SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Trafalgar went back down to the rope line and made himself the most reasonable man in Meraval.

”Sorry to bother you again.” He stopped at a polite distance and pitched his voice to carry. ”Since I’m not permitted to approach, I’d like to record the details properly. Who’s the officer on record for this?”

The soldier’s jaw moved. ”That’s not something you need.”

”It’s exactly something I need. I’m required to log what I observe.” Trafalgar took out a small notebook he had no intention of writing anything useful in. ”Case number, then. Time the body was reported. Name of the unit holding the line.”

”You’re not getting any of that.”

”That’s fine, I’ll put down that it was refused.” He clicked his tongue and made a show of writing. ”Should I send my report to Ithanne, or would you rather it went to your captain first? I don’t want to go over anybody’s head on my third day.”

Two dockworkers at the rope had stopped watching the body and started watching this instead.

The soldier held out for four more questions. Trafalgar asked all of them the way a clerk asks, patient and mild and endless, and on the fifth the man’s temper came loose in front of about thirty people.

”Enough! I don’t care whose son you are. Get away from my line before I put you somewhere you’ll like a lot less, and take your little book with you.”

’Well, it seems to be working.’

Somewhere behind the line an officer had turned around at the shouting and was already coming over with the expression of a man whose morning had just acquired a second problem.

”Now this is something I wasn’t expecting.”

The voice came from his left, and Trafalgar turned, and the whole channel went out of his head for a second.

She had come down the slope with two Myrrhvale attendants trailing her and no interest in either of them. Skin pale to the point of porcelain, two black horns curving up off her forehead, and that purple hair falling in waves down her back the way it always had. The grey eyes found him first and stayed.

”Good morning, Trafalgar. You look busy with the guard.”

’Zafira.’

The last time he’d seen her had been long enough ago that the years had done work on both of them, and they had been noticeably more generous to her. She had grown into herself, and one part of that had been generous to the point of rudeness, and Trafalgar got his eyes back where they should be before anybody had to comment on it.

’Right. Good. Two days of corpses and locked doors and this is what nearly finishes me.’

Behind him the officer was already talking to the soldier, low and fast, and the soldier’s face had gone from red to something closer to grey. Whatever was being said, it ended with the man being pulled off the line and pointed back toward the yards.

He muttered something under his breath as he passed. Trafalgar caught about half of it and let all of it go.

”Oh, that?” He put the notebook away. ”It’s nothing. He was having a difficult morning and I helped.”

”You made it worse on purpose.”

”That could be true,” Trafalgar agreed.

Zafira’s mouth moved at the corner, and something in her shoulders came down. She’d been carrying herself like an observer of a Great House since she’d walked into view, and for about a breath she stopped bothering.

’And Nerith told me the First Heir’s observer comes from House Zar’khael.’

Nobody was looking at the far end of the channel.

Rhosyn went down the maintenance ladder while thirty people faced the other way, and the soldiers who should have been watching the drained stretch were busy watching a Morgain get shouted at by one of their own.

She had a few minutes and she used all of them.

The man lay on his side in two fingers of standing water, and the first thing she checked was his mouth. Nothing. No froth at the lips, no swelling in the face, and when she pressed under his ribs the chest gave the way an empty chest gives.

She moved him with two fingers under the shoulder, just enough to see his back.

The blood had pooled along his spine and the backs of his arms in one solid dark band, flat and even. He was lying on his side. He had been put here long after he stopped being able to move.

His coat was dry. Only the hem that touched the puddle had taken any water at all, and the soles of his boots had none of the salt crust that covered every stone in that channel.

His neck was clean. There was no collar or similar things. Whoever he was, he belonged to himself.

Then she turned his hand over.

Ink under three of the nails, worn in deep enough that scrubbing had stopped helping. A hard yellow callus on the side of the middle finger. And on the heel of the right hand, a flat patch of shine where a man leans his weight down again and again onto a seal.

’A clerk. He stamped paper for a living.’

She checked the pockets, found them empty in the particular way that pockets are empty when somebody else has been through them, and went back up the ladder.

”Where is the girl I saw with you earlier?” Zafira asked. ”The one in black. Rhosyn.”

”Around.”

”Right here,” Rhosyn said, arriving at his shoulder from a direction neither of them had been watching. ”Lady Zafira.”

”Rhosyn.”

Nothing else passed between them, which was about right. They had met a handful of times, they had each decided the other was worth not underestimating, and neither had ever wanted more from it than that.

Trafalgar looked at Rhosyn, and Rhosyn looked back at him, and he could tell from her face that she had something.