He had no idea why. The colour wore off after a few days, but they renewed it every time they took him out of his cage.
When they were removed from their cages and taken to the pit, most of the other griffins went passively enough, now accustomed to the knowledge that they had no hope of escape. Darkheart did not. He continued to try to break free at every opportunity, and would lunge at every human he saw, even if he was still chained.
It took a toll on him. The collar wore away all the feathers from around his neck, and the flesh underneath became permanently raw and bleeding. The manacles on his forelegs rubbed away the scales and bit into the skin beneath, which swelled and hurt. In the end his lunges tore one of the rings out of the wall, and the humans had to drug him so they could reattach it. He tried to chew away the chains, until his beak became chipped and cracked. He dug his talons into the dirt, until he had made a deep ditch just in front of the spot where he lay, exposing the metal plates underneath, which he scratched at pointlessly.
Eventually, though, his strength failed him and he took to lying still with his talons outstretched, only rising when he needed to drink, or striking the wall with his beak until the noise ground itself into his head and put him into a kind of trance.
His eyes became dull and lifeless, his fur rough and his feathers bedraggled. He lost interest in talking to Aeya, or in eating, and became steadily thinner. It was only in the Arena that he came to life. There he was more than alive; he was wild, savage, magnificent, caught up in a killing frenzy that took away his pain and his despair. That was where he lived now, in the Arena. There he was more than a mindless nothing that lived in a cage. There he was Darkheart, the mad griffin, the one the crowds screamed for. There he was alive.
He stopped hitting the bars and laid his head on his talons, feeling the warmth of the evening sun on his face. He tried to remember his valley. Had there been sunsets there? Had he basked in the sun there? He couldn’t remember. The images kept slipping away from him like fish wriggling between his talons.
“Darkheart?”
It was Aeya’s voice. Darkheart raised his head slightly. “Aeya?”
“How did you come here?” said Aeya.
She had asked him this question before, but he hadn’t answered it. Not properly. He had learnt more speech from her since then, though. “I live . . . on mountains,” he mumbled. “Tall. Cold. Three. Three mountains.”
“Was it in the South?” said Aeya. “I came from the South.”
She had taught him about the four directions. He looked up at the sky and tried to remember. Which way had he come? The journey had passed in a haze. Now, looking back on it, it felt like a dream or like something that had happened to some other griffin in another place and another time. “South,” he said eventually, hoping this would be enough.
“I lived in the Coppertops,” said Aeya. “On the edge. I had a nest. But I built it too close, too close, too . . .” She trailed off. “I built it too close,” she said again. “Humans saw it. When my chicks went to the ground, they took them away. I could not stop them. I chased them; they were fast. I looked for them for days, but I never saw my chicks again. So I killed the human chicks. And the adults. Killed and ate them. They were good. Good food.”
She had told him this before. It was a kind of litany she recited when the mood took her, and she said it as if she had said it so many times that she didn’t even remember what the words meant any more. Darkheart half-listened.
“Why did you do it?” Aeya asked suddenly. “Why did you kill humans?”
Darkheart tried to think. “Was looking,” he said slowly. “For human.”
“For human? What human?”
“I wanted—a griffin told me she had human. One who spoke. I looked for one. I speak. They not speak. So I killed them. Then saw a griffin. White griffin. Calling me. Griffin with . . . with human. Dark human. I chase human. The griffin . . . want . . . stop. Kill her. And then . . .