16. Killian

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

KILLIAN

W hat the fuck was I doing?

Over forty years, I'd known who I was, understood why I did everything I did. Life hadn't been perfect—quite the opposite—but I'd always been confident that I knew what I needed to do.

I did my job. I took care of my soldiers. I did what politicking I had to in order to make my clan run. I was cautious and focused and attentive.

And here I was, turning into a wishy-washy disaster.

Pushing Hector away because of the risk of Avianitis and then sliding onto my knees to suck his cock. Protecting him instead of doing my damned job—the same job I'd been doing for fucking decades.

Was this how it had been for Mother when she'd chosen to go back on the wall while injured, knowing it was a ridiculous decision? Had she been unable to stop herself, even while knowing she was acting inappropriately?

I slept poorly, barely touched my breakfast, and then spent an hour staring at the forms I still hadn't sent to Brett. If I didn't send them soon, he'd send a letter asking if everything was well.

Or given the fact that I had his husband's brother in my care, he might show up to check on things.

Maybe he should, because I couldn't seem to do anything right.

On my way to lunch, I took a different route than usual.

No, not one that led to the smithy. I wasn't that pathetic. It was a route that let me cross paths with Abram on his own way to get lunch for the people working in the smithy.

Not pathetic at all.

He lifted a brow at me when I fell into step beside him, because he knew me. More than that, he knew I wouldn't be there if I didn't want something. The problem was that I still couldn't define what it was I wanted.

I wanted someone to assure me I was doing the right thing even though I knew full well I wasn't. Excellent leadership skills on my part. Clearly my people had made a good choice in making me clan leader.

"That bad, is it?" he asked after a moment of silence.

I sighed.

What else could I say? All the questions I wanted to ask him were answers in themselves—it was ridiculous, how much concern I was putting into a single man, and a single situation. I was in control of thousands of lives. I didn't have the time to be obsessing over any one of them.

"He's clever," Abram finally said, because it was obvious what I was thinking about. Who I was thinking about. "Set himself up a little line, one thing at a time, and then moves to another as he waits for the first to cool. He's already getting ten times as much work done as any of the other apprentices you've sent me in my time at the forge. Fuck, give him a few years, he could be faster than me."

Clever.

I wish it surprised me that he was clever, but of course it didn't. His room in the castle in Urial had shown it. Every surface had been covered in books and schematics, as though he needed to know everything. Needed to know how everything worked. Just like he needed to fix everyone's problems. Needed to spend his brother and sister's years on the wall. Needed to...

Well, fucking me didn't figure into that. Part of me wanted to shove it into that same box and forget about it. Hector wanted to fix everything, and that included fucking me because... because I didn't want to think about it. I wanted to dismiss it, tell myself he didn't actually want me, and walk away.

Walking away was always the easy answer to everything.

"I've been telling you for years that you should assign smiths who have brains, and not just incompetents like me who are too old to go back to the wall."

In the moment, I wished my other form was a cat or a wolf, so I could growl at him. I turned to glare at him anyway, and he gave me a completely unconcerned shrug.

"You're not incompetent," I said. "You're just an ass. You belong in the smithy. Mother should have moved you there years earlier, because it's always been your damn calling."

Instead, Mother had been selfish. She'd kept him at her side for many long years. It had almost ended in his death more than once.

Instead of defending her, he shrugged again. "It was worth the fingers." He held up his hand before us, wriggling the fingers that were missing full knuckles. "Maybe I'm good there, but where I wanted to be mattered too. Maybe your mother was indulging me by letting me choose, but she did it for the right reasons. Can you say the same?"

I stopped dead, and he must have seen that coming, because he stopped and turned to face me, eyebrow raised in challenge.

Indulging him?

Where he wanted to be?

"You... wanted to stay on the wall all those years. You didn't want to be in the smithy." Somehow, it had never occurred to me that he'd wanted to be there. Wanted to fight. Wanted to put his life in danger every day.

Who would ever want that, and why?

"My place was at her side, boy. For as long as I could be there. I didn't give a fuck about anything else. Fingers, the smithy, or even my life if it'd come to that." He stepped in close to me, meeting my eye and refusing to let go. "Some things are important, and some things aren't. Only I get to decide which ones are important to me. Only you get to decide which ones matter to you. I think you can probably see where that goes."

Blinking, I swallowed and nodded.

"Good." He turned and started walking again, clearly assuming that I would follow along. "Now, he's got this notion we want to try out. So I need you to send for extra materials from the Owl."

"Notion?"

He grinned wide. "A crossbow that resets without having to reload it. Imagine. Not just being able to shoot the bastards without having to spend a lifetime training, but being able to shoot one, then point and shoot another."

It actually sounded sort of awful. Being able to kill one person after another, in quick succession. The death toll could be horrific.

But it might save Crane lives. Nemedan lives. In the end, that was all that mattered. That was the heart of my work: to preserve as many Nemedan lives as I could. My own wishes didn't come into it. Maybe Abram was right, and I had to worry more about what Hector wanted, but I knew very well I would never get what I wanted.

I just wanted the war to be over. I wanted my people safe.

So I tore my mind from pointless wishing and nodded to Abram. "I'll write to Balthazar today."

It was damned impressive, if I thought about it. Hector and Abram had come up with something that might save countless Crane lives. It was the sort of thing that didn't happen anymore. Early in the war, people had come up with new things, new forms of fighting, new ideas to stop the pointless southern aggression. Nowadays, everyone was simply continuing what our parents had done before us. Nothing new, nothing ingenious, nothing clever or creative or artistic. There was no room for that in the life of a Crane now. But there Hector was, new to the wall and still thinking that things could be changed.

And still, Abram was lecturing me on letting Hector do what he wanted to instead of coming up with clever things like this. What I couldn't figure out, for the life of me, was why anyone would ever want to be on the wall.