But he stands in the corridor with his hand against the wall and the feeling in his chest is not safety. It is something adjacentto it. Something that lives in the same neighborhood. It is the feeling of a creature who has been alone for a very long time encountering another creature who saysI see youand means it, and the recognition is so profound and so overdue that it shifts something tectonic inside him.
He breathes through it. The way he breathes through everything. In through his nose, out through his mouth. His hand presses flat against the wall. The stone is cool. His heart is hammering.
Wolf,he thinks, and the word sits differently in his mouth than lamb ever has. It doesn't carry a prophecy of destruction. It carries teeth.
He pushes off the wall. Straightens. Wipes his eyes with the back of his hand and squares his shoulders and walks to his room, and his stride is even and his head is up and the wolf inside his chest is awake.
It doesn't go back to sleep.
Chapter sixteen
Chapter 16
The boy brought the kitten.
Zazyrus becomes aware of this fact in stages. First the smell: warm fur, milk, the faint musk of an animal too young to produce any real scent of its own. Then the sound: a small, high mewling, barely audible, coming from inside Lethe's satchel. Then the satchel moving, a visible bulge shifting against the leather, and Lethe's hand reaching in to steady whatever is wriggling inside with an expression on his face that is simultaneously fond and conspiratorial.
"I brought someone to meet you," Lethe says, and his voice carries a lightness that Zazyrus has not heard before. A brightness. As though the weight he carries has been set down, temporarily, and the person underneath it is younger and easier than the person who usually enters this cage.
He opens the satchel and lifts out a tiny black thing.
Zazyrus stares at it.
It is a kitten. The kitten. Soot. The one Lethe has been talking about for weeks, the one who climbed into a stock pot and chased a moth into a flour sack and caught a mouse bysitting on it rather than pouncing on it. In Lethe's hands it is absurdly small, a scrap of black fur and enormous eyes and ears too large for its head, and it blinks at the dim cage with the absolute, unearned confidence of a creature that has never once considered the possibility of its own insignificance.
Lethe sets it on the floor.
The kitten wobbles. Its legs are unsteady, too long for its body, and it takes a step and nearly topples and rights itself with a dignity that is hilarious in something so small. It sniffs the stone. Its enormous eyes swivel around the cage, and then it sees Zazyrus.
It stares at him.
Zazyrus stares back.
The kitten weighs less than his fist. It is, objectively, the least threatening thing he has ever encountered. He has fought creatures armored in bone and beasts twice his size, and none of them made him feel what he is feeling right now, which is an utterly disarmed, bewildered uncertainty about what to do with something this fragile in his immediate proximity.
The kitten wobbles toward him. It reaches his knee and bumps its head against his leg and the contact is so small and so warm that he feels it reverberate through his entire body.
The kitten looks up at him. Mews. The sound is ridiculous.
Then it sees his tail.
Zazyrus's tail is resting on the floor beside his leg, the tip curled loosely against the stone, and the kitten locks onto it with the instantaneous, absolute focus of a predator that has found its prey. Its pupils blow wide. Its haunches lower, a wobbly approximation of a hunting crouch that is so earnest and so incompetent it borders on tragic. Its tiny rear end wiggles.
It pounces.
The kitten flings itself at the tail with its full body weight, which is negligible. It wraps its front legs around the tail andbites it and the bite is cosmically insignificant and the kitten seems very pleased with itself.
Zazyrus's tail flicks. Instinct. The kitten goes tumbling across the stone floor, a rolling ball of black fur and outraged mewling. It rights itself, shakes its head, and stares at the tail with an intensity that suggests the tail has personally offended it.
It crouches. Wiggles. Pounces again.
The tail flicks again. The kitten tumbles again. Recovers. Crouches. Wiggles.
This is absurd.
He is a killer. He is chained in a pit. He has torn men apart with his hands and stood in arenas while thousands screamed for blood and he has never, in his memory, been in a situation for which he is less equipped than being menaced by a creature that weighs less than his fist and considers his tail a mortal enemy.
The kitten pounces a third time. The tail flicks. But this time, it flicks slower. Just a fraction. Just enough that the kitten, in its wild, wobbling lunge, manages to catch the tip.
