SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The graveyard lay at the edge of the settlement where the ground went hard and the wind had nothing left to break it, and Gerhardt had buried more of it in one season than in all his years before.

He stopped at the low gate and let the young lord go on ahead. There was no proper order to the rows anymore. They’d run out of good ground and out of time both, and the mounds crowded one against the next up the slope, fresh-turned earth gone stiff with frost, each with its rough marker leaning where the cold had heaved it.

Two thousand. He’d lost the ability to hold the number in his head after the first week of digging, and now it was only the field, and the field went on.

Trafalgar walked out among them and stopped with his back to the gate, facing up the slope into all those markers, and did not turn around.

Gerhardt hung where he was, a few paces behind, and looked at the back of the man and could not make the account balance.

He was an old foreman. He’d heard the stories same as anyone who worked Morgain ground. The ninth son. The wastrel, the bastard they kept shoved in a back room of the great house so the family wouldn’t have to look at him, good for nothing but spending coin and shaming the name, beaten soft and packed off to rot.

That was the Trafalgar du Morgain the road talked about when it bothered to talk about him at all, which was seldom, and never kindly. Gerhardt had heard the name come down the mountain with the relief and felt his heart drop, because a useless lordling was one more mouth to feed and one more body to bury.

And that same useless lordling had walked into that mine alone, and walked back out of it on his own two feet, and stood here now with the whole ruined field in front of him wearing a quiet that had nothing soft in it at all.

’Whoever told me about you,’ the old man thought, ’told me wrong. Or you stopped being him somewhere along the way.’

He’d have given a great deal to see the lord’s face as he said it. But Trafalgar kept his back to him, and Gerhardt was well behind him and far too low a man to walk around and plant himself in front of a Morgain, so he watched the shoulders and the dark of him against the frost and waited on whatever came.

”I’ll see to the families,” Trafalgar said.

His voice carried back over the field without him lifting it. Gerhardt straightened.

”The ones who lost the man who kept them fed. Every household that put a body in this ground and can’t put bread on a table for it now.” A beat, the wind pulling at the markers. ”They’ll be looked after. It isn’t charity and it isn’t a favor, so nobody needs to come to me with a cap in their hands over it. It’s owed. I’ll see it paid.”

Gerhardt opened his mouth and found nothing worth putting in it, so he shut it again.

”And I’d ask your pardon, Gerhardt.” The shoulders didn’t move. ”For what my family didn’t do. This vein’s fed the house for generations, and when the ground turned on the men working it, the house was slow. Slower than it had any business being. Two thousand paid for that slowness before anyone with real strength bothered to come.” He let it stand a breath. ”I can’t give them back to you. I can only tell you it shames me, and mean it.”

The old man’s eyes had begun to sting, and he was grateful, in a distant helpless way, that the lord had his back turned and couldn’t see it. He blinked hard against the cold and it did no good at all.

”My lord, you don’t have to...”

”I know I don’t. That’s rather the point of saying it.” The wind moved through the field.

”Things go wrong that nobody had the reach to stop. It happens to every man breathing, high or low, and there’s no wisdom hiding in it and no lesson, only the enduring of it after. You bury what you have to bury, and you carry it, and you keep on. And the work a man puts in gets its due in the end. It always does. That much I’ve found to hold true.”

Gerhardt didn’t know what he’d braced for out of a Morgain lord standing over a mass grave. Cold words, or none. Not this, and not a man half his age telling him plainly that the loss was real and the grief was his to carry and that carrying it was the only road through, said the way you’d say it to a man and not to a subject.

The tears came properly then, sliding hot down the cold creases of his face, and he made no sound and did nothing to stop them, and let them fall for the men in the ground and for the small mean way he’d measured the one standing over them.

”Look at me tomorrow,” Trafalgar said, ”and don’t look at any of this. Tomorrow it ends. I give you my word on it, whole and without a crack in it. By this time tomorrow the thing under the mountain is dead, and this settlement goes back to being a place where men work and come home. All of it, back to how it was. I don’t promise what I can’t hand over, Gerhardt. I’m promising you this.”

The old man dragged a rough sleeve across his face and got his voice back down where it belonged. ”Yes, my lord,” he managed, thick with it. ”I’ll hold you to every word of it. And thank you. For coming. For all of it.” He swallowed. ”The men would want it said.”

”They’d want you warm and asleep, more like.” A dry thread ran through it, the first the whole night. ”Go on back, Gerhardt. Rest. You’ve a long day of hauling monster hides ahead of you, and I’ll want you sharp for it.”

It was leave to go, gently given, and Gerhardt took it, because there was nothing left to stay for and because his face was in no state to be looked at.

He dipped his head to the back that had never once turned to show him its front, murmured a last rough thanks the wind mostly stole, and went down through the low gate toward the waking lights of the town, wiping his eyes as he walked, carrying something he had no name for and would turn over in his hands for the rest of his years.

Behind him, alone now with the two thousand, Trafalgar lifted his hand.

The shadowlink bled up out of the dark of his palm, cold and small and waiting, its faint pulse the only warmth in all that frozen field.

He turned it once in his fingers, his eyes still on the graves, and readied the message for Caelum.