10. Killian

CHAPTER TEN

KILLIAN

F ucking southerners.

Goat fucking, ass-pain southerners.

I cursed every single one of them that had ever been born, and went about the field of battle and stabbed each in the heart once more, just to be sure not a single one returned to his awful land in order to tell the tale of landing on the other side. Maybe next time they'd think twice about taking a boat around my wall.

I had to contact Minerva, since the area we were in was between Crane and Raven lands, and she'd want to know about the change. It was unsettling; a group of people who'd never tried to go around the wall in years upon years of fighting, and now they thought of it. What next? New tactics against the wall? Weapons I'd never seen before?

The southerners proving able to learn was a nightmare scenario that could end in the destruction of everything I loved, and I couldn't allow it.

Not that I could actually stop anyone from learning.

Like Hector.

No, he wasn't anything like the southerners, no threat to my people and their future, but I still didn't like it. Didn't like him learning to fight, because I didn't fucking want him fighting.

I twisted my spear as I pulled it out of the last southern asshole, and spun back to look at my own people. No one was seriously injured, thank fuck. What a great introduction to the fight that would have been for Hector, dead Cranes.

On the other hand, the look on his face had been...

I remembered the moment I'd killed my first man. I'd been rather younger than Hector, but that was inevitable when one grew up on the wall. But in the end, age didn't make that much difference.

I remembered it too well, the arrogance of innocence, the conviction that I would be able to be better than other people. I was the future clan chief, after all. I had been raised to defend Nemeda.

Then I'd thrown up.

I'd been... eleven, I thought. Maybe twelve. Mother hadn't wanted me to be there, and I'd been determined to prove myself. Prove my iron will.

The gore had been rather more overwhelming than I'd expected. The smell of opening a man's bowels up with my spear, the slick flow of his blood over my hands. More than that had been the shock writ large on his face. His enormous round eyes, lips gaping open. He'd called me a child with his dying gasp, and I'd never been sure whether he'd been horrified at the indignity of being bested by a child, or horrified at the idea that Nemedans let children fight.

We didn't, and mother had blistered my hide for sneaking up onto the wall without permission.

I, much chastened and still on the queasy side, hadn't argued with her. I'd accepted my punishment and then after that, waited until she decided I was ready.

It'd been too soon.

It was always too soon, for everyone.

Hector was easily in his late twenties, maybe even thirty, and it had been too soon for him.

Orestes was bandaging him, the giant oaf having escaped with hardly a cut, as usual, and everyone was paying more attention to Hector than their own issues. Oh, they pretended otherwise, busying their hands with bandaging and salvaging supplies and changing clothes and washing up and the like. But to a person, every one of them would pause every few seconds and sneak a glance at him.

We all recognized it. We'd all been there and felt it ourselves. The sick rush and horror of killing for the first time, and how it left you gasping for breath, trying to figure out which way was up and whether the sun still shone or if everything in the world was just a horrible trick. The tiny hope that perhaps this was a nightmare.

"He did well," Nia said, coming up beside me. She whispered the words, not wanting anyone else to hear them, least of all Hector.

Rare was the man who wanted to hear that he killed well.

"He shouldn't be here." I went to wipe my face, and realized my hands were still covered with blood. I sighed at them in annoyance and headed for the water. When were my hands not covered in blood?

An ancestor of mine had been a painter. He'd specialized in a kind of line painting that involved not lifting the brush from the canvas until you'd completed an image. I imagined it had been rather easier to live with hands constantly stained black with ink.

"He shouldn't," Nia said, having followed me down to the water's edge. "But he is. He made a choice, and I won't pretend it wasn't a sensible one. He's too much like you for his own good, Killian. All he cares about is protecting the people he loves, and he puts them before anything. He's not just taking his brother and sister's years on the wall; he's making it so people like Otus can't make trouble for them. We both know he's right. Nemeda has become insular over the years. We don't like outsiders. The Hawk can accept Brett's husband all they want, but the other clans don't recognize his contributions the same as a year on the wall. A year on the wall is currency we all recognize and respect."

She wasn't wrong.

I hated more than anything that she wasn't wrong. They did think of it like currency, the other clans. People fighting and dying, and because most of them only ever spent one year on the wall, they could leave and put it behind them. The Raven and Crane understood better, but they still acted as though a year of fighting for their lives was something... expected. Normal.

It was indeed something that brought us together as a nation, since the majority of us had it in common, and could speak with authority on the subject of risking their lives.

That didn't make me hate it any less.

And for some reason, I hated it most of all for Hector of Urial.