Lies, nothing but lies.
(The Prince finds a boy in his room just a year younger than him, short and skeletal with a heart-shaped face and clever fingers. For a moment, Prince Hydron is shocked into silence, too stunned to move or call for the guards; a moment he knows should have been a moment too long, that the slide of the boy's sky-blue eyes over to his frozen form should have been the last thing he ever saw. Instead, the boy grins, sharp as the knife the Prince can see on his hip, genuine as a stab wound.
"You'd better be more careful with your stuff, Princey! Don't just go leaving your window unlocked, now."
The boy gives a jaunty wave, blows him a kiss, and with his cherubic smile still in place slips back out through the castle window and into the night, quick as a bird.
Hydron's heart pounds, his legs turn to jelly, and he kneels on the floor with one hand bracing on the floor and the other clawed over his heart, like that would protect it, head bowed.
He doesn't die that day. He might as well have.)
Hydron knows the boy is lying. The boy is not just a thief but the prince of thieves, mockery of the very thing Hydron is, friend to none but the birds and where he goes only crows follow, ready to feast on the flesh of those he leaves for dead. He is the Crow and he is the flock with more faces than his birds have feathers, clever and charming and is only fluttering by the Prince's gilded cage, pausing to glance at the creature trapped within.
Lync is free to go whenever he pleases, and he'll take everything the Prince has and is with him when he leaves, and he will leave. But he's there, now, and Hydron- Hydron is weak. Lonely. Desperate. An easy target.
(He doesn't tell anyone about the intruder. Try as the Prince might, he can't figure out what Lync took, so he resolves that it must not have been that important, lies to himself that the incident was imagined, that it wouldn't happen again so there was no point worrying.
He wakes up, three days later, to the cacophony of crows on his windowsill and the thief himself perched on the end of his bed. Lync's knife is still there, an ever-present threat, but it's still sheathed. Lync rests his head in one hand, elbow braced against his knee, and his other dangles harmlessly towards the floor, not resting at his hip, ready to open Hydron's chest and invite his birds to nest within.
Lync's watching him, eyes the color of the sky, open air and freedom, curious but not malicious. They simply stare at one another for a while, trying to find a starting point, testing one another's mettle.
Lync is the first to break.
"I guess I'm curious," he says, tilting his head like the birds he is so fond of, like the crows that follow him like death, "How come you didn't tell anyone you saw me in here?"
The Prince tries to speak, opening his mouth to say something, anything, but he doesn't have an explanation and the Crow can smell lies like weakness.
A beat of silence and Lync smiles, lopsided and sharp and genuine, wrinkles around his eyes appearing as he half-closes them in laughter, dimples making his skeletal features softer, somehow.
"Bird got your tongue?" Lync jokes, laughing, and Hydron's heart jumps at the sound, somewhere between terrified and relieved and something dangerously close to happy before he barks out an answering sound, sudden and sharp and somewhat hysterical, and some of the ever-present tension in the Prince's shoulders melts away.
Lync scoots up on the bed with half-hopping movements, reaching over to grab at the Prince's throat, but Hydron doesn't tense, can't bring himself to move. Crow drags a finger like a talon down the line of his throat in a slow, deliberate, gentle movement, teeth still bared in that childish, angelic grin.
"That's a shame; I'll bet you'd sing just beautifully for the right reason," he drawls, wiggling his eyebrows ridiculously, and crows with laughter as Hydron turns red,sputtering with anger and flushed with emotions he cannot name.)
It was lies. He knows, he knows, he knows. Lync does not need his knife, his talons, his beak, to tear someone apart.
He only needs to say the right things and just like that Lync settles in the Prince's heart like he owns it, steals it away without a trace.
Hydron figures out what Lync stole that first day and he can't bring himself to be mad. It's a relief to know he had enough of a heart to be stolen.
(Lync always shows up somewhat randomly, without rhyme nor reason, sometimes staying in the Prince's room from sunrise to sunset and sometimes away for days at a time, but never longer than three. Lync beats Hydron at chess, shows off shiny things he's stolen, and lets the Prince have some of them if he deems them worthy, a haphazard charm necklace on rough string, glass beads and rusted coins and small scraps of metal arranged in chaotic harmony. It hangs where it would not be visible underneath the Prince's royal attire, warm on his skin underneath scratchy and stiff clothing. He lets the Prince rant for hours at a time about his duties, about his father, about how he wishes it would all go away. He listens with an attentive ear Hydron has never been granted, offers advice to help Hydron and not for his own gain or to set himself ahead. Lync's there, filling a hole in the Prince he hadn't realized was there.)
Lync is lying. He knows, he knows, he knows.
(There's a coup; a nobleman close to his father, to the King, tries to seize control, brings power and people from his own lands and the castle buckles under the weight of revolution. The King escapes but the Prince is left behind; he's certain he's going to die, that it'd finally all be over, but the shrieking of crows doesn't drown out the crackle of the fire at his heels and death doesn't come for him.
One of the royal knights charges in, blood on her sword and shield and armor, high-ranking but the Prince has never bothered to learn her name. She sheathes her sword to grab around his wrist with a grip that bruises and drags him through the crumbling castle, bashing through doors and enemy soldiers like a dragon and the Prince can only be dragged along for the ride.
She does not slow until they are far, far into the forest, where the Prince has no hope of return on his own and the roar of sword on shield no longer rings in his ears and instead somewhere deep in his soul.
Hydron asks in panicked, disjointed gasps, what had happened. How she knew, why she saved him.
"Little birdie told me," she responds, voice gruff but void of emotion, and doesn't say anything else to the Prince but he does not say anything else to her, either, his world breaking and rearranging around him with all the force of a tornado and it's all he can do to hold on. He grips Lync's necklace to tightly in his hand that the dull glass shards cut into his skin, stain the collar of his ashen robes with specks of ruby red and strains his ears for the cawing of crows in the distance.)
He knows, he knows, he knows that Lync was lying, that he is lying, so why-
(Somewhere along the way, he loses the knight that saved him, and before he can panic at losing his only way out of the wilds he finds himself in the sound of wingbeats that seems to fill his ears the way the fire did, the way the ringing of sword on steel did, the way his father's yelling did, and when he turns around Lync is there, dirt smeared on his face and hands but teeth still a brilliant white when he smiles and eyes bright as the sky above them.
"You would not believe what I have been through, today," Lync starts, voice rough from breathing in smoke but still the most beautiful sound that the Prince has ever heard.
Hydron chokes on a laugh that turns into a sob and Lync talks over his tears, pretends not to notice when the Prince scrubs at his wet eyes with bloody, filthy hands.)
If Lync was lying, why would he be here, why would he risk his life to save Hydron, why would he stay with him through the three days it takes them to trek through the forest, hunt for them both and show him how to set a proper fire, curl close during the nights when they couldn't keep a fire going for fear of being discovered, why-
("You're lying," Hydron croaks out halfway through the third day as Lync stamps out the embers of the fire they used to cook the fish they caught in the river for lunch, and he immediately kicks himself for ruining this, for ruining what had been the best and worst days of his life, out in the wilds where he was no one but the companion to the boy who spoke to birds, as far removed from the Prince as he's ever been and more than likely ever would be.
Lync looks up in surprise, the honesty of the movement odd on his figure, before he cracks a grin, smiling as wide as the sky.
"Hey, you're smarter than people give you credit for!" He says, delighted for reasons Hydron can't even imagine, "I thought so, but the King swore up and down you wouldn't notice. Shows what he knows, huh?"
The Prince- he doesn't know what to say.
"I mean I was supposed to kill you, but you're not, like, terrible, y'know? Convinced the King you'd be useful and I'd just spy on you, then get this- nobleguy who betrayed you guys? Also hired me to spy on both you and the King, so now I'm, like, spying for three people on those three people at once and they're all aware of it? It's wild, let me tell you. But to answer your question, yeah, I'm lying. To a lot of people, a lot of the time!"
Truth sounds strange on Lync's tongue, like he wasn't built to form the words, even though he says them cheerfully enough.
"Why?" Hydron manages, strangled with something like sorrow, like shock and betrayal but not quite any of those at once.
"I mean, this kinda stuff's my job, y'know? Was just another knife in the back of someone I didn't care about," he focuses his gaze on the Hydron's face, tilting his head in the birdlike manner he's so fond of, "But like I said, you're not terrible, so."
The truth looks terrible written in Lync's eyes, like steel and stone weighing down the sky, like a bird in a cage, like chaining freedom itself.
"You didn't deserve that, Hydron.")
"You're lying," the Prince chokes out, again, and Lync huffs a laugh through his nose, shifting his balance from one foot to the other as he weighs his words.
He makes a humming noise, the first drawn-out note of a bird's song.
"Maybe," Lync agrees, eyes bright and violent and free again, "But it's nice to pretend every once and a while, right?"
He's lying. He's lying. He'll tear Hydron apart from the inside out, he'll leave him for the crows to peck into pieces, he'll leave and that would be worse than any option the Prince could think of.
But he's right.
Hydron swallows around the emotions in his throat, pulls on the necklace Lync gave him like a noose, pushes down hatred and anger and confusion and love and every other terrible thing nesting inside of him, little birds with sharp beaks ready to tear their way out of his chest to fly free, to go to the freedom in Lync's eyes, into the sky that he shares with only them but is offering to Hydron.
"Right," the Prince agrees, and the Crow smiles like knives.
It's lies, lies, it's nothing but lies.
(But what lovely lies they are.)