Chapter 5 #2
He sits in the warm kitchen and drinks his tea and breathes.
Just breathes. The steam rises from the cup and the sounds of the kitchen wash over him, the clatter and the voices and the hiss of something being dropped into hot oil, and he feels, for the first time since he put on that dress in Mithri's room, something other than afraid.
He feels tired. He feels sad. He feels homesick for a home that was never much of one, which is a particular kind of longing that doesn't make any sense and hurts all the more for it.
But he's breathing. And the broth is warm. And the kitchen doesn't expect anything from him.
***
Syreth finds him in the corridor outside the kitchens.
He doesn't see her coming. One moment he's walking, feeling almost steady on the foundation of warm broth and kindness, his step lighter than it's been since he arrived, and the next she's in front of him, stepping out from an alcove with the timing of someone who was waiting for him.
Specifically. Deliberately. Her silver hair is pulled back from that severe face and her pale scales catch the amber light of the corridor and her expression is controlled, measured, nothing at all resembling the fury of the great hall.
This is worse. The fury was honest. This is calculated, and Bryn has spent enough years around calculated people to recognize the difference and to know which one is more dangerous.
"You were not in the dining hall," she says.
"I had breakfast in the kitchens. I wasn't aware there was a mandate about where the prince's intended takes his meals."
"There isn't. I'm merely observing that an intended who hides in the kitchens rather than sit beside his prince is not exactly a portrait of devotion."
Bryn says nothing. He's learned, through years of dealing with his father's creditors and his mother's silence and the sycophants who circled Everen's dying court looking for any remaining scraps of influence, that sometimes the sharpest response is no response at all.
Let them fill the silence with their own assumptions.
It costs him nothing and it gives them nothing to work with.
Syreth steps closer. She's nearly a foot taller than him and she uses every inch of it, standing close enough that he has to tilt his head back to meet her eyes, and the posture is designed to make him feel small.
It works. It would work on anyone. But Bryn has spent years standing in rooms with people who were taller and louder and more powerful than him and refusing to be the one who looked away first, and he doesn't look away now.
"You should understand something, boy. The prince's reaction to you in that hall was biological.
Involuntary. It is a response his body has to your scent and nothing more.
It is not affection. It is not desire in any meaningful sense.
It is hunger, and you would be wise not to mistake it for something more flattering. "
The word hunger lands in him and detonates.
"You are a warm, pliant body for the prince's taking," she continues, her voice measured and almost gentle in the way that a blade is gentle when it's very sharp and doesn't need force.
"A vessel for a biological imperative he did not choose and does not want.
He will use you as his body demands, and when the novelty fades and the compulsion dulls, you will be exactly what you were in Everen: nothing.
A second son with no kingdom and no worth and no place in any court, Drekian or otherwise. "
She pauses. Lets it settle. She is good at this, Bryn thinks with the detached part of his brain that is always assessing, always cataloging, even when the rest of him is absorbing a blow.
She is very good at this and she has probably been doing it for centuries and he is not her first target and he will not be her last.
"You will never be sovereign. You will never be queen, or king, or consort, or anything else that carries weight.
You will never be anything more than the body that happened to trigger a response in a prince who deserves far better than what Everen has sent him.
And one day, perhaps soon, the prince will wake and the bond will have cooled and he will look at you and see what the rest of us see.
A boy. A liar. A nothing from a nothing kingdom, wearing clothes that don't fit. "
Bryn holds her gaze. His face is still. He knows it's still because he has spent years making it still, years learning to absorb cruelty without flinching, and this is cruelty of the most sophisticated kind, the kind that is tailored and precise and knows exactly where to cut because it has been watching and listening and learning where the soft places are.
She found them. She found every single one.
It works. Not because she's wrong about all of it.
But because she's right about enough. He doesn't know what the mate bond is, not really, not in any way he can verify independently.
He doesn't know if what he saw in Ithyris's eyes was genuine want or involuntary reflex.
He doesn't know if the gentleness was real or if it was a biological compulsion dressed in tenderness, an instinct wearing a kind face, and the doubt was already there.
It had been there since the moment the prince touched him, a small, cold seed planted deep, and Syreth has just given it water and sunlight and a name.
"Thank you for the insight," he says, and his voice is even and dry and gives her nothing. He has been giving people nothing for years. He is excellent at it. "Is there anything else, or may I go?"
She smiles. It's thin and satisfied and it's the smile of someone who knows she's landed every blow she aimed for and doesn't need to throw another.
She steps aside and Bryn walks past her and he doesn't look back and he makes it around two corners and out of her line of sight before his hands start shaking.
He presses them flat against the stone wall and closes his eyes and breathes.
The wall is warm beneath his palms. Everything here is warm.
And he is standing in a corridor in a borrowed shirt with Syreth's words sitting in his chest next to the hollow space where his certainty used to be, and he cannot tell the difference between a prince who wants him and a dragon who is simply hungry.
He cannot tell and there is no ledger for this, no column of figures he can run, no calculation that will give him the answer, and the not-knowing is its own kind of cruelty.
He stands there for a long time. Then he pushes off the wall and walks and doesn't stop until he finds somewhere to think.
***
He spends the rest of the day in the library.
It's an accident. He's wandering the corridors, trying to learn the layout, cataloging turns and staircases and the location of exits because old habits are survival habits and also because the alternative is going back to the suite and sitting on the too-large bed and thinking about Syreth's words until they eat through what's left of his composure.
He pushes open a door that looks indistinguishable from every other door in this corridor and finds himself in a room that stops him where he stands.
The library is three stories tall. Shelves carved directly into the volcanic rock, rising from floor to ceiling, every surface covered in books and scrolls and bound manuscripts in languages he can and cannot read.
The ceiling is open to a shaft of natural light that falls through a fissure in the mountain above, and the light catches the dust motes suspended in the warm air and turns them to gold.
There are reading alcoves set into the walls, each one furnished with a cushioned bench and a small table and a glowing amber stone for light, and the whole room smells of old paper and leather and the faint mineral tang of the volcanic rock and it is, without question, the most beautiful room Bryn has ever entered, and he walked through the great hall yesterday.
In Everen, the library held forty-seven books.
He knows because he read them all by the time he was thirteen and then read them again because there was nothing else, and by fifteen he could recite entire chapters of the kingdom's trade history from memory, which is both impressive and deeply sad depending on how you look at it.
This room holds thousands.
He pulls a book from the nearest shelf. It's a history of Drekian trade routes, written in Common, with detailed maps and annotations in a precise, elegant hand.
He opens it and starts reading and he doesn't stop, because information is the only currency Bryn has ever had that couldn't be taken from him, and this room is a treasury beyond anything he's ever imagined.
He reads through the afternoon. He reads about the thermal river networks and how they're used for transport and agriculture, and the systems are so elegant and so efficient that he wants to weep for Everen's rotting irrigation and the canal that collapsed four years ago because his father wouldn't fund the repairs.
He reads about the obsidian trade and the gem mines in the eastern mountains.
He reads about the Sovereignty's military history, its alliances, its enemies, its internal politics, and he absorbs it all with the desperate, methodical focus of someone who knows that understanding the place you're trapped in is the first step toward surviving it.
He's deep in a chapter on Drekian succession law, which is both more complex and more interesting than he expected, when the air in the library changes.
He doesn't hear Ithyris approach. But he feels him.
A warmth at his back, a shift in the quality of the silence, and the back of his neck prickles with that involuntary awareness that he has already learned to associate with the prince's proximity, and he knows, with a certainty he resents, that Ithyris has entered the room.