SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The settlement threw the best feast it could afford and a good deal more besides.

Fire pits went up the length of the main lane, and over them turned meat nobody had touched since the wave, salted stores dragged out of cellars people had been rationing for a season.

The ale came out by the barrel. Trestle boards ran end to end down the street, packed with miners and their families and half the highland farms within a day’s ride, all of them eating like men who had decided the future could pay for itself.

The fiddler had found three friends. There was dancing on the packed snow, badly and with enormous commitment. Somebody’s grandmother had cornered Moses against a wall and was interrogating the enormous half-demon about his eating habits, and Moses, to his eternal credit, was answering her seriously.

Gerhardt held court at the head of the longest table with a mug in each fist, telling the story of the lord walking out of the mine to anyone who had not heard it, which by now was nobody.

They toasted the dead first, and properly, every cup raised and the whole street gone quiet. And then, having done right by them, they got about the business of being loudly, defiantly alive.

Trafalgar let it run for a couple of hours.

He took a corner seat near one of the fires with a cup of something dark and spiced that a widow had pushed into his hands, and he drank it slowly and answered when spoken to and let the noise wash past him.

Every so often somebody worked up the courage to come and thank him again, and he told them again that it was owed, and they went away happier than they had come.

It was good. He was glad of it. And around the second hour, watching a man across the lane teach his daughter a dance step while a fiddle sawed away behind them, Trafalgar decided he had taken as much good as he could carry in one sitting.

’Time to go,’ he thought, and drained the cup.

Because there was a box on a ship waiting for him, and a report to make, and a castle full of people who needed to hear the word Rivena said out loud with evidence sitting on the table underneath it. None of that got smaller while he nursed a cup by a fire.

He caught Moses’s eye across the crowd, tipped his head toward the back of the hall, and the captain extracted himself from the grandmother with the delicacy of a man defusing something.

They went out the back door.

It was the only way it was ever going to happen. If Trafalgar had walked out the front, the whole street would have followed him to the flats, and there would have been another speech, and Gerhardt would have cried again.

So they slipped through the kitchen, past two startled cooks, out into the alley behind the common hall, and up the lane with the noise of the feast dropping away behind them into the cold.

The road out of town ran between drifts higher than a man, and above it the white peaks stood hard against a sky going the pale gold of late afternoon. The vessel waited on the flats beyond the wall, hunkered in her own crater of blasted snow, black and enormous, her six wings folded tight along her flanks. She looked less like a ship than something that had come down off the mountains to sleep.

Alfred was on the boarding bridge with his coat open at the throat despite the cold, watching them come.

”Oh good, the conquering hero.” He spread his arms. ”And here I was, three hours into a bottle, thinking you had decided to stay and become a miner.”

”Three hours into a bottle explains why you are standing in a wind like this with your coat open.” Trafalgar came up the bridge past him. ”Do you want to be found frozen to your own rail, you sack of bones? Somebody would have to chip you off it.”

”I have flown in worse than this with less on.”

”You have. And you complained about your knees for a week afterward.”

”My knees are a private grief and none of your business, you ungrateful bastard.” Alfred hauled the bridge lever anyway, grinning like a man who had won something. ”Get aboard before the whole town notices you have gone. I am not waiting while another thousand people weep on you.”

The vessel woke under their boots.

Trafalgar felt the hull take up its low hum, and out along her flanks the six great wings unfolded one after another, stretching wide over the snowfield, each one throwing its own long shadow across the white.

Snow tore up around her in a blinding wall as she lifted, and the flats dropped away, and the settlement went small and gold beneath them, its fires and its music and its two thousand graves shrinking into the fold of the valley.

The mountains opened out around the ship. Peak after peak of blue-white going pink at the tips in the failing light, and the black mouth of the mine somewhere back there in the shadow of them, quiet at last.

Trafalgar stood at the rail and watched it go and felt nothing he could put a name to.

Moses came up beside him, and something in the way he did it made Trafalgar turn.

”I think it is about time for this, young master.” The captain was holding a box. Plain dark wood, unmarked, no bigger than his two hands together, and it looked absurdly small resting in one of them. ”Your reward. Your father gave it to me before we left, to hand over when the work was done.” He offered it out. ”You have earned it.”

Trafalgar took it. It weighed almost nothing.

”Well, now I am curious.” He turned it over once, hunting for a seam or a seal and finding neither. ”Is it something good?”

”It might be.” Moses folded his arms, and there was not a trace of theater in it. ”I could not tell you. Whatever it is, it is in that box.”