10. Standing Watch
Standing Watch
Kain spent the next day setting fence posts and fitting the rails into the notches, working each one level before he tamped the post firm. By the time the light went, he was worn through, and he hauled his aching body back toward the house.
That was about when Oren came up the road at a run.
"Kain. Sasha's asking if you can come up again."
Kain nodded. This time he took Oren up with him, and before long they came in through the front of the Kettle.
Sasha stood at the bar, swaying on her feet, with Matthew crying in the room behind her.
"Kain. Thank you for coming. I'm sorry to keep asking."
"What do you need?" Kain set the day's ache aside.
"It's Matthew." Sasha put her hands flat on the counter. "He woke just past eleven last night, after you left."
"So you slept from nine to then. Two hours."
"Then he was up until five. I got him down and got an hour, and then some half-trained mage in Room Seven knocked his potions over and conjured up I don't know what.
Some kind of spirit-thing. It near wrecked the kitchen and woke the whole house.
He put it right, but everyone was up and wanting breakfast by then. "
"Four hours, near enough." Kain's voice was flat.
"I tried to nap in the day. Every time I had the chance he was awake, and he slept like a stone whenever I had my hands full." Sasha held up her hands, and they were unsteady. "He's awake now, fussy but better. I'm just so tired I'm scared I'll pass out and drop him."
"Go sleep. I've got him."
Sasha was asleep on her bed before Kain had even cleared her quarters. He lifted Matthew against his chest and carried him out into the main room.
The fire had burned low. Matthew looked up at him from the crook of his arm.
"Hey, there. I'm your uncle."
Matthew burbled, kicked a few times, screamed once, and then settled. Kain held him against his chest and started walking the room, slow lengths of it, back and forth.
Every part of him ached from the fencing, but he had worked through worse than tired.
He lost count of the lengths he walked. Matthew was wrung out from a day of screaming and growing teeth, and he settled into the crook of Kain's arm without going under, sucking his thumb, fussing now and then.
The trouble came once, when Matthew jerked upright and let out a scream fit to wake the dead. A muffled curse sounded upstairs, a door banged open, and boots came down the steps.
Kain watched the stairs. A young man stomped down into the firelight, scowling.
Kain sized him up, an adventurer, D-rank by the look, young enough that the armor still showed its shop polish. He had a hand on his sword.
"If you can't keep that baby quiet," the young man said, "I need my sleep, and I get mean without it."
"And what's all that rest for?" Kain raised an eyebrow. "Marching that little toothpick of yours up to Greyhaven to poke at some beginner dungeon?"
The young man went purple, and before he could get a word out, Kain went on.
"The road up there's easy. No bandits, nothing on it.
You could walk it half-dead, and I have, more than once.
So you come down here threatening me over a crying baby again, and we'll find out how that sword holds up against a chair.
Solid oak, these. I figure thirty, maybe forty damage in a good swing. "
The young man went pale instead, and his eyes moved over the scars the firelight pulled out of Kain's arms. A breath later he was up the stairs and gone, and that was the last Kain saw of anyone that night.
The hours went on, and Kain walked them. Now and then he got Matthew down for a few minutes, never longer. In the low firelight he looked the boy over close.
The chin was Mark's. The same angle, the same stubborn set to it. When Matthew wound up to cry, just before it broke loose, his jaw locked at a certain angle, and it was a look Kain had watched cross Mark's face a thousand times, mostly when Mark knew he was about to lose an argument.
Though, looking back, Mark had mostly won them. Whatever they were deciding, Mark could lay it out so his way was the sounder one, and Kain would set the logic aside and barrel ahead with his own plan, and mostly come to wish he hadn't.
"You're going to make your father proud," Kain said. "I know you are."
He had marked the chin the day the boy was born, and said as much, once. He had not said it again.
He had stood watch a thousand times in his life. This was only one more, and the only one that had ever mattered like this.
Around three in the morning he sat down near the fire, set his back against the wall, and held Matthew close. The boy burrowed into him, found his thumb, and let his eyes fall shut.
The last of the fire's heat reached Kain's side. He knew his own body, and he would come awake the instant anything was wrong.
When Sasha woke, the window was grey with the first of the light, and she came up out of sleep all at once and sat straight. It took her a moment to land on why the room was quiet, and then she remembered that Kain had taken the boy for the night.
She got the last of the sleep out of her eyes, rose, and slipped into the hall and out to the main room, where one early riser was moving around on careful feet, hunting up something to eat. He pointed toward the hearth without a word, and Sasha followed it.
Kain sat propped against the wall by the hearth, dead asleep, Matthew folded into his chest. His arms were locked around the boy even in sleep, holding him sound, and Matthew had one fist knotted into Kain's shirt.
Sasha put a hand on the door frame.
"How long have they been like that?" she asked, quiet.
"Couldn't say. Long as I've been up, an hour maybe." The man kept his voice down. "I'd give a good deal to sleep like that. I thrash half the night. He hasn't moved an inch."
"He came by the trick honestly, from what I've gotten out of him." Sasha looked at the two of them by the fire. "What'll you have for breakfast?"
"You're not going to wake him?"
Sasha looked at Kain a moment longer, then shook her head.
"No. He needs the sleep, and he's earned that too." Sasha turned for the kitchen and left the two of them there by the fire.