Chapter 21
Ithyris wakes to cold sheets.
His hand reaches across the bed before his eyes open, the motion instinctive, automatic, the muscle memory of a man who has spent weeks falling asleep with his arm across another body and waking to the warm, solid weight of it against his chest. His fingers find fabric.
His palm finds the impression in the mattress where a body lay, the shallow curve of a hip, a shoulder, still holding the ghost of warmth.
But the warmth is fading. Has been fading.
The sheets are cool in the way that speaks of absence measured not in minutes but in hours.
He opens his eyes.
The bed is empty.
The bond tells him before his mind has assembled the evidence.
The steady, warm pulse that has lived in his chest since the great hall, since the first breath of Bryn's scent across the distance, is wrong.
Not absent. Muted. Thin. Stretched to a frequency so faint it registers less as a feeling and more as an ache, the phantom pain of a limb that has been severed and the nerves have not yet accepted the loss.
He is on his feet before the thought completes.
The cold of the stone floor registers against his bare feet and is dismissed.
He pulls on trousers. Does not bother with a shirt.
The scales on his shoulders and spine are already rising, an involuntary response to the wrongness in the bond, his body preparing for something his mind has not yet named.
Bryn went to Mithri's chambers last night.
Ithyris knows this because Bryn told him, because he said I'm going to see my sister, I'll come to you after, and kissed him at the door with the casual, devastating ease of a man who has stopped treating affection as a tactical risk and started treating it as a reflex.
Ithyris said I'll be here and watched him walk down the corridor in that borrowed cloak that drowns his frame and thought, with a fierceness that never diminishes: mine.
He goes to Mithri's chambers.
The corridor is quiet. The sconces flicker.
His bare feet are silent on the heated stone and the scales on his arms are fully raised now, dark violet and ridged, and the air around him is warmer than it should be, his body radiating heat the way it does when the dragon is close to the surface, when the ancient machinery of instinct is spinning up and the human form is becoming an inconvenience rather than a choice.
He knocks.
The door opens. Mithri is awake. She is wearing a sleep shift and her light hair is tangled and her eyes are puffy with interrupted sleep and she looks at him in her doorway, shirtless and scaled and radiating heat, and her face changes.
"Is Bryn here?"
The question is calm. His voice is level.
The control it requires to keep both of those things true is a physical effort, a clenching of every muscle in his jaw and his throat, because the bond is screaming now, not screaming with information but screaming with absence, and the absence is louder than any sound he has ever heard.
Mithri's face goes white.
"He left," she says. Her voice is small. "At midnight. He said he was going to your chambers. He..." She stops. She reads his face. The scales and the heat and the controlled, rigid stillness of a body holding itself together through will alone. "He didn't come to you."
"He didn't come to me."
Mithri's hand flies to her mouth. Her eyes fill.
The sound she makes is the raw, animal sound of a twin who knows, in the marrow of her bones, that something has happened to the other half of her.
Ithyris watches the color drain from her face and the fear flood in and he wants to reach for her, wants to offer comfort, wants to be the steady, patient prince who handles crises with measured calm.
He cannot.
The patient prince is gone. He left the moment Ithyris's hand found cold sheets and the bond went thin and the scent of his mate began to fade from the pillow.
What is left is older than the prince. Older than the man.
Older than the four hundred years of accumulated wisdom and restraint and the hard-won discipline of a creature who has learned, over centuries, to hold the fire in check.
What is left is the dragon.
"Stay here," he tells Mithri. His voice is different now. Lower. Vibrating at a frequency that makes the stones hum. "Lock your door. Do not open it for anyone but Lira."
"Ithyris." Mithri's voice cracks. Tears are streaming down her face and her hands are shaking and she is eighteen years old and her twin is gone and the man in front of her is not the man she dragged through the market three days ago, the man who laughed and ate honey cakes and let himself be pulled by the hand through a crowd.
This man has fire behind his eyes. "Please. Bring him back. Please bring him back."
He takes her face in his hands. The gesture is deliberate, an echo, the same hands that hold Bryn's face in the dark, the same careful grip that has learned to be gentle with fragile things.
He looks at Mithri and sees Bryn's eyes looking back at him, the same shape, the same color, the same fierce, desperate intelligence, and the sight of it nearly breaks the last of his control.
"I will bring him back," he says. Quiet. Absolute. The words are not a promise. They are a statement of physical law, as certain as gravity. "Nothing in this world will stop me."
He releases her. He turns. He walks down the corridor and the heat pouring off his body leaves scorch marks on the stone where his bare feet fall.
***
The war council convenes in the great hall.
Ithyris arrives and the room changes. He sees it in their faces. The advisors, the guard commanders, the intelligence officers, the elders roused from sleep and assembled in the predawn dark, all of them turn to look at him and all of them take a step back.
He is not hiding it. There is no point. The scales cover his arms, his chest, his throat, the sharp ridges of his cheekbones.
His eyes are not amethyst. He can feel the light behind them, incandescent, the soft purple burned away and replaced by something that is not a color so much as a force, violet fire trapped in crystal.
The air around him shimmers with heat distortion.
The crystal veins in the walls pulse brighter as he passes, responding to the energy radiating from his body, and the temperature in the great hall climbs ten degrees in the time it takes him to walk from the door to the council table.
These are men and women who have known him his whole life. They have watched him grow from a hatchling to a prince. They have seen him lead with patience and intelligence and measured calm. They have never seen this.
This is not their prince. This is a dragon whose mate has been touched.
His father is there. Thalryn stands at the head of the table, silver-scaled and impassive, and his eyes track Ithyris's entrance with the particular, unreadable attention of a father who recognizes what is happening and is calculating how to manage it.
He has been here before. Not watching his son.
Being his son. Four hundred years ago, when his own mate was threatened, and the memory of what he did in response is the reason the northern border of the Sovereignty is a blackened wasteland where nothing grows.
Syreth is there. Silver-scaled and rigid, and her expression is the first honest expression Ithyris has ever seen on her face.
It is not hostility. It is not calculation.
It is fear. Pure, animal fear, the instinctive response of a creature in the presence of something vastly more powerful that has stopped pretending to be safe.
Good.
Lira is there. Green-scaled and still, her hands clasped behind her back, and her face is carefully neutral but her scales are vivid and she is the only person in the room who does not step back when he enters.
Lira has served him since he was young and she knows what he is and she is not afraid of what he is.
She is afraid of what has been done to the boy she has been guarding for weeks, the boy she wakes with soft knocks and leads through corridors and whose happiness she watched the prince build, stone by stone, and her fear is not for herself.
The intelligence officer speaks. Evidence of infiltration.
A network of agents operating within the palace, connected to Vaelmoor, to King Orren Pliath, who has been probing the northern border for eighteen months and has apparently decided that probing is no longer sufficient.
The agents entered through the servant passages.
They had inside knowledge of the palace layout.
They targeted the princess's chambers but took the wrong twin, the twin in the prince's cloak, the twin with the light hair and the delicate features who was walking the wrong corridor at the wrong time.
Ithyris listens for ninety seconds.
The intelligence is irrelevant. The infiltration routes are irrelevant.
The political calculus, the diplomatic implications, the careful strategic response that a wise prince would formulate, all of it is irrelevant, because his mate is bleeding in a cell and Ithyris can feel his fear through the bond, faint and distant and steady.
The steadiness of Bryn's fear is the thing that is destroying him.
Bryn is not panicking. He is afraid and he is not panicking because he trusts Ithyris, because he believes the prince is coming, because the boy who spent eighteen years believing no one would come for him has been rebuilt into someone who believes that Ithyris will.
And Ithyris will not make him wrong. He will not let the world prove Bryn wrong.
Not about this. Not about the one thing the boy finally let himself believe.
The windows blow inward.