Chapter 7
He's talking about the sea again.
He does this sometimes, when the wounds are minor and the work is routine and his hands know what to do without his brain's full participation.
He drifts. Not to the quiet room, not to the locked space behind his eyes where he hides from things that hurt.
This is different. This is the place where Lethe keeps the things he wants, the small collection of desires he's gathered from books and overheard conversations and the descriptions of travelers who passed through the pits and didn't stay.
"The book said the water changes color depending on the time of day," he tells Zazyrus, unwinding the bandage on his shoulder.
The wound is healing well. The stitches can come out in two days.
"Blue in the morning, green at noon, and at sunset it goes this color that the author called gilded, which I think is just a fancy way of saying orange.
But I like the idea of it. Water that can't decide what color it wants to be. "
Zazyrus is listening. Lethe knows this the way he knows most things about the beast now: through small, accumulated details.
The tilt of his head, slight, angled toward Lethe's voice.
The way his breathing changes when Lethe says something that interests him, a fractional deepening, barely perceptible but there.
The occasional low sound in his throat, not quite a hum, that Lethe has learned to interpret as acknowledgment.
He's listening, and the listening has a quality to it that Lethe can feel against his skin, an attention so focused it has weight.
"I'd go south," Lethe says. He checks the wound, prods the edges gently, satisfied with the closure.
"If I could go anywhere. South, to the coast, and I'd find a town small enough that nobody asks questions and I'd live near the water.
I'd have a garden. Herbs, mostly. Calendula and comfrey and lavender and whatever else grows in salt air.
" He re-dresses the shoulder with clean linen.
"I'd keep a cat. Obviously. Several cats. An unreasonable number of cats."
A sound from Zazyrus. The almost-laugh, the low rough exhale that Lethe heard for the first time a few days ago and has been chasing ever since. It isn't a full laugh. It may never be. But it's there, a fracture in the silence, and every time Lethe hears it something in his chest expands.
He doesn't want to admit what's happening.
He doesn't want to look at it directly, the way you don't look directly at the sun because looking at it will blind you and then you can't look at anything else. But the truth is there, patient and undeniable, sitting in the center of his chest where it's been growing for days.
Coming to Zazyrus is the part of his day he looks forward to.
Not the healing. He takes satisfaction in all his work, in every creature he tends, in the steady accumulation of stitches and bandages and small recoveries that prove something in the pits can be mended.
But this is different. This is specific.
This is the particular warmth that begins in his chest when his feet hit the stairs to the deep kennels, the quickening of his pulse that has nothing to do with fear, the way the cold air on his face as he descends feels clarifying rather than oppressive because at the bottom of these stairs is a cage and inside the cage is someone who listens.
Someone who has never hurt him.
The thought stops him every time. It shouldn't be remarkable.
It shouldn't be the bar. But it is, because Lethe's experience of proximity to powerful bodies is comprehensive and uniformly terrible, and the fact that Zazyrus, who is bigger and stronger and more dangerous than anyone Lethe has ever been near, has never once used that advantage against him is a thing Lethe cannot stop marveling at.
Aside from touching his throat, which was not violence.
Aside from grabbing his wrist, which was a boundary.
Zazyrus has never laid a hand on him. Has never looked at him the way Demos looks at him, assessing and proprietary, a gaze that calculates what can be taken and how.
Zazyrus looks at Lethe and Lethe can feel himself being seen.
Not evaluated. Not appraised. Seen. The difference is so vast that it makes Lethe dizzy if he thinks about it too long.
Some part of him that he thought had been killed years ago has started trusting this angry, violent beast not to hurt him.
The part is small and cautious and terrified of itself, and Lethe keeps trying to smother it because trust in the pits is a death sentence, and it refuses to die.
It feeds on the accumulated evidence of days and weeks of proximity: Zazyrus holding still while Lethe stitches him.
Zazyrus accepting the orange without demanding more.
Zazyrus tracing the bruise on Lethe's throat with a claw that could have opened his jugular and choosing, instead, to be gentle.
He sat patient. He listened. He looked at Lethe and saw him.
Lethe is in so much trouble.
***
The guards don't monitor them anymore.
Lethe noticed the change gradually. The first week, they hovered outside the cage, polearms ready, watching through the bars with the tense, coiled vigilance of men expecting violence.
The second week, they waited at the end of the corridor.
By the third, they unlocked the cage and left entirely, returning when Lethe called for them, and now they don't even walk him down.
They hand him the key and he goes alone.
He doesn't know what changed. Either they've decided Zazyrus won't hurt him, which would require a level of observation and deduction that Lethe doesn't credit most of the guards with possessing.
Or they've decided that if Zazyrus does hurt him, there's nothing they can do about it, and the risk of losing a guard is greater than the risk of losing a healer.
Both calculations arrive at the same result: Lethe is alone with Zazyrus.
No witnesses. No supervision. No one watching what happens in the cage.
The privacy is unsettling.
Not because he's afraid. That's the thing, the impossible, irrational, reckless thing: he's not afraid.
He should be. He should be terrified of being alone with an unchained beast in a cage that no one checks for hours at a time.
But Zazyrus's chains are always on when Lethe visits, and even if they weren't, Lethe has spent enough time in this cage to know that the chains are not the reason Zazyrus doesn't hurt him.
The decision is the reason. The choice, made and remade each time Lethe enters, to hold still and be gentle and listen.
No. The privacy is unsettling because of what Lethe thinks about in the absence of watching eyes.
Some of his thoughts are bad. He knows what happens to people who are alone with powerful things in dark places.
He has lived that. He carries it in the bruises that refresh themselves weekly, in the careful way he walks after certain nights, in the quiet room behind his eyes that he built for the sole purpose of surviving exactly this kind of proximity.
Some of his thoughts are instinct, the flinch-response of a body that has learned to associate closed spaces and large figures with pain, and those thoughts come uninvited and he lets them pass through without holding them.
But some of his thoughts are not bad.
Some of his thoughts are very, very good.
Some of his thoughts involve the heat of Zazyrus's skin under his palms. The way the muscle in his abdomen contracts when Lethe stitches near the hip.
The rough texture of the markings that trace his body in patterns Lethe has memorized from hours of proximity.
The breadth of his chest and the weight of his hands and the low, resonant hum that vibrates in the air between them when Zazyrus acknowledges something Lethe has said.
Some of his thoughts make his mouth go dry and his skin turn hot.
He thinks about what it would feel like to be held by those arms instead of tended.
To press his face against that chest and feel the rumble of that voice through his own bones.
To trace the markings with his fingers not because he's examining a wound but because he wants to.
He thinks about the hand that caught his wrist, the controlled power of it, and reimagines it on his hip, his waist, the small of his back.
He thinks about Zazyrus's mouth, which he has only seen set in a hard line or bared over teeth, and wonders what it would feel like against his skin.
Against his throat, where the claw traced his bruise. Against his mouth.
He thinks about these things in the cage while his hands work and his voice fills the silence and Zazyrus watches him with those dark, unreadable eyes, and the privacy means no one sees the color that creeps up his neck or the way his hands pause, just for a breath, when Zazyrus shifts beneath his touch.
He thinks about them in his cot at night, in the dark, and his body responds in ways he can't control and barely remembers how to manage, and he lies there aching and confused and terrified and wanting, and the wanting is the worst part because it's the part that means something he isn't ready to name.
***
"I think the stitches on your shoulder can come out tomorrow," Lethe says.
He's packing his satchel, cross-legged on the floor of the cage, and his voice is normal and his hands are steady and nothing about him betrays the thoughts that have been running underneath his words for the past hour.
He's gotten good at this. Partition. The voice talks.
The hands work. The thoughts do whatever they want in the dark space behind both, and no one is the wiser.
Zazyrus watches him. Lethe can feel it, the familiar weight, and he meets the gaze and holds it and there it is again: that sensation of being seen.
Of every wall and performance and carefully maintained exterior being looked through to the person underneath, and the person underneath being found acceptable. Being found enough.
"Same time tomorrow," Lethe says. He stands. Slings his satchel over his shoulder. "Try to avoid getting clawed in the meantime. I know that's a lot to ask."
The almost-laugh. The low exhale. Lethe's heart does something complicated and he turns away before his face can show it.
He calls for the guards. No one comes. He waits, calls again. Still nothing. They've wandered off, probably. Wouldn't be the first time. He has the key, so he lets himself out and locks the cage behind him and starts up the corridor alone.
The deep kennels are quiet. His footsteps echo on the damp stone.
The lanterns gutter in the draft from the stairwell and the shadows jump and sway and Lethe walks through them with the ease of long familiarity.
He knows every crack in these floors. Every puddle. Every place where the ceiling drips.
He reaches the staircase and ascends into the warmer air of the upper kennels. The corridor here is busier, a few guards on patrol, a handler wheeling a cart of feed toward the cages. Normal. Routine.
Lethe steps out of the stairwell and the cage door clangs shut behind him, the sound reverberating through the stone, and he doesn't see the figure in the shadows of the corridor.
Doesn't see the small eyes that track his movement from the darkened alcove to the left of the stairs.
Doesn't see Demos standing in the space between two unlit lanterns, silent, watching, his mouth curved in a line that isn't a smile.
The pit lord watches his healer emerge from the deep kennels.
Notes the color in his cheeks. Notes the softness in his expression, the unguarded quality that Lethe hasn't yet put away.
Notes the direction he came from and the cage he came from and the creature inside that cage and the look on the boy's face that Demos has seen before, on other faces, and knows exactly how to use.
Lethe walks down the corridor toward his room. His step is light. His thoughts are full.
He doesn't look back.
He doesn't see.