SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Zafira caught the look that went between them.

It lasted about half a second, Trafalgar to Rhosyn and back, and it told her that something had happened down in that channel and that neither of them was going to say what in front of thirty dockworkers. She wanted to ask. She didn’t, because the whole slope was still full of people with nothing better to do.

The soldiers had gone back to their line and their work. That helped less than it should have.

Three people were standing at the edge of a dead man’s channel and two of them belonged to the Eight Great Families. Morgain and Zar’khael, both of them houses that Myrrhvale had spent generations treating as something between rivals and open enemies. Nobody down here was going to stop watching them, and nobody was pretending otherwise.

The rest of the attention had nothing to do with politics.

Zafira and Rhosyn made a striking pair from any angle, and the yard crew had noticed within about a minute of the two of them standing together.

”Can we go somewhere quieter?” Zafira asked. ”Somewhere we’re not the main attraction. This is getting unbearable, and I’m fairly sure half of them have undressed me twice already.”

”That’s probably for the best.” Trafalgar was already turning away from the rope. ”Lead the way, you’ve been down here longer than us. You must know somewhere.”

They went back up the slope, and Zafira took the front.

Trafalgar dropped half a step and let the distance open up.

”Did you find anything?” he asked.

”I did.” Rhosyn kept her voice at the level of two people discussing the weather. ”Do you want it now or later? We’re with Zafira, so it depends what you want to do here. Do you trust her?”

Trafalgar didn’t answer straight away.

He ran the possibilities out, the way he always did, and every branch of it came back the same. He had known Zafira for years. He knew her better than almost anyone alive knew her, and she knew him the same way, which was the part that mattered. If she was down here because someone had put her here, then telling her was worth more than keeping it, because two people looking at the same city see twice as much of it.

’And she might be exactly what she says she is. An observer, doing the job, counting the days until she can leave. That happens too.’

That was the honest answer, and he didn’t much like it. He didn’t know. He hadn’t known for the last two years, because two years was how long it had been.

There was also the thing sitting underneath all of it.

Zafira was the First Heir’s observer. Vaelis. The man half of Meraval had already convicted of killing his own mother, the man Ondrek was protecting on principle, the man who had shaken Trafalgar’s hand in a corridor yesterday and walked off without a word.

Whatever chain of decisions had ended with Zafira du Zar’khael standing behind that particular chair, Trafalgar wanted to hear it from her mouth before he decided anything else.

”Later,” he said. ”But she hears it.”

They came off the docks and up through the checkpoint into the third ring, and the noise fell away behind them like a door closing.

Zafira didn’t take them toward the main street or anywhere near it. She turned off two streets early, down a walkway that ran alongside one of the stone channels, and stopped at a narrow front with no sign on it, three storeys of dark blue tile wedged between two larger buildings that had clearly tried to squeeze it out and failed.

An old woman came out from behind a counter as they stepped in, saw Zafira, and stopped where she was.

”Back again.”

”Hi.” Zafira had already started for the stairs. ”Table for three, upstairs at the front, and whatever you’re pouring today.”

”The corner one’s taken.”

”Then the other one’s fine, as long as nobody’s sitting near it.”

The woman looked the three of them over, worked out roughly what she was dealing with, and decided she didn’t want to know. ”Nobody’ll be sitting near it.”

The upper floor was half empty and built for it. Low ceilings, heavy walls, tables set far enough apart that a raised voice would carry and a normal one wouldn’t. The window at the front looked down over the channel, and the water moving through it was the only thing in the room making any noise.

Zafira dropped into the seat with her back to the wall.

”I come here when I want to be left alone,” she said. ”I’ve been down here a while now, and you learn where the quiet is. So what brings you two to Meraval?”

”I’m an observer.” Trafalgar took the chair across from her. ”Same as you.”

”Is that really all?”

She said it lightly, and it landed anyway.

”I knew something was wrong the moment I saw you at that channel. You weren’t arguing with that guard, you were working him. Very patiently, and very much on purpose, in front of as many people as you could get to look at you.” Zafira turned her glass a quarter turn on the table. ”You wanted every pair of eyes on the wrong end of that stretch so Rhosyn could be at the other one. Or am I wrong?”

Rhosyn’s face gave up nothing.

’She got that from one look,’ she thought. ’She wasn’t there for the start of it, she didn’t see me go down, and she’s already assembled the whole thing.’

Nothing showed. Unless the woman could read minds, and Rhosyn was reasonably confident she couldn’t, that reaction stayed exactly where it was.

”You’re not wrong,” Trafalgar said. ”That’s exactly what it was, and you got all of it.”

”I usually do.”

”Then let’s skip the polite part.” He leaned back and let the chair take his weight. ”How did you end up as the First Heir’s observer?”