Chapter 7
The first trial is trust.
Lira tells him this the morning of, delivering the information along with a tray of plain bread and broth that Theryn has been sending up daily since Bryn found the kitchens.
He's been in the Sovereignty for five days.
He's eaten every meal in either the kitchens or his chambers except for that first dinner, which he counts as a victory of self-preservation even if the court counts it as cowardice.
He has also read fourteen books from the library, memorized the layout of two-thirds of the palace, and developed what he suspects is a genuine friendship with the head cook, which is more meaningful relationships than he formed in the last three years in Everen combined.
"The Trial of Sky and Storm," Lira says, perched on the arm of the chair with her legs crossed, delivering catastrophic information with the casual energy of someone discussing the weather. "You'll fly with the prince. On his back. In his other form."
Bryn sets down the bread.
"His other form."
"His dragon form. Yes."
"You want me to ride a dragon."
"I don't want you to do anything. The trial does.
There's an aerial gauntlet through the mountain passes, a route that's been used for centuries.
You hold on, you trust him to keep you alive, you make it through the other side, you pass.
It's meant to test whether the intended can surrender control to the dragon.
Whether you trust him with your life when you have no power to save yourself. "
"And if I fall off?"
"He won't let you fall."
"That wasn't my question."
Lira looks at him with an expression that is either sympathy or amusement. With her, the distinction is often academic.
"Bryn. He will not let you fall."
***
The trial takes place at dawn, on the wide stone platform that juts from the eastern face of the palace.
The court has gathered in the galleries above, dark figures against the grey sky, and the elder council is arranged on a viewing balcony with expressions ranging from skeptical to openly hostile.
Syreth is front and center, because of course she is, positioned with the deliberate visibility of someone who wants to be seen watching and wants Bryn to know she's watching.
He doesn't give her the satisfaction of looking up.
He's found that denying Syreth his attention bothers her more than anything he could say, and it's one of the few small pleasures available to him in this palace that doesn't involve the prince or baked goods.
The platform is enormous. A hundred feet across, flat and smooth, designed for takeoffs and landings on a scale that accommodates creatures Bryn has been trying very hard not to think about in their full dimensions.
The volcanic wind whips across the open stone, hot and sulfurous, tugging at his short hair and the too-large shirt he's wearing because Lira's alterations, while valiant, have not yet conquered the fundamental size disparity between Drekian clothing and Bryn's frame.
Below the platform, the mountain drops away into a valley of thermal rivers and dark stone, and the scale of the drop is so absolute, so vertiginous, that Bryn's vision swims when he glances at it and he doesn't look down again.
Ithyris is already on the platform.
He's in human form when Bryn arrives, standing near the edge with the wind in his dark hair and his face turned toward the mountains, and the sight of him outlined against the grey sky with the volcanic peaks behind him does something to Bryn's chest that he is not going to dignify with acknowledgment.
The prince is dressed simply, a light shirt and trousers, bare feet on the warm stone because the man apparently does not own shoes and has made this a lifestyle choice, and he turns when he hears Bryn approach and his eyes find him and soften.
"Good morning," he says.
"You're going to make me ride you," Bryn says.
Ithyris's eyebrows lift. The corner of his mouth twitches.
Bryn hears the words play back in his head and his face ignites from the collar up, a flush so immediate and so thorough that it probably visible from the viewing galleries. "The dragon. I'm going to ride the dragon. Your dragon form. That is what I meant."
"I understood," Ithyris says, and his voice is steady but there's a light in his eyes that wasn't there before, bright and warm and deeply entertained, and Bryn wants to walk off the edge of this platform. He briefly considers it. The fall would be less painful than this conversation.
"Just shift," he mutters. "Before I say something else."
The prince smiles, and the smile does the thing it always does to Bryn's internal architecture, which is to weaken load-bearing walls.
Then the smile fades and his expression turns serious and he steps closer, not touching, just near enough that the wind carries his scent and Bryn's body responds to it before his mind can intervene, a full-body tightening that he disguises by folding his arms across his chest.
"The gauntlet is through the Ashveil Pass," Ithyris says. "There will be crosswinds. Updrafts. Narrow corridors between the peaks where the air moves in ways that are difficult to predict. It will be fast and it will be frightening and I need you to hold on to me and not let go. Can you do that?"
"I can hold on. Holding on is what I do."
"Bryn." Ithyris dips his head to catch his gaze, close enough that Bryn can see the individual fractures of gold in the amethyst of his eyes. "I will not let anything happen to you. Do you believe that?"
The honest answer is: he doesn't know. He wants to believe it.
He believes the prince means it, believes the sincerity of it, believes that Ithyris would throw himself between Bryn and harm without hesitation.
But Bryn is a person for whom the world has made very few promises it actually kept.
His father promised to rule. His mother promised to love him.
Alder promised to come home from the hunt.
Trust is a muscle he hasn't used in so long it's atrophied, and being asked to exercise it while straddling a dragon over a mountain pass feels aggressive for a first session.
"Shift," he says instead. "Let's get this over with."
Ithyris holds his gaze for a moment longer, and something passes across the prince's face that Bryn can't quite read, something between understanding and a sadness that Bryn didn't ask for and doesn't know what to do with.
Then the prince steps back and turns and walks to the center of the platform and the shift begins.
Bryn has seen partially shifted Drekians.
Scales and claws and slitted eyes, fragments of something other showing through the human shape.
He has cataloged these partial transformations in the court and the corridors and filed them away as data points in his ongoing project of understanding this kingdom and its people. He was not prepared for this.
The shift is not gradual. It is a convulsion, a rearrangement, the fundamental laws of mass and proportion rewritten in real time.
One moment Ithyris is a man, six feet and change and broad-shouldered and human in every way that counts.
The next, his body cracks open and unfolds and expands outward in all directions at once and what rises from the platform is not a man at all.
He is enormous.
Two hundred feet from nose to tail, at minimum.
Bryn's brain does the calculation automatically, the way it always does, and comes up with numbers that it then refuses to accept as possible.
The dragon's body is long and powerful, built for both devastating speed and sustained flight, and every inch of him is covered in scales that are dark violet so deep they're nearly black, shimmering with an iridescence that catches the dawn light and refracts it in colors Bryn doesn't have names for, colors that shift and change as the massive body settles and the scales catch new angles of light.
His wings are vast, spanning the width of the platform and extending beyond its edges on both sides, membranes of muscle and tissue stretched between ridged bones, the underside shot through with veins of deeper purple and threads of gold.
His head is massive and angular, a predator's skull refined to elegance, with a long snout and curved horns that sweep back from his temples and eyes that are the same fractured amethyst they are in his human form, luminous and depthless and the size of carriage wheels, and they are fixed on Bryn with an intensity that makes his knees go weak.
He is the most terrifyingly beautiful thing Bryn has ever seen.
He is the most terrifyingly beautiful thing anyone has ever seen, probably, in the entire recorded history of seeing things, and Bryn is supposed to climb on him and hold on while he flies through a mountain pass and not think about the fact that this creature declared him his mate in front of the entire court.
The platform trembles under the dragon's weight.
The wind changes direction, redirected by the sheer mass of him, and heat pours off his body in waves that distort the air between them.
Bryn can feel it from thirty feet away, the furnace of his internal fire, the metabolic output of a body that could level castles and fly through storms and apparently also sit in library alcoves in human form with his bare feet up and watch Bryn read about succession law.
Ithyris lowers his head. Slowly, carefully, with a deliberateness that tells Bryn the prince is aware of every inch of his size relative to Bryn's.
He brings his massive head down to Bryn's level and those amethyst eyes, each one larger than Bryn's torso, find him and hold him and in them Bryn sees the same thing he sees in the prince's human eyes: want, worry, the desperate hope that Bryn won't run.
He doesn't run.