Chapter 2 #2
A human. Male. Small. The lantern light from the corridor barely reaches into the cage, but it's enough to make out the shape of him: slight, pale, standing just inside the door with his hands clutching a leather satchel against his chest. He's wearing a white shirt that gapes at the collar, loose on his slender frame, and his hair is brown and short and his eyes, when they catch the light, are a blue so vivid it registers even in the dark.
He stinks of fear. Zazyrus can smell it on him, sharp and acrid beneath the scent of soap and dried herbs and something floral that must be from whatever he carries in that satchel.
His pulse is visible in his throat, quick, fluttering, and his breathing is controlled in a way that tells Zazyrus it's deliberate.
The boy is scared and the boy is managing it and that, at least, is interesting.
Zazyrus watches him from the floor. The pain is a dull, throbbing presence in his ribs and his shoulder and his forehead, and through the haze of it he thinks: they sent me a sacrifice.
Because that's what this is. A small, soft, breakable human pushed into a cage with a beast who has killed five men in two weeks.
The guards locked the door behind him. They're not coming back.
If Zazyrus tears this boy apart, they'll find the pieces in the morning and shrug and send another one or they won't, and either way it costs them nothing.
He thinks about how the boy would break.
Easily. The bones of his wrists, visible where his sleeves have ridden up.
The thin column of his throat. The narrow shoulders that carry that satchel the way a soldier carries a shield, as though leather and needles could stop claws that have opened armored plating.
He would break easier than the handlers.
He would scream or he wouldn't and it would be over quickly and the brief satisfaction of violence would gutter out within seconds because it always does, because breaking things that are easy to break has never once eased the burning in his chest.
He doesn't attack.
He's tired. He's wounded. The fight drained him in ways that go beyond the physical, and the effort of tearing into this trembling human feels like more than it's worth.
Even if he kills him, the guards will not open the door for the body.
They both know this. The boy is stuck in here until morning whether he's alive or dead, and Zazyrus would rather bleed in silence than exert himself for a kill that won't even get the corpse removed.
So he watches. And the boy stands there, clutching his satchel, fear rolling off him in waves, and for a long moment neither of them moves.
Then the boy does something unexpected.
He kneels.
Not a collapse. Not a surrender. A deliberate lowering, controlled, until he's on his knees on the cold stone floor two paces from Zazyrus with his satchel open in his lap.
His hands are shaking. Zazyrus can see the fine tremor in his fingers as he lays out supplies on a cloth: needle, thread, a tin of something, strips of linen.
But his face, when he lifts it to meet Zazyrus's gaze, is calm. Impossibly, infuriatingly calm.
"Don't worry," the boy says, and his voice doesn't break. "I'm going to help you."
Zazyrus stares at him.
The words land in a place he didn't know was still open.
He has been spoken to by humans for as long as he can remember and the words have been commands, threats, insults, instructions, numbers on a ledger, terms of a sale.
No human has ever knelt beside him while he bled and offered to help.
No human has looked at him with steady blue eyes and spoken in a voice meant to reassure rather than control.
The boy is terrified. Zazyrus can see it in every line of his body, can smell it, can hear it in the barely-managed cadence of his breathing. He is terrified and he knelt down anyway. He walked into the cage of a beast and he is showing him his throat and he said, don't worry.
Something shifts in Zazyrus's chest that he doesn't have a name for. Not the rage, which is always there, but something beside it. Something small and quiet and deeply inconvenient.
He thinks, unwillingly, that the smallest person he's met in this pit is the bravest by far.
He doesn't move. He doesn't speak. He watches the boy open his tin of salve and soak a cloth and reach, slowly, telegraphing every movement, toward the gash on his ribs.
The boy's fingers are still trembling when they make contact, but his touch is light and sure and careful in a way that Zazyrus has never experienced from human hands.
"This will sting," the boy says. "I'm sorry."
It stings. Zazyrus breathes through his teeth and his claws scrape against the stone and the boy doesn't flinch, doesn't pull back, just holds the cloth steady and waits for the tension to ease before pressing again.
"Almost done with the cleaning," the boy murmurs. "Then I'll stitch it. You'll feel the needle but I'll be fast. I'm good at this. It's the one thing I'm good at, honestly, so you're in luck."
He talks while he works. A constant, quiet narration.
This will pinch. I'm sorry. Two more. You're doing well.
Almost done. The words wash over Zazyrus and he hates that they're soothing and he hates that the boy's voice, steady beneath the fear, is doing something to the knot of fury in his chest. Not untying it.
Nothing unties it. But shifting it, somehow.
Making room for something else that he can't identify and doesn't want.
The boy stitches his ribs. His shoulder.
Butterflies the split on his forehead. He works efficiently, his hands growing steadier as the minutes pass, and Zazyrus watches his face the entire time.
The concentration in his brow. The way he bites his lower lip when he's threading the needle.
The bruise on his throat, half-hidden by his collar, that Zazyrus noticed the moment the lantern light touched him and has been thinking about since.
When the boy finishes, he packs his satchel with careful hands and stands. He takes a step back. He looks at Zazyrus with those blue eyes and Zazyrus looks back, and the cage is very quiet and very cold and the silence between them holds a shape that Zazyrus can almost touch.
"I'll come back tomorrow," the boy says. "Those stitches need checking."
He turns toward the cage door. Calls for the guards. The lock turns, the door opens, and the boy slips through and the door closes behind him and the footsteps recede and Zazyrus is alone.
He lies on the cold stone. The stitches pull when he breathes. The salve numbs the worst of the pain, a small mercy he did not ask for and was given anyway.
He thinks about the boy. About the steadiness of his hands and the fear in his scent and the bruise on his throat that wasn't made by a beast. About the fact that the guards called him Lamb, and the boy didn't correct them, and the name settled on him with the weight of something old and worn and accepted.
He thinks about that voice.
Don't worry. I'm going to help you.
Zazyrus closes his eyes. The rage is still there, burning, constant. But beside it, stubborn and unwelcome, something else flickers. Small. Nameless. Inconvenient.
He doesn't sleep for a long time.