SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Selendra left.

Alfons stayed where he was, looking at the door she had walked through only a few breaths before.

The wood had shut tight behind her. Nothing of her was left in the room. No blood, no spell mark, no proof that a Nocthar heir had stood here and spoken of his house broken beneath its own towers. His jaw had drawn tight enough to ache.

The bite below his thumb beat in time with his pulse, and every beat dragged the same three things to the front of his mind.

Three people. Eight towers. A choice.

’Argh. I do not like a single part of this.’

He turned from the door, and the feeling came with him. It pressed under his ribs, set his fingers twitching, and left him wanting to put his fist through something costly. Breaking furniture was for children, drunks, and men without servants who would report it by morning.

’It is one possible future,’ he told himself. ’One road. One vision. Nothing signed.’

It should have helped. But in the end, it did not. Because even a single road had to be built by something, and towers did not crack because a vampire dreamed too hard. Battlefields did not bloom in the middle of a family’s land unless a hand had dragged them there.

He started out of the clothes he had worn for the meeting. The day could end here; it was late, and going back to the Academy tonight would buy him nothing but a sleepless train. His head was already heavy from the knives his family had spent the evening sliding between one another’s ribs with level voices and correct posture.

House Vaelion was hostile even to itself. That was not new.

They pushed. They measured. They cut with words long before steel was ever asked to bother. And underneath all of it they were a family all the same, cold and poisonous and exhausting, but a family. If an outside hand closed around one of them, the rest would notice. Eventually.

’Charming people,’ he thought, working his collar loose. ’They could try saying one thing in this house without making it bleed on the way out.’

His hands paused on the buttons as his father’s order came back to him.

Stay close to Trafalgar du Morgain.

As if that were a small thing to ask.

’Get close to Trafalgar du Morgain. Why not send me to stroll into a dragon’s mouth and ask for directions while I am in there?’

Whatever stood between him and the Morgain boy, it was no foundation to build cooperation on. Rivalry, dislike, every old thing Alfons had failed to bury, that was the whole of it. Trafalgar had no reason to trust a word out of him. If Alfons walked up wearing a friendly face, the boy would spot the hook before the first sentence landed.

Direct was off the table. So the road would have to bend.

’I need someone already near him. Someone who can hold a door open without making him slam it in my face.’

There were few options, and fewer good ones. But one name came back, not because he liked it, but because it would work. A favor would not be enough to move it. He needed leverage.

He had barely finished binding the mark on his hand when the door opened again.

Roderic came in without hurry, the way a man walks into a room that has always been his. One glance at Alfons’s hand, one at the window, and his eyes said he had already pieced together more than most men could pull from a written report.

”Selendra au Nocthar left,” Roderic said.

”A few minutes ago.” There was no profit in pretending the visit had been nothing, and lying to his father was a losing wager. Roderic knew the Nocthar class. He knew enough of the house to ask the one question that counted and skip the rest.

”And what did she come here for?”

”She had a vision,” Alfons said. No point dressing it up. ”Of me.”

Roderic’s expression barely shifted. ”Go on.”

”Of our territory. The eight towers cracked, several of them close to falling, and a battlefield laid out in the middle of it. Three people left standing. I was the one at the center, with a man on either side of me.”

”And what came out of that?”

”She said it felt less like a fight than a decision. As though the whole field were waiting on what I chose.”

Roderic studied him for a few seconds, and then a soft laugh left him, controlled and quiet and somehow worse than open mockery.

”Do not go building fear out of nonsense, son.”

Alfons’s mouth tightened. ”You are calling that nonsense?”

”Our house in ruins? The Eightfold Hold split open, and you planted at the heart of some grand decision the world apparently holds its breath for?” Roderic’s voice stayed even. ”Truly, Alfons. A vampire takes a mouthful of your blood, sees smoke and ruin in it, and you let the thing crawl around under your skin all night.”

”I thought you would want to know.”

”I did. Now I know.”

Alfons said nothing to that.

Roderic stepped closer. ”Go back to the Academy as soon as you can. Nothing about your task has changed. Watch Selara. Watch the Morgain boy. Keep your ears open for Aurevane, for Esmond, for the homunculus, and for anything that touches our older alchemy.”

”I have not forgotten any of it.”

”Good.” He stopped at the door. ”I expect a great deal from you, Alfons. Do not disappoint me a second time.”

The words stayed in the room after he had gone.

The next morning Alfons took a carriage to the nearest Gate, crossed to Velkaris, and boarded the train back to the Academy. He spent most of the ride watching the country blur past the glass, one gloved hand laid over the bandage beneath it. Selendra’s warning turned over in his head, and Roderic’s order turned alongside it, the two of them grinding against each other the whole way.

By the time the Academy towers rose on the horizon, he had picked his first door.

He found the one he wanted in a quiet corridor off a side courtyard, well clear of the thicker student traffic. The other boy saw him coming and stopped where he stood. His face gave away little. His shoulders gave away more.

”What do you want from me, Alfons?” he asked. ”I do not recall us ever being close enough for you to come looking.”

”We are not,” Alfons said. ”And believe me, I like doing this even less than you are going to like hearing it.”

”That is a miserable way to open a conversation.”

”It is. It does not improve from here, either.”

The Roquefort student’s eyes narrowed.

Alfons kept his voice low and easy. ”House Roquefort. I had no idea you had a sister.”

The boy went very still.

Alfons let the quiet do some of the work before he finished the thought.

”Oh. Forgive me. You do not.”

His face hardened. ”You know perfectly well that is not true.”

”What I know,” Alfons said, ”is that someone walked into a Council under a name that was never hers to wear. I know she was placed close enough to your family that the room swallowed the lie. And I know House Roquefort had a hand in standing her where she had no business standing.”

”You are bending this into something it was not.”

”Am I?” Alfons asked. ”Someone slipped into a Council. Stood among heirs, lords, sealed records, live wards, conversations she had no right to overhear. She could have walked out carrying secrets that ruin people. She could have done far worse while she was up there. One careful word in the right ear, one ugly question in another, and all at once House Roquefort looks very bold for a family that prefers the shadows.”

”You have no idea what you are putting your hand on.”

”I know enough to make the right people start asking.”

The boy’s hand curled at his side. ”What do you want.”

Alfons held his eyes.

”There is something I need from Trafalgar du Morgain. Something tied to what happened in Aurevane. My family can buy a report when it wants one, but some things have to be found from closer in than any report reaches.”

”And you have decided I will hand him to you.”

”I have decided you would rather help me,” Alfons said, ”than stand there while your mother’s name, and your family’s, gets dragged through a very public misunderstanding.” His voice dropped, almost gentle. ”It would be a shame, watching the Roquefort name bleed over something this easy to avoid. Don’t you think?”