[ His response isn't a yes, or a no, or any gesture or look that might indicate at either. Instead, if comes, at first, as him staring down at the way you have covered your hand with his, then at how he turns his palm up to grasp it. Then he's turning his gaze away, past the lights and the festivities, towards the forest and the dark beyond. He takes a drag from the pipe that the two of you are now sharing. ]

They made the children they owned fight each other for their meals, their clothes, a place to sleep... things that no one should be deprived of. Some of these matches ended in one or both of them getting killed. The soldiers tell me that sometimes, the children took the fights outside of the Pit. Other times, some children would snap and eat each other to prove that they were vicious enough to be entertaining, and therefore worthy of being fed.

[ A beat, as he takes another long drag from the pipe. He's still looking off like it is not Falner that he is looking at, but another place entirely. ]

I'd be lying if I said that I did not understand. That it does not move me.

[ Still, it must remain odd to you, Mother Wolf, that such empathy could breed this level of attachment in your son. He was compassionate in general, but he rarely ever took it this far. The last had been Kalika, and even that has a different dynamic. Tala, Selene, and Brianna might have been young, but they had all still been old enough to stand on their own without their adoptive father.

Lyall was a child. A babe. ]