Harbor (On the Wind #3)

9. Orestes

CHAPTER NINE

ORESTES

C ourt was an ordeal.

I’d always thought the four yearly meetings of the council of chieftains was excessive, almost four whole weeks every year where the chief of every clan had to show up at long pointless meetings, discuss food and the war with the south and other nonsense.

My father had taken me at his side a few times in my teens, before I’d escaped to the wall and never returned, and it had always been awful. Interminable meetings, talking about things I hadn’t understood or cared about. Who cared if the wheat crop had been light that year?

It had only been later that I’d understood the things they’d talked about were important, when I’d spoken to Brett as he had exchanged letters with his father over just such a poor harvest. But as a teen who had cared more about going flying than where my next meal was coming from? I’d never gone hungry—the Hawk Clan had seen to that—so I’d never cared to think about it. I’d never realized how much the Hawk worried about it.

It hadn’t been as though my father had cared or understood how hard the Hawk worked to see to the feeding and clothing of our people.

But the Nemedan clan chiefs saw to all their business in those four weeks a year, and any other items were handled one-on-one, usually through letters, and very occasionally personal visits to other clan lands. Flying made our organizing simpler.

In Urial? They had court every. Single. Day.

Every day of every week of every year.

Oh, they didn’t really handle much during those days. They didn’t have discussions about crops or shipments or trade agreements. They talked endlessly about... well, nothing. What I’d thought the clan meetings had been like as a teenager, that was what this was, every single day.

Oh, there were a few issues that someone needed to see to. A man caught skimming profits from his money-changing business, who faced the king personally. But why did the king need to handle that? Why was there not a system in place where the city guard handled that?

It seemed to me that it was all a strange effort to put the old man in the center of everything; to make him so indispensable that Urial couldn’t survive without him.

Killian, one of the best leaders I knew, had taught me well that such a thing was a terrible way to run a people.

When I’d arrived at the wall, I’d been confused about how independent most everyone was. Warriors were put in groups like family units of twelve or so, and they split shifts on the wall evenly between them, each unit handling one section of wall. All separate. All independent.

As a future clan head, I’d been assigned to Killian himself, and a few months in, I’d haughtily demanded to know why things were so broken up. Why he refused to take responsibility for his whole clan instead of one tiny section of wall.

The old bastard had laughed at me, and unlike when I’d questioned my father during my childhood, he’d... well, he’d answered me instead of beaten me.

No one person should have the weight of the future on their shoulders, he’d told me. However strong those shoulders were, any one person could be killed. Any one person could take ill and die of a fever. Any one person could be looking in the wrong direction when a real threat against Nemeda came. So the responsibility had to be on everyone. The wall had to run like one of the Hawk Clan’s looms, every piece with its purpose, every piece in good working order, doing its specific job. But there had to be redundancy, too. No single piece, if lost, should stop all of Nemeda from running.

If Killian were as indispensable to the Crane as I’d thought he should be, and he was killed, then all Nemeda was in danger.

In Urial, the problem was a dozen times worse, because the king didn’t just protect the country, like Killian and Minerva. He was also responsible for the food and clothing like Brett, and the lumber like Balthazar, and the fishing like Nestor and... everything.

He was responsible for everything.

It was madness.

Worse yet, he didn’t seem competent at any of it. Some of that could be assigned to cultural differences. He didn’t have a standing army because no one wanted to invade frozen Urial. He didn’t have as many people to clothe and feed because Urial was less populated than Nemeda. He’d been especially hard on the money lender who’d been stealing, having his hand removed, because... well, I was sure there was a reason. Maybe Urial was just a harder place than Nemeda.

Sitting in a jubilant court room, watching the man as old as my long-dead grandfather say he was going to marry a girl younger than me, though... that was something altogether different. Disturbing. The people cheering it also seemed wrong.

In fact, I realized as I looked at the faces of the people, it was wrong. They weren’t actually happy at all. There was strain in every face, everyone glancing to the side at their neighbors, checking to make sure they were reacting the same way. They weren’t unhappy, precisely, but the overall feeling of the moment was one of discomfort, not one of joy. They smiled and nodded and congratulated their king, but they were afraid of what the future held.

The Lady Penelope seemed genuinely pleased, if not effusively so, smiling and ducking her head and blushing prettily. Behind her there was a girl, struggling to break away from an austere, irritated looking man, straining toward Penelope. A girl-child with the same blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair features as the lady herself.

As I watched, the man lost patience and wrapped a hand around the child’s throat, who instantly went limp and stopped struggling, eyes wide and filled with tears. My hand went to my side by instinct, half expecting to find my spear there.

People did not threaten or manhandle children so in Nemeda. Much less with an entire court of people watching. If it was so commonplace a thing in Urial that no one thought to comment on it, much less stop him, then I held no hope at all for a peace between our people.

On the other side of the room, another scene singled itself out for me. Prince Tybalt, standing alone. I’d never before witnessed someone looking quite so alone before, in fact. Standing between two falsely cheering people, he stood quiet, arms at his sides, staring at his father and the girl.

My own father had never done anything quite so contemptuous of me, but I could feel the stab in my gut as though the bastard Albany was my own father. He’d practically just announced in public his intention to replace his own son.

Tybalt didn’t just look alone; he was alone.