SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 766: By Name

"So the finest warship in Morgain skies, and the stubborn old goat who built her, are both sitting in my corner." Trafalgar let the weight of the story move through him and out the far side, and did what he always did with things too big to hold. He put a dry edge on it. "Strategically, that's an asset most lords would trade a limb for. And I had it the whole time without knowing."

Alfred snorted. "There he is. I bare my soul to the boy and he starts tallying his assets."

"You'd think less of me if I didn't." Trafalgar's mouth curved, but the humor had a floor under it this time, and he held the old man's gaze a beat longer than he usually allowed. "For what it's worth. Thank you. And I don't mean for the ship."

Alfred waved it off, the way a man bats away a thing that's caught him somewhere soft. "Don't turn sentimental on me now. One of us going misty in here is plenty, and it won't be me." He levered himself upright off the seat, one hand braced against the table, his joints filing their usual complaint. "Anyway. It's got late."

"It's the same grey out that window it's been for hours."

"Late enough for a man my age. Which, if I've got the tale straight, you've spent years insisting is somewhere the wrong side of a fossil." He rolled his shoulder and winced. "So I'll take the rumor's advice for once and go rest these ancient bones before you talk what's left of them into dust."

Trafalgar got to his feet as well. And here, at the door of the little room, he did a thing he almost never did.

He didn't reach for old man, or sack of bones, or any of the dozen worn names the two of them threw around to keep the ground easy under their feet.

"Goodnight, Alfred."

The old pilot stopped with one hand on the frame. Something crossed his face, brief and worn and glad.

"Rest, Trafalgar."

It was the first time in longer than either of them could have counted that they'd used the other's name, both at once, in the same breath. Neither pointed at it. A few things lost their weight the moment you named them out loud, and this was one worth leaving exactly where it stood.

Then Alfred was off toward the helm, grumbling about ballast and headwinds and the thousand small tyrannies of flying a ship this size, and Trafalgar was alone with the hum of her and the grey sliding past the glass.

He lowered himself back down by the window. He had walked onto this ship certain he knew the whole of the old man he'd spent the flight bickering with, and he would be walking off it knowing he had never once had the full measure of him.

Every needling trip, every groan about his knees, every time Alfred had turned up out of nowhere at precisely the hour things went wrong, and beneath all of it a promise made to his father in a storm nineteen years gone. It reframed a great deal, and he let it, and kept it behind his teeth, because that was the courtesy the thing was owed.

The hours went by the way hours did up here, unmarked, the white beneath the hull giving way by slow degrees to land with more colour worked into it. Trafalgar spent most of them at one of the tall windows, turning nineteen years of a story he'd only just been handed over and over in his head, until the ship tipped into its long descent and the thing he'd been half-waiting for climbed up out of the country ahead.

Euclid.

His city. And every time he came home to it, it had grown a little further into itself.

He could still call up what it had been the day they'd first put it in his hands. A tired frontier hold clinging to the lip of a Gate, half its districts standing hollow, its people ground down to the plain work of lasting one more winter.

The place spread out below him now shared its bones and almost nothing past that. The walls ran higher and thicker, lined with more soldiers than the old garrison had ever fielded, the same stone that had once barely turned a dragon away now raised to turn away anything at all.

The Gate itself sat black at the city's edge, the old wound in the world that had made Euclid necessary to begin with, and along the wall above it a man could find the stretch where Mordrek had died holding the thing back.

Trafalgar had rebuilt that length higher than any other. Beyond the old quarter, whole districts had gone up where there'd been frozen mud the last time, roofs packed close and grey and smoking against the cold, the streets below them moving with people who had somewhere to be and the means to get there.

Caravans stood drawn up in the trade quarter that no merchant would have risked hauling this far out in the lean years. No longer a town holding its breath, but a city that breathed on its own.

At the heart of it, past the markets and the muster yards, his own mansion sat broader than he'd left it that first time and every time since, its walls reinforced, its gardens widened out, no longer a great house waiting on a lord who never came but a home with someone living in every wing of it.

Smoke climbed from its chimneys. Lamps had been lit against the early dark, warm little squares of gold scattered through the grey, and down there people were going about their evening as though the world were a safe place to do it in, which under his roof it was, because he had spent two years making it so.

His people, his land, his name over the gate, and everything beneath it his to answer for.

Something in his chest let go that had been fisted tight since the castle. Whatever waited out there in the dark of the family, whatever Rivena was building in the dark and Valttair steering them all toward, none of it lived here. Here was the one thing he'd built with his own two hands that had only ever grown better for being touched.

The vessel banked, its great wings tilting against the wind, and slid down toward the mansion grounds. The garden swung up to meet them. Grass began to flatten in a wide ring under the force of the descent, branches thrashing, loose snow torn off the ground and thrown wide.

And through the glass, on the landing ground below, Trafalgar saw them already gathered, waiting for him to come down out of the sky the way they must once have watched him leave it.

At the front of the small knot of figures stood one he could have picked out of any crowd in any life he had ever lived, both hands folded over the curve of her stomach, rounder now than the morning he had left. Whatever these last weeks had loaded onto his back, the whole of it went quiet at the sight of her.