SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

”I said forget it.” The growl crept back into the words. ”Not every thought I let out is meant to be kept.”

”Then hold them tighter. I keep only the ones you hand me.” His head inclined a fraction. ”But as you wish. Consider it buried.”

He faced the sealed door again.

The chamber kept their breathing for a few heartbeats, mist rising and dissolving in the cold between them. Moses worked one gauntleted hand open and shut, the plates sliding over knuckles that had cracked more men than most soldiers ever stood beside. He had not clawed his way back into civilization to be lectured by Caelum. He had not spent years past the last honest map, carrying out orders no noble would ever hear whispered, only to thaw in a frozen chamber while a servant reminded him that rank in House Morgain did not always trail behind strength.

That had always been the wound.

Moses could kill Caelum. Both of them knew it. But the killing would not hand him Caelum’s place, and that was the part that never stopped itching.

”So.” Moses drew the word out, interest rekindling. ”You truly mean to tell me nothing of what I missed? Word reached me of an attack on an Aurevane train. And that the youngest one — the good-for-nothing — happened to be aboard.”

Caelum’s eyes cooled.

”You would do well not to call Young Master Trafalgar that.”

Moses tipped his head, purple eyes glinting. ”Young Master Trafalgar, is it. That is new.”

”What is new,” Caelum said, ”is how far behind your information has fallen. Wherever our lord buried you, he plainly spared you the decent reports. You speak of him as he was years ago.”

A slow grin spread across Moses’s face. ”So the good-for-nothing has grown into something worth correcting me over.”

”He earned that long before tonight.”

Moses weighed him with new attention, the teasing keeping its edge but growing fangs. ”Interesting. We ran a long stretch beyond any road worth the name, my boys and I. News came in scraps, when it came at all. I knew the youngest Morgain had changed — rumor travels even through the ugly places. SSS talent. War honors. Betrothals. A whole city, if the report I saw was not some clerk’s notion of a joke. But rumor is thin broth. It leaves a man hungrier than before.”

”Then read better reports.”

”I would rather hear it from someone who stood in the room.”

”That depends on the room, and on who is asking after it.”

”And on who answers.” Moses leaned a fraction forward. ”Were you in the room, Caelum?”

Caelum did not answer at once, and the pause did the answering for him — not the reply Moses wanted, but enough to tell him the question had struck stone instead of air.

”The Aurevane affair sits under restriction,” Caelum said. ”Parts of it will surface through the proper channels. Parts of it never will.”

”Ah. Paperwork soaked in blood.”

”One way to describe it.”

”Did the boy hold himself together?”

”Young Master Trafalgar survived an attack built to sow confusion, seize leverage, and bury the evidence before anyone could answer it. He did a great deal more than survive.”

Moses held him in a long stare. ”You sound proud.”

”I sound accurate.”

”With you,” Moses said, ”those tend to wear the same coat.”

Caelum let it lie. ”You asked what happened. I have told you as much as I am able to.”

”No. You have hung a curtain where the answer should stand and described the weave to me.” His voice dropped, shedding a layer of its mockery. ”Esmond reached me once. Orven Halbrecht as well. Selara, of course — she has a talent for surfacing in sealed pages. What did your young master step into?”

”A room with too many hands already in it.”

”And you cleared the room.”

”We contained it.”

A short, rough laugh broke from him. ”There it is. You could narrate a slaughter and file it under correspondence.”

”Only when the first hand made a poor job of the work.”

The grin came back before Moses could stop it. ”I had almost forgotten that about you.”

”Give it an hour. The rest will come back to you.”

Caelum steered them off Aurevane before Moses could lean on it again. ”You came back sooner than anyone planned for.”

The amusement in Moses dropped by a degree. ”Disappointed?”

”Curious.”

”From anyone else I would take that as the gentler answer. From you it means you have already begun prying.”

”Lord Valttair sent you out on a task that stripped the First Squadron from the castle for better than three years.” Caelum’s gaze stayed level. ”He did not recall you when the Thal’zar war handed him every reason to. He let the family bleed where you might have spared it, and kept you in reserve for none of it. Now you stand beneath a sealed mountain, outside a door no man passes without his word. Curiosity is the only honest response left to me.”

Moses’s stare hardened. ”Careful. You are circling the rim of something no one gave you leave to see.”

”I know precisely which rim it is.”

”Knowing never used to hold you back.”

”It did not.” His head tilted by a degree. ”What the years gave me was the sense to stand at an edge and study the drop without putting a boot over it. You have never told the two apart. Show you a ledge and your first instinct is to leap and trust your fists to win whatever waits at the bottom.”

Moses’s jaw worked. He turned toward the door, the rough tail of his hair scraping his backplate, and let it drop into the cold. The carved symbols gave him nothing — no light bled through the script, the seams held fast, and not the faintest flicker suggested Valttair had spared a thought for the men freezing at his threshold.

When Moses finally spoke, the bravado had gone out of his voice. ”We finished what our lord sent us to finish. That is as much as I am permitted to give you.”