Chapter 22 #2
"Ithyris." Again. Stronger. His eyes are open.
Bright and wet and bruised underneath but clear, focused, looking at the prince with the same steady, stubborn certainty that has defined him from the first moment Ithyris smelled him across the great hall.
He is not afraid of the prince. He has never been afraid of the prince.
Even now, with Ithyris's eyes blazing and the stone glowing and the dragon barely leashed, Bryn looks at him and there is no fear in his face.
Only relief.
Only there you are.
The rage breaks. Not dissipates. Breaks.
The way a wave breaks on a shore, the force of it spending itself against something solid and immovable, and the solid, immovable thing is Bryn's voice.
His face. The look in his eyes that says I knew you'd come.
The rage is still there, vast and hot, churning in the deep places of Ithyris's body, but it is no longer in control.
Bryn is in control. He has always been in control of the prince, from the first breath of his scent, and the knowledge is not a weakness. It is the only strength that matters.
Ithyris crosses the cell.
He kneels.
The stone is cold beneath his knees and he does not feel it.
He kneels in front of his husband on the floor of a Vaelmoor cell and takes Bryn's face in his hands, carefully, so carefully, his thumbs avoiding the bruise on his jaw, the split in his lip, and he holds him the way he has held him in every moment that matters: gently, completely, with the full attention of every sense he possesses.
Bryn's face is in his hands. His skin is cold.
His eyes are wet. And he is smiling. Bloody and bruised and bound and smiling, the real smile, the Mithri smile, the one that uses his whole face, and the smile says I told you so and you came and I never doubted you and it is the most beautiful thing Ithyris has seen in four hundred years of looking.
"You're late," Bryn says.
The sound that comes out of the prince is not a laugh.
It is not a sob. It is the sound Bryn makes when the feeling is too big for a single word, and Ithyris presses his forehead against Bryn's and breathes him in, blood and sweat and fear and beneath it all the warm, clean scent of the man he loves, and they are both shaking and his hands are on Bryn's face and Bryn is here. Alive. Smiling.
"I came as fast as I could," Ithyris says.
His voice is wrecked. The dragon's resonance is gone and what is left is just a man, kneeling on a cold floor, holding the face of the person who matters more than kingdoms and crowns and four hundred years of composure.
"I will always come for you. There is nowhere they can take you that I will not follow.
No wall thick enough. No distance far enough.
You are mine and I am yours and I will tear apart every fortress in the world to get back to you. "
Bryn turns his face into the prince's palm. His cracked lips press against the center of Ithyris's hand, the way he does in the mornings, the way he does when the walls are down and the armor is off and he is just Bryn, and the kiss is soft and warm against the prince's skin.
"Untie me," he says against the prince's palm, "and take me home."
Ithyris unties him. The ropes come apart in his hands.
The skin beneath is raw and bleeding and he holds Bryn's wrists and presses his mouth to each one, to the raw, abraded skin, and Bryn winces and then softens and his freed hands find the prince's face and his fingers trace the soot on Ithyris's cheeks and the scales still receding from his jaw and he looks at the prince with those bright, bruised eyes and says, quietly:
"You blew up a castle for me."
"I declawed a kingdom for you. The castle is mostly intact."
"Mostly." Bryn looks at the hole in the wall behind the prince. The ragged, man-shaped breach that opens onto a corridor of scorched stone and shattered masonry. "You punched through a wall."
"The wall was in my way."
Bryn laughs. The sound is rough and cracked and painful and it is the best sound Ithyris has ever heard and he pulls Bryn against his chest and holds him and Bryn's arms come around his neck and his face presses into the prince's throat and they are both shaking and the cell is cold and the dawn is coming through the hole Ithyris made and they hold onto each other on the floor of a Vaelmoor prison and the bond between them blazes, wide open, flooded with relief and love and the specific, devastating joy of finding the thing you were afraid you'd lost.
Ithyris holds him. The way he held him the night after the pool, the night he did not sleep, the night he watched Bryn breathe and thought it was better than dreaming.
He holds him and the fire in his chest banks to an ember and the scales recede and the glow fades from the stones and what is left is two men on a cold floor in a ruined fortress, holding each other in the grey light, and one of them is crying and the other is letting him.
Ithyris is the one who is crying.
Bryn holds him tighter.