Chapter 23 #2
Ithyris takes him to his chambers. Sits him on the bed. Fetches water and cloths and a healing salve from a cabinet Bryn didn't know existed and kneels in front of him and begins cleaning the blood from his face with hands that are steady and precise and trembling at the edges.
Bryn lets him.
This is the terrifying thing. Not the cell, not the beating, not the hours in the dark.
This. Sitting on a bed and letting someone take care of him.
Letting someone clean his wounds and wrap his wrists and press a cup of warm tea into his hands and say drink and watch him until he drinks.
Letting someone kneel in front of him and tend to the damage with the careful, devoted attention of a man who would burn the world to prevent a single bruise on Bryn's skin and failed and is now trying to make amends with warm water and clean cloth.
Bryn has spent eighteen years taking care of everyone.
His father, his mother, his sister, his kingdom.
He has cleaned wreckage and balanced books and carried the weight of other people's failures and he has never sat still and let someone take care of him because letting someone take care of you requires trust, the bone-deep kind, the kind that says I believe you will not use my vulnerability against me.
He trusts Ithyris that much.
So he sits. He drinks the tea. He eats the bread the prince puts in his hands.
He lets Ithyris clean the blood from his lip with a cloth dipped in warm water and wrap his wrists in clean linen and check his ribs for cracks, the prince's fingers pressing gently along each one, clinical and thorough and shaking.
He lets the prince take care of him and the letting is harder than the cell and harder than the beating and harder than the dark because it requires him to be the thing he has never been: someone who receives.
The prince finishes wrapping his wrists. Sits back on his heels. Looks at Bryn, his hands resting on Bryn's knees, and the composure cracks.
Quietly. His eyes go glassy and his jaw works and his hands tighten on Bryn's knees and the dam is tissue and the flood is everything, every hour since the cold sheets, the fury and the flight and the fire and the wall and the cell and the sight of Bryn on the floor with blood on his face.
Bryn reaches up. Touches the prince's face.
His fingers trace Ithyris's cheekbone, the line of his jaw, the soot still smudged across his skin.
His thumb rests at the corner of the prince's mouth.
Ithyris's eyes are bright and brimming and he is trying to hold it because he is the prince and the prince does not break in front of the person he was supposed to protect.
"I'm here," Bryn says.
The prince's breath catches.
"I'm still here."
The dam breaks.
Ithyris folds forward. His forehead drops to Bryn's knees and his shoulders shake and the sound he makes is muffled against Bryn's thighs, not a sob exactly, more of a surrender, the sound of a body releasing a tension it has held for hours.
Bryn puts his hands in the prince's hair.
He holds Ithyris's head against his knees and lets him shake and says it again, quietly, a refrain: "I'm here.
I'm still here. You found me. I'm here."
The prince cries against his knees and Bryn holds him and the reversal of it, the dragon prince on the floor and the human boy on the bed with his hands in the dragon's hair, steady and sure, feels true.
Ithyris carried him home. Bryn holds him while he falls apart.
The arithmetic is not equal. It is not supposed to be.
It is reciprocal, and reciprocity is a kind of math Bryn never learned in Everen, where every exchange was a deficit and every kindness was a debt.
Ithyris lifts his head. His face is wet and wrecked and Bryn wipes the tears from his cheeks with his thumbs the way the prince wipes his, a mirror, and Ithyris catches his hand and presses his mouth to Bryn's bandaged wrist with the same reverent tenderness he showed in the cell and Bryn lets him. It doesn't hurt.
***
Mithri is waiting.
Bryn hears her before he sees her. The sound of running feet in the corridor, the specific cadence he would recognize anywhere because he has listened to those footsteps his entire life, and the door bursts open and she is there.
She throws herself at him.
The impact nearly knocks him off the bed.
Her arms lock around his neck and her face buries in his shoulder and she is sobbing, the full-body, shaking sobs of someone who has been holding it together for hours and has run out of material.
She is gripping him so hard her fingers dig into the bruises on his back and the pain is sharp and he does not care, not slightly, because his sister is in his arms and she smells of tea and soap and Everen honey cakes and she is alive and safe and they did not get her.
He kept her safe. Even bound and bleeding in a cell, even with his face against the floor, he kept her safe because he did not give them her name.
"If you ever do this to me again," she says into his shoulder, her voice wrecked and muffled, "I will kill you myself. I will kill you with my bare hands, Bryn Kaelith. I will find you and I will murder you and then I will bring you back and murder you again."
"That seems excessive."
"I will make it look like an accident." She pulls back.
Her face is swollen and red and furious and she is the most beautiful person he has ever seen, his twin, his mirror.
She takes his face in her hands, an echo of Ithyris's gesture, and looks at the bruises and the split lip and her eyes fill again and her jaw sets and she says, with a ferocity that could cut glass: "Who did this? "
"It doesn't matter."
"It matters to me."
"Mithri." He takes her hands from his face and holds them.
Her fingers are cold. She has been waiting, he realizes.
For hours. Since Ithyris left her chambers with scorch marks on the floor and fire in his eyes.
She has been waiting and not knowing and holding herself together because that is what Kaeliths do. "I'm here. I'm okay."
"You are not okay. You are bruised and bloody and..."
"I'm alive. I'm home. And I am never leaving your line of sight again."
She laughs. Wet and broken and angry and relieved and the most Mithri sound in the world and she pulls him into another hug, gentler, mindful of the bruises, and they hold each other and they are twins on a bed in a dragon's palace and they are alive and together and for a moment they are children again, holding onto each other in the dark.
Bryn looks over her shoulder.
Ithyris is standing by the door.
He has stepped back. Given them space. The practiced withdrawal that gives the people he loves room to love each other without his presence as an intrusion.
He is leaning against the doorframe with his arms at his sides and his face is still wet and his eyes are still red and he is watching Bryn hold his sister with an expression that is not jealousy, not possessiveness.
It is love.
Not the love of the bond or the body or the sacred pool.
Not the love that burns and claims. A different love.
A quieter one. The love of a man watching the person he chose holding the person she chose and seeing, in the tangle of their arms and the press of their foreheads and the sound of their crying and laughter, the reason that person is worth everything he burned to bring them home.
The prince is looking at Bryn holding his sister and seeing, for the first time, the full shape of who Bryn is.
Not the sharp tongue and the tariff arguments.
Not the body in his bed or the voice that says husband.
The whole of him. The brother. The twin.
The boy who crossed a kingdom in a stolen dress because the girl in his arms was too young to be sold and someone had to stand up and it was always going to be him.
The boy who cleans wreckage because that is what he knows.
The boy who loves fiercely and protects recklessly and carries everyone and asks for nothing and is, right now, being carried by the people who love him.
Bryn looks at the prince across Mithri's shoulder.
Ithyris looks at him.
And Bryn realizes, with a clarity that is not new but is newly understood, that he is in love with his husband.
Not the realization of the pool, which was a truth dragged from him by magic and spoken under duress.
Not the slow evidence of the weeks before, the corridor and the dream and the bond and the wanting.
This is the realization that arrives after the crisis, after the fire, after the fear and the rescue and the flight home.
The realization that happens when you are sitting on a bed holding your sister and the man who burned a kingdom for you is standing in the doorway with tears on his face and the look in his eyes is not I would die for you but I would live for you, every day, every ordinary day, for the rest of whatever time you give me.
That is the love that matters. Not the grand gesture.
Not the fire and the fury and the wall punched through with bare hands.
The living. The breakfast. The stolen food and the loaded plate and the honey cakes at the market and the forty minutes in the archive.
The ordinary, relentless, daily act of choosing someone and being chosen back.
He is in love with his husband. Not because Ithyris rescued him. Because the prince will be there tomorrow morning, loading his plate, watching him with dark eyes, letting him steal his tea. Because the rescue was the exception. The breakfast is the rule.
Bryn holds Mithri. He looks at Ithyris.
He mouths two words across the room.
Come here.
The prince crosses the room. He sits on the bed beside them.
Mithri shifts without releasing Bryn, making space, and Ithyris's arm comes around Bryn's shoulders, careful of the bruises, and Mithri reaches across Bryn and takes the prince's hand, fierce and certain, and they are three people on a bed in a dragon's palace, holding onto each other in the midday light, and the bond hums and Mithri's grip tightens and the prince's arm pulls Bryn closer and he closes his eyes and he is held.
He is held and he is home.