SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Time wore on, and the Morgain castle finally rose out of the white, a black fortress standing hard against a whole range buried in snow. Against all that pale nothing there was no mistaking it. You could not have lost the place if you tried.

Alfred ducked out from the helm. ”We land soon. Don’t go hanging over the rail, either of you. I’d rather not scrape someone off a mountain on the way down.”

Trafalgar glanced back at him, a smirk tugging at his mouth. ”Worried about me? I knew it. You do care.”

”As if you’d throw yourself over.” Alfred snorted. ”And if you did, nobody would come looking.”

Trafalgar laughed at that, and Alfred laughed with him, though he turned his face into the wind to do it, hiding it the way he hid most things worth seeing. Which was almost endearing, given how little ever slipped past Trafalgar’s eyes or ears.

’Old bastard,’ he thought, watching the peaks slide by. ’You fret over me and you’d bite your own tongue off before you owned up to it. Playing the hard man to the last.’ The castle swelled in the glass ahead, and his humor cooled a notch. ’Well. We’re here. I want to hear what Valttair makes of all this. Walking a nest into our territory is no small piece of work, and he is not a man who lets a thing like that pass. Someone will pay for it. Given it was her ground, and she was nowhere near it when the ground opened up, my money is on Rivena.’

A shadow fell over the deck beside him. Moses, big as a doorway, the two horns catching the last of the light, had been watching him think.

”Something on your mind, young master?”

”Hm.” Trafalgar did not look away from the fortress. ”I want to see how Valttair takes it. What he decides. He won’t let it sit, that much I know.”

”No, he won’t.” Moses folded his arms. ”And we’ll have our answer soon enough. Though if I know him, he’ll have me back to work before the day’s out. I’ve been idle a good while now, waiting on orders. Feels about time he pointed me at something.”

The vessel shed the last of its height and came down on the castle’s landing shelf, the great wings folding in one after another as the hull went quiet under their boots.

A handful of soldiers held the watch there. They straightened the instant the two of them came down the bridge, heads dipping low for the captain of the First Squadron, and lower still for Trafalgar. There was no one left in this house with the stomach to withhold it from him. Two years had burned that habit out of them.

Alfred stayed with the ship. He had a second leg to fly once this was done, hauling Trafalgar home to Euclid, and the old man had been away from his own bed long enough to start saying so out loud.

Inside, the castle swallowed him the way it always did. Grim stone and ceilings pitched too high, corridors built wide enough to march a column down and cold enough that the marching would not warm them. Moses came at his shoulder, bound for the same place he was. The patriarch.

They caught a maid crossing the passage ahead, and Moses put the question to her plainly. Where was Lord Valttair?

The girl went stiff at being addressed by the horned giant at all, and got out that the patriarch ought to be in his study, though she could not swear to it, before she dropped a hurried curtsy and was gone down the hall as if somewhere else needed her more.

The study, then.

They had gone barely three strides toward it when two figures came around the turn ahead and stopped them where they stood.

The first was the second wife. Lady Verena. At her side, her daughter.

Rivena.

Verena took the pair of them in, cleared her throat, and let a thin thread of surprise carry through it. ”Finished with the mission already? Rather fast, I must say.”

Trafalgar had no wish to trade words with either of them. He gave her a short nod and made to pass.

Rivena’s voice caught him mid-step.

”Two thousand, I heard.” She said it lightly, turning a ring on her finger as though the number were a dull line in a ledger. ”If our miners were worth anything, you would not have needed to go crawling down there at all.”

Trafalgar stopped.

He turned his head, and when he spoke there was no heat in it, only a low, cold weight that carried further than shouting would have. ”If you had been doing the work you were handed, those people would be breathing. They are ours, Rivena. Our house, our name, the ground under our own feet. You lot spend so much breath wondering whether what I do serves me or serves the family. Strange that of the two of us standing here, I look to be the only one who gives a damn which.”

He let his gaze drift over her, unimpressed. ”You count corpses like spoiled stock and call it foresight. That is not cunning. It is a small mind wearing a cold one’s coat.”

Verena’s patience went out of her all at once. ”You ungrateful bastard. You would speak to her so, after everything this family has handed you.”

Trafalgar turned the same flat look on the mother. ”Handed me.” He let the two words hang. ”Have a care, Lady Verena. Your daughter went missing for six months and came home carrying something she will not name, and the patriarch already suspects which way it points. Were I you, I would think hard about how close I care to stand to her when the bill comes due. Blood has spared no one in this house before. It will not start with you.”

Verena’s mouth opened, and closed, and stayed closed. Whatever answer she had reached for, she had the wit to leave it lying where it fell.

Moses chose that breath to step in, smooth as a man easing a blade back into its sheath. ”Forgive us, Lady Verena. Lady Rivena.” A slight bow, all courtesy and no give in it. ”The patriarch is expecting us. We would rather not keep him waiting on our account.”

And with that he steered the both of them past, and Trafalgar let himself be steered.

He turned it over as they went, the mother’s flare and the daughter’s boredom both. ’I wonder how much of what the girl has been building behind everyone’s backs her mother knows. Whether she has a hand in it, or only a blind eye turned to it.’ Nothing was confirmed. He held that fact honestly, the way he held all the others. ’But every crooked step Rivena has taken points one direction, and the itch under my ribs points the same. At her. And now at the woman standing beside her.’

They walked the length of the castle in a quiet broken only by their own steps, climbing through the wide cold halls toward the heart of it, until the passage narrowed and the air began to change.

He felt the door before he saw it. That weight of him, leaking out through the stone the way cold leaks through glass, a pressure with no source a man could point to, heavy enough that the two guards on the final stretch stood a touch too straight and kept their eyes fixed on nothing at all.

Then the door itself. Enormous, black, banded in old iron and set deep into the mountain the fortress had been carved from. No handle on it anywhere that Trafalgar could find. There never was. Doors like this one opened when the man behind them decided they would, and not a breath sooner.

He came to a stop in front of it and drew one slow pull of the cold air.

Behind that slab of iron waited a dead queen, a hand behind her, a sister’s name, and a sleeping alchemist he had not yet breathed a word of to a living soul. And the one man alive who would take all four of them and find the seam before Trafalgar had finished his opening sentence.

’Right,’ he thought. ’Let’s see how much you already know, old man.’

The door began to open.