SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

”Slow down.” Dravok didn’t move from where he stood. ”Before any of that, I need to see what I’m working with. Strip. Down to your shorts.”

Trafalgar looked at him, certain for a second he’d misheard.

Dravok said nothing more. He simply waited, patient as stone, the request already made and in no danger of being repeated.

It wasn’t worth arguing over. Rhosyn turned away without being asked, giving him the small courtesy of her back, and Trafalgar began pulling off his coat and the layers under it, until he stood on the black ground in nothing but his shorts, the cold of the place raising no gooseflesh on him at all.

He’d been looked at plenty of ways in his life, sized up by nobles, enemies, and directors weighing what he was worth. He knew this particular kind of scrutiny as well—the cold, impersonal measure of flesh, blood, and potential—and he had never cared for it. He kept his face flat and let the old man work.

Dravok came closer and looked him over the way a smith looks over raw steel, slow and unhurried and without a scrap of ceremony. He circled once, reached out, and pressed a thumb into the muscle of Trafalgar’s shoulder, testing it, moved to the forearm and did the same, the back, the ribs, the line of the thigh, reading the body under the skin the way another man might read a page. His pale green eyes narrowed a fraction as he went.

”Enjoying yourself over there?” Caelvyrn called from the couch, thoroughly entertained. ”Should the rest of us step out and leave the two of you to it?”

Dravok ignored him completely, which was, Trafalgar was learning, the usual answer to most of what Caelvyrn said.

”Huh.” It was less a word than a sound out of the old man, and there was real interest buried in it. ”Now that, I did not expect.”

Trafalgar held still through the whole of it, though his patience had a floor. ”You want to tell me what you’re finding so fascinating, or should I just stand here?”

”A body like this.” Dravok stepped back, arms folding across his scarred chest. ”I’ve felt out more fighters than you’ve met people, and this is its own thing entirely. I wouldn’t have laid a bet on finding it in someone half-human.” His head tilted. ”You’ve a rare build under there. A very rare one.”

”And that’s supposed to mean what?”

Dravok considered him a moment before answering.

”Some of you carry mixed blood. It happens. And as a rule, the ones who aren’t purebred come out the weaker for it, watered down, never running at the full measure of what our line can be.”

His mouth moved, not quite a smile.

”With you it’s gone the other way. You’re no diluted version of anything. You stand above the average of us as you are right now, and you’ve not trained a single day under someone who knew what to do with you.”

He nodded once, as though a thing had been decided.

That means I can take you to the limit and never once have to nurse you the whole way there.”

Trafalgar turned that over, and found the obvious question sitting on top of it.

”Then what about the two of you?”

”Not me.” Rhosyn spoke from where she stood, her back to them. ”I’m a hundred percent of our bloodline. No human or any other race in me anywhere. Dravok’s the same.”

”I see.” Trafalgar looked down at his own hand, at the black marks across it, and let a slow breath out. ”Good to know.”

Caelvyrn barked a laugh from the couch. ”Say mongrel around Dravok again and you’ll earn the whole lecture on bloodlines. I’ve had it forty times. It has chapters.”

”It isn’t a lecture if it’s true,” Dravok said, without any heat to it.

”It’s a lecture, it’s long, and it’s the same every time.” Caelvyrn draped an arm over the back of the couch. ”A word of advice, boy. Never ask him about the old wars either. You’ll lose a whole afternoon and come out the other side with nothing but a headache.”

”Says the man who could talk the moon down out of the sky,” Rhosyn murmured, without opening her eyes.

”I’m charming about it. There’s a difference.”

Trafalgar huffed a quiet laugh. It was an easy thing to stand here, easier than most rooms he moved through. These three had known what he was for years, and not one of them had ever once thought it worth a second glance.

Dravok, who had let the whole exchange wash over him without a flicker, was already moving on.

”Get dressed. You’ll want your feet under you for what’s next.” He waited while Trafalgar pulled his clothes back on, the layers falling back over the strange, indifferent chill of the place. Rhosyn turned round to them once he was decent, and Caelvyrn, who had watched the whole examination from the couch with the lazy attention of a man at a play, finally sat up a shade straighter.

Trafalgar rolled his shoulders back into the weight of his coat.

”So we’ve established I’m built for it,” he said. ”What now?”

”Now I stop guessing and start watching.” Dravok’s voice dropped into something flatter and colder, the register of a man who had done this a thousand times over and buried a fair number of the people he’d done it to. ”Enough of the body. Let’s see what you can actually do with it.”

He raised one open hand at his side.

The air above his palm broke into light, a scatter of pale motes drawn out of nowhere, gathering and folding in on themselves the way they always did, and a heartbeat later the weight of a blade dropped into his grip, solid and real, as though it had been waiting there all along for him to call it. It was a plain thing, that sword, no ornament on it anywhere, the weapon of a man who had stopped needing it to look like anything a long time ago. Trafalgar had learned to be wary of plain weapons in the hands of people who could afford better.

Those pale eyes came to rest on him over the edge of the blade.

”Let’s see your skills. Summon your sword.”