Chapter 20
The corridors are quiet at this hour.
It is past midnight and the palace has settled into its nighttime hush, the amber sconces dimmed to a low glow, the thermal vents breathing their steady exhale of warm air through the carved stone passages.
Bryn is walking from Mithri's chambers to his own, his bare feet silent on the heated floor, and he is smiling.
He doesn't smile in corridors. Or he didn't, before.
The boy who arrived at the Sovereignty in a stolen dress did not smile in corridors because corridors were spaces to traverse, not to enjoy, and enjoyment was a luxury reserved for people whose lives were not a series of controlled emergencies.
But tonight he and Mithri talked for three hours about nothing, about everything, about honey cake recipes and whether Ithyris's formal voice is deeper than his private voice (it is, Bryn confirmed, and Mithri shrieked and threw a pillow at him) and whether the chestnut stall on the lower terrace is better than the one near the eastern gate, and the normalcy of it, the utter, unremarkable normalcy of lying on his sister's bed and arguing about chestnuts, has left him with a warmth in his chest that has nowhere to go except his face.
He is wearing his nightclothes and one of the prince's cloaks, pulled on as an afterthought because the corridors cool at night and Ithyris's cloak was the closest thing to hand and it smells of cedar and smoke.
The cloak is too large. It pools at his feet and the hood sits loose around his face and in the dim light of the corridor he is a shape, a silhouette, a figure in an oversized cloak with delicate features and light hair and nothing about him, from behind, in the dark, distinguishes him from his twin.
He is thinking about going to the prince's chambers instead of his own because his own chambers have become a formality, a place where his clothes live but he does not, and the prince's bed is where he sleeps now and the distance between Mithri's door and Ithyris's door is shorter than the distance to his own and he is already calculating the route when the hand closes over his mouth.
It happens fast.
One moment he is walking, smiling, thinking about cedar and smoke and the weight of arms around him.
The next there is a hand over his mouth, leather-gloved, smelling of horse and road dust and something chemical, something sharp and acrid that burns his nostrils.
An arm locks around his chest, pinning his arms to his sides.
He is lifted off his feet. His back hits a body, broad and hard, and he thrashes, instinctive, his heels kicking backward, connecting with a shin. A grunt. The grip tightens.
A second pair of hands. His wrists, seized and bound with rope so fast the burn of it registers before the comprehension does.
The hood of the cloak is yanked forward over his face, blinding him.
The chemical smell intensifies, pressed against his nose and mouth through the glove, and his vision swims and his muscles loosen and he fights it, fights the dissolution of his own consciousness with every scrap of will he possesses.
The bond.
He reaches for it. Through the haze, through the chemical fog descending over his mind, he reaches for the bond the way a drowning man reaches for a rope.
It is there, thrumming in his chest, Ithyris's presence warm and distant, and he pushes against it, hard, a flare of panic and fear and help, something is wrong, come find me.
The chemical takes him.
The last thing he feels before the dark closes is the bond, still pulsing, still there, and he clings to it the way he clings to everything that matters: desperately, stubbornly, with the grim refusal to let go that has kept him alive for eighteen years.
Then nothing.
***
He wakes in the dark.
The first thing he registers is cold. Not the volcanic warmth of the Sovereignty, not the heated stone and mineral air that he has acclimated to over weeks.
Cold. Damp. The kind of cold that seeps through clothing and into bone and speaks of underground places built for containment rather than comfort.
The second thing is pain. His wrists are raw from the rope.
His shoulders ache from the position, arms bound behind his back, the joints pulled at an angle that sends sharp, lancing pain through his upper arms every time he shifts.
His head throbs with the residue of whatever they used to put him under.
His mouth tastes of chemicals and blood.
The third thing is the absence.
The bond is muted. Not gone. He can feel it, faint and distant, a thread stretched thin across a vast distance, but the warmth that has lived in his chest for weeks, the constant thrumming presence of Ithyris, has dimmed to a whisper.
The absence is physical. A cold hollow where the warmth should be, and the hollow aches with a depth that has nothing to do with the rope or the bruises and everything to do with the fact that he is, for the first time since the bond formed, alone.
He opens his eyes. The dark resolves into shapes. A stone room, small, windowless. A heavy door with iron fittings. A thin line of torchlight seeping beneath it. The floor is damp stone. The walls are rough. The air smells of mildew and earth and the faint, distant tang of the sea.
Not the Sovereignty. Not the mountain. Somewhere far enough away that the bond has stretched to its limit and the connection that has been his compass, his anchor, his proof that he is wanted, is barely there.
He sits up. The pain in his shoulders flares and he breathes through it, slow and steady, the way he has breathed through pain his entire life: by acknowledging it, cataloging it, and then setting it aside in favor of information.
Where he is. Who took him. What they want.
The door opens.
Three men. The torchlight from the corridor spills in and Bryn squints against it and catalogs them in the seconds before his eyes adjust. The first is broad, heavy-set, with a soldier's build and a soldier's face, blunt and scarred and professionally disinterested.
The second is thin, angular, with quick eyes that move over Bryn with an assessment that is more commercial than personal.
The third is younger, nervous, hovering behind the other two with the energy of someone who has not done this before and is not sure he wants to.
The broad one steps forward. He looks at Bryn. He looks at the cloak, Ithyris's cloak, pooled around his bound body. He looks at Bryn's face, his light hair, his delicate features, and something shifts in his expression.
He reaches down and pulls back the cloak.
The nightclothes beneath are thin. The fabric clings to Bryn's chest, his arms, the flat plane of his body that is unmistakably, undeniably not female. The broad man's eyes travel downward and stop and his expression changes.
"This isn't the princess."
The thin one pushes forward. Looks at Bryn. His face tightens.
"You said blonde hair, fine features, in the prince's cloak. This was supposed to be Princess Mithri."
"This is not Princess Mithri." The broad man's voice is flat. "This is a boy."
Bryn looks up at them from the floor. His wrists are bound.
His head is throbbing. The bond is a whisper in his chest and the cold is seeping through his nightclothes and he is afraid, deeply and fundamentally afraid, in the way he has not been since the great hall when the elders stripped him bare and he waited for an execution that did not come.
But he has been afraid before. He has been afraid his entire life.
Fear is the water he swims in, the background radiation of an existence defined by not having enough and not being enough and never knowing when the next blow is coming.
He is an expert in fear, and expertise breeds competence, and competence breeds control, and control is the only weapon he has ever owned.
He straightens his spine against the wall. Lifts his chin. Looks the broad man in the eye.
"I'm not the princess," he says. His voice is steady. Hoarse from the chemicals but steady. "I'm her twin brother. And I am the dragon's husband."
Silence.
The broad man looks at the thin man. The thin man looks at the broad man. The younger one shifts his weight from foot to foot.
Then the broad man laughs. Not a kind laugh. The laugh of a man who has been given information that does not fit his model of the world and has chosen to reject it rather than revise the model.
"The dragon's husband." The broad man crouches in front of Bryn. His face is close. His breath smells of ale and something sour. "A human boy. The dragon prince's husband."
"That's what I said."
The first blow catches him across the jaw.
The force of it snaps his head sideways and stars explode behind his eyes and the taste of blood fills his mouth, bright and metallic.
He has been hit before. Not often, not routinely, but enough to know the particular quality of pain that comes from a closed fist meeting a human face, and the knowledge is useful because it means he does not panic.
He breathes. He spits blood on the stone floor. He turns his head back to face the man.
"Where is the princess?"
"I told you. I'm the one who..."
The second blow is to his stomach. It drives the air from his lungs and doubles him over and he retches, dry, the chemicals and the blood and the emptiness of his stomach conspiring into a spasm that leaves him gasping on the cold floor.
"King Pliath paid for the princess." The thin one's voice, cold and precise. "The dragon's bride. A valuable hostage. Not a..." He looks at Bryn on the floor with distaste. "Not this."
Not this. The dismissal is so casual it almost doesn't register. But the elder council has trained Bryn well in the specific vocabulary of worthlessness and he hears the subtext clearly: you are not valuable enough to have taken.