Chapter 5
Bryn wakes confused and aching and tangled in a cloak that isn't his.
For a disoriented moment he thinks he's in Everen, that he's fallen asleep at his desk again and the crick in his neck is from the ledger and the warmth is from the fire and Mithri will knock any moment with tea and that look she gives him when he's worked through the night.
The quiet, exasperated fondness that says I love you and you're an idiot in equal measure.
Then the ceiling comes into focus, vaulted and carved and glowing with amber light, and the memory of where he is drops through him and settles in his stomach and stays there, heavy and cold and real.
He sits up. The cloak falls from his shoulders and the cedar smell rises and he pushes it away, then pulls it back, then pushes it away again and leaves it in a heap on the bed and stands up and decides he is finished being pathetic about a piece of fabric.
He's been wearing other people's things his entire life.
A cloak is just a cloak. The fact that this particular cloak belongs to a dragon prince who declared Bryn his mate in front of several hundred people and smells of cedar and smoke in a way that apparently short-circuits Bryn's higher reasoning is irrelevant.
The borrowed clothes are wrinkled from the few fitful hours of something that wasn't quite sleep but wasn't quite wakefulness either.
He smooths them as best he can, rolls the sleeves again where they've come unrolled during the night, and splashes water on his face from the basin.
The obsidian mirror shows him the same pale, tired boy as last night, with the addition of dark circles under his eyes that could house small animals and a crease on his cheek from the pillow that makes it look as though someone has drawn on him in his sleep.
Stunning. Truly fit for a prince. The Drekian Sovereignty must be thrilled with what Everen has sent them.
He should go to the dining hall. That's what's expected.
He should sit beside Ithyris at breakfast and perform the role of his intended and let the court assess him over their morning meal, and the thought of it makes his throat close so tightly he can't swallow.
He can picture it with perfect, horrible clarity: the long table, the watching eyes, the elders cataloging his every movement, the courtier from the gallery looking at him and remembering what he said and smiling that smile that made Bryn's skin crawl.
Syreth sitting somewhere nearby with her pale scales and her cold certainty and the memory of her hand in his hair and her fingers on his chin and the sound of linen tearing.
He can't do it. Not today. Not yet. Yesterday he was stripped bare and thrown on the floor and threatened with things he hasn't stopped thinking about since, and if he sits at that table and feels the weight of the court's eyes on his body he will shatter, and Bryn does not shatter where people can see.
He has shattered exactly once in his life, the day Alder died, and he did it alone in his bedroom with the door locked and he put himself back together before anyone noticed he'd been in pieces.
He will afford himself the same courtesy today.
So he goes to find the kitchens instead.
***
It takes him twenty minutes and three wrong corridors.
The palace is a labyrinth, hallways branching and splitting and connecting in ways that suggest it was designed for beings who navigate by scent or thermal sense rather than by sight, which is deeply inconvenient for a human who relies primarily on his eyes and his sense of direction, both of which are proving inadequate.
He passes libraries and training halls and open-air galleries where the volcanic wind sweeps through, hot and mineral, ruffling his hair and carrying sounds from elsewhere in the palace that he can't identify.
He catalogs every turn and landmark the way he catalogs trade routes and fortifications back home, building a map in his head out of habit and necessity.
Survival through information. The only kind he's ever had access to.
The kitchens are in the lower levels, carved into the rock near the thermal vents, and he smells them before he finds them: bread baking, meat roasting, something sweet and spiced that makes his empty stomach cramp with want so sharply he has to stop walking and press a hand against his abdomen and breathe through it.
He follows the smell down a wide staircase and through an archway and into a room that is, miraculously, the first place in this palace that feels familiar.
It's enormous, of course. Everything here is enormous and Bryn is beginning to suspect that the Drekians do not build small anything, ever, as a matter of cultural principle.
But the chaos of the kitchen, the clatter of pots and the shouting across counters and the clouds of flour and the organized disorder of people who are very good at feeding a great many others, is so achingly familiar that something in his chest unclenches for the first time since he left Everen.
This is something he understands. This is the language of logistics and supply and the practical magic of turning raw ingredients into something that keeps people alive.
He has spoken this language for years, negotiating with merchants and rationing grain and calculating how many mouths the castle could feed and for how long, and hearing it spoken fluently in this enormous kitchen feels, absurdly, more welcoming than any suite of rooms could.
A woman at the nearest counter spots him and stops mid-chop.
She's Drekian, broad and strong, with copper scales along her forearms and flour dusted through her dark hair and a cleaver in her hand that could take his head off at the neck.
Her expression as she looks at him is not hostile, not welcoming, but assessing, the way a cook assesses an unfamiliar ingredient and decides what to do with it.
"You're the prince's intended," she says.
Word travels fast in a palace. Even a palace carved into the interior of a volcano.
"I'm Bryn," he says. "I was hoping for some breakfast. Something simple, if you have it."
She stares at him for a long moment, during which Bryn becomes acutely aware that he is standing in the busiest kitchen he has ever seen in his life wearing clothes three sizes too large for him with pillow creases still on his face, asking for food the way he used to ask Everen's cook for scraps when the formal meals had already been served to people who mattered more than him.
She sets down the cleaver and wipes her hands on her apron and says, "Sit. "
He sits.
Within minutes he has been installed at a small table in the corner of the kitchen, away from the main bustle but close enough to the ovens that the warmth wraps around him, and in front of him is a bowl of plain broth and a round of soft bread and a pot of tea that smells of chamomile and something herbal he doesn't recognize.
The head cook, whose name is Theryn, stands over him with her arms crossed and watches him eat with the same critical attention she probably gives her sauces, and there is something so deeply, unexpectedly comforting about being watched over by a large woman with a cleaver and an opinion about his eating habits that Bryn has to look down at his broth to keep his composure.
"You're too thin," she declares.
"I've been told."
"Humans are too thin in general, from what I've seen, but you're thin for a human. When's the last time you ate a proper meal?"
He thinks about it. The answer is embarrassing enough that he considers lying, but she has the kind of face that suggests she'd know, and also she's still holding the cleaver. "Define proper."
She makes a sound that transcends language.
Disapproval, sympathy, and the immediate intention to correct the problem, all compressed into a single exhale through the nose.
She disappears and returns with a small pot of honey and a dish of soft cheese and sets them beside the bread with the decisive placement of someone who considers this a prescription rather than a suggestion.
"Small bites. Don't rush it. Your stomach needs to remember what food is."
The broth is warm and mild and sits in his stomach without protest. The bread is fresh and soft and the honey is sweet in a way that is gentle rather than cloying and the cheese is creamy and mild and he eats slowly, the way she told him to, and for a few minutes the fear recedes to a manageable distance and he is just a hungry person having breakfast. Just a body being fed.
Just a boy sitting in a warm kitchen being looked after by someone who doesn't seem to want anything from him except for him to finish his bread.
The kitchen staff are kind. This is the thing he wasn't prepared for.
Not the grandeur of the palace or the beauty of the prince or the hostility of the court, but the simple, unremarkable kindness of the people who work here, offered without ceremony or expectation.
A young cook brings him a second cup of tea without being asked and sets it down with a nod and moves on.
Another pauses to ask if he has any food sensitivities, and the question is so thoughtful and so mundane that Bryn almost doesn't know how to answer it.
Theryn tells him the kitchen is always open to him, any hour of the day or night, and he should come whenever he needs to eat because she can tell he's the kind of person who forgets.
She's right. He is that kind of person. It's hard to remember your own hunger when you're busy calculating whether the grain stores will last the winter and whether the root cellar has flooded again and whether the cook has noticed that three of the silver serving spoons are missing because Bryn sold them to cover a debt his father doesn't know about.