12. Killian

CHAPTER TWELVE

KILLIAN

T he report was largely a good one, and I only wished I could have returned the favor to the leaders of various sections of the wall. Instead, they had to be informed to be on the lookout for southerners trying new tricks. Getting into fucking boats and coming around the wall.

It wasn't the easiest prospect, since the coast where our lands joined was rocky and rough, but clearly, they'd found at least one path.

I could only hope that the party not returning convinced the others that they hadn't made it at all, since we had a weakness I hadn't previously known about.

I didn't like it, this new hole in our armor. I didn't like any hole in our armor, because it inevitably ended in losing people, and every death was a failure. Whether I'd failed to see an attack coming, or failed to properly train someone, or failed to plug a gap like this one, they all sat uneasily on my shoulders.

Yes, yes, it was sheer hubris to take responsibility for everything. I was one man, and a fucking tired one at that. But at the same time, all these lives were put in my hands, whether by other clans or my own people. While I wasn't ridiculous enough to think I had killed every Nemedan who died defending us, it didn't change that they were all, in a way, my responsibility. All of these people were putting their lives in my hands, and I had to do my very best to respect that, and minimize loss of those lives.

Inevitably, that led me back to Hector.

Everything now seemed to lead me back to those honey-gold eyes and dark hair. That too-serious countenance that I not only understood, but felt down deep in my soul. Hector was a man who knew something about feeling the burden of too much responsibility.

He wouldn't have come to the wall if he didn't.

When Otus had tried to press him at the wedding, he'd have ignored it, or refused responsibility, or come up with some glib reason it didn't apply to him. It wouldn't have been bad, but it also wouldn't have made me feel like we knew each other, deep down in my bones.

"Does he at least already have some muscle?" Abram was asking, looking at me like I was his mother demanding he eat his vegetables, because the Hawk worked hard to grow them, dear. He hefted a box of metal scraps, meeting my eye meaningfully. "They sent me that little hummingbird boy last year, and he couldn't even help with fetching and carrying."

I remembered the Hummingbird. He'd been sweet and earnest and ready to do anything he could, truly wanting to be of service during his year. I'd wanted to send him right back where he'd come from. After enough years in my position, it wasn't hard to tell who could handle the never-ending fight on the wall and who could not. If I'd sent the boy into the fray, we'd have sent him home in a box, for his family to scatter to the winds.

So he'd trained half the year, and helped Abram the other half. After his training, I'd given him a week on the wall proper, just to make it so he'd defended Nemeda, not left out, and he'd also known full well it wasn't for him. He'd been through a single major skirmish during his week, like the one Hector had already lived, and he'd jumped at the chance to assist Abram after that.

But Hector had already been through a fight, and he'd killed an attacker. He'd been horrified, yes, but every decent man was, when he was forced to kill for the first time. And the fiftieth. It got easier, but it never got better. And if, winds forbid, it started to seem fun, then that person didn't belong on the wall any longer either.

But Abram.

He was asking me about Hector, since I'd come to ask him about taking him as a sort of apprentice.

Abram was... well, he was possibly the closest thing I had to a singular father. It was possible he was my father, though I didn't look particularly like him. No, I looked just like my mother, and her father before. But Abram had been one of her pack of half a dozen lovers everyone at the time had called the Crane's consorts, so it was possible. He was the only one of that lot I'd ever thought of as family, most of them simply being Mother's men, never particularly interested in me.

I hadn't blamed them, since I wasn't father material either.

"He's sturdy," I promised Abram. "At least twice the size of the Hummingbird. And clever. Paris said something about him fixing locks back in Urial."

Abram stopped and looked at me, considering. The box he was holding in his arms probably weighed more than the Hummingbird had. I'd actually half hoped that Abram would be taken with him when I'd assigned the pretty young man to his workshop. He'd been alone since mother's death, and I hated that.

"Then why give him to me at all?"

Of course. The bad part of trying to get anything past Abram: the old bastard knew me too well.

So I justified it to him the same way I'd been justifying it to myself. "He's going to be here three years. That's a long time to spend on the wall. Besides, if he's really that clever, he'd be wasted as a line fighter."

He continued watching me a moment before turning back to put the box on the shelf where it belonged. He kept his workshop in perfect order, and I thought, somehow, without even knowing Hector all that well, that they would fit together. I had a moment of concern that Hector would be the one Abram fell for, after years of me trying to send him attractive prospects to help in his shop.

He knew me too well.

"He's handsome, I suppose?" He leaned against a bench, crossing his arms and lifting his brows at me.

I flushed. "I don't... that is, I'm not planning for you to fuck him. He's from Urial. He could get Avianitis."

"Afraid I'm going to fall in love with him?"

I snorted and rolled my eyes. "We both know falling in love as a prerequisite to illness is nonsense. Sicknesses don't know shit about love, and neither do most people."

He bent his head to one side, then the other, letting his neck crack loudly, then sighing. "I suppose it is rather farfetched to think love causes Avianitis. But love isn't pretend, boy, and you need to stop trying to convince yourself it is. If I hadn't loved your mother, do you think I'd have put up with her shit for twenty years?"

I sighed, shaking my head and then dropping it to stare at the workshop floor. Abram was, in fact, one of the few people I believed that from. I truly believed he'd loved my mother. He'd stood by her side through it all, despite the daily war they'd fought. Despite the fact that he'd lost three fingers and nearly his life, and she'd banned him from the wall after that. She'd said it was because a person needed to have all their fingers to properly fight on the wall, but we'd known the truth.

She'd been terrified of losing him, and so she'd put him in a safe place.

Abram, nearly forty at the time, had willingly gone and stayed off the wall. The almost twenty years he'd spent on it at her side had been more than enough fighting for any man, let alone one whose heart was that of an artisan. A blacksmith.

And now he made our weapons. He made it so we could continue the fight, since he couldn't anymore.

"I know you loved Mother," I finally agreed, dodging the whole subject. "I'm just saying I wasn't trying to set you up with Hector. I truly think he could be helpful in the workshop. And... he's planning to spend three years here, Abram. I can't have him on the wall for three whole years."

Abram snorted. "Why the fuck not? The Hawk baby was there for five, at least. The lone Eagle even longer. Fuck me, I think I saw his enormous ungainly shadow up there again this morning. Why not this boy from Urial?"

I couldn't meet his eye, and the silence stretched out between us.

I startled when I felt his shoulder nudge against mine, turning to meet his eye. I hadn't realized he was moving, let alone coming to stand next to me. "It's like that, is it?"

Instantly, I scowled back. "I don't know what the fuck you're on about, I just think he'll be an asset in the workshop. Now stop making my life harder and teach him to make spears, old man."

His laughter followed me as I stomped out of the workshop. Damned old men who thought they knew me so well.