Chapter 17
The third trial finds Bryn in the library.
He has been there for six hours. The texts are spread across the table in the order he has arranged them: founding statutes on the left, elder precedents in the center, bond law on the right, and the thin, fragile thread of an argument winding through all of them, growing stronger with every clause he cross-references and every footnote he chases into the margins of crumbling Drekian manuscripts that have not been opened in decades.
The argument is this: the Clause of Unfitness was written to protect the crown from bonds formed under coercion, deception, or magical corruption.
It was never intended to dissolve a bond that the magic itself has confirmed through three completed trials.
Using it to sever a confirmed bond doesn't protect the crown.
It violates the very law the clause was written to uphold.
It is a good argument. It might even be a winning one. But he hasn't had time to finish building it because Lira is standing in the doorway and her expression is the one that means something important is happening and he is not going to like the timing.
"The third trial," she says. "Now."
"Now?" He looks at the texts spread across the table. The thread of his argument, half-woven, fragile, critical. "Right now?"
"The sacred pool has been prepared. The elders are assembled. The prince is waiting." She pauses. "The trials are not scheduled at the convenience of the intended, Bryn. They come when the bond is ready."
The bond. He feels it now, thrumming in his chest with a fullness that has been building since the dream, since the petition, since the afternoon in the prince's bed when the bond blew open and they felt each other's pleasure through the connection and Bryn came with Ithyris's name in his mouth and an understanding in his body that he has been circling for weeks and landed on three days ago in the kitchen with Mithri, between bites of bread, without fanfare or ceremony.
He is in love with Ithyris.
The knowledge sits in him the way all the truest things sit in him: quietly, without drama, with the plain solidity of a fact that has been true for longer than he's been willing to look at it.
He is in love with the man who pauses in doorways and leaves dents in chair arms and walked through the wreckage of his fear without flinching and threatened to burn his kingdom for him and holds him afterward with hands that shake and has never, not once, made him feel as though wanting was something to be ashamed of.
He is in love with him and he has not said it.
Not to Ithyris. Not out loud. Not in any form that exists outside the privacy of his own skull, where he can control the shape of it and examine it from a safe distance and pretend it is a hypothesis rather than a conclusion.
Because saying it out loud makes it real in a way that thinking it does not, and real things can be broken, and Bryn has spent eighteen years learning that the surest way to lose something is to admit you need it.
And now there is a trial. A trial that takes place in a sacred pool where you cannot lie, cannot deflect, cannot hide.
A trial that will strip him bare in every way that matters and hold him in water that reads the truth in his blood and he will have to stand there, face to face with the man he loves, and the water will not let him keep it to himself.
He is terrified.
Not of the trial. Not of the pool or the magic or the elders watching.
He is terrified of saying I love you to a man who is bound to him by ancient magic and having Ithyris look at him and realize that what the prince feels is the bond.
Not love. Not choice. The bond doing what bonds do, manufacturing affection from proximity, and the tenderness and the want and the way Ithyris says his name are all just the magic working as intended and Bryn is a fool who mistook the architecture for the architect.
He is terrified that he will say it and the prince will be kind about it.
That Ithyris will take his face in his hands and press his mouth to his forehead and say something gentle and devastating about how the bond creates strong feelings and those feelings are real but they aren't the same as love and he cares for Bryn, of course he cares, but.
But.
The smallest word in the language and the one that has preceded every disappointment of his life.
He closes the book. He stacks the texts. He stands.
"Lead the way," he tells Lira.
***
The sacred pool is beneath everything.
Beneath the palace, beneath the mountain, beneath the layers of volcanic stone and crystal and carved corridor that Bryn has come to know over the weeks.
Lira leads him down through passages that narrow and warm, the air thickening with moisture and mineral heat, and the walls shift from carved stone to raw rock to something older, smoother, as though the mountain itself has been worn to glass by centuries of water and steam.
The crystal veins in the walls are not amber here.
They are white. Blinding. They pulse with a light that has nothing to do with fire and everything to do with the magic that lives in the deep places of the earth, the ancient, patient magic that existed before the dragons built their kingdom on top of it.
The pool is at the bottom.
Bryn steps through a low archway and the cavern opens around him and he stops breathing.
It is beautiful. Not the way the palace is beautiful, designed and deliberate.
Beautiful the way a thunderstorm is beautiful, or a cliff face, or the sea at night.
The cavern is vast and low-ceilinged, the stone walls curved and smooth, and the pool fills the center of it, a wide circle of water so still it looks solid.
The water glows. Bioluminescent. A pale, shifting blue-white that illuminates the cavern from below and casts rippling shadows on the ceiling and the light is alive, it moves, it breathes, and the effect is of standing inside the mountain's lungs.
The heat is staggering. It presses against his skin from every direction, wet and dense, and within seconds his shirt is clinging to his back and his hair is damp at the temples.
The air tastes of salt and copper and something older, something mineral and strange, and the bond in his chest is resonating with the light in the water, vibrating at a frequency that makes his teeth hum.
The elders are here. Five of them, seated on a stone ledge that curves around the far side of the pool, half-obscured by steam.
Bryn can see Syreth, silver-scaled and rigid.
The bronze-scaled elder beside her, unreadable.
The others are shadows in the vapor. They do not speak.
Their presence is the audience. The trial is not for them. The trial is for the water.
Ithyris is already in the pool.
He stands in the center, the water at his waist, and the bioluminescent glow illuminates him from below and turns his violet scales to something ethereal, something that catches and refracts the light until his skin shimmers and the boundaries between scale and light dissolve.
He is bare from the waist up. His hair is wet.
His eyes find Bryn's across the distance and they are steady and open and afraid.
Afraid.
The sight of it nearly buckles Bryn's knees.
This man who faced down the full court and threatened to abdicate, who cracked stone pillars with his fists and held Bryn through the dream and told him he was everything, is standing in a pool of magic water and looking at Bryn with fear in his eyes.
And the fear is not of the trial. The fear is of Bryn.
Of what he might say. Of what the water might pull from him.
Ithyris is afraid Bryn doesn't love him.
The understanding detonates in Bryn's chest. He sees it so clearly that he doesn't know how he missed it, except that he does know, because he was so consumed by his own terror of being gently let down that he never considered the possibility that the prince was carrying the same terror in the opposite direction.
Ithyris is afraid that what Bryn feels is gratitude, or lust, or the bond doing its work, and that when the water strips everything away Bryn will stand there and the truth at the bottom of him will be I don't love you, not really, not the way you love me.
The boy in the empty hall and the prince on his knees. The same fear wearing different faces.
Bryn strips off his shirt. Pulls off his boots. Walks to the edge of the pool in his trousers and looks at Ithyris across the glowing water and steps in.
The water is hot. Not painful. The exact temperature of blood, of the inside of the body, and the sensation of entering it is the sensation of stepping into himself.
The bioluminescent light wraps around his legs and climbs his thighs and settles against his skin and he can feel the magic in it, alive and probing and relentless, pressing into him through every pore, reading him, peeling back the layers of deflection and humor and armor that he has built over eighteen years and reaching for the truth underneath.
He cannot lie in this water. His body knows it immediately.
The water is inside him now, in his blood, in his bones, and the truths he carries are rising to the surface the way heat rises, inevitable and unstoppable, and the things he has hidden are pressing against the inside of his skin, demanding release.
He walks to the center of the pool.
He stands in front of the prince.
The water is at his waist and the light pulses around them and they are face to face in the heart of the mountain, in the belly of the magic, and the prince's eyes are on his and the fear in them is a mirror of Bryn's own.
Ithyris speaks first.
His voice comes out stripped of every register of princely composure. Raw. Low. Shaking.
"You are the most extraordinary person I have ever met."