Chapter 23
Ithyris carries Bryn out of the cell on his back.
Not because Bryn cannot walk. He can walk.
His legs are bruised and stiff from the cold stone floor but they function, and he tells the prince this, twice, and Ithyris ignores him with the serene, immovable certainty of a man who has just punched through a wall and is not currently accepting feedback on his decision-making process.
He crouches and Bryn climbs onto his back and his arms go around the prince's neck and his legs wrap around the prince's waist and Ithyris stands and carries him through the ruined corridors, stepping over rubble and scorched stone and the occasional piece of melted armament, and the warmth of the prince's body against Bryn's chest is the first real warmth he has felt in hours and he presses his face against Ithyris's neck and breathes him in and does not let go.
The fortress is a ruin. Not entirely. The prince was telling the truth about that.
The residential wings are intact. The civilian structures, untouched.
But the military infrastructure is gone, systematically and precisely dismantled, and the precision of it is more terrifying than total destruction would have been because total destruction is rage and rage is understandable and this is not rage.
This is a lesson. This is a four-hundred-year-old predator explaining, in the language of fire and stone, exactly what happens when you take something that belongs to him.
Ithyris carries him through the breach in the outer wall and into the morning.
The dawn is full now, gold and pink, the sky absurdly beautiful above the scorched remains of Vaelmoor's defenses, and the courtyard is empty.
The soldiers are gone. The city beyond the walls is quiet, stunned, every window shattered, and in the distance Bryn can hear the sound of people emerging from their homes, cautious and frightened, looking up at the sky for the dragon that is no longer there.
The dragon is carrying Bryn on his back in human form, his hands hooked under Bryn's thighs, his stride careful and steady, and when they reach the open ground beyond the fortress he stops and sets Bryn down gently, so gently, and looks at him with those still-glowing eyes and says: "Will you fly with me? "
The first time Bryn flew with him he was terrified. White-knuckled, rigid, every instinct screaming that humans are not meant for the sky. The first trial. The trial of trust. Hold on and don't let go.
He looks at the prince. Soot-streaked and shaking and human, mostly, the scales still patchy on his arms and chest, his eyes still carrying the remnants of the fire.
This man punched through a wall for him.
Flew north in the dark and declawed a kingdom and tore apart a fortress with his bare hands and the first thing he did when he found Bryn was kneel and take his face in his hands and cry.
"Yes," Bryn says.
The prince shifts. The dragon unfolds, vast and dark and violet, and Bryn should be afraid because he is standing next to two hundred feet of apex predator whose scales radiate enough heat to cook meat and whose eyes are burning with a light that is not entirely of this world.
He is not afraid. He has never been afraid of Ithyris.
He has been afraid of wanting him, afraid of needing him, afraid of the vulnerability of loving someone with the power to destroy everything he is.
But afraid of the prince himself, of this creature, never.
Ithyris lowers his neck. The scales there are smooth and warm, the same scales Bryn pressed his face against during the first trial, except now they are familiar. Known. His body recognizes the texture the way it recognizes the prince's hands, his mouth, the weight of his arm in the dark.
He climbs onto the dragon's neck. Settles into the natural hollow between the ridges of the spine, the place that seems made for his body specifically, and his legs press against warm scales and his arms wrap around the thick ridge in front of him and he leans forward and presses his forehead against the warm surface.
No white knuckles.
His hands are open. His fingers rest flat against the scales, relaxed, feeling the heat through his palms, the vibration of the dragon's body beneath him, the deep, rhythmic pulse of a heartbeat transmitted through bone and scale and muscle.
He closes his eyes and presses his forehead to the warm surface and trusts him.
Not because a trial requires it. Not because the bond compels it.
Because Ithyris came for him. Because Ithyris always comes for him.
Because the man who watches him breathe all night and loads his plate with food and leaves dents in furniture rather than cross a line Bryn hasn't drawn is the same creature who tore apart a fortress to reach him and the contradiction is not a contradiction.
It is the whole truth of the prince. The patience and the fury.
The gentleness and the devastation. The man and the dragon. Both of them Bryn's.
The dragon launches.
The ascent is smooth, careful, none of the explosive force of the departure from the Sovereignty.
Ithyris climbs gently, banking in wide, easy curves that minimize the wind against Bryn's body, and the air up here is cold but the scales are warm and the cloak around Bryn's body is the prince's cloak and he is cocooned in warmth and cedar and smoke and the steady, rhythmic beat of wings carrying him home.
He keeps his eyes closed. He can feel the bond between them, wide open and blazing, flooded with the prince's relief and love and the fierce, primal satisfaction of a dragon carrying his mate home, and the feeling fills the hollow that the muted bond left in his chest and the hollow overflows and he is crying, silently, his tears soaking into the scales, and Ithyris feels it through the bond and his wingbeats slow, infinitesimally, as though he is trying to hold Bryn more gently with the sky itself.
The prince flies so gently.
The flight that should take an hour at full speed takes three.
Ithyris is in no hurry. He carries Bryn through the morning sky at a pace that keeps the wind soft and the air warm and the ride smooth, and Bryn presses his forehead to the dragon's neck and listens to the heartbeat and thinks: this is what it feels like to be carried by someone who loves you.
Not rescued. Not retrieved. Carried. Held.
Brought home with the tenderness of someone who understands that the boy on his back has spent eighteen years carrying everyone else and has never been the one who was carried.
Bryn sleeps.
He doesn't mean to. But the warmth and the rhythm and the safety conspire against him the way they conspired the night after the pool, and he surrenders.
He sleeps on the back of a dragon, three thousand feet above the ground, with his forehead against warm scales and his hands open and flat and the wind cradling him and he is not afraid of anything.
***
Ithyris lands on the palace steps.
Bryn feels the descent in his sleep, the gradual banking, the shift in pressure, and he opens his eyes to the familiar amber glow of the Sovereignty's crystal-veined walls catching the midday sun.
The mountain. Home. The word settles into him with a weight and a warmth it has never had before, not in Everen, not anywhere, and he thinks: home is not a place.
Home is the back of a dragon who flies gently because you are sleeping.
The prince shifts beneath him, the vast body contracting, and Bryn slides from the dragon's neck into arms that catch him, human arms, strong and soot-streaked, and Ithyris holds him against his chest with his mouth in Bryn's hair, saying his name over and over.
Then the fussing begins.
The prince sets him on the palace steps and his hands are on Bryn's face immediately, tilting his chin, examining the bruise on his jaw, the split lip, the swelling.
His fingers are feather-light on the damaged skin and his expression is focused and devastated, the look of a man cataloging injuries and trying not to calculate the exact force required to produce each one.
"Your lip needs stitching." Clinical. Controlled.
The composure reassembled hastily over the cracks.
"The jaw is bruised, not broken. Your wrists.
.." He takes Bryn's hands and turns them over and the raw, abraded skin makes his jaw clench so hard Bryn hears his teeth creak.
"Your wrists need cleaning and wrapping. "
"Ithyris."
"You need to eat. When did you last eat? The chemicals suppress appetite and you've been..."
"Ithyris."
"Let me get you inside. The temperature out here is not adequate. You're in nightclothes, Bryn, you've been in nightclothes in a stone cell for hours and your core temperature..."
He is unraveling. The clinical inventory is a dam and the dam is cracking and behind it is the flood, the full, accumulated terror of waking to an empty bed and a muted bond, and the terror is only now catching up because the fury burned first and the fury is spent and what is left is a man who is very afraid and trying to contain it inside a checklist of injuries because if he stops listing things he will have to feel them.
The prince wraps another cloak around Bryn, layered over the first, and ushers him inside, his hand on the small of Bryn's back, the familiar gesture, his other hand gripping Bryn's elbow as though Bryn might vanish if the prince breaks contact.
He steers them through the corridors and the palace guard stares and the servants stare and the courtiers stare and Bryn is bruised and bloody and wrapped in two cloaks and barefoot and the prince beside him is shirtless and soot-streaked and wild-eyed with his hand on Bryn's back and his jaw set in steel.