Harbor (On the Wind #3)

1. Orestes

CHAPTER ONE

ORESTES

“ H e could just stay with us,” Paris said, grumbling as he sat in the front of the wagon that carried my single trunk.

The trunk with everything I owned in the world inside it.

Somehow, oddly enough, that didn’t make it all that important. It was mostly a collection of clothing, a few weapons, and a handful of trinkets I’d collected over the years. I could have hurled it off the nearest hill, and mostly not missed it.

Like my family, which I’d also lost.

“As much as we’d all like that, some of the clan leaders are concerned about it,” Brett said with a sigh. “Orestes is still considered a clan leader by many, and the council is worried if he stays in Hawk or Crane lands, it’ll lend one clan or the other more power. And since we’re already trying to resettle everyone into a new normal after the breaking of the Eagle, it’s extra worry we don’t need to be adding to anyone’s load.”

He wasn’t wrong, exactly. I’d never been a leader, not even as much as my viper of a father had been. His death resulting in me taking over the clan had probably been his worst nightmare. Well, right after what actually happened: the entire clan being disbanded and added to other clans in tiny portions. This group to Crane lands, that one to Hawk, another to Heron... The Eagle clan was no more, spread to the winds like the ashes of our ancestors, and it had been all my father’s fault.

Worse yet, I could never tell anyone the shameful truth: I was glad for it.

Oh, everyone knew I was happy justice had been done. No one thought I had been my father’s man and wanted to destabilize the Hawk and steal their land or slaughter the Raven. But no one, not even my friends, Brett or Killian or Paris, knew that I was grateful the Eagle had been broken not because of justice, but because this way, I would never have to try, and fail, to lead a clan myself. I would never have thousands of people counting on me to take care of them when I knew I simply wasn’t capable of that kind of responsibility.

It was one of the reasons I’d gone to the wall and stayed with the Crane for a decade. Not because of a never-ending thirst for violence, but because it was something I knew I could do. The wall was a place where I knew I wouldn’t fail everyone.

But now I couldn’t even have the wall, because the clan leaders were worried that Killian was getting too powerful.

And the fact was that if Killian weren’t constantly distracted by the war with the south, he could be a danger to them. Well, if he weren’t Killian, he could. He had won the loyalty of an enormous number of Nemedans and proven himself on the battlefield times beyond measure.

I didn’t expect the war with the south to end—possibly ever—but even given an army that was made up of more Nemedans than all the clans combined and no war to fight, Killian wasn’t a danger to Nemeda. He’d given up too much of his life, too many of his people, to ever turn on Nemeda’s people and try to take over.

Plus, the last thing the man wanted was more responsibility. He had a clan to care for, and that was enough for him.

But all that left me with was... less than nothing. I couldn’t stay with Brett and the Hawk clan and learn to farm. Couldn’t stay with Killian and keep fighting. I didn’t belong anywhere in Nemeda, all because my fucking father had wanted to take over other clan lands, and not cared about the expense in lives or... well, our entire way of life. Nemeda was like one of Brett’s people’s looms. It worked to make fabric because it had a hundred parts, and all were in their proper places and doing the correct jobs. Put one piece in the wrong place, take one piece out, and what did you have? A pile of kindling, likely. Nemeda worked because the Hawk provided, and the Crane protected, and the Duck and Heron and Pelican fished, and the Hummingbird raised bees for honey. Everyone had a part to play to make Nemeda whole and keep everyone fed and safe and happy.

Everyone but me.

So we were headed north, well into Vulture lands, with a wagon and my one pitiful trunk that I’d almost wanted to leave behind. Brett had insisted, though, we couldn’t send me off with just the clothes on my back. We had to “outfit me properly.”

Which meant that half the clothes in the trunk were actually new; perfect smooth clean cotton freshly made and sewn by Brett’s clanspeople. Paris had taught them how to make me heavy, down-filled coats for the winter, and Brandon and Rosaline had knit me heavy woolen socks, because...

Because it snowed in Urial, and Urial was where I was headed. The clans had decided that things were strained with Urial, because of the exodus of Brett’s beloved, Paris, and his family last winter. I thought Urial could take a flying leap, lack of wings or not, since they had apparently tried to kill Paris’s brother, Hector, who seemed a fine, steady fellow to me.

But Nemeda didn’t want me anymore, so to Urial I went. The council didn’t especially want better relations with Urial—to a man, Nemedans thought Urial a harsh, cruel land, and its people no better. But they certainly did want to be rid of me, and Urial was a good excuse.

I should have been grateful. If not for Urial, they might have sent me to die in a vain attempt to make peace in the south. Never mind that I was no diplomat. Never mind that they didn’t even care about the peace I’d have been sent to broker.

My own people just wanted to be rid of me, so they had found a way to get rid of me.

The Montague family, the southernmost people of Urial, were kind, for people from their nation. They liked Nemedans well enough, and always treated us with hospitality.

Case in point, they’d loaned me the use of their carriage to get from the border to the castle the king of Urial lived in, and even more important, they’d lent me Lord Montague himself, to accompany me into the castle and give introductions.

On the other hand, Lord Montague, a man who’d encouraged me to call him Emilien, did not seem to have much faith in his own king. He’d apologized to me on behalf of his king for “how he was likely to react” to me, because I was Nemedan. The people of Urial had as dim a view of us as we did them, it seemed, and in Emilien’s youth, he’d spent time at court and not even realized they were talking about his family’s neighbors, the Vulture Clan, until someone had asked him for more information. Apparently, they thought us some kind of bird-worshipping cultists, slavishly devoted to every bird we saw.

All this added up to a simple conclusion: I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve this exile from my land, or a life among the staid, emotionless people of Urial, but I had clearly done the world some great wrong.

After a week of traveling by carriage, I was ready to shriek at the sky. Somehow, traveling south with my people from the Vulture lands to the wall by wagon for Hector’s sake had not been half so grating as this endless trip to Urial. Perhaps it was the destination, but my skin prickled with the need to shift and fly—a thing I couldn’t afford to do in front of strangers.

Once we’d reached our destination, Emilien led me into the castle, and they didn’t give him too much trouble, though every one of them stopped us to have a look at me. One guard even reached out toward one of the feathers in my hair. I reached up and snatched his hand before it touched the feather that stood for my dead sister. “Forgive me if my manners are strange,” I told him woodenly, “but in Nemeda, it is rude to touch a person without their permission.”

He scowled at me, but by my side, Emilien almost choked on a laugh. “Indeed, friend Orestes, it’s also rude here in Urial. But sometimes our curiosity overrides our manners.”

I nodded to him, then the guard. “I can understand curiosity. It’s the feather of a white-headed eagle. As are the other four near it. The rest are mostly crane feathers.” My entire family, those five feathers. Mother, father, sister, and the two grandparents who’d been alive at the time of my birth. There had been no cousins or nieces or nephews in the main line of the Eagle Clan. Every one of those feathers was a sore spot in my mind, every member of my family a bittersweet memory. A monster of a father, who had taught me how to hunt and fish. A sister who had been a poisonous viper who’d tried to murder my best friend, but who had loved to run as a child, and never wanted to become like the rest of the family... until she had. A mother who’d been constantly angry when I was a boy, and only later had I realized it had been because she’d hated my father even more than I did.

No one touched the feathers for my family. Not even I wanted to touch them.

The guard rolled his eyes and turned around. “The king’s audience chamber, then. All foreigners have to see the king for permission to stay at the castle now.”

The king... was precisely what I’d imagined, from Brett and Paris’s stories. He sneered down his nose at me from his raised throne, where he sat like a lump, as though he were incapable of movement, so he had to be raised above the world, that he might see it better. Respect, Paris had said. Everyone had to respect the king, so he sat above. He ate first at dinners. He was first in all things.

It sounded less like a leader and more like a self-important child. Like what my father had wanted out of running a clan—importance and accolades, to be treated as special. But I’d spent the last ten years watching the examples of my friends Brett and Killian, who always did the opposite. They took care of their people first, because it was the duty of a leader.

“So, this is the Nemedan, sent in supplication,” he said, nose curled as though I smelled bad. From the look of him, from his lank hair to his spotted jowls, I suspected I bathed more often than he did, so I didn’t let it bother me. No, he just seemed like my father, and I remembered very well how he’d ended, at the point of a knife, as he’d deserved.

“I am a Nemedan,” I told him. “My people were informed that you wanted a treaty, to gain trade for the things we can grow that Urial is too cold for. Nemeda is not disinterested, so they sent me, son of a clan chief, to speak to you on the possibility of getting you what you want.”

Like I said, not a diplomat. But if he expected me to bow and grovel, well, we were all out of luck.