SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The hall emptied slowly, branch by branch, until the last of them had gone and the tall doors swung shut on their own weight. No one lingered to hear what came next. Whatever passed between the patriarch and his second daughter behind those doors was not meant for the rest of them, and they were wise enough to want no part of it.

Rivena waited until the footsteps had faded down the corridor before she turned back toward the table.

”Was the public humiliation not enough, Father?” There was insolence under the calm, held on a short leash but plain to hear. ”Or did you want to draw it out in private as well?”

Valttair did not rise to it. He watched her cross the floor toward him, unhurried, and let her come.

”You went into the restricted archives,” he said. ”You left this house without a word to anyone, and you did not go quietly. You met people outside Morgain land, close enough to our enemies’ borders that no honest errand would have carried you there. And you came back with a thing you are building toward.” His grey eyes never left her. ”I do not have the whole of it yet. But I know enough to know it was nothing good, and I know your reach could have dragged this entire house down behind you.”

Rivena took all of it without a flinch. ”I do not know what you believe I was doing.”

”Whatever you began, end it.”

”There is nothing to end.” She spread her hands, the picture of a woman wronged. ”You have been shut behind a wall for two years, Father. Perhaps the quiet has you seeing plots in every shadow.”

”Do not mistake my lack of proof for ignorance.” His voice held level, and somehow that was worse than shouting. ”Tell me the truth now, while it is only the two of us, and it stays between us. I will not offer it twice.”

”There is truly nothing to tell. If two years of quiet have you inventing plots where there are none, that is your burden to carry, not...”

He moved before she finished.

Valttair came out of his chair and struck her across the face, an open hand, fast and hard, no mana behind it and none needed. The crack of it filled the hall and carried through the shut doors into the corridor beyond. Rivena went down. For a heartbeat she only knelt there on the cold stone, one hand rising slowly to her cheek, as though her mind needed the extra beat to accept that her father had truly hit her.

The blow humiliated her far more than it hurt. What burned under her palm as she pressed it to her cheek was not pain. It was fury, cold and controlled, with nothing to do with the sting blooming across her skin.

”You may lie to your brothers.” Valttair looked down at her without a flicker of regret. ”You may lie to your mother. But do not stand in front of me and pretend I cannot see exactly what you are.”

The doors banged open.

Verena had heard the blow from the corridor, and she came through fast, taking in the whole of it in a glance: her daughter on the floor with a hand to her face, and Valttair standing over her.

”What did you do?”

Valttair turned the full weight of his anger onto his wife. ”Far less than she has earned. You want to know what I did. Tell me first what you know. Where did your daughter spend six months? Who did she meet? What did she carry back into my territory?” Each question came down harder than the one before it. ”You cannot answer a single one of them. You call yourself her mother, and you cannot tell me where she spent half a year or what she brought home with her.”

”She is a grown woman, Valttair.” Verena did not back away from him, whatever the risk. ”She is an heir of this house, more than capable of deciding her own affairs without reporting every step to us.”

”An heir of this house does not act for herself alone.” The cold in him did not shift an inch. ”Her mistakes do not stop at her own door. When one of you falls, the whole family falls a little with you, and what Rivena has been playing at could have brought all of us down at once. You have never grasped that, and it is precisely why she does as she pleases.”

Through all of it, Rivena got to her feet.

She did it slowly, chin level and spine straight, and she did not shed a single tear. She would not give either of them that. The slap had cost her nothing she could not afford. If anything, it had told her more than it had told her father.

Because now she knew where he stood. Valttair suspected her, yes. But suspicion was the whole of what he held. He did not know the truth of what she was building. He had no idea what hand was in it, and no notion at all that his own first heir stood on her side of the board.

The wall he had spent two years behind had left him a step slow, and a step was all she needed. She would only have to bury her movements deeper than before.

When she finally spoke, her voice had gone flat and cool again, every trace of the fury folded back out of sight.

”Have you finished?”

Valttair looked at her for a long breath.

”No,” he said. ”But you may leave.”

Rivena inclined her head, the barest fraction, and turned for the doors. Verena went with her, one hand hovering near her daughter’s shoulder without quite touching it, as though she had not decided whether Rivena would allow it.

Out in the corridor, Rivena kept one hand pressed lightly to her cheek as she walked, less for the pain than for the wish to remember it. Let him believe he had won something in that room. Let him believe the blow had put her back in her place. He held a sliver of the truth and had talked himself into calling it the whole. That mistake was hers to use.

She never looked to her left as she passed the mouth of the side corridor, and neither did Verena. Which was why neither of them saw Trafalgar.

He had stopped at the junction where the two halls crossed, on his own way out, close enough to the gathering room that the sound had reached him and far enough that the walls had chewed the words down to fragments. He had heard the crack of the blow. He had caught the edges of raised voices, Valttair’s and Verena’s both, and something under them that carried the weight of a threat. He had seen nothing, and he had not moved to see more.

He waited in the shadow of the crossing until the two women had gone, Rivena with her hand to her face and her chin high, Verena half a step behind her. Only when their footsteps had thinned into the far end of the house did he step out and go his own way, turning what little he had over in his mind.

Something was rotten in Rivena’s corner of the family. Valttair had struck her for it, which meant the patriarch believed it ran deep, and a thing that made a man like Valttair raise his hand to his own heir was a thing worth knowing.

Trafalgar had barely taken another step when Valttair’s voice carried through the closed doors.

”Trafalgar.”

He stopped.

”Since you felt like listening from the corridor,” Valttair continued, his voice cold and perfectly clear, ”you may as well come back inside.”

The doors opened on their own, and Trafalgar went back inside.