SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The conversation slowed down after that.

Trafalgar looked across at the man in the chair and thought about what he had here. Darian was useful. He had always been useful, and Trafalgar had never once pretended otherwise, not to himself. A patriarch of a Great Family who answered his letters and told him the truth was worth more than an army.

But the old arrangement had gone soft at the edges, and both of them knew it. Years ago the leash had been fear, plain and simple. Darian had watched what Trafalgar did to the men standing between him and that chair, and he had behaved accordingly. That worked when Darian was a frightened heir sitting on a ruin. It didn’t work now. Darian had soldiers, walls, money, and a family that mostly did what he told it to.

’And if he ever decided he was finished with me, what would I actually do about it?’

He could reach Darian. He was fairly confident of that much, even now. But killing a patriarch and controlling a Great Family were two different things, and the second one wasn’t something he could manage from Euclid. Whoever came after Darian might hate him. The whole territory might close its borders again and never open them. He would trade a friendly Great Family for a hostile one, and gain nothing out of it except a corpse.

So he had no intention of squeezing him. He’d rather Darian kept working with him because it suited him, because he was treated well, and because he had no reason at all to look for a better offer somewhere else. Goodwill held longer than fear, and it cost him almost nothing to give.

Trafalgar leaned forward and rested his arms on his knees. ”Before I go, let’s be clear about what you’re doing with my brother.”

Darian’s ears turned toward him. ”The slow answer.”

”The slow answer. You’re interested, you’re flattered, and you’re careful. That’s the whole of it.” Trafalgar counted it out plainly. ”You ask him questions. You take your time. You tell him you have people inside your family to consult. And whatever he offers you, however good it sounds, you don’t accept a single thing.”

”Nothing on paper,” Darian said. ”Nothing spoken either.”

”The moment you agree to anything, he will own a piece of you, and he’ll use it later in a room full of people you’d rather not be standing in.” Trafalgar tipped his head. ”String him along. Get him talking. Every question you ask him is a question he has to answer, and sooner or later one of those answers will tell us what he’s building.”

”And if he stops writing?”

”Then that tells us something too.”

Darian let out a breath and nodded. ”All right. I’ll play it that way.” A faint smile touched his mouth. ”It’s not as though I’ve never delayed a Great Family before. I had two years of practice with the Sylvanels.”

”You’ll be fine, then.”

Darian went quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice had changed. ”Can I ask you for something?”

”Go ahead.”

”I know I’m not in a position to make requests of you. I’m aware of how this works between us, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.” He said it without bitterness, as a plain fact he’d made his peace with a long time ago. ”But from everything you’ve told me today, whatever is coming isn’t small. If my family is going to end up standing near it, I’d rather not find out about it the same week everyone else does.”

Trafalgar watched him for a moment. ”You want to be told first.”

”When you can. I know there’ll be things you can’t say, and I’m not asking for those.” Darian’s tail moved once behind the chair. ”I’m asking for time. If I get a few weeks’ warning before something breaks, I can move people. Fill the storehouses. Pull my patrols back toward the towns. If I find out on the day, I can’t do anything except watch it happen to us again.”

That was a fair thing to ask, and it cost him nothing to give. ”You’ll be told.” He said it plainly, so it wouldn’t sound like a courtesy. ”Not everything, and not always as early as you’d like. But when I know something is coming that touches your territory, you’ll hear it from me before you hear it from anyone else.”

Darian sat back, and some of the tension he’d been holding all afternoon went out of his shoulders. ”That’s more than I expected.”

”You’ve earned it. Keep earning it.”

”I intend to.”

Trafalgar stood, and Cynthia and Rhosyn rose with him. Darian got up from his chair and came around the low table, and for a moment the two of them stood there looking at each other, the boy who had been terrified of him and the man who now ran one of the Eight.

Darian put out his hand, and Trafalgar took it, and this time neither of them measured the difference in size. ”Write to me,” Trafalgar said. ”About Maeron, about the rifts, about anything that feels wrong. I don’t care how small it is.”

”You’ll hear from me.”

Varek was already at the door, holding it open with one hand and watching the corridor beyond it. He gave Trafalgar a short nod as they passed, the last of the afternoon’s stiffness gone out of him, and fell in behind them to lead the way back up through the tunnels.

The heavy door closed on the room and on Darian standing in the middle of it. They walked a good stretch of the passage before anyone spoke. Cynthia was looking at the mana lamps on the walls, and Trafalgar was still turning the meeting over in his head, sorting what he’d learned from what he’d only been told. It was Rhosyn who broke it, her voice low enough that it stayed between the three of them.

”There have been a great deal more Void Creature attacks lately.”