Chapter 4
The lamb keeps coming.
Days pass. Fights pass. The routine of the pits grinds forward in its ugly, predictable rhythm, bells and blood and the roar of crowds that Zazyrus hears through stone and hates with a consistency that borders on devotion.
And every day, between the first bell and the second, the cage door opens and the boy comes in with his satchel and his steady hands and his voice that fills every corner of the silence Zazyrus has built around himself.
He learns the boy's name from the guards.
They use it occasionally, when they bother to use it at all, calling it down the corridor when they need him somewhere.
Lethe. Lethe, the beast in cage four needs stitching.
Lethe, Demos wants the roster updated. More often they call him Lamb, and the boy answers to both with the same quiet compliance that Zazyrus is beginning to suspect is a performance so thorough it has become indistinguishable from the real thing.
Lethe.
He turns the name over in his mind the way he turns everything over, examining it, cataloging its weight and shape. It's a small name. Soft on the tongue. It suits the boy the way the pits don't, something gentle and clean in a place that is neither.
Lethe speaks to him the way no one has spoken to him in years.
Perhaps ever. He talks while he works, a steady, unhurried current of words that washes over Zazyrus and doesn't demand anything in return.
No commands. No threats. No questions designed to probe for weakness.
He narrates his movements, explains what he's doing and why, and between the medical commentary he talks about other things.
Ordinary things. Things that have no purpose or utility and exist, apparently, just because the boy needs to fill the air.
He talks about a cat.
Not a fighting beast. Not some creature in the cages.
A kitchen cat, apparently, who produced a litter of kittens three weeks ago, and the boy has named one of them Soot because it's black and because he is, by his own admission, not creative.
He tells Zazyrus this while changing the bandages on his ribs, his fingers light and careful, and his voice carries a warmth that Zazyrus doesn't know what to do with.
"She's getting braver," Lethe says. "Yesterday she climbed into a stock pot. Maren nearly had a fit. I told her Soot was just conducting an inspection and she threw a ladle at me, which I think is an overreaction."
Zazyrus says nothing. He watches the boy's hands.
"The orange one is the troublemaker, though. He's been knocking things off shelves. Maren says he's doing it on purpose, and I believe her, because the look on his face when the jar hits the floor is extremely deliberate. He's a menace. I love him."
Zazyrus says nothing. He watches the boy's mouth.
He talks about poultice recipes. The specific properties of calendula versus comfrey, the ratios of fat to oil in salve, the difference between a clean stitch and a pretty stitch, which are not always the same thing.
He talks about the weather above ground that Zazyrus hasn't seen in weeks: rain, apparently, three days running, and the cistern is higher than usual and the corridors are damp and the guards are in foul moods because mud and wet leather make everyone miserable.
He talks about places he's read about in the few books that circulate among the kitchen staff.
A city on the coast where the buildings are white and the sea is visible from every window.
A forest in the north so old and thick that the canopy blocks out the sun and the floor is covered in moss that glows at night.
A mountain range where the peaks are above the clouds and the air is so thin you can see the stars during the day.
Zazyrus has never seen the sea. He's never seen a forest that glows or a mountain above the clouds.
He's seen cages and arenas and the backs of wagons and the insides of holding pens and the faces of humans who looked at him and saw property.
And now he's hearing about the sea from a boy who's never seen it either, who describes it from secondhand words with a longing so naked it makes something in Zazyrus's chest pull uncomfortably tight.
He doesn't respond. But he listens.
The boy's voice makes him feel something that might be significant in another person.
Might be warmth. Might be comfort. Might be the particular, dangerous sensation of being treated gently by someone who has no obligation to be gentle, no incentive, no reward.
Lethe is gentle when the guards are watching.
Lethe is gentle when they're not. The consistency of it is what undoes Zazyrus, because he has spent his entire life cataloging human behavior and the universal constant has been that humans are one thing in public and another in private, and Lethe is the same in both.
Quiet, and kind, and careful with his hands, and brave in a way that makes no sense.
Zazyrus resents this.
He was comfortable in his silence. The silence was his, the same way the rage was his, a space he'd carved out that belonged to him and no one else.
And this boy, this small, pale, relentless boy with his satchel and his stories about kittens, keeps filling it.
Keeps pouring words into the emptiness and leaving them there, settling into the corners, and Zazyrus can't seem to scrape them out.
He resents that the boy's voice makes the cage feel smaller.
That the boy's hands on his skin make something unclench in his chest that he didn't know was clenched.
That the hours between the boy's visits are longer than the hours during them, and Zazyrus has begun, against his will and against his better judgment, to listen for the sound of light footsteps in the corridor.
***
The boy brings extra rations.
He does it casually, without ceremony, pulling a cloth bundle from his satchel and setting it beside Zazyrus's knee as though it appeared there by accident.
Bread. Cheese. A piece of dried fruit. Once, an apple so crisp and fresh that Zazyrus knows it didn't come from the slop they feed the fighters.
Someone gave this to the boy and the boy gave it to Zazyrus, and the math of that is simple and the meaning of it is not.
He brings clean water, too. Not the brackish stuff that comes through the pipes down here but clear water, carried in a stoppered flask, and he sets it beside the rations and doesn't mention it. Doesn't draw attention to the offering. Doesn't wait for gratitude.
Zazyrus drinks the water and eats the food and says nothing, and the boy keeps talking about the cat.
***
Once a week they take him to the cistern.
It's below the kennels, a vaulted stone chamber with a pool fed by rainwater and runoff from somewhere above.
The water is cold and slightly silted and it is the closest thing to freedom Zazyrus gets.
His first week here he killed a guard during the transfer, snapped his neck while the man was fumbling with the chain, and injured two more before they put him down with a blow to the back of the skull that he felt for three days.
Since then, they're careful. They unchain him in the cistern and wait on the other side of the heavy door and give him time because they've learned that rushing him costs more than it's worth.
Zazyrus uses every second. He strips and enters the water and scrubs the grime and blood from his skin and hair and claws, and the cold hits him in a way that feels clean, feels honest, feels nothing at all like the cage.
He submerges. Holds his breath. Lets the water close over his horns and fill his ears with silence that is different from the silence of the cage, fuller somehow, alive.
When he surfaces, the air tastes different.
Colder. Sharper. For the span of the bath he is unchained and alone and the door is thick but not impenetrable and the calculations run constantly: the distance to the door, the angle, the number of guards on the other side, the time it would take to reach them before they reacted.
He files the calculations away. Not yet. Not today.
This week, he is not alone.
The boy is there when the guards push Zazyrus through the door and close it behind him.
He's kneeling at the far edge of the pool, away from the deeper water, with an armful of linen bandages and soiled cloths spread across the stones beside him.
A block of rough soap sits at his elbow, and the smell of it reaches Zazyrus from across the chamber, clean and sharp and herbal.
The boy is washing the bandages, wringing them out with efficient, practiced hands, and he doesn't look up when the door opens.
Then he does.
He looks up and he sees Zazyrus, unchained and standing in the doorway with no bars between them, and his hands still in the water. His blue eyes widen. His lips part, just slightly. He doesn't move.
Zazyrus doesn't move either.
The guards who let him down here don't seem concerned that they've put a beast who has killed five men in the same room as the smallest, most breakable person in the kennels.
Either they think Zazyrus won't hurt the boy, which is presumptuous, or they've decided the boy is expendable enough to risk, which makes something ugly twist in Zazyrus's gut that he doesn't examine.
He crosses the chamber. The boy's eyes track him, and Zazyrus is aware of the gaze the way he's aware of everything, filed and cataloged and noted, but he doesn't acknowledge it. He reaches the edge of the pool and strips off his pants and enters the water.
The cold bites. He welcomes it. He sinks to his chest and tips his head back and the tension in his shoulders unknots in slow increments and he breathes.
The water comes up to the center of his chest when he's sitting and it's dark in the pool, silted, and he can see the blur of his own body beneath the surface and feel the current of the feed pipe against his back.
He can feel the boy's eyes on him.
Not just on him. On him. The distinction is important. Zazyrus has been watched his entire life. Watched by owners appraising his value, by handlers assessing his threat, by crowds screaming for his blood. He knows what those gazes feel like. They are calculating, or hungry, or afraid.
This is none of those things.
The boy's gaze tracks across his shoulders, his chest, the expanse of his body where it breaks the surface of the water.
Zazyrus doesn't have to look to know this.
He can feel the path of it, warm and specific, and when he does glance toward the boy, the evidence is plain.
Lethe's hands have stopped moving in the basin.
His lips are parted. His cheeks carry a flush that the cold air in the cistern should not allow, and his eyes are focused on the point where the water meets Zazyrus's abdomen, where his skin disappears into the dark pool, where the cut of his hips and the dip of the V below his navel vanishes beneath the surface.
Lethe is looking at him the way someone looks at a thing they want and are terrified of wanting.
Zazyrus knows the shape of that particular expression. He just never expected to see it on the face of a human looking at him.
But the boy is not the only one who is looking.
Lethe is bare to the waist. His shirt is folded neatly on the dry stone behind him, removed to keep it from getting soaked while he works, and the lamplight in the cistern catches the lines of his body in a way that the dim cage never has.
He is pale. The word feels insufficient.
His skin is luminous in the low light, scattered with freckles across his shoulders and the bridge of his nose and the tops of his arms, and Zazyrus finds himself tracing the pattern of them the way his eyes trace the markings on his own body, following constellations.
He's slender but not malnourished. There is muscle in his shoulders and his forearms that speaks to the work he does, the wrestling of creatures twice his size into compliance, the lifting and carrying and brute daily labor of keeping the pits' investments alive.
It makes him lean. Not soft. Just enough definition to catch the lamplight along the ridges of his arms, the cut of his collarbones, the flat plane of his stomach where his pants sit low on narrow hips.
Zazyrus should feel nothing looking at him except anger and disgust. A human. Another filthy human in a long procession of them, another body that happens to be in the same room, unremarkable and irrelevant.
That's not what he's feeling.
Something hot settles low in his core, heavy and unfamiliar, and he doesn't examine it.
He doesn't trace it to its source, doesn't hold it up to the light and name it.
He is in the water and the boy is on the stone and the space between them is full of lamplight and cold air and the sound of water moving and something else, something charged and silent and heavy with attention.
The boy's eyes travel up from the waterline. Across Zazyrus's chest. His shoulders. His throat. Up.
Their eyes meet.
Lethe looks away first. His gaze drops to the linens in his hands and his head ducks and the pink on his cheeks deepens to red, spreading across his nose and up to his ears and down his neck to his collarbones.
His hands resume their work, too quickly, and he wrings a bandage so hard the soap shoots out of his grip and he catches it without looking up and his jaw is tight and his breathing is carefully, forcefully controlled.
Zazyrus files this away.
Zazyrus sinks lower into the water and closes his eyes and the heat in his core doesn't dissipate.
He is aware of the boy across the chamber with a precision that is neither casual nor comfortable.
The sound of his hands in the water. The rustle of linen on stone. The careful evenness of his breathing.
He doesn't kill anyone today. The guards collect him without incident.
He lets them chain him. He walks back through the tunnels to his cage and the door closes and the lock turns and he lies on the cold stone and the heat is still there, low and persistent, and when he closes his eyes he sees pale skin and freckled shoulders and the curve of slender hips and the pink flush on a face that turned away before it could be caught.
He tries not to think about it.
He fails.