Zazyrus bows his head.
He lifts Lethe’s hand and presses his mouth to the center of his palm. Open. Reverent. The kiss is slow and deliberate and the boy’s hand trembles in his grip, a fine vibration, and Zazyrus feels it against his lips and holds the hand steady and kisses it with everything he cannot say.
Lethe’s breath leaves him.
The sound is soft and shaking and his fingers curl against Zazyrus’s jaw, the tips resting against the hard edge of bone, and his face in the lantern light is open and bruised and beautiful.
Zazyrus murmurs against his skin.
"I need you to trust me."
The words are low and rough and spoken into the warm hollow of Lethe’s palm, and they carry the weight of everything that comes next. The fight. The escape. The corridors and the guards and the single, narrow window through which they willeither pass or perish. Everything depends on trust. On Lethe trusting that Zazyrus will come for him. On Zazyrus trusting that Lethe will be ready. On both of them trusting that the plan will hold and that they will find each other in the chaos and that the other will be there.
Lethe’s fingers tighten on his jaw.
"I do trust you," Lethe whispers.
The words are steady and certain and they land in Zazyrus’s chest with the weight of an anchor. He closes his eyes. Presses his mouth to Lethe’s palm one more time. Releases his hand.
Lethe’s fingers trail across his jaw as they withdraw. A lingering touch. An imprint.
He leaves. The cage door closes. The lock turns. The footsteps recede, steady and sure.
Zazyrus sits in the dark with the taste of Lethe’s skin on his lips and the plan in his mind and the vow in his chest.
Three days.
He begins to prepare.
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter 21
The night before the tournament final, Lethe comes to prepare Zazyrus for his fight and stays to give him everything else.
The mood in the cage is taut. Electric. The air feels different, charged with the knowledge that everything changes tomorrow, that the plan either works or it doesn’t and there is no version of failure that leaves either of them alive. Lethe can feel it humming in the stone beneath his knees and in the space between their bodies and in the precise, deliberate way his hands move over Zazyrus’s wounds, checking, cleaning, wrapping, performing the work for what might be the last time.
He works in silence.
No narration tonight. No chatter about Soot or the weather or the garden he’d plant by the sea. The words feel insufficient, too small for the space they’d have to fill, and the silence is better. The silence holds everything the words can’t.
He finishes. Ties off the last bandage. Packs his satchel.
He does not leave.
He sets the satchel aside and sits against the wall beside Zazyrus, close enough that their arms touch. The contact is grounding. Warm. Zazyrus is solid beside him, the heat of his body radiating through the thin fabric of Lethe’s shirt, and Lethe leans into it and breathes and the breathing is unsteady.
"I was sixteen," Lethe says.
The words come out quiet. Not the clinical detachment he uses for medical assessments or the careful steadiness he deploys in dangerous situations. This is something rawer. Something that costs.
"A village in the south. Three days’ walk from the nearest port. My mother was a healer. She taught me. I was her apprentice and I wasn’t very good yet but I was learning. I could set a bone by the time I was twelve. I could stitch a wound by thirteen. She said I had gentle hands."
Zazyrus is silent. The listening silence, dense and total, the full weight of his attention turned on Lethe.
"Men came through. Traders, they called themselves. They took things. Grain. Livestock. People, if the people had skills they could sell. I had skills." His voice doesn’t waver. He has told himself this story so many times, in the quiet room behind his eyes, that the telling has worn smooth. But he has never told it out loud. Never said the words to another person. The words have lived inside him for six years, sealed behind the same walls that keep him safe, and saying them now is an act of demolition. "They brought me here. Sold me to Demos. Demos saw a healer and saw something else and decided he wanted both."
A long pause. Lethe’s hands are in his lap, still and steady.
