8. Killian

CHAPTER EIGHT

KILLIAN

O restes was teaching Hector the spear.

It made sense. They had the same sort of body, in a way. Orestes was taller—Orestes was taller than almost anyone—but he had the same compact feel as Hector, because of the thick, corded muscle of him.

Most people born to the Crane Clan were cursed with the same willowy long limbs and slender frame that made it difficult to pack on any muscle at all. I'd spent my whole lifetime working on gaining the muscle I had, and it remained a constant struggle.

I watched as we ate dinner, Orestes walking Hector through a simple practice routine. It had most of the useful maneuvers the spear required on the wall. Stabbing, naturally, and slashing, but more importantly, the end sweep that we used to swipe southerners off their ladders, and the end butt to shove them back when they came close enough to make use of their swords.

Our spears were an advantage, and one we needed to use to their fullest. It was one of the reasons we kept beating them back—we had spears, and those gave us better reach. We had the wall, an immovable obstacle, covering the whole of our border from coast to coast.

For some reason, the southerners insisted on making war in very specific ways, and never seemed interested in learning new techniques that might help them prevail. They used only their swords, even bows most often relegated to grappling onto the wall, not combat, never any other weapon that might help them overcome the reach of our spears. I shouldn't complain, since it saved the lives of my people, but it had always seemed odd to me.

We Crane were constantly trying to better our tactics. To find new and smarter ways of killing the invaders.

Why didn't they do the same?

"You should offer to teach him," Nia said as she sat down next to me, an extra bowl of stew in her hand for me, which she passed along before she started eating.

I shook my head and tried to focus on my food. "Orestes is better for him. He'll teach him how best to move for someone who has the same limitations on his flexibility."

She hummed what sounded like an agreement, but shook her head anyway. "So? You can teach him the same, you just have to think about it."

"Orestes is a good teacher."

"Sure he is," she agreed, cheerful and smiling. "But the Eagle doesn't want to fuck him, and you do."

I let my head fall back and groaned. "So obvious?"

"I grew up with you, old man. I know when you want a shiny thing. I just can't figure out why you're denying yourself." She turned away from them, facing me in her seat, waiting for my answer.

Like it mattered.

"If you grew up with me, maybe you shouldn't call me old," I mumbled, and before she could cheerfully tell me she was perfectly comfortable being old, I went on. "He's susceptible to Avianitis. And we both know that nonsense about love is just that. Nonsense. That misbegotten son of the Crow infected that last envoy from Urial. He's not capable of love."

She made a face, and we fell into momentary silence. The Crow... they had been the first clan broken after the pact that had formed Nemeda, and unlike the overreaction of the breaking of the Gull, no one felt bad about the Crow's end. They'd created it themselves, as sneaky and ill-intentioned as the Eagle had been when they'd been broken the year before.

Even now, being a child of the long dead Crow Clan brought nothing but shame. And he who would have been the chief of the Crow Clan, Xanthos, was a conniving bastard. Better to call him fox than crow, the way he'd been constantly trying to sneak into the hen house the whole time he'd been on the wall as a young man. He was technically part of the Pelican Clan, and he'd come to spend his year with us through them. He'd spent the whole year fucking anyone who'd have him.

Normally, the Crane respected that, but Xanthos had taken it to a different level. I wasn't one to insult a man's ability to sleep with many partners and also feel emotions, but in three-hundred-odd days on the wall, the man had slept with at least four hundred people.

"I suppose... That's a good point," Nia finally said, with a sigh at the end. "I always liked the story about love, because at least if it's love, it means people aren't just dying for nothing. Love is always worth something."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I just shrugged.

She leaned in and bumped her shoulder against mine. "I know, I know, oh fearless leader, you don't believe in love." She affected a deeper voice that was clearly supposed to approximate mine and said, "Who has time for love? I have to go bleed for Nemeda."

It was... well, it wasn't exactly right. But it wasn't wrong, either. I did believe love was real. Brett was in love. Paris was doubtless in love. It was just that love meant something else under pressure. Love could be sweet and perfect and eternal when you were a farmer and nothing ever tested it. When you lived every day under threat of death? Everything was different. Love had to be perfect, or it would crumble.

And if I'd learned one thing in my years of life, it was that nothing was perfect.

Not, I realized as I sat there eating my dinner, even the wall. Because as I sat there, bowl in hands, I watched a small boat pull up on the rocky shore beneath where we were traveling, bearing the standard of one of the south's warring city-states.

What was it I'd just been thinking, about how the southerners were too bound in tradition to think of simple ways around their obstacles, like spears to match ours, or... boats to go around the wall and land on the other side?

Fuck.

Immediately, my eyes turned to Hector. How could I keep him safe and handle the fucking invading southerners at the same time?