SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The food was, in fact, very good, and Cynthia conceded it with the reluctance of a woman handing a point to someone who’d never let her forget it.

”Fine. It’s good,” she said, around a second helping she’d sworn she wasn’t taking. ”Don’t let it go to your head. That’s already the biggest thing in the room.”

”Too late. It got there around the first bite of yours.” Trafalgar topped up her cup, thoroughly pleased with himself.

Mayla laughed, low and easy, a hand on her middle. Across the table Pipin picked through a crust of bread with the focus of a creature who considered the whole meal his by right.

For a while it was only that: the warm room, the clink of plates, four people scattered across cold places for a month letting the quiet knit them back together. No talk of mines or houses or borders, only the ordinary noise of a family at a table.

”So what happens now?” Aubrelle asked into it, turning toward him. ”You’re home, I’m home. Do we get to keep you a while, or is there already something out there tugging you back?”

”Few days. Maybe a little more.” He turned his cup. ”After that there’s training I can’t keep putting off. Until then, nothing. A few plain, boring days, and I mean to waste every one of them.”

”That I’d like to see,” Cynthia muttered.

It was Mayla who spoke next, the way she usually did, gently and with something worth saying. ”I found out what it is,” she said. ”The baby.” She let it sit a beat, her eyes bright. ”It’s a boy.”

Trafalgar’s hand paused halfway to his cup. ”A boy,” he repeated.

”A boy.” Her smile spread wide and sure. ”I wanted to tell you with you in front of me, not on the end of a letter.”

Something moved through his chest, quiet and enormous. He’d stood over a dead queen a week ago and felt less than he did now, looking at his wife and the small stubborn weight of the future she was carrying.

”A son,” he said, and it came out rougher than he meant it to.

”A son.” Cynthia lifted her cup an inch, dry as ever, though her eyes had gone soft at the corners. ”Congratulations. He’ll be impossible. He’s got the two of you for parents.”

”He’ll be wonderful,” Mayla corrected, and, because the thought had plainly been living in her, ”I’ve been turning names over. For weeks now.” She traced a slow line on the cloth. ”I keep circling back to Aaron. I couldn’t tell you why. It just feels warm. Steady. A name a good man could grow into.”

Then she went quiet.

Trafalgar looked at her. ”Something wrong? It’s a good name. I like it.”

”No, nothing’s wrong.” She hesitated. ”It’s only that I had another one as well.” A small pause. ”Mordrek.”

His hand stopped around the cup.

She knew the name. They all did. The man who’d held Euclid before any of them, who’d stood on when the Gluttony Dragon came for the city and died buying the time that saved it. The uncle whose seat Trafalgar sat in now.

”You’d put that name on him,” Trafalgar said, quiet. It wasn’t a refusal. It was closer to being caught off guard.

”If you wanted it.” Mayla’s voice stayed gentle. ”I know what he meant to you.”

He turned the cup slowly, and for a moment the old weight moved behind his eyes. ”I lived with his family for a while, before I left for the Academy. He was one of the few in that whole line who ever looked at me like a person instead of a problem.” He set the cup down. ”And this house, this city, all of it, I built on ground he died holding. His name should get to live somewhere warm, after the cold way he went.”

For a moment no one spoke, and the not-speaking sat easy, the way it does once something honest has been said.

Mayla reached across and laid her hand over his. ”So we keep both on the list,” she said. ”Aaron and Mordrek. We’ve time to decide, and he’s a good while yet before he’ll answer to either.”

”He’ll answer to neither and do as he pleases,” Cynthia said. ”He’s a Morgain. Worse, he’s yours.”

Trafalgar huffed. ”And he’ll have you for another mother, on top of it all. God help the boy.”

Aubrelle spoke up, wry. ”You’ll have to forgive me. I feel like I’ve walked in halfway through a play the rest of you have watched for a month. This morning I was on a road three days out. Now there’s a mission, a mine, a husband who’s reached Ascend since I left, and a guest tomorrow nobody’s mentioned to me.”

”Bartholomew,” Cynthia said.

”Bartholomew?” Aubrelle’s face opened with real pleasure. ”He’s coming here? I haven’t seen him in a while now.” A fond curve touched her mouth. ”I was a year above the rest of you and even I knew him on sight. The boy who went the color of a beet the moment anyone so much as glanced his way.”

”Still does it, before you ask. Put him in a room full of eyes and he folds up like wet paper. But he’s a good boy, my Barth, better than he believes. Trafalgar set him up with a teaching post at the Academy, and against all expectation it suits him.”

”He’s finding his feet,” Trafalgar said. ”Comes out tomorrow to tell us how it’s going, and to be fussed over by his sister, though he’d sooner die than admit he wants that part.”

”He wants it,” Cynthia said, flat and fond. ”Which is half of why I want the house in order before he gets here.”

Aubrelle turned toward Trafalgar, teasing. ”So this is the guest important enough that the woman who ordered us all to leave our business until morning means to scrub the floors herself?”

”We have maids,” Trafalgar said. ”I keep telling her.”

”They don’t do it the way I do,” Cynthia said, as though that ended the argument, which for her it did.

The evening wound down the way the good ones do, by degrees, the talk going slower until the gaps in it stretched long and comfortable. Mayla gave in first, pushing back from the table with a hand braced at her spine and a tired, contented breath.

”That’s me finished. Your son’s been using my back for a drum this last hour, and I’d like to lie down before he starts on the ribs.” She kissed the top of Trafalgar’s head on her way past, Cynthia’s cheek after, and rested a hand a moment on Aubrelle’s shoulder. ”It’s good to have you all home. Don’t stay up too late fixing the world.”

”No promises,” he said, and watched her go with something soft in his face.

Cynthia rose not long after, stacking a couple of plates from habit before he waved her off. ”Leave them. My mess.”

”I’m up early regardless.” She said it like a threat. ”I want the place right before Barth walks in, and I’ll be up before the maids to do it properly.” She gave Aubrelle a nod that carried more than it showed, and paused at the door to level a finger at him. ”Don’t leave those pans soaking overnight. It’s lazy, and I’ll know.”

And she was gone as well, and the big warm room emptied out around them, until it was only the two of them left in the low light.

Aubrelle stayed where she sat, Pipin drowsing on the chair-back at her side, her face turned toward the small sounds of him moving.

And Trafalgar rolled his sleeves back up, and started on the dishes.