Chapter 2
The carriage smells of leather and something faintly metallic that Bryn can't identify, and the seats are built for bodies much larger than his.
Everything about the interior is scaled up in a way that makes him feel small, which is not a sensation he's unfamiliar with but is certainly more literal than usual.
He sits with his knees together and his cloak pulled tight and his hands folded in his lap in a posture he's watched Mithri hold a thousand times.
Spine straight, chin level, fingers laced.
The picture of a composed young woman traveling to meet her intended.
Beneath the cloak, his heart is beating so hard he can feel it in his teeth, and he's fairly certain that if either of the guards looked closely enough they'd be able to see the pulse hammering at the base of his throat where the pendant sits.
The two Drekian guards ride ahead on mounts he can't get a good look at through the carriage window.
Something large. Something that moves with the wrong number of legs and makes a sound against the road that is distinctly not hooves.
He decides not to investigate further and focuses instead on the landscape sliding past, cataloging details with the sharp, strategic mind that no one has ever given him credit for and that he has never once been thanked for using.
They cross the border at midday.
He knows the exact moment it happens because the air changes.
In Everen, the air tastes of nothing. Dust, sometimes.
Woodsmoke in winter. The general ambient flavor of a kingdom slowly rotting from the inside out.
But the moment they cross into the Sovereignty, the air thickens and warms and carries the taste of sulfur and cedar, ancient and mineral, and his lungs feel heavy with it in a way that isn't entirely unpleasant.
It's the kind of air that has weight to it, that has history in it, that suggests the land beneath it has been alive and powerful for longer than Everen has existed.
The land changes too. Everen is grey stone and tired fields and forests that have been logged well past the point of recovery because his father's father's father apparently shared the family talent for short-term thinking.
The Sovereignty is something else entirely.
The mountains here are volcanic, dark stone veined with rivers of thermal water that steam in the cool air and catch the light in ribbons of white against the black rock.
Obsidian towers rise from the peaks, connected by sky bridges so high they disappear into the low-hanging clouds.
Everything is enormous. The roads are wide enough for three carriages to ride abreast with room to spare, the bridges built with arches that could accommodate something with a forty-foot wingspan passing beneath them without so much as tucking a wing.
The architecture doesn't just allow for dragons.
It assumes them. It was built around the expectation that enormous, fire-breathing creatures would need to move through these spaces freely, and it treats that fact with the same casual practicality that Everen applies to making sure the stable doors are wide enough for horses.
Bryn presses his face closer to the window and takes inventory, because that's what he does.
That's what he's always done. Two guard towers at the border crossing, manned by four soldiers each, which means a minimum standing border force that already outnumbers Everen's entire royal guard.
Thermal rivers running parallel to the road, which means natural heating infrastructure and most certainly geothermal energy for forges and industry.
The obsidian is volcanic glass, which means weapons, building material, and trade goods all from a single geological resource.
The forests on the lower slopes are dense and old-growth, untouched.
Resources they haven't needed to exploit because they have enough of everything else.
Everen has been starving for a decade. The Sovereignty looks as though it has never once in its history known want.
He sits back and closes his eyes and runs the numbers the way he runs the numbers on everything, because numbers don't lie and numbers don't have feelings and numbers are the one language Bryn has always been fluent in.
Military outposts every six miles along the road.
Supply lines that follow the thermal rivers for efficiency and natural defense.
Trade routes marked by the sky bridges, connecting mountain settlements that would be functionally impregnable to any kind of ground assault.
No visible poverty. No visible neglect. No crumbling infrastructure patched with cheaper materials and hope.
The roads alone tell him more about this kingdom's strength than any intelligence report Everen has ever produced, which, to be fair, is none, because his father dissolved the intelligence office seven years ago to pay for a new wine cellar.
He is going to die in a very well-organized country. That's the thought that settles into his chest and makes itself comfortable there, curling up next to the fear and the grief and the stubborn, burning refusal to regret what he's done.
The thought should terrify him more than it does.
Instead he feels a strange, hollow calm that he suspects is shock wearing a more dignified costume.
He's made his calculations. Mithri is safe, or will be soon, tucked away in the Lowlands where the Sovereignty has no reason to look and no interest in looking.
If they discover his deception and execute him, Everen loses a second son that no one wanted in the first place.
The kingdom will mourn him for exactly as long as it takes to pour the next glass of wine, and then it will carry on collapsing without him, which it was going to do eventually anyway.
If they discover his deception and demand the real princess, they'll have to find her first, and Aunt Elowen's estate is remote enough to buy Mithri time to disappear further.
Elowen is their mother's sister and she's sharp and practical and she's never liked Viktor, which means she'll hide Mithri without asking too many questions.
If they discover his deception and decide to burn Everen to the ground, well. It's half-burnt already. His father will have no one to blame but himself and no one to mourn but his wine collection, and Bryn finds that he can't summon much guilt about that.
He opens his eyes and watches the Sovereignty roll past the carriage window and he thinks: at least it's beautiful.
At least the last thing he sees won't be the inside of that mildewed study with its bare walls and its lying ledger and its smell of candle wax and slow decay. There are worse places to go to die.
***
The guards don't speak to him.
They stop twice for the mounts to rest, the creatures settling into the roadside with heavy, reptilian sighs that Bryn can hear from inside the carriage, and he's offered water and dried meat that he accepts with a murmured thanks.
He keeps his voice soft and his hood up and his hands tucked inside his cloak where no one can see how large they are.
The guards are enormous, both of them, easily six and a half feet tall with the broad, dense build of creatures who carry more weight than their frames suggest, as if their bones are made of something heavier than bone.
One of them has faint copper-colored patterns along his forearms that catch the light when he moves.
Scales. Not armor. Scales that are part of his skin, rising and receding with some rhythm Bryn can't parse, and the sight of them sends a complicated shiver through him that is equal parts fascination and the very reasonable desire to not be anywhere near something that can grow scales at will.
He eats the dried meat and tries not to stare and fails at both.
The meat is gamey and rich and seasoned with something that burns pleasantly at the back of his throat, and he's eaten more in this single serving than he typically allows himself in a full day back at the castle because someone has to ration and it's never going to be his father.
He hasn't eaten this well in months. The irony of receiving his best meal from the people he's actively deceiving is not lost on him, and neither is the uncomfortable realization that if this is how they feed prisoners and brides-to-be on the road, he doesn't want to know what an actual Sovereignty dining table looks like. It would probably make him weep.
At the second stop, the guard with the copper scales looks at him for a long moment.
Long enough that Bryn's stomach drops and his mind starts cataloging exits that don't exist, because they're on a mountain road in a foreign kingdom and there is nowhere to run even if he could outrun something with scales and a stride twice the length of his.
But the guard only says, "We arrive before nightfall, Princess. You should rest."
Princess. The word lands on his skin and sits there, ill-fitting and uncomfortable. He resists the urge to brush it off.
"Thank you," he says, and climbs back into the carriage and doesn't rest at all.
He spends the remaining hours watching the landscape change and memorizing every detail of the route in case he ever needs to find his way back, which is optimistic to the point of delusion but Bryn has always been better at planning than he is at accepting when there is no plan to be made.
***
The castle is not a castle.
Bryn doesn't know what to call it. Fortress, maybe.
Monument. Cathedral of dark stone and living heat.
The carriage rounds a final bend in the mountain road and there it is, carved directly into the interior of a dormant volcano, and the scale of it punches the air from his lungs so completely that he forgets for a moment to be afraid.