SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 760: What Comes Next

Valttair answered without a pause, as though he had drawn the whole plan up long before Trafalgar walked in and had only been waiting to be asked.

"Several steps." He came back from the window to the desk, unhurried. "The first is your sister. She gets looked into properly now, all the way down. It is plain my daughter had a hand in something. Something I take no pride in. But a thing like that was always going to happen the moment she slipped past where I could see her."

No feeling in it. He said it the way another man might note a crop had failed, a loss to be counted and worked around, and moved on before it could sit in the room.

Trafalgar kept his own read behind his teeth. He had walked off that airship two days ago already certain the road ran back to Rivena, and here was Valttair naming her with not a scrap of proof laid on the desk between them.

Which told him the patriarch had arrived at that place long before the mine ever cracked open. He was not being handed a suspicion to chew on. He was being shown a verdict already reached.

His grey eyes went to Moses. "That end of it I have already arranged with Caelum. Your part runs elsewhere, Captain." A dry edge entered his voice. "Your squadrons have sat idle a good while now, chasing nothing worth the name. I would hate to think they have gone to rust on me."

Moses drew himself upright, the respect in his posture the same it wore in this room and in no other. "Always ready for you, my lord. Say the word and the work is done."

"There is a fair amount of it." Valttair set the first piece down. "Send the Third and the Fourth into the old underground workings. The deep ones, the ones the maps forgot. Whatever came into that mine came through a hole in a wall somewhere, and a thing like that leaves marks. Have them find the marks."

"Understood."

"That is not all." He went on without a breath between. "The First and the Second take a second task. I want the minor houses sitting close to Vaelion looked at. Quietly. Who has been buying, who has been moving, who has come into coin they cannot account for."

Moses's brow drew down. "If they catch Morgain men sniffing at their doors, my lord, that turns ugly fast. They could stand up a Council and try to paint us the guilty party in the whole affair."

"They could try." Valttair did not look troubled by the thought in the slightest. "They will not manage it. We hold far too much against Vaelion for that door to open, and every stone of it came home in this one's hands." A brief glance at Trafalgar. "There is a second reason besides. Myrrhvale is a house in disarray at present. They are still squabbling over who takes the head of the family, which leaves one of the Eight without a seat to fill. And a Council does not convene while a chair stands empty."

Moses took that in. "So they cannot move against us at all."

Valttair let the observation lie where it fell. He had said it plainly enough already, and a man who had built the whole of this weeks ago did not spend breath confirming his own work. The quiet was answer enough.

Trafalgar turned it over and felt something close to reluctant respect crawl up under his ribs. The old man had not merely foreseen the fallout.

He had timed the whole affair against a rival house losing its head at the worst possible moment for it, and stacked the proof high enough that no one dared reach for the one weapon that could bruise Morgain over it. Every angle shut before it could open.

very Valttair sort of win, he had to grant, one that wore the face of patience and was closer to a trap laid years deep.

His attention came to Trafalgar, and the weight of the room turned with it.

"There will come a day you need the ring." Valttair held his gaze. "Wait for it. When the pieces stand where I want them, you will hear so from me, and not before. Until then, go back to your own affairs. I have no further work for you."

Trafalgar inclined his head.

"And, Trafalgar." The patriarch paused a half-beat, which for him was a long while. "Ascend, at nineteen." Something that was not quite warmth moved behind the grey. "You reached it faster than your father did."

The words caught somewhere he had not braced for.

Not Valttair. That word had never fit the man, and both of them knew why. His father was Magnus, and Magnus was a grave and a handful of borrowed stories, a brother buried under a lie the world still repeated. Leave it to Valttair to find the one comparison that could slip past his guard, and to reach for the dead to do it.

'Clever old bastard,' he thought, with less bite than the words usually carried. 'You will use anything.'

He gave none of it to his face. "Good to know I am ahead of someone."

Valttair let it pass, and turned back to his captain. "When you turn something up, Moses, it comes to me first. Before anyone."

"Understood, my lord."

"Then we are finished here." His eyes came to Trafalgar one last time. "You may go. Moses stays. There are details he needs and you do not."

Trafalgar dipped his head, turned, and put the study behind him with no wish to linger in it. The great iron door drew shut at his back on its own weight, and the pressure of the place came off his shoulders the instant it did.

He set off through the cold halls toward the landing shelf, where Alfred and the ship waited to carry him home to Euclid at last. Two days of open sky and the old man's needling stood between him and his own bed, and after that room he found he wanted both.

He had gone barely a dozen strides when a figure came around the turn ahead and stopped him.

This one he was glad to see, which put her in a company of exactly one. The only person in the whole of this house he could stand across from and speak to as though the word family carried any weight at all.

Lysandra.