48. Killian

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

KILLIAN

I woke every morning with the warmth and scent of Hector on my sheets, and went to bed each night with him by my side. It was more than I'd ever expected from life, so much more. It was peaceful and happy in a way I never thought I would feel.

I understood, suddenly, my mother's life. The way she'd always seemed so happy with her many partners and bed that had never been empty. I'd always assumed it barren, like the assignations I'd had in dark rooms, seeking nothing but release, and left empty and longing afterward. But that wasn't what she'd gotten out of her half-dozen lovers. This was what she'd gotten. This entirely sated feeling, not emptiness, but like I'd forgotten what it truly was to be that empty. That alone.

As though alone had ceased to exist, because even when he wasn't with me, Hector was there. He existed, and I knew that I'd be with him again. He would always be there, always fill my life with his presence.

It was a shame that I only now understood, so many years after she'd died. I wished I could tell her that I finally got it. I'd been such a little shit to her when I was a child.

I wanted to tell Abram, but he'd just say the same thing he always said when I went to him, to tell him something I hadn't said to her.

She knew, Killian .

Maybe that was just the story of my whole life. I was just so fucking stunted that everyone else knew how I felt before I did. Not because I was incapable of feeling as I'd assumed for so many years, but because I didn't comprehend feelings, so I didn't know how to name how I felt.

Still, there was a freedom in that. Not that I no longer had to try to figure myself out as I went, but that when I could no longer apologize to my mother, no longer tell her how wrong I'd been, that... she knew.

She had always known.

She'd just given me the time to figure it out for myself.

I was staring at my monthly food requisition thinking about my mother when footsteps came thundering down the hallway.

My office door flung open to reveal three soldiers. I recognized them immediately: two from positions on the northwest end of the wall, and the third, a scout. He'd spent almost a decade sliding out into the southland, searching out their armies and coming back to us with information. He was possibly the best scout we'd ever had; a hummingbird in origin—small, slight, and quicker than a dragonfly in flight. He'd also done the years of more than a dozen of his people on the wall, since I insisted on counting each of his years as two. He wasn't just defending Nemeda, after all. He was risking his life every single moment of every day, going into enemy lands. Eating and sleeping and bathing there for weeks at a time.

Now, he was sporting a slice on his side, covered with a thin bandage that he was already in the process of bleeding through.

I leaped from my chair, looking to one of the men who'd accompanied him. "Go get a healer and bring them here." Then I pressed him into a chair. "How soon?"

He shook his head. "They only saw me when I was almost home. They don't... they don't know I know." He reached out and grabbed my wrist, his grip like an iron vise. "They're massing at the foot of the western hills. It's... it's a bigger force than they've thrown after us in all the years I've been scouting, m'lord. Three thousand that I could count, and more arriving as I left."

Three thousand.

I leaned back against my desk, the breath knocked out of me.

We hadn't seen a force that big since Carlyle had come, and it had been a bloody fucking mess. Thousands dead on both sides. More theirs than ours, yes, but that was because we had the wall and our spears. And if the man Hector had captured was to be believed, all because we weren't ignorant asses who thought we needed to impress our gods by doing inane things that got ourselves and our loved ones killed.

I wondered at the logic of following a god who demanded such unreasonable things, but being Nemedan, well... I couldn't fathom it. Foreigners thought we worshipped birds, but the truth was that if we worshipped anything, it was freedom.

The scout, Phaedo, took just a moment to catch his breath, and went on to start giving me details. With each one, the situation seemed to get worse. Cavalry. The camp they had built, which implied to my mind an even bigger force than the three thousand Phaedo had counted, which he clearly also suspected, though he never said anything like it. He was very good about giving me all the information, detailed and perfect, and letting me see the damning truth for myself.

He continued talking as the healer arrived, even as she pulled out her tool kit, washing and then stitching his wound.

I made notes, already mentally changing my food requisition form in my mind. If we were going to be fighting, we'd need more. There would be no time for hunting, and soldiers who had spent the day fighting needed more food than ones who'd spent the day staring into the horizon.

The ones that survived it, anyway.

But I was never going to preemptively change my food orders assuming people would die. It was perhaps the singular area where I insisted on being optimistic. My people were going to live, gods damn it. Whatever I had to do to make that more likely, I'd do it. My Crane were worth every moment of struggle I had to go through to keep them alive. Every last one of them.