SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Moses caught the look on Alfred’s face and rumbled out something that lived halfway between a grunt and a laugh. ”It has been a while, Alfred. Are you not pleased to see me after so long?”

”I will not pretend otherwise. It has been a while.” Alfred looked the half-demon over from horns to boots, weighing the years. ”How has life treated you, Moses? You have not changed much, by the look of things.”

Both of them stood on the deck by now, Trafalgar at Moses’s shoulder, while the vessel woke beneath their feet. Her wings unfolded along her flanks one after another, six of them stretching wide, and the great hull groaned as she made ready to take the sky.

”Life has been interesting enough.” Moses set one enormous hand on the rail, and the wood complained about it. ”One of these days you will have to fly this little lady of yours through the Dead Meridian. What do you say?”

”I have no wish to die yet, and even less wish to watch my girl torn to splinters, so I will have to decline the offer.” Alfred said it cheerfully, the way a man says a thing he has already given no thought to. ”I am perfectly content ferrying Morgain across the skies for now, so let us leave it there. Well? Where are we bound this time? I am no fortune teller, so one of you had better tell me.”

Trafalgar took that one. ”There is a stretch of territory my sister Rivena has left to rot. A horde of monsters has taken one of our most important mines. That is where we are going.”

”Oh. That.” The cheer thinned out of Alfred’s face. ”Right. I know the place. Two days at full speed, and it is a fair way out, in all honesty.” He scratched at his jaw. ”It surprises me they sent you to the mines and not her. Why is that?”

”My first official mission, Alfred.”

”Oh.” The grin crawled back. ”Though you have had a few before this one, have you not? The first time I carried you out to that Zar’khael business, that was a mine as well. A good while ago now.” He pushed off the rail. ”Well. I had best get all this moving.”

He went off toward the helm, and the deck began to hum under them as the vessel gathered herself. She was a monster in her own right, that ship, enormous even by the standards of the houses that could afford such things, and she carried far more than her six wings to keep herself in the air.

That left the two of them alone on the deck.

Trafalgar crossed to the prow and leaned out over it, forearms on the rail, watching the ground fall away beneath the hull as the ship finally climbed. Moses came up beside him, and for a man his size he moved with surprising care, as though he had spent his whole life learning not to break the things he stood next to.

”We will have to work out a plan before we arrive,” Trafalgar said. ”So. Any ideas, Moses?”

Moses considered him. ”In all honesty, I would rather leave the whole of it to your judgment. I want to see how you handle it. So does your father.” He let the offer breathe. ”Though give me an order, and I will carry out every part of it myself.”

Trafalgar shook his head. ”Out of the question. You are here to put me to the test, and I doubt you have decided what you make of me. I have not decided what I make of you, either.” He glanced over. ”That greeting we traded, you held back. That was to be expected. And I know perfectly well you will carry every last thing I do straight back to Valttair. So I suppose I have no choice but to put on a show.”

Something shifted behind the half-demon’s face. Not quite a smile, though it lived in the same neighborhood.

”What is the first thing we do?”

”First, we go to the city where all those miners lived.” Trafalgar turned back to the clouds. ”I want eyes on the situation there before anything else. Check the defenses, put the place in order, get them ready. Half those families will be nursing a grudge against us over how long the house took to come, and I would rather learn how deep it runs before I need any of them to hold a wall for me.”

”And what of it?” Moses gave the words no weight at all. ”They can be replaced.”

Trafalgar heard the question hiding under the question.

”True enough. We could do exactly that,” he said. ”But hauling in people who were never born to this territory, breaking them into the mountain, waiting out the seasons while they learn to stop dying in it, all of that is a hassle I have no appetite for, and it costs us time and resources we cannot spare. From what I understand, that mine is among the most valuable we own. With what is coming, we are in no position to be throwing away years.”

Moses said nothing for a breath.

He had put the question in the water like a hook, and he had expected one of two fish to take it. Either the boy would recite something high and warm about the lives of Morgain subjects, which would have told him the young master was soft, or he would agree without a flicker, which would have told him the young master was a butcher who happened to own a title.

Trafalgar had done neither. He had never once reached for the dead, or for duty, or for any of the words a man uses when he wants to be admired for using them. He had run the sums out in the open and arrived at the answer that kept those people breathing, because keeping them breathing was worth more than the alternative.

’That is how a lord thinks,’ Moses noted. ’Not a mere or simple soldier.’

He had come aboard this ship expecting to weigh a young man with an enormous talent and a great many stories trailing after him. He had not expected to be weighing a ruler.

Moses shifted his bulk against the rail, and the rail held, barely.

”Very well.” Something new had crept into his voice, and it was not deference, though it lived in the same house as deference. ”In that case I will help you along a little, young master Trafalgar. Listen.”