He was not prepared for this.
A beast, unchained and blood-soaked and promised a body, sitting on the floor of his cage and asking about a kitten.
Something is happening in Lethe's chest.
He doesn't have a name for it. It's enormous and it's crushing and it's warm and it's terrible and it makes his eyes burn and his throat close and his hands shake for a reason that has nothing to do with fear. It fills him from his stomach to his sternum to his throat, pressing against the inside of his ribs, and it is the feeling of a door opening in a place he thought was walled shut.
A man who could take what he wants, choosing not to.
A beast with more decency than the human who owns them both.
Lethe's knees unlock. He takes one step away from the door. Then another. His legs are unsteady and the satchel is still clutched to his chest, but he's moving, crossing the cage in slow, uncertain steps. He doesn't go to Zazyrus. He sinks to the floor halfway across the cage, lowering himself to the cold stone with his back against the wall, three feet of dark air between them.
He doesn't talk. Not at first.
He sits. He watches the rise and fall of Zazyrus's chest in the thin light from the corridor. The power in his shoulders. The thickness of his arms, the biceps and the forearms that could pick Lethe up and pin him and take whatever he wanted, and he is sitting on the floor with his wrist on his knee and he asked about a kitten.
Lethe's breathing slows. His heartbeat slows. The panic drains from his body in increments, receding the way a tide recedes, and what it leaves behind is not calm. It is something rawer than calm. It is the feeling of bracing for a blow that doesn't come, of tensing every muscle for an impact that never arrives, and the slow, exhausting release that follows.
He swallows. Wipes his eyes with the heel of his hand. His voice, when it comes, is rough and thin and very quiet.
"She's getting braver."
Zazyrus doesn't move. Doesn't speak. He tilts his head, just slightly, the listening angle, and waits.
"She caught a mouse yesterday," Lethe says. The words come out halting, breaking apart on the edges. "Or she tried. She pounced on it and it ran between her legs and she sat there looking offended. Maren said she takes after me. I'm not sure if that was a compliment."
The almost-laugh. That low, rough exhale. Barely audible. Barely anything.
More than enough.
Lethe talks. Slowly at first, the words hesitant and scattered, the sentences incomplete. About Soot. About the kitchen. About the weather, which is cold, and the cistern, which is full. Ordinary things. Safe things. The things he always talks about in this cage, the steady stream that fills the silence and asks for nothing.
The trembling stops. His hands unclench from the satchel strap and come to rest in his lap. His breathing evens out. His voice finds its rhythm, the familiar cadence that he uses in the cages, gentle and steady and unhurried, and the cage is cold and dark and the beast across from him is blood-soaked and silent and the door is locked until first bell and Lethe talks.
He talks about the fighter who died. The one with the cracked skull, weeks ago. He tells Zazyrus that he left a note on the ledger and the note was ignored and the fighter was sent to the arena and died and Lethe recorded the death and it mattered to no one. He tells him about the poultice he's been working on, the one with the comfrey root that reduces swelling, and how he tested it on Gnarl's foreleg and it worked and no one cared about that either.
He tells him about the sea. Not the facts, the colors and the tides and the things the book said. The wanting of it. The way he thinks about salt air when the kennels smell of blood and the way he imagines open water when the walls close in and the way the idea of a horizon, a line where the sky meets something vast and free, is the thing he holds onto in the quiet room behind his eyes when he needs to be somewhere that isn't here.
His voice gets quieter. His words get slower. The cold stone is leeching the warmth from his body and the adrenaline crash is pulling him down and his eyelids are heavy.
He doesn't remember falling asleep.
He doesn't remember the moment his head tips sideways and his cheek comes to rest against the rough stone and his bodygoes slack and his breathing deepens into the slow, even rhythm of genuine sleep. He doesn't remember his hand relaxing open on the ground between them, palm up, fingers loose. He doesn't remember the silence settling over the cage, thick and dark and warm.
He sleeps.
And across the cage, three feet of cold stone between them, Zazyrus watches him in the dark and does not move and does not touch him and does not sleep.
Chapter twelve
Chapter 12
Lethe wakes with the first bell.
Zazyrus watches the moment it happens. The shift from sleep to waking is not gradual in this boy. It is a switch, a sudden tension that runs through his entire body in a single wave, and his eyes snap open and his hand flies to his chest and his breathing goes sharp and fast before his brain catches up to his surroundings and tells his body where he is.
The boy is on the floor. Curled on his side against the wall, three feet from Zazyrus, his satchel clutched to his stomach and his cheek creased with the imprint of rough stone. His hair is flattened on one side. His shirt has ridden up, exposing a sliver of pale skin at his hip. He looks young. He looks small. He looks, for the span of a breath before the walls go back up, terrified.
