SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 724: A Message Home

Trafalgar fed mana into the item, and the shadowlink echo woke in his palm, ready to carry whatever he put into it.

"Caelum. I will not be passing through Euclid. I have no idea how long the mission Valttair handed me is going to take, so make sure Mayla, Aubrelle and Cynthia get the word from you."

That was the whole of it. He let the mana die out of his hand, and the message went where such messages went, gone as fast as it had come.

'A mine full of things that eat men. There is a fine excuse to keep a husband from his own bed.'

On the other end of it, Caelum was already walking the corridor when the shadowlink echo dropped into his hand. He poured his own mana into the thing, and his young master's words repeated themselves for him, unhurried and exact. When they ran out he recorded his answer, sent it back, and kept moving without breaking his stride.

By that hour one of his clones was in Euclid.

Snow came down over the city, thin and unhurried, and in the garden of Trafalgar's manor two of his three wives had the afternoon to themselves. Mayla was seated on the low stone bench, one hand resting over the curve of her belly, watching the other work.

Cynthia had a bow materialized in her hands. Finishing the Academy had not turned her idle. She had married Trafalgar, yes, and she also carried half the small burdens of running Euclid on his behalf, but she had kept training her skills all the same, and she had learned new ones with the bow. Those were what she was drilling now.

The arrow she loosed tore a bright line across the cold air, quick enough to leave a flash hanging where it had passed, and a breath before it reached the target it split into three, each fragment hunting its own point of the mark to wring out every scrap of damage it could.

"You have finally mastered that one, by the look of it," Mayla said.

"It only took me the better part of a year." Cynthia dragged her forearm across her forehead, wiping away the sweat that had gathered there despite the snow. The bow came apart out of her hands and vanished, and she crossed the white ground to the bench and dropped down beside her.

Mayla held something out to her. "Here."

"Thank you." Cynthia drank, and the cold air steamed around the cup. "Oh, before I forget. Aubrelle should be back with us soon. Whatever her family had her doing in their territory is finished."

"That is good to hear."

Before either of them could carry the thread further, quiet footsteps came over the snow toward the bench. Both turned their heads together.

Caelum. They knew him well enough, the two of them, though this was one of his clones, and he had dressed it in a face that was not his own. Black hair this time, unkempt and falling into his eyes, a man who looked far more like a playboy loitering outside a tavern than anything House Morgain kept on its payroll.

"Is something wrong, Caelum?" Mayla asked.

"Forgive the intrusion, my ladies." He bowed his head to them both, and the courtesy in it was real. "It appears the young master will be longer in coming home than he had planned."

"Has something serious happened?" Cynthia set the cup down.

"He is in no immediate danger, so you may both rest easy on that count. He has been handed his first official mission, and it will keep him away a while, since he has to see it through to the end."

"Oh. Understood." Mayla's hand had gone flat over her belly. "Will you be at his side, as you always are?"

Caelum shook his head. "A pity, but not this time. I cannot be near the young master for this one. Moses will be with him instead. There is other business I have to attend to, though the instant the young master returns to report to the castle, I will bring you word myself."

"Oh..."

"Who is Moses?" Cynthia asked. "I do not know him."

"The captain of the First Squadron, my lady. One of the strongest men House Morgain has to its name. With him along, the young master should be safe."

"Should be?" Mayla repeated.

Caelum caught himself. "Forgive me. He will be safe. That is a fact."

"Well." Something in her shoulders eased. "That does reassure me a great deal more." She looked up at him, and her voice softened. "Do not push yourself so hard either, Caelum."

He inclined his head, thanked her for the kindness, and withdrew across the snow the way he had come.

He had more of himself scattered across Morgain land that day than he had run at once in years, and the strain of it had to be showing somewhere, in the set of a shoulder or the beat of a pause that came a fraction late. Caelum never showed anything. He had built a life out of never showing anything. Yet Mayla had caught the thread of it anyway, and had bothered to say so.

He valued that more than she would ever guess. In the halls of the Morgain castle nobody looked twice at such things. To every soul under that roof he was a servant and little else, which he was, and which he had chosen. It cost them nothing to notice, and none of them ever did.

Far from Euclid, Trafalgar climbed aboard Alfred's vessel with the mountain wind pulling at his coat.

"Oh, finished already?" Alfred called over from his post, cheerful as ever. "Back to Euclid, is it?"

Moses ducked through the hatch behind him, and the enormous half-demon filled the deck the way a storm fills a valley. Alfred's grin thinned out by several degrees as he took in the horns, the armor, and the sheer size of the man now standing on his ship.

"Well." Alfred cleared his throat. "By the look of things, Euclid is not where we are going."