SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The vessel came down on the flat outside the walls, her six wings folding back one after another, snow blasting up around her in a white wall that took a while to clear.

”I will keep her warm,” Alfred called down from the rail as they went. ”Try not to die up there. I hate flying home light.”

The walls were a patchwork of desperation. Timber lashed over stone, iron plate hammered across the gaps, ore carts turned on their sides and packed with rubble where a section had given way. Braziers burned along the top at intervals, and the men beside them carried crossbows, mining picks, and one or two swords that had clearly come off the dead. Every one of them watched the two figures cross the snow toward the gate.

No one cheered. Trafalgar had not expected them to. A month of waiting on a house that never came, two thousand of their own in the ground or not even that, and now the house arrived at last: two men and a ship.

The gate ground open. Soldiers in Morgain colors formed up inside it, thin in the face, their armor hanging loose on them. Behind the soldiers stood the miners, and those were another animal entirely. Shoulders like door frames, hands ruined by thirty years of rock, eyes hollowed out and burning at the bottom of the hollow.

Trafalgar wasted nothing on a greeting.

”I want the man who actually holds these walls standing in front of me within the hour, and I do not mean whoever signs the reports.” His voice carried without any effort put into carrying it. ”Every miner who came out of that mine alive is to be gathered in one room before the night is done. And I want a count. Soldiers on their feet, men who can hold a weapon without falling over, stores, every gate and every choke point in this city. Begin now.”

Nobody moved. A soldier with a captain’s braid looked at him the way a man looks at a stranger who has walked into his house and started rearranging the furniture.

”And who,” he said, ”are you, to be handing out orders here?”

”We sent word a month ago.” A miner shouldered his way forward, older, a scar running from his ear down into his collar. ”A month. We asked for the house. We asked for an army.” He stared past them at the empty snow. ”And they send us two.”

”Trafalgar du Morgain.”

He gave the name plainly, without weight, and waited for it to do the work it usually did.

It did something else.

The muttering went through the crowd the way water finds a crack. He watched the recognition arrive on their faces and curdle in the same breath, and he understood, with a sourness he had not tasted in years, exactly which Trafalgar du Morgain had climbed this mountain inside their heads.

”The ninth,” someone said.

”The concubine’s boy.”

”Two thousand dead, and they send us the bastard.”

’Three years,’ Trafalgar thought. ’Three years, and not one whisper of any of it has crawled this far up the rock. Wonderful.’

The scarred miner took a step, and the men at his back took it with him, because grief with nowhere to go will always go hunting for a throat. Trafalgar did not give ground. He let a thread of what he carried bleed off him into the cold, no more than a thread, and the two men nearest him discovered that their knees had opinions of their own and were currently voting to kneel.

Moses stepped forward.

He did it without hurry. The packed snow groaned under his weight, and every eye in that yard went up, and up again, and the noise drained out of the crowd in one long breath.

”It appears the news does not reach you up here,” Moses said.

He let them look at the horns, the armor, the crest they all knew by heart, and when he spoke again his voice filled the yard from wall to wall.

”Trafalgar du Morgain. An SSS talent, one of a handful in the entire world. He finished first at the most important academy that world has to offer. He helped throw back a terrorist attack, and he stood at the heart of that defense while grown men with better names ran for the doors. He commanded troops and gave more than any man alive in the war against the Thal’Zar, and against Void creatures besides.” He let iron into the pause. ”He is the future of House Morgain. You will show respect when you speak to him.”

Nobody argued with the captain of the First Squadron. The scarred miner’s shoulders came down out of their fighting set. The soldier with the braid found an urgent reason to study his own boots.

Trafalgar kept his face exactly where it was and turned the thing over behind it.

’So he wants to buy my favor.’ The thought came and went in an instant, and he discarded it just as fast. ’No. He is loyal to the house the way Caelum is loyal to it, and in his book a young master outranks a mining town regardless of what the young master is worth. It is the second.’

Which, in its own way, was worth more. A man who flatters you can be outbid by anyone with deeper pockets. A man who respects the chair will hold that chair for whoever proves worthy of it.

The crowd parted before he could carry the thought any further.

The man who came through it was old, and had worn a knight’s bearing so long that his body had given up on any other. Deep lines cut his face from nose to jaw. His hair was cropped short and white, his beard cropped shorter and whiter, and his armor had been kept in better order than anything else in that city.

He stopped in front of Trafalgar and bowed, slow and full, the way men had given up bowing a generation ago.

”I am Gerhardt,” he said. ”I command this city and every soldier left standing in it, and I hold that post under your sister Rivena, young master Trafalgar.” He straightened, and his eyes were tired past any hope of sleeping it off. ”I have done what I could with what I was given. I would ask that we speak somewhere out of this wind, so I can lay the situation before you properly and calmly.” His jaw worked once. ”And I ask your pardon. For all of it.”