things live.
There. A simple traveling dress in dusty blue, linen with a modest neckline and a skirt that falls straight rather than flaring at the hip.
It's the plainest thing she owns, probably worn once to some country outing and never thought about again. It'll do.
He strips in her room and pulls the dress on.
The fabric settles against his body, loose in the chest where it was meant to have something to hold onto, but otherwise passable.
The length is right. He turns to the mirror and examines himself with a critical, dispassionate eye, which is the only kind of eye he's ever been able to turn on himself.
The face that looks back at him is fine-boned and fair, framed by gold hair that falls past his shoulders.
Wide grey eyes. A mouth that is, admittedly, prettier than it has any right to be on a man, which is something he's been told more times than he cares to count and in varying degrees of kindness.
He's spent his whole life being mistaken for a girl at first glance, which had stung terribly when he was younger and now just strikes him as the single most useful thing about himself.
From a distance, in this dress, with his hair down, he could pass.
Up close is where it falls apart. No chest. No hips.
Hands too large, jaw a fraction too strong, the line of his throat too visible where a woman's would be softer.
He'll need a cloak. A heavy one, with a hood. Something to keep the illusion intact until he's far enough away from Everen that it won't matter what they see when they look at him.
He braids his hair the way Mithri wears hers, loose and threaded with small flowers from what's left of the garden.
He finds her simplest jewelry, a thin chain with a pendant that sits right at the hollow of his throat, and clasps it in place.
He keeps his own boots because hers are too narrow, but the dress is long enough to hide them and he's not about to try navigating a foreign court in shoes that pinch.
One last look in the mirror. Not Mithri. Not quite Bryn. Something in between, something fragile and temporary that won't survive close inspection, and he decides that's fitting. He's spent his whole life being something in between. At least now it serves a purpose.
He sits at her desk and writes her a letter.
He tells her he loves her. He tells her not to come after him, no matter what she hears.
He tells her to stay with Aunt Elowen and that when the dust settles, if there's anything of Everen left standing, it's hers to rule.
She'll be better at it than anyone in their bloodline has been in generations, and that's not flattery.
It's the honest truth, which is something Bryn deals in so rarely these days that it feels almost foreign to put it to paper.
He doesn't write a letter for his father. Viktor wouldn't read it. He's not even sure his father would notice he's gone, not until the wine runs out and there's no one there to negotiate with the merchants for more.
He doesn't write one for his mother. She wouldn't open her door to receive it.
There's no one else. It's a thought that should probably sting more than it does, but Bryn has never been one for self-pity.
It's a waste of time that he could spend on something more productive, and right now the most productive thing he can do is fold the letter, seal it with plain wax since they haven't had proper sealing wax in months, and leave it on Mithri's pillow where she'll find it when she arrives at Elowen's estate and unpacks the things she's certain to have forgotten.
He pulls the cloak tight around his shoulders, lifts the hood, and walks out of the castle he's held together with his bare hands for six years without a single word of thanks from anyone in it.
The envoy is waiting in the courtyard. Two Drekian guards, tall and broad and radiating the kind of contained, effortless power that makes the air itself feel heavier.
Their armor is dark and polished and worth more than everything Bryn is currently wearing combined, including the jewelry.
Their eyes pass over him without pause, without suspicion, and he's not sure whether to be relieved or insulted that the disguise works this easily.
"Princess Mithri?" one of them asks.
"Yes," Bryn says.
His voice doesn't crack. His hands don't shake. He has been lying to keep this kingdom alive for six years and he is, if nothing else, exceptionally good at it.
He is his father's greatest work of fiction and his sister's last line of defense, and he climbs into the carriage with his borrowed dress and his stolen name and doesn't look back. There's nothing behind him worth seeing.