Chapter 3 #2
The prince is staring at him. Not at the dress, not at the braid, not at the careful performance of a princess that Bryn has been maintaining since he left Everen.
He's staring at Bryn. At his face, his throat, the line of his jaw, the hollow beneath his ear, and the hunger in his gaze is so raw and so focused that it hits Bryn in the sternum and stays there, a physical impact that he feels in his bones.
He doesn't understand it. He is standing before the prince of the most powerful kingdom on the continent in a wrinkled linen dress with dirt on his hem and fear running through every vein in his body, and this creature, this beautiful, terrifying creature, is looking at him as though Bryn has walked into his hall carrying something he's been searching for his entire life.
No one has ever looked at Bryn with anything approaching this level of attention.
No one has ever looked at Bryn as though he were something worth finding.
His pulse hammers. He holds the prince's gaze because looking away feels impossible, because something in that amethyst stare has hooked into something behind his ribs and won't let go, and for a stretched, airless moment the hall and the court and the heat and the hundreds of watching eyes fall away and it is just Bryn and this stranger on his throne with his blown-black eyes and his white-knuckle grip and whatever is happening between them that neither of them seems to have expected.
Then movement. A figure to Bryn's left, descending from the gallery.
He breaks the gaze and turns, and the world rushes back in, loud and hot and overwhelming, and the loss of that connection feels so abrupt that it takes him a moment to reorient himself.
The hall. The court. The hundreds of Drekians watching him with expressions he can't read.
Right. He's still here. He's still pretending. He's still about to die.
The woman approaching him is old. Drekian old, which means her face is barely lined but her eyes hold the flat weight of centuries behind them.
She's tall and angular, with silver hair pulled back from a severe face, and the scales at her temples are pale, almost white, faded with age in a way that somehow makes her look more formidable rather than less.
She wears the robes of the elder council, dark fabric with violet trim, and she moves through the crowd with the confidence of someone who has never once in her very long life been questioned or contradicted.
She stops in front of Bryn. Close. Too close. Her nostrils flare in the same way the prince's did, a quick, deliberate intake of air, but the expression that crosses her face is not hunger.
It's suspicion.
Bryn's blood goes cold.
She circles him. Slowly, deliberately, and he can feel her gaze on his shoulders, his neck, the shape of his body beneath the cloak, cataloging every angle and every absence with the clinical precision of someone who knows exactly what she's looking for and is not finding it.
The court watches. He can hear the silence thickening around them, can feel the shift in the room's attention from curiosity to something sharper, and he knows with absolute certainty that something has gone wrong.
Something fundamental. Something that no amount of quick thinking is going to fix.
She stops in front of him again. Her eyes narrow.
"Remove your cloak," she says.
His throat closes. "I beg your pardon?"
"Your cloak. Remove it. Now."
The hall is silent. Bryn can feel the prince's gaze on him still, a physical weight against the side of his face, but he doesn't look at Ithyris.
He looks at this elder with her ancient eyes and her cold suspicion and he knows.
She can smell it. Whatever Drekians detect when they identify sex, whatever pheromone or marker or biological signature distinguishes male from female to their senses, she has caught it on him, and no amount of linen and flowers and careful posture is going to disguise it.
He has options. He runs through them quickly, the way he runs through columns of figures in a ledger, calculating odds and outcomes with a speed born of years of practice.
He can refuse and escalate the confrontation, which will only confirm her suspicion faster.
He can run, which is laughable given the number of beings in this room who could snap him in half without standing up.
He can faint, which would be a believable response and might buy him time except that he's never fainted in his life and he's not entirely confident his body would cooperate even if he tried.
Or he can hold his ground and see what happens, which is what he's always done when the numbers don't add up and there's nothing left to negotiate with.
He unclasps the cloak and lets it fall.
The dress does its best. It was never going to be enough.
Not here, not under this kind of scrutiny, not in front of a creature who can smell the difference between him and his sister from three feet away.
The elder's gaze drops to his chest, his hips, his shoulders, cataloging the absence of curves and the presence of angles that no dress in the world can soften.
To a human eye, he might still pass. He and Mithri share the same delicate features, the same gold hair, the same wide grey eyes.
From a distance, in poor lighting, in a kingdom that doesn't have creatures with predatory senses, they are interchangeable.
But this woman is not human, and she is not looking from a distance, and the lighting in this hall is excellent.
She grabs his arm.
The grip is crushing. He feels the bones grind together beneath her fingers and he clenches his jaw against the sound that wants to escape, because he will not give her the satisfaction.
She wrenches him forward, pulling him off balance, and her other hand seizes his chin and turns his face to the light with a roughness that makes his eyes water.
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."