2. Brett

The only sound in the room was breathing.

My breathing.

Rosaline's breathing.

Not Clio's breathing, though.

She'd stopped doing that. A tiny, distant part of my mind was screaming that I needed to summon the healer. Get help. Scream for my years-dead father, and he would come and hug me and make everything right.

But that wasn't going to happen.

Even if my father could gather his own ashes from the winds and come to help, nothing could fix this.

There was blood everywhere.

The kitchen was covered with it, giant gaudy red stripes splashed about like decorative paint swirls on the body of a warrior on a celebration night. The same as those swirls, it told a story of violence.

I looked up at Rosaline, who was shaking all over, her whole body trembling like a brown oak leaf in the fall.

My father wasn't coming. I was the adult. I was the caretaker, having taken Rosaline in when her parents had died in the same epidemic that had taken my own father, and we'd needed each other. Perhaps she'd needed someone more than I had, she a teenager and I an adult, but it didn't change the fact that my cousin had saved me, again and again, just by being there.

And she'd done it once more, today, when my wife had come at me with a blade, ranting about the grazing land her father's clan—the Eagle Clan—needed, and how once she was head of the Hawk Clan, she would give it to him. Once she murdered me and wrested control of my clan from its people.

Once more, Rosaline had saved my life.

She'd come in from gathering the eggs in the chicken coop, a basket in one hand and a smile on her face. She'd never liked Clio, but she'd been trying to get along with her, for my sake. Because I'd married the daughter of the Eagle Clan in an attempt to make a lasting peace between our peoples.

That smile had fallen away when she'd seen Clio stabbing at me, heard her poisonous words. Thinking quickly, Rosie had dropped the basket of eggs on the floor and gone for the knife block, pulling out the biggest of the lot and lunging at my wife.

Clio hadn't seen her coming. I'd been trying to motion her away, so she didn't have to be exposed to the violence, but Rosaline hadn't given that a second's consideration. She was too strong, too clever, too loyal. She'd cut Clio's throat from behind with a single, unexpected swipe.

The look of shock on her face—on both their faces—had been...

I'd been to war, for fuck's sake. I wasn't going to throw up at the thought of Clio's neck opening wide. The feel of her blood spraying across my face, still warm on my skin. The blood with the force of her pumping heart behind it, as strong as a waterfall, hitting my cheeks.

With two steps forward, I snatched the knife out of Rosaline's hand and looked her over. There was almost no blood on her. Clio had been facing me, so I'd borne the brunt of everything. I motioned to the basket of eggs that had landed neatly on its flat bottom, not a single egg having escaped from it. "Take the basket. Run next door. Tell them you saw Clio come at me with a knife."

"I—I—I killed?—"

"You did nothing. You saw Clio trying to kill me," I stressed, grabbing her arms and staring into her eyes. "You didn't come inside. You didn't do anything."

It took her a moment, but my cousin was smart. If Clio had tried to kill me, and I'd defended myself, I was entirely justified. There would be questions, but I could answer them. And I was a warrior, so if anyone challenged me as a result—and no doubt they would—I could handle the fight that would ensue. If it came out that Rosaline had stepped in, well... that got muddy, fast. She hadn't been the one attacked, so she'd had no right to attack a woman of such high standing as the wife of her clan head.

Technically, she'd been defending her clan head, so she'd been in the right, but that meant that when Clio's father or brother inevitably challenged over her death, Rosaline would have to be the one to fight a full-grown warrior, and Orestes had spent longer on the wall than any Eagle. He'd been there during my tenure and hadn't left yet.

Tiny, eighteen-year-old Rosaline, just having reached her cresting ceremony the year before, against trained killers. She was barely an adult, and no kind of fighter. She was going to run a household like her father, my uncle, not become a warrior.

I wouldn't have her repaid for saving my life with her own death.

As calm as I could, I turned to set the knife on the kitchen table and went to find the healer's kit we kept in the house. It had bandages at least, and I would need some. Clio was beyond saving, but she'd managed to hit me with her first blow and my side was still bleeding, if not so much as to be a danger to my life. I'd seen the flash of the knife right before she'd hit me and managed to swing away, so she'd swiped the blade along my ribs instead of sliding it between them. She'd been aiming for my heart.

I wondered how she'd thought to explain my gruesome, bloody death to my people. Perhaps among the Eagle, it was common to murder a clan head and take their place. For the Hawk, it was unheard of. No one would have supported her becoming head of the clan, not with even a hint that she'd done away with me.

Ironically, Rosaline would have been made chief, which frankly, was another tragedy. Not that my cousin wouldn't have risen to the occasion and done her best. She'd have done the job admirably. But it wasn't a job she wanted. She wanted to run a household. Care for chickens and cook and sew and decorate. She was damned good at it, and I wanted that for her. I thought perhaps she had her eye on the head of the Owl Clan, and his household, and I wanted that for her too.

I hadn't wanted to be chief either, at least not when I'd inherited the position at the tender age of twenty-six. It was too young to have the wisdom of a clan head. At thirty, I was still too young to have the wisdom of the clan head, and had been blessed with regular advice and guidance from the Raven and Owl clans. Minerva, the head of the Raven Clan, was only a few years older than me, but she had always been far more blessed with cleverness than I. It was the way of Ravens.

I wished she were there now. She'd have known how best to handle this disaster.

My own wife had tried to kill me.

I set the healer's kit on the table next to the knife, and sat down in the chair in front of them. Then I closed my eyes and breathed, long and calm and slow. One. Two. Three.

And that was it. All the time I had to give myself.

I heard the front door burst open, voices shouting, as I slumped forward, my slippery, bloody fingers trying to work the clasp on the healer's kit.

Maybe... maybe I was in worse shape than I'd thought, as I couldn't seem to make my fingers wrap around the metal edge of the clasp. They were clumsier than usual, and the blood... so much blood...

"Chief Brett," a horrified voice hollered from the door of the kitchen, then slightly quieter, possibly turned away, "No, keep in there, Rosaline. Brandon, go get the healer. Brett is going to be fine. Everything is going to be fine."

Owen, it had to be. He was one of our closest neighbors, and while everything was starting to sound far away, his voice was always deep and strident, even when coming as though down a long, echoing hallway.

"Owen," I said. Or maybe mumbled. I was having a hard time understanding myself.

Owen seemed to have no such issue, suddenly appearing on his knees before me. He'd turned me in the chair, I realized. Just grabbed me and moved me like I was a doll, and I hadn't even noticed.

At least no one in my own clan would doubt that I'd killed Clio in self-defense. I almost burst into laughter at the thought. Or maybe it was tears. I couldn't tell anymore.

"Clio tried?—"

"We know," Owen assured. "Rosie said Clio tried to kill you, and you shouted for her to get help. You only defended yourself. No one would ever think otherwise of you. No one who knows you."

Clio's father, chief of the Eagle Clan, wasn't likely to see it that way, even if he knew very well that his daughter had been a murderous snake of a woman. Even if he'd set her to the task himself. It would be far more convenient for him if I was a mad murderer and Clio an innocent.

It might yet earn him the right to that grazing land he wanted to steal from my people.

I leaned back, almost falling out of the chair, and met Owen's eye. "Ribs. She sliced me open. Can't die. The Eagle will want justice, and I won't have them take it out of the clan."

Owen snorted. "Aye, you'll take it out of their hides with a dead challenger when they come, just as they deserve."

I didn't relish the thought of killing another member of Clio's family, if—or rather, when—they did challenge me over her death, but it was a reasonable expectation. A challenge was to death or submission, and the Eagle Clan weren't much for submitting. For admitting their wrongs.

So not only did I have to survive, and get better, and be ready for another fight... I had to be prepared to kill yet another member of Clio's family. Orestes, perhaps, who I'd served beside.

It was a relief when the world slipped away, even as the last thing I heard from Owen was, "now my chief, don't go—fuck."