Chapter seventeen
Chapter 17
Torr dies on a Tuesday.
Lethe knows it is a Tuesday because Tuesdays are when the roster rotates and the fresh sawdust comes. He checked Torr’s stitches that morning and they were holding and his breathing was even and his eyes were calm and Lethe told him he was healing well and gave him the dried apple from his satchel and moved on.
He knows it is a Tuesday because when he comes back for the afternoon rounds, Torr is dead.
The creature was massive. Feline in shape, tawny, powerful through the haunches, with golden eyes that tracked Lethe’s movements with an intelligence that felt conversational. Lethe had tended him since the day he arrived eighteen months ago. He’d stitched the gash on his shoulder from his first bout. He’d set the broken jaw after the third. He’d nursed him through a fever that should have killed him, sleeping on the floor of the cage for three nights, holding compresses to the creature’s burning skull and talking to him about the sea.
Torr was put on the roster for the afternoon bout. Lethe had written on the ledger that he needed two more days. The note is gone now, the page turned, and Torr fought and Torr died because the pits needed bodies on the sand and Lethe’s notes are suggestions, not orders, and suggestions from the lamb carry the weight of air.
He stands at the bars and looks at the body. Torr’s golden eyes are half-open. His mouth is closed. There is blood on the straw, dried to black.
He was not ready. Lethe had told them. He was not ready.
Lethe’s hands grip the bars. His knuckles go white. He stands there for a long time, and then he logs the cage number and the time and closes the ledger and his handwriting does not shake because his hands never shake, and he moves on.
He moves on. He always moves on. Tend, record, move on. Do not grieve. Grief is a luxury. Grief makes you slow.
He does not grieve.
He does not grieve through the rest of his rounds. He does not grieve in the kitchens where Maren takes one look at his face and sets a bowl in front of him without a word. He does not grieve while Soot climbs into his lap and butts her head against his wrist, because kittens do not understand death and their ignorance is a kindness.
He does not grieve until evening, when his rounds are done and the pits are settling into their nighttime rhythms and he descends the stairs into the deep kennels and unlocks the cage at the end of the corridor and steps inside.
***
He does not come to heal.
There are no wounds to tend tonight. Zazyrus has not fought in days and the old injuries are closed and there is no medical reason for Lethe to be in this cage. He knows this. He came anyway.
He came because he has nowhere else that feels safe.
The realization is quiet and enormous. The safest place in the pits, for Lethe, is inside a cage with a beast who has killed five men. On the cold stone, in the dim light, beside a creature whose rage could level the building and whose gentleness, offered sparingly and specifically and only to Lethe, has become the one fixed point in a world that is otherwise entirely composed of things that hurt.
He sits down. Not in his usual spot. Against the wall. He draws his knees up and wraps his arms around them and he sits.
Zazyrus watches him.
Lethe can feel the gaze but he does not look up. He stares at the opposite wall and his jaw is tight and his eyes are dry and his hands, for once, are not steady. They are clenched around his own forearms, gripping hard, and the pressure is the only thing keeping him together.
He does not talk.
The silence fills the cage. This is the silence of someone who has run out of words, who has arrived at the bottom of it, the place where the words stop and the feeling starts and the feeling is too large for language.
Zazyrus shifts.
Lethe hears it. The scrape of skin on stone, and Zazyrus is closer. Not touching. Not reaching. Just closer. Reducing the distance from three feet to two, and then from two to one, and the warmth of his body reaches Lethe before his body does, a wave of heat that finds Lethe’s arm and stays.
Closer than they have ever been without a wound between them.
A long silence. The lantern gutters. The pits breathe.
Zazyrus’s tail uncurls.
It extends across the narrow space and wraps around Lethe’s wrist. Loose. Barely there. The contact so light that Lethe could break it with a twitch. The tail rests against his skin, warm and rough, and it holds.
