36. Brett

Minerva was annoyed, and Balthazar was cautious.

At the meeting, yes, but also, always.

Okay, Minerva wasn't always annoyed, but she was easily annoyed by dishonesty, and when we had meetings like this, we were often dealing with something that did annoy her. Something that annoyed all of us.

If someone was looking at the three of us together, I suspected they'd agree on my descriptions of Minerva and Balthazar, and I'd be... oh, dull, maybe. Brown. Quiet. At best, they'd call me patient, which I tried to be, and it wasn't hard to be that with my best friends among other clans.

Even when they were annoyed.

"We should tell the others. This is unbelievable. He should—his whole clan should face consequences. He sent that viper to murder you, Brett!" She paused, looking at Orestes, wincing, but didn't take back her words.

That was no surprise. Minerva jumped quickly to decisions, but she was quite clever, so they were rarely decisions she regretted later. While I doubted she wanted to punish Orestes personally, the Eagle Clan as a whole was a different matter.

Worse, again, she was rarely wrong.

Orestes didn't seem particularly offended. He shrugged and leaned against the tree behind him. "If the whole clan is involved, then the whole clan should face the consequences. It wouldn't surprise me. The Gull Clan was broken for less."

We all turned our eyes to the ground and shivered. Well, all but Paris. "Gull Clan?"

Everyone looked up at him in surprise, but Minerva was the first to recover. It was the best thing about my dearest friends being cleverer than myself—they almost always came up with the right answer before I had to wrack my brain too hard.

"The Gull used to have the land on the southeastern peninsula. Heron lands now. They tried to incite the Heron and Crane Clans into a war with each other, so they could pick at the bodies after it was done." She turned away, considering. "A very scavenger thing to do, I suppose. Eagles are scavengers too."

"Not all of us," Orestes grumbled. The enormous gold eagle form he'd inherited from his mother was a variety of the bird that definitely hunted for its own food. His father's white-headed variety... less so.

Paris winced but nodded. "So there's no more Gull Clan?"

"No." I was sitting cross-legged in front of my own tree, and leaned toward where Paris sat nearby, bumping our shoulders together, trying to reassure him, because he looked worried. "When their duplicity was discovered, both clans turned on them. It was hundreds of years ago, and the Crane were artisans then, but they came with their allies to answer the threat—the Hawk and Raven and Owl. The Heron came with their closest allies, the Pelican and Duck. The Gull were broken, and as the Crane lands were already the largest in Nemeda, the Heron took their lands. Even now, there are few people whose inner birds are gulls."

Paris didn't seem nearly as horrified as I might have expected by a tale that ended with the destruction of an entire clan. Nemeda was still ashamed of it, as a whole. Not just that a clan could turn on the others, but of how completely everyone else responded. Wiping the Gull off the map entirely, taking their lands, and erasing them.

What happened with the Gull stood as a warning in Nemeda for both sides of any possible clan infighting. You could end up destroyed, or forever ashamed. Stop and think before you act. Balthazar had once said that I was the best example of how Nemeda had changed for the better after the Gull, that I always thought about how my actions affected others.

I wondered what he would say about how I'd infected Paris and not told him anything.

Paris, sweet, perfect, wonderful Paris, didn't say anything about that. Not that it was what we were discussing, but somehow I'd still expected a rebuke. A dropped comment about what I'd done, at some point during the conversation. Something.

"If the Eagle are all complicit, the Falcon are with them," Orestes added while Paris continued to look thoughtful. "Their clan leader, Otus, is so far up my father's ass it's a wonder he can breathe for all the shit."

Paris choked on nothing, leaning over and having a coughing fit, so I tapped his back to make sure he was all right. He waved me off after a moment, rasping, "Thank you. I've just... never heard anyone say that before."

Orestes shrugged, careless. "You haven't met Otus."

Paris grimaced like the very idea was odious to him. "Fair enough. But as much as you're all worried—and should be worried—if you react to this right away, it's going to end up like the Gull Clan, isn't it? You have more allies than the Eagle Clan, so you and your allies will attack and kill them. And you'll think you were right, but you'll never know for sure. You'll never have proof."

Minerva scowled, clearly ready to go to war, but not willing to leap quite so blindly. Balthazar, on the other hand, nodded. "Wise," he finally said to Paris. "What do you suggest?"

Paris frowned and bit his lip a moment, then sighed and took a deep breath, steadying himself for something. "I don't know if you... in Urial, sometimes if we have a political enemy, we'll get someone to spy on them. I know everyone knows you have birds, but... not every bird in Nemeda is a person, right?"

"Right," Minerva agreed, interested, leaning toward him.

Spying wasn't a new concept to Nemeda, but she was wondering what we all were: what did it have to do with birds?

"So send some people who have small, unobtrusive birds to watch the majority of the Eagle Clan. They can literally just sit outside their town in a tree and keep an eye out. So if the Eagle really does move against someone, you'll have lots of forewarning."

It wasn't quite that simple, but?—

"Peregrine," Minerva said suddenly. "He's not small and unobtrusive, but he's the fastest bird there is. Some kind of hawk or falcon, like none other we've ever seen. If he sees the Eagle moving, even if they see him coming to tell us, they could never catch up with him and stop him."

There was silence for a moment, before Orestes nodded. "He's faster than I am, even with my wingspan. He could outfly the entire clan. And he's small and light enough they might not notice him."

"So you keep an eye on the Eagle." Paris nodded, getting into his plan, excited and maybe the most adorable I'd ever seen him. And so very smart. "I know they've been trying underhanded stuff like marrying people and hiring assassins, but they're kind of stuck now. None of you are going to fall for it anymore, and to some degree, he's got to know that. Otherwise he wouldn't have approached me, of all the ill-prepared, non-frightening people. I was the only option because I was an outsider who might be willing to believe his lies."

"But you didn't," Orestes pointed out. "Because you're clever, and anyone half so clever as you can tell with relatively little effort that my father is more a monster than Brett could dream of being." He glanced over at Balthazar, considering for a moment, then added, "But anyone who's thinking about marrying a Hawk in the near future should know it's possible she's been traumatized by having had to kill someone attempting to assassinate her Clan Head."

Balthazar, moving only his eyes in that strange Owl way, looked to Orestes and smiled. "Of course. Clan is everything."

Orestes snorted and shook his head, muttering, "Of course he already knew."

Rolling her eyes at both of them, Minerva waved a hand dismissively. "He knows everything. The years we spent together, you should've realized already."

This seemed to fascinate Paris. He stared at Balthazar, who stared back, a tiny pleased smile on his face. Likely, Paris had been taken in like most people were upon meeting the Owl, by his odd, awkward, bird-like movements, and the fact that he used few words and spoke so very slowly. People who didn't know Balthazar, at best thought he was awkward. Usually, they thought he was slow. The fact was that he was likely smarter than the rest of us combined. Or two Minervas, since she was the smartest of the rest of us.

Or, well, maybe Paris, since he smiled at all this, and nodded.

"So you wait for the Eagle clan to make a move, and you stop them when they do. Then no one needs to feel like they overstepped or overreacted. And you're ready. And we all already know, so everyone is prepared for an attack."

Everyone nodded and went quiet. It wasn't a perfect answer. It wasn't even a real answer, since waiting wasn't what anyone wanted to do. But it was right and as good a plan as we could have come up with.

"How like a Hawk," Orestes said, with a genial smile at Paris, "to counsel patience. You might be an owl, but you're definitely a Hawk."

And instead of just jumping to denials, Paris ducked his head and blushed. For the first time since he'd fallen ill, I had a moment's hope that maybe, someday, he'd forgive me. Maybe someday he truly would be a member of the Hawk Clan.