Chapter 6
Bryn cannot avoid the dining hall forever, much as he'd like to make a genuine attempt.
Lira is the one who tells him, arriving at his chambers the following evening with an armful of clothing she's clearly altered herself.
The stitching is uneven in places and the thread doesn't quite match the fabric, but the intent is sound and the effort is considerable: she's taken in the shoulders and hemmed the trousers and adjusted the waist so that the result is something that almost fits him, dark fabric that doesn't hang off his frame in quite so tragic a fashion as the clothes from last night.
She's also brought a fresh shirt with a collar that sits higher, which Bryn suspects is deliberate.
It covers the spot on his collarbone where Ithyris's fingers brushed, and he is grateful for that in a way he is not going to examine.
"The court expects you at dinner tonight," she says, tossing the clothes on his bed with the casual precision of someone who has delivered clothing to difficult people before and has no patience for ceremony.
"The prince's intended, seated at his right hand.
Formal. Mandatory. Not optional, before you ask. "
"I wasn't going to ask."
"You were absolutely going to ask. I could see it forming behind your eyes the moment I said the word dinner. You were already composing your excuse. Something about feeling unwell, probably, or needing to continue your research in the library."
She's right. He was composing exactly that excuse, and the fact that she's known him for one day and can already predict his avoidance strategies is either a testament to her perceptiveness or an indictment of his transparency. Possibly both.
He changes into the altered clothes and Lira stands in the doorway with her arms crossed and studies him with the critical eye of a person who takes presentation seriously and is not entirely satisfied with the materials she's been given to work with.
She adjusts the collar. Smooths the shoulders.
Steps back and tilts her head and examines him from two different angles and makes a small sound that could be approval or could be resignation.
Then her gaze moves up to his hair and she frowns.
It's still long, still gold, still falling past his shoulders in the same style he's worn it his entire life because Mithri wore hers that way and their mother wore hers that way and in Everen a prince's hair was a statement of lineage, of belonging, of the bloodline it represented.
Bryn has been wearing his hair for his family since before he can remember.
"The hair's a problem," Lira says. "It still looks like hers."
She means Mithri's. She means the braid he threaded with flowers and the loose golden curtain he hid behind in the carriage and the hair that Syreth fisted her hand in and used to wrench his head back on the dais.
She's right. It does still look like his sister's.
That was the point, once. It's not the point anymore.
"Cut it," Bryn says.
Lira blinks. "What?"
"My hair. Cut it. Do you have scissors, or a knife, or anything sharp enough to get through it?"
She stares at him for a moment, reading his face the way she seems to read everything, with a directness that doesn't bother with tact. Whatever she finds there makes her expression shift from surprise to something quieter, something that almost looks like understanding.
"I have a blade. Hold on."
She disappears down the corridor and comes back less than a minute later with a pair of shears that look like they belong in a tailor's kit, which they probably do given the alterations she's been doing.
She pulls the chair out from the writing desk and positions it in the center of the room and gestures at it.
"Sit."
He sits. Lira moves behind him and he feels her hands gather his hair, lifting it away from his neck, testing the weight of it.
It's heavy. He's never noticed how heavy it is because he's never been without it, the same way he never noticed the weight of the ledger or the weight of the crown's debts or the weight of any of the things he's been carrying until he imagines what it would feel like to set them down.
"How short?" she asks.
He thinks about it. He thinks about Mithri's golden hair catching the afternoon light in the ruined garden.
He thinks about his mother's hair, the same shade, the same length, the hair of Everen's women, the hair of a lineage he was born into and never quite belonged to.
He thinks about the mirror in Mithri's room where he stood in a borrowed dress and saw something in between, something fragile and temporary, and he thinks about the fact that he is not in between anymore.
He is here. He is in this palace and he is the prince's intended and he is not Mithri and he is not pretending to be Mithri and the hair that helped him pass as his sister is not something he needs to hide behind anymore.
"Short," he says. "Short enough that no one looks at me and sees her."
Lira is quiet for a moment. Then she combs her fingers through his hair, separating it into sections with a gentleness that he wasn't expecting from her, and he feels the cool edge of the shears against the back of his neck.
"You're sure?"
"Yes."
The first cut is the loudest. The shears close and a thick strand of gold falls past his shoulder and lands on the heated stone floor, and the sight of it there, pale and bright against the dark rock, does something to Bryn's chest that he wasn't prepared for.
That hair has been with him his entire life.
It was there when Alder died and when his mother closed her door and when he sat up through the night forging numbers in the treasury ledger.
It was there when he held Mithri in the servants' passage and breathed in the smell of her and tried to memorize the shape of her against him.
It was there when he put on her dress and became someone else to save her.
Lira cuts again and another strand falls.
And another. The weight lifts from his neck, from his shoulders, strand by strand, and with each cut something loosens in him that he didn't know was tight.
The hair collects on the floor around the chair in soft, golden curls and he watches it accumulate and he thinks: that's Everen.
That's the boy who held the walls up. That's the prince who darned his own clothes and forged the ledger and fed everyone before he fed himself and never once asked for help because there was no one to ask.
That boy got him here. That boy kept Mithri safe and held the kingdom together long enough for it to matter and walked into a dragon's court in a dress and didn't flinch.
He is grateful for that boy. He will always be grateful.
But that boy was surviving, and Bryn is tired of surviving.
He has been surviving for six years and it has cost him everything and he is sitting in a chair in a volcano letting a girl with green scales cut away the last physical thing that ties him to the person he was, and it hurts and it's necessary and he is not going to cry about it.
His eyes are stinging. He blinks hard and stares at the far wall and breathes through his nose.
Lira works in silence. She is careful and precise and she takes her time, trimming the length down to something that falls just above his ears, shorter at the sides and slightly longer on top.
She doesn't try to fill the silence with conversation and he is grateful for that too, because if she said something kind right now he would lose his composure and he has already lost enough today.
The last cut. Lira brushes the loose strands from his neck and shoulders with her hand and steps back.
"There," she says. Her voice is softer than usual. "Go look."
He stands and crosses to the obsidian mirror and the person looking back at him is not the person who left Everen.
The long gold hair is gone. What remains is short and fine and frames his face in a way that changes the geometry of it entirely, sharpening the cheekbones that were always there but were softened by the curtain of hair, exposing the line of his jaw and the length of his neck and the shape of his ears.
He looks younger in some ways and older in others.
He looks less like Mithri. He looks less like his mother.
He looks, for the first time in his life, entirely and unmistakably like himself, and the sight of his own face without anything to hide behind is disorienting and raw and frightening and, underneath all of that, something that feels unexpectedly close to relief.
He doesn't look like a princess anymore.
He doesn't look like a substitute or a stand-in or something in between.
He looks like a boy with sharp cheekbones and tired grey eyes and a mouth that is still, admittedly, prettier than it has any right to be, but it's his face.
Just his. Not borrowed. Not stolen. Not worn on behalf of someone else.
"Better?" Lira asks from behind him. Her voice is careful, which is unusual for her, as though she understands that this moment is more fragile than it appears.
"Yes," he says, and his voice comes out rough and he doesn't bother trying to fix it. "Better."
She nods. She doesn't comment on the roughness or the stinging in his eyes or the gold hair still scattered on the floor around the chair. She just picks up the shears and tucks them into her belt and says, "Good. Now you look like you belong to yourself. The court can deal with that."
She sweeps the hair from the floor and discards it without ceremony, which is exactly right, because ceremony would have broken him.
Then she adjusts the collar of his shirt one more time, smooths the shoulders, steps back and examines the full picture: the altered clothes, the short hair, the grey eyes that are still a little too bright.