Chapter 14
The second trial comes for Bryn in sleep.
There is no warning. No summons from Lira, no descent into the mountain, no ceremonial architecture.
One moment he is lying in Ithyris's bed with the prince's arm across his stomach and the bond humming between them.
The next he is standing in a hall he recognizes, and the recognition is a knife between his ribs.
The great hall of Everen.
The vaulted ceiling that leaks when it rains.
The cracked stone pillars his grandfather's grandfather built.
The faded tapestries depicting victories no one alive remembers.
The long banquet table, scarred with centuries of use, where his father used to hold court before he stopped holding anything but a wine glass.
Every detail is precise, rendered with the merciless fidelity that only dreams achieve.
Bryn is on his hands and knees.
The floor is covered in wreckage. Broken glass, overturned chairs, spilled wine darkening the stone, papers scattered and trampled.
He knows this wreckage. He has cleaned it up a thousand times.
His hands are already moving, picking up glass, stacking papers, righting chairs.
The muscle memory is so deep it operates without thought, the way breathing operates, and he has been doing this since he was old enough to hold a broom and he will be doing it until there is nothing left to clean.
He straightens a chair and moves to the next piece of debris and his knees ache on the cold stone and he realizes, with a sick lurch, that he is small.
His hands are a child's hands, thin and pale, the knuckles scabbed.
The shirt he's wearing is too large, sleeves rolled back, and the hall is enormous around his small body.
The wreckage stretches in every direction.
No matter how much he cleans, there is more.
He rights a chair and two more fall. He stacks papers and the wind scatters them.
He sweeps glass and it multiplies, glittering, and his hands are bleeding now, thin cuts across his palms from the shards, and he keeps cleaning because stopping has never been an option.
He calls out.
"Father?"
Nothing. The hall stretches. The wreckage multiplies.
"Mother?"
Nothing. His voice cracks on the word.
"Mithri?"
The silence after her name is the one that breaks him. Not his father, who was never coming. Not his mother, who stopped seeing him years ago. Mithri. The only person who has ever come when he called, and in this place, even she does not answer.
He stops cleaning.
He sits on the floor of the ruined hall with glass in his palms and blood on his hands and understands, with the clarity that only dreams provide, what this place is.
Not a memory. The truth beneath all his memories.
The vast, empty architecture where he has lived his entire life, surrounded by wreckage that is never his fault and always his responsibility, calling out for someone to help and hearing only his own voice returned to him.
The loneliness is not an emotion. It is a geography.
The height of the ceiling, the distance between the walls, the specific, measurable space between him and every person who was supposed to love him and didn't. He has furnished this geography with competence and sarcasm and the grim satisfaction of being needed, if not wanted.
He has made it habitable. But it is still empty.
He feels Ithyris before he sees him.
Not the bond. Something different. A presence at the edge of the dream, vast and warm, pressing against the walls of his fear.
The hall shudders. The tapestries ripple.
And then the prince is there, standing at the far end of the room, and he is not the prince.
He is not the dragon. He is a man looking at a hall full of wreckage and a boy bleeding on the floor and his face is an open wound.
He sees everything.
Bryn knows this the way he knows things in dreams, with a certainty that bypasses logic.
Ithyris sees the hall, the wreckage, the child with glass in his palms and no one coming.
He sees the years of it, the way Bryn built his armor plate by plate from the raw material of being left alone, and the expression on his face is not pity.
It is rage. It is grief. The particular, devastating fury of a man who loves someone and is being shown, in precise detail, exactly how that someone was broken.
Ithyris takes a step toward him.
The hall resists. The wreckage shifts and rearranges, blocking his path, because this is Bryn's fear and his fear does not want to be witnessed. His fear wants to stay hidden, managed, locked away. Opening it now, with the prince watching, is unbearable.
Ithyris takes another step. The glass crunches under his boots and the wreckage parts and he walks through Bryn's fear because he is not afraid of it. He has seen centuries and he does not flinch.
He kneels in front of Bryn.
Bryn is a child and Ithyris is a man and the prince is kneeling on the glass-strewn floor and takes Bryn's bleeding hands in his and his hands are warm and large and they close around Bryn's with a gentleness that makes the dream shake.
Bryn looks at him and is himself again, eighteen and sharp-boned and afraid, and the hall is still there but smaller now, the walls closer, because Ithyris is in it and he fills the emptiness with his presence and the solid, undeniable fact of his body.
He doesn't speak. His face says everything. I see you. I'm here. The glass dissolves in Bryn's palms. The blood dries. The wreckage stills. And the silence, for the first time, is not empty.
***
The dream shifts.
It pulls Bryn out of his own fear and into the prince's, and the transition is violent. The hall of Everen dissolves and he is falling through dark space and then he lands, hard, on warm ground, and the air smells of cedar and smoke.
A chamber. Built for ceremony, not emptiness.
High ceilings carved with Drekian script.
Columns of dark volcanic stone veined with crystal.
Tiered benches rising on all sides, filled with figures blurred at the edges, more impression than detail.
The elder council. The court. The assembled weight of a kingdom's judgment.
Ithyris is in the center.
He is on his knees.
The shock of it stops Bryn's breath. He has seen this man command a room by entering it. He has seen him face Syreth's cruelty with a jaw set in granite. He has seen him in his true form, vast and ancient and terrifying. He has never seen him kneel.
The prince is stripped. Not of clothes. Of everything. The violet scales have receded, pulled back, leaving bare skin exposed. His crown is gone. His title is gone. The composure he wears is gone. He is a man on his knees on a stone floor, and he is asking if he is enough.
The words don't come from his mouth. They come from everywhere, from the walls and the crystal veins, his fear given voice by the dream.
Am I enough? Without the scales, without the crown, without the power, is there anything beneath the prince worth loving?
If you stripped away everything I was born into, would there be a man underneath worth staying for, or would there be nothing?
The court does not answer. The blurred figures are still and mute and the silence stretches and Bryn watches it land on the prince, watches him absorb the non-answer.
The crown prince of the Drekian Sovereignty is on his knees asking to be loved and the only response is the vast, indifferent quiet of a chamber full of people who value him for what he is and have never once considered who.
This is Ithyris's fear.
Not rejection. Not defeat. The terror that he is lovable only in context.
That without the scales and the crown and the centuries of accumulated power, he is nothing anyone would choose.
That every person who has ever stayed did so for the prince, not for the man, and if the prince were stripped away the man would kneel in an empty room and beg and no one would answer because no one was ever there for him in the first place.
Bryn's heart cracks.
Because this is not what monsters fear. Monsters fear defeat, the loss of their hoard.
Monsters do not kneel on stone floors and ask, with the quiet desperation of someone who has been asking for centuries, whether there is something in them worth loving beyond the power they were born with.
The fact that this is what lives beneath Ithyris's composure, beneath the patience and the steadiness and the infuriating, relentless kindness, undoes Bryn in a way he was not prepared for and could not have defended against.
He moves.
The dream does not resist. Bryn's fear fought Ithyris, tried to keep him out, but the prince's fear lets Bryn in without hesitation, as though it has been waiting. He crosses the chamber floor and stops in front of Ithyris and looks down at him, stripped and kneeling and raw.
Bryn kneels.
Face to face. Knees on warm stone. The prince's eyes find his and they are the amethyst he knows, bright with unshed tears, and the expression in them is the one Bryn saw in the corridor when Ithyris told him he was ruined.
Naked. Desperate. Certain that what he feels is real and terrified that it won't be enough to make someone stay.
Bryn takes his face in his hands.
No scales. Just skin, human and vulnerable, and the prince leans into his touch the way a starving thing leans toward food, involuntary, helpless.
Bryn holds his face and thinks about the man who put his hand on the small of his back and waited for permission and learned that Bryn didn't want flowers and brought books instead without a wounded word.
The man who told Bryn he was everything and meant it with his whole body.
The man beneath the prince. The one who is enough.