SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Silas grinned, delighted to be asked, and let the change take him.

It happened fast. The human form blurred and stretched and went on stretching, the two horns drawing out into something that could gore a house, scales spilling across him in a dark tide, until what stood on the lawn where a boy had been a heartbeat before was a dragon.

Ten metres of one, give or take, from the grass to the crest of his lowered head, and he wasn’t even trying to loom.

Trafalgar tipped his head back to take the whole of him in.

’Holy hell, he’s big.’ The thought came flat and honest. ’And he’s not done. He’s going to be enormous. Caelvyrn’s weight, maybe, if he keeps eating the way he eats.’

Beside him, Barth had gone very quiet, his neck craned all the way back, his mouth slightly open. Whatever a teaching post and a face like a poster had done for the boy’s nerve, none of it held up against a dragon the size of a guard tower standing ten paces off.

”He’s, ah.” Barth swallowed. ”He’s gotten bigger.”

”That’s one word for it.”

The dragon huffed, a gust of warm air rolling flat across the grass, and there was something unmistakably smug in the set of his enormous head, the exact look the boy wore when he stuck his chest out. He shrank back down a moment later, the whole vast bulk of him folding away in seconds until Silas stood there again, human and grinning and hugely pleased with himself.

”Well?” Silas said. ”How much?”

”Enough that I’m glad you sleep outside.” Trafalgar looked him over. ”You’ve grown well, Silas. Truly. Keep at it.”

Silas beamed like he’d been handed the world.

”There you are.”

The voice came from the direction of the house, and Trafalgar watched Barth flinch like a man who’d heard a blade clear its sheath. Cynthia was crossing the lawn toward them, a cloth still knotted in one hand, wearing the particular calm of a woman who has been cleaning since before dawn and has just found her guest of honour loitering in the garden.

”I’ve had the front rooms ready for an hour,” she said. ”What in the world are the two of you doing out here?”

And Trafalgar, without a flicker of hesitation or a single word from his conscience, turned and laid a hand on Barth’s shoulder.

”Barth wanted to see Silas,” he said, grave as a judge. ”Couldn’t be talked out of it. You know how he gets.”

The betrayal hit Barth like a slap. His head snapped around, his mouth opened, and what came out of it was not language so much as the rubble of it.

”I, what, no, I didn’t, that’s not, he was the one who, Trafalgar, I never once said...”

”Is that so.” Cynthia’s attention swung onto her brother, cool and complete, and Barth wilted where he stood. ”You couldn’t wait ten minutes to greet a dragon you live down the hall from.”

”It wasn’t, I didn’t...” Barth spun to point at Trafalgar, to call up the one witness who could save his name.

Trafalgar was not there.

Somewhere in the last handful of seconds, without a sound, he had removed himself from the whole affair, and was already halfway to the mansion door with his hands in his pockets, the very picture of a man with nowhere in particular to be.

Cynthia turned, following her brother’s stricken stare, and caught the back of Trafalgar just as it slipped through the doorway.

’I’ll wait for you inside, Barth,’ he thought, and let the door fall shut behind him on the sound of Cynthia rounding on her brother and Barth’s voice climbing a full octave in protest.

He felt no guilt whatsoever. It had been a genuinely excellent morning.

By the time Barth was released and shown in, red about the ears and looking faintly haunted, the household had gathered in the sitting room.

Mayla had a hand on the curve of her belly and amusement written all over her, plainly having caught the short version already. Aubrelle sat with Pipin on her chair-back, her head tilting toward the door as Barth came through it. Cynthia had laid out tea and a spread of small things to pick at, arranged with the same ferocity she’d aimed at the floors, and now sat looking thoroughly vindicated.

Barth lowered himself into a chair with the care of a man half expecting it to be rigged, accepted a cup because declining Cynthia’s tea was not a thing that was done, and slowly, under the warmth of the room and the plain comfort of people who liked him, began to unwind.

Trafalgar watched him loosen and felt the easy thing he only felt around a short list of people.

Because Barth was on that list. A very short one. The boy across from him, timid and brilliant and helpless in a crowd, was one of only two people alive Trafalgar had ever chosen to hand the whole of himself to.

Not the trimmed story the world got, nor even the softer version the people closest to him lived beside, but all of it, down to what he actually was, the Primordial blood he kept folded out of sight from nearly everyone who breathed. He’d given Barth that, once, and never once wished it back. If there was a single person he’d trust to pull a buried thing into the light and come back with the truth of it, teeth and all, it was the one going pink over a teacup.

Barth set the cup down, and something in him shifted, the nerves giving way to the other thing he was, the careful, precise mind that lived under all the fluster. He cleared his throat.

”So,” he said. ”Believe it or not, I didn’t come all this way just to get ambushed and blamed for it. I actually brought you something.” He met Trafalgar’s eyes, and the last of the flustered boy went out of them. ”A report. On the homunculus.”