"Wolves don’t make those sorts of sounds," he says.
Zazyrus looks at him. At the flushed face and the bright eyes and the smile that is testing the boundaries between vulnerable and brave. He looks at the boy in his lap who walked into a cage and took a beast’s face in his hands and saidI won’t leave you againand meant it.
"My wolf does," Zazyrus says.
Lethe’s eyes go wide and bright and his mouth opens and nothing comes out and the flush returns, vivid, blooming across his cheeks and his nose and his ears.
Mine.
Lethe buries his face in Zazyrus’s neck. His arms wrap around the broad shoulders and his fingers curl into the muscle of his back and he holds on, tight, trembling, and against Zazyrus’s skin his breath comes warm and unsteady and his mouth moves in words that are too quiet to hear.
Zazyrus holds him. His arm tightens around the narrow back. His tail curls around Lethe’s thigh, loose and warm. He presses his mouth to the boy’s hair and breathes him in, herbs and skin and the faint salt of sweat, and the warm thing in his chest that he has been refusing to name sits there, patient and enormous and undeniable, and he lets it.
He lets it.
Chapter nineteen
Chapter 19
Demos takes a bad loss on a Tuesday and Lethe pays for it on a Tuesday night.
The bout was supposed to be a sure thing. A visiting fighter, undertrained, brought in from a provincial circuit to pad the local card and give the crowd an easy win. The local fighter lost. The crowd turned ugly. The betting houses adjusted their ledgers and Demos’s share of the take evaporated and by the time the last spectators filed out and the torches guttered and the sand crew began raking blood into the drainage channels, the pit lord was drunk and furious and looking for somewhere to put the fury.
The three sharp knocks come at the late bell.
Lethe goes to the quiet room. He goes there the way he always goes, quickly, efficiently, sliding behind the door in his mind and closing it and standing in the still, numb space where his body is a thing that happens to someone else. The room has always held. Six years. Hundreds of nights. The walls are thick and the door is solid and the person inside is safe, if not whole, if not undamaged, if not anything resembling okay.
Tonight the room does not hold.
Demos is angry in a way that is different from his usual cruelty. His usual cruelty is measured, calculated, the precise application of force by a man who knows the value of his property and doesn’t want to damage it beyond repair. Tonight there is no calculation. Tonight there is only rage, and the rage needs a target, and Lethe is the target, and the quiet room’s walls shake and crack and Lethe is present for more of it than he has been in years.
Afterward he stands at the basin. The water is cold. His hands are steady because his hands are always steady, but his reflection in the water is wrong. His left eye is swelling shut. His lip is split, deep, the kind that will scar if he doesn’t stitch it and he cannot stitch his own lip. There is a bruise forming on his jaw that will be black by morning. His ribs ache on the right side, a deep, grinding pain that means cracked, not broken, but the distinction is academic when breathing hurts.
He washes. Carefully. Cataloging the damage the way he catalogs wounds on fighters. Split lip, significant. Black eye, left, significant. Contusion jaw, moderate. Ribs right side, cracked, two probable. Abrasions wrists bilateral, minor. The inventory is clinical and thorough and he performs it with the detached efficiency of a professional assessing a patient who happens to be himself.
He buttons his shirt to the collar. Eases into his satchel strap. Takes a breath that his ribs inform him is inadvisable.
He has rounds to do.
***
The upper cages first. Routine. His hands do the work and his voice narrates and the fighters don’t know anything is wrongbecause Lethe doesn’t let them know. He keeps his head angled to favor the good eye. He speaks from the right side of his mouth so the split lip doesn’t pull. He moves carefully, distributing his weight to spare his ribs, and the adjustments are practiced and automatic and invisible to anyone who isn’t paying close attention.
Zazyrus pays close attention.
Lethe descends into the deep kennels. The air cools. The lanterns flicker. He unlocks the cage and steps inside and he is going to act normal. He is going to sit down and open his satchel and talk about Soot and the weather and whatever else fills the space, and his hands are going to be steady and his voice is going to be even and Zazyrus is not going to know.
He sits. Opens his satchel. Reaches for the needle and thread.
His hands shake.
Not the fine, controlled tremor he can work through. Shaking. Full, visible, his fingers refusing to cooperate, and the needle slips from his grip and clatters on the stone and Lethe stares at it on the floor and his vision blurs and his jaw tightens and he reaches for it and his hand shakes too badly to pick it up.
He cannot thread a needle.
He has threaded needles in the dark, in moving carts, in cages with thrashing creatures and screaming guards and blood on his hands. He has threaded needles through every kind of fear and pain and exhaustion this pit has thrown at him. His hands do not shake. His hands have never failed him.
They are failing him now.
