28. Brett

Greeting Orestes so glibly wasn't going to help and I knew it, but... well, nothing was going to help.

Orestes, the other child of Memnos of the Eagle clan. The man who had once been my brother by marriage. The only member of the Eagle clan I'd ever gotten along with.

Orestes and I had spent years on the Crane wall together, and we'd been friends. We'd been brothers, in a way, like all men who fought together on the same side, but more than that, I knew him to be a good and honorable man. We'd spent days off together, wandering the local village, drinking and playing games and sometimes helping the villagers with their jobs.

He'd encouraged me marrying Clio not because he thought the clans should merge, but because, in his words, "We should be brothers in fact as well as spirit."

I'd known he would react badly to his sister's death. He was a man who believed deeply in honor, and a man killing his own wife was horribly dishonorable. I knew it. I felt it, every day.

Worse, I'd lied about it. I hadn't actually killed Clio, and couldn't give him the satisfaction he wanted.

I'd have begged out of the fight right then on account of having been drinking, but it was clear from the way he was swaying in my doorway that he'd been doing the same. He wouldn't have an advantage because of my drinking.

Besides, someone should beat the hell out of me, shouldn't they?

Even though any guilt over Clio's death had faded over the months, my heart truly accepting that she had tried to kill me and no one need carry guilt about her death except perhaps her father—or herself—I still felt it, deep down. Still wondered if there hadn't been something I could have done to fix it. Some way to make a better peace with the Eagle.

"Orestes," I said, sagging against the doorway with a sigh. "She tried to murder me. It was a choice between me and her."

He blinked, frowning, then belligerently shook his head. "No. That's not possible. Clio was... she was a child. She never would have?—"

I leaned in toward him, meeting his eye steadily. "You left home over a decade ago, Orestes, and with good reason. You've hated your father since you were a boy, and she grew up with him, became as manipulative and hateful as he was. You missed her growing up. She was not a child. She knew what she was doing. I can't tell you why she did it, but there was no doubt in her. We hadn't been fighting. She hadn't asked me for anything. I walked into the kitchen, and she stabbed me. She was shouting something about grazing lands she wanted for her father."

He flinched and looked away, but then took a deep, shaky breath and met my eye once more. "Be that as it may. I must challenge you. For... for Clio."

He'd described her to me once when we'd been on the wall, and it had been a description of a child. How she loved to run, and her laughter was high and sweet, and she swore to him she would never marry anyone, because she wanted to be free forever. I'd been hesitant to accept Memnon's suggestion because when he'd mentioned her, I had assumed she was the child Orestes remembered.

Sadly, Clio had been nothing like that.

Not that I'd ever wanted to marry a child, but it would have been better to "marry" her and set her free in Hawk lands without my interference, if her father had been determined to marry off a child.

But by then Clio hadn't been a boyish girl who enjoyed spending her days in the woods at all. She'd been a woman in excessive finery who had thought everything beneath her and wouldn't have willingly touched her bare feet to the ground if someone had begged her to.

Orestes knew, I realized. He knew exactly what had happened. He knew about his father and sister's duplicity, and what they'd planned for me.

That, not grief over his sister's death, was why he was drunk.

Because he knew he had to challenge me, for the honor of his family, and he didn't want to make the challenge any more than I wanted to answer it. He was drunker than I was by quite a measure, because he also didn't want to succeed.

This, more than Clio's death, more than Memnon's fury, more than even my sweet cousin Rosaline's fear and horror at what she'd been forced to do, broke me. My friend. My brother-in-spirit. Forced into this situation by a horrid, manipulative father who wanted, what, more land for his cattle? It was fucking ridiculous. But Orestes had no choice. He had to try to kill me, for a cause he knew was unjust.

So I waved him out into the street. "Fine. We'll handle this now. And then I'll call for the healer, and you'll sleep it off. And maybe... maybe stay a while. Until you feel better."

He let me lead him out into the street, staring at the stones beneath his feet and only looking up at me when I grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him to face me. "I'm sorry," he whispered.

I squeezed his shoulders tight. "So am I."

And then, it was a fight.

He took a gut-shot that he knew damned well I'd shake off like no one else he'd ever sparred with. We'd had the discussion a dozen times over the years, about how to brace for such a blow, but he'd never quite managed to get it down. Likely he wanted me to return the favor, and end the fight quickly.

I . . . I couldn't.

It wasn't even about Clio anymore, which probably made it worse, but I'd fucking put Paris's life in danger, giving him Avianitis, and hadn't even had the guts to tell him what had happened yet. What the illness truly meant.

Someone should hit me.

So when Orestes swiped my leg from under me and I went down hard on the stone street, all I could think was that it was good. I deserved this. A little pain, at least, as payment for all I'd done to wrong everyone. Lying about Clio's death. Lying to Paris.

What kind of man was I becoming? The kind my father would be ashamed of. He'd always been a simple man. He'd only spent a single year in defense of Crane lands, deciding that violence wasn't for him. He'd never begrudged me my years on the wall, saying that even if he wasn't a violent man, violence had its own value, in the defense of Nemeda. But if my father had been one thing, truly and completely, it had been honest.

Hitting the ground knocked the wind out of me, but it only took a second to hop back up—it was a skill we'd all learned well on the wall. Lying down on the job was a good way to get dead, fast.

We circled each other, taking largely ineffective swings, until Orestes hissed, "Fucking do something, damn you. You know better than anyone that my father trained Clio to be more snake than Eagle."

But no. Even if she had stabbed me, I was quite certain that the man in the world most aware of Clio and Memnon's duplicity was Orestes himself. Why else spend his entire adult life on the wall, when we were only required to spend one year there? While there was self-sacrifice involved, that wasn't the whole of it. The wall had been a convenient way to avoid his clan and their degeneration under his father's control.

I broke away, stepping back and glancing over at Paris, then back at Orestes. "I... I infected the diplomat from Urial."

For a moment, he blinked, staring at me. I wondered if the fight would start in earnest at this; if he'd try to kill me for replacing his sister so quickly after her death. But then he grinned. And laughed. "You fucking crow. Always did like the shiny, pretty things."

Suddenly, it was a wrestling match, each of us trying to get the better of the other, but no one trying to truly injure the other. It ended the way those always did with us. Me atop him, his arms twisted behind his back, him unable to move.

The sun was starting to come up, and half the town was up and about, standing on their stoops, watching the fight proceed. They didn't know Orestes. Didn't know me and Orestes, friends and companions in the tragedy that was his family. They looked terrified.

Damn. It was time to end this. "Concede," I told him, calm and sober as I possibly could. It was surprisingly sober, given how much I'd had to drink.

He wriggled one way and then another, and finally, unable to break free, slumped forward. "Tricky fucking Hawk, you never change."

Then, in a new move I'd never seen him manage before, he threw his front half forward and me along with it, putting me on my back on the other side of him. He pushed away, and he was on his feet before me. As I jumped up, he leapt forward with a strong right jab.

I wasn't worried. Orestes wasn't going to hurt me. He was going for the usual gut shot, that we both knew I could withstand easily. Orestes had enormous, muscled arms, and most people who had ever been in a fight knew how much a shot like that could hurt, so it looked awful.

No one else knew that Orestes intended me no harm, though, and a second later, Paris was shoving his body between us, pushing me away, and himself into the way of the oncoming fist.