SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 761: The Only One Welcome

Of every face this castle could have thrown at him on the way out, hers was the one he did not mind stopping for.

Lysandra waited a little down the corridor, out of armor for once, wrapped in something light and pale that let her move like a person instead of a soldier.

Her platinum hair sat shorter than it had in the old days, cut back to her shoulders now, the pale of it near enough to the snow past the windows that she looked half made of it. Green eyes found him and warmed, and there was not a knife anywhere in the look. In this family that alone made her rarer than any talent.

"Look at you." She crossed the last of the distance and took him in, head to boot, the way she had on the landing when he first came home. "You walk into a mine a Prime and stroll back out an Ascend. And here I was, thinking I had a few good years on you yet."

"You still have the years." Trafalgar let the corner of his mouth go. "Only not the lead."

"Give it a season and I will not have that either, the pace you keep." Dry, but the pride under it was real, and she made no effort to hide it. "Truly. Well done. The mission, the core, all of it. You have earned a stretch of quiet, if this house ever lets a soul have one."

"That is the plan." He rolled his shoulder, the ache of the mountain living in it somewhere yet. "Home to Euclid. A few days flat on my back doing a great deal of nothing. After that I will see what the world has decided to set on fire."

That pulled a short laugh out of her. The humor thinned a breath later, and she said the thing she had come to say.

"Watch Rivena."

"That is my line, not yours." He held her eyes. "And it runs wider than her. A woman does not build a thing like that mine on her own. She has hands helping, and I would bet money on more than one of them wearing our own name. So watch her, yes. Watch the ones circling her harder. You stand closer to the fire than I do, Lysandra. Do not go careless because you happen to share her blood."

Something moved through her at that, brief and serious, and she dipped her head. "I hear you."

"Good." He let it stand, and tipped his chin at her. "And you? Father has you running errands, I take it."

"Errands." She sighed the word. "Here, there, wherever a problem is too small for Maeron and one Helgar cannot be trusted with. Missions, mostly." A wry tilt came into her voice. "And if the road proves kind, perhaps I finally cross paths with someone worth the trouble along the way."

"You? Meeting someone?" He angled his head at her. "You are the second heir of House Morgain. Crook one finger and you would have a line of suitors out the gate and halfway down the mountain."

"That is the very queue I want no part of." She flicked the idea away like lint off a sleeve. "A crooked finger and a row of men counting my father's soldiers behind their eyes. I want what you have. Someone met plainly, well off to the side of all this, a thing that grows on its own time because it chose to and not because a house drew up the papers." A rueful warmth crossed her. "Which leaves me taking pointers from my little brother, of all the indignities. I may even turn up at Euclid one of these days and ask the three of them how on earth they tolerate you. Go straight to the source."

"You would be welcome." He said it plainly, the way he said the few things he meant with the armor off. "Of everyone under this roof, Lysandra, you are the only one who would be. The door is yours whenever you want it, and no one else's."

Something in her face gave at that, quiet and glad. She closed the last step and pulled him into her arms, and for a breath the cold castle and the rot living inside it were somewhere else entirely, and it was only the two of them, the pair that had come out of this house able to stand each other.

"Go home," she said against his shoulder. "Rest. Before the world burns something down and hauls you back out to put it out."

She let him go. Trafalgar turned for the ship.

He crossed the last of the frozen ground to the landing shelf, where the black vessel sat with its wings half spread and Alfred somewhere aboard, no doubt already drafting a complaint about how long a report could possibly take. Behind him the fortress stood black and enormous against the white, packed with knives and quiet plots and a father who moved his own children across a board like stones. Ahead of him lay two days of open sky, and past that, Euclid.

Home. The one place in the world the word did any work in him at all. Mayla with the child coming, and Cynthia, and Aubrelle. A door that shut with the right people on the near side of it, and, for a few stolen days at least, nothing on the far side asking him to bleed for it.

"Try not to pitch yourself off the rail before I deliver you to your women," Alfred called from inside the hull, not bothering to look up. "I'd rather wash my hands of the whole business without having to scrape you off a mountainside first."

"No promises." Trafalgar set his boot on the bridge.

The wings stretched wide, the snow tore up around them in a blinding wall, and the mountain dropped away into its own fold of white. Ahead of the ship lay Euclid, and every last thing he had left waiting there.