SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Trafalgar went in first, and Moses came a step behind him.

Valttair was waiting, seated behind a broad desk at the top of the fortress, and the window at his back gave the room away for what it was. It ran the full height of the wall, and through it lay almost the whole castle, black stone dropping in tiers down the mountainside to the white peaks beyond, all of it going gold at the edges in the failing light.

Out on the landing shelf, small from this height, sat Alfred’s ship, the thing the old man doted on like a daughter, wings folded and waiting to carry Trafalgar home.

The patriarch did not rise. He let Trafalgar cross the floor to him, the way he let most things come to him. Even seated and holding his presence in tight, the man filled the room. That much had not eased since the family hall. Paradox sat under his skin like a held tide, and a person felt the pull of it whether Valttair meant them to or not.

”You are back, so it went well enough.” Level, unhurried. ”Good. We will start with the report. All of it, Trafalgar. Not the trimmed version you fed me through Caelum. Everything.”

Trafalgar inclined his head and began. He gave it plainly. The flight in, the town half-buried and holding its breath, the anger and the grief waiting for him at the mouth of the mine.

The two thousand dead in the ground, a figure Valttair already carried and took now without a flicker, because a patriarch of a Great Family who let a number like that move his face would not have kept his chair long enough to grey. Nothing reached the surface of the man. It never did.

He went on. The warren under the mountain, the brood packed into the dark, the queen at the heart of it grown fat and furious past her tier. The fight that had run him to the ceiling of his fifth core and shoved him through it.

He said the sixth without weight, one fact laid beside the others, and if Valttair marked that his son had gone into that mountain a Prime and walked back out an Ascend, he gave it no more of himself than he had given the dead.

An Apex beast wandering into Morgain land was not, on its own, the part that itched. Such things strayed. What refused to sit right was where it had turned up. One of the richest veins the family held, the queen fed on the best crystal in Morgain and swelling on it, down in the very ground the house went to war to keep.

And there was the proof.

That was the piece that turned a disaster into something worse. He set it out for Valttair the way it had been set out for him. The burnt rods in their corroded cradles. The glass with the black residue dried inside.

The length of tubing hauled straight out of the nest floor, its inner wall eaten smooth by whatever had been fed down it. The queen had not grown past her tier on her own.

Someone had dosed her, steady and patient, force-grown her and driven her mad on purpose, and staked the ground with beasts to keep the whole warren fat.

It had been built. Fed and driven for weeks by a hand that knew the hour every patrol passed. An outside hand, reaching into Morgain territory as though the border were a line drawn in chalk.

Trafalgar laid the whole of it out, and stopped.

Valttair let the quiet run a breath. ”Good.”

Trafalgar had braced for a dozen answers, and that was not among them. He kept his face even and turned the single word over, hunting the weight under it, because the man did not spend a word like that on comfort and never had.

”Good?”

The grey eyes came off the middle distance and rested on him a moment. The patriarch pushed back from the desk, stood, and turned his back on the room to look out over the snow.

”You did well, Trafalgar. Good work.” He said it to the glass and the mountains beyond it, not to his son. ”The trouble itself is dealt with. The source is another thing, still to be dug loose, though I have an idea who reached into our ground. And a fair notion of who lent them the means to do a thing like this.” A pause. ”You are carrying the main piece of proof yourself.”

He turned, and his gaze went to Moses.

”Proof?” Trafalgar said. ”The main one?”

”One of several.” Valttair’s eyes held on his captain a beat, weighing something he did not share, before they came back. ”You have been keeping a guest on our land, Trafalgar. It is a rare day I fail to hear about a thing hidden in my own territory.” No heat in it, only fact set down. ”And that guest is a key to the whole of this. I trust the gift was to your liking. It will make the keeping of him far simpler.”

Trafalgar knew the name behind the word. Esmond.

So the old man had known. Not guessed, known, and known long enough to have a ring made for the problem and pressed into Moses’s hand before the mountain had ever split open.

The thing Trafalgar had worked out for himself on the deck two days back sat confirmed in front of him now, and it carried the same cold edge it had carried then.

Every gift from this man was a piece moved into place and dressed up as generosity because the dressing cost him nothing. Valttair was always a step ahead. A step ahead was a long way from being on his side.

He let none of it climb into his face. ”Then thank you for the gift.” He said it dry, because gratitude was the coin Valttair expected least, and he saw no reason to pay the man in any other. ”It does make life easier.”

He met the grey eyes across the room. ”So. What are the next steps? What is it you mean to do about all this?”