SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 768: The Fourth Place

The kitchen was the one room in the mansion where nobody argued with him.

Trafalgar had sent the staff off an hour ago, rolled his sleeves to the elbow, and taken the whole thing over the way he took over most things he cared about, quietly and completely.

The same hands that had put a blade through an Apex queen a week gone moved down a row of vegetables now, the knife going quick and even, and there was something in the plain work of it that emptied his head the way nothing at the castle ever had.

He'd always been able to cook. Long before the Academy handed him an elective and he took the one that let him stand at a stove instead of in a lecture hall, he'd known his way around a kitchen, carried over from a stretch of his life he never talked about with anyone.

The Academy had only refined it. Tonight it was a shoulder braised slow enough to slide off the bone, a dark reduction he'd been building since the afternoon, roasted roots pulled at their sweetest, and bread he'd set to rise before he had even finished unpacking. Overkill, for three. He'd decided he didn't care.

Mayla had claimed a stool at the counter, hands laced over the swell of her belly, watching him work with the easy contentment of a woman who meant to be fed well and knew it was coming. Cynthia leaned against the far wall with a cup of something warm, offering commentary she knew he wouldn't take.

"You're using the good pan," Cynthia noted. "You never use the good pan for us."

"I never have a week like the last one to make up for." He tipped the pan, and the meat folded over in a hiss of butter and dark spice. "Consider it an apology I've no intention of saying out loud."

"That's the nearest to sorry we'll ever get out of him," Mayla told Cynthia, amused. "Take it. He means it more than he'll let on."

"I always mean it." He reached for the herbs. "I just mean a great many things at once, and most of them are unprintable."

Cynthia's mouth twitched despite herself.

He worked in near quiet after that, the good kind, the sort a house only earns once the people in it have stopped bracing for the next bad thing.

The smell built and thickened, meat and butter and something sweet running under it, filling the kitchen and drifting out into the halls, and by the time he began to plate, both of them had gone silent with plain hunger.

He made it good. Because he wanted, for one night, to set something in front of the people he came home for that told them, without him having to say a word of it, how glad he was to be standing in his own kitchen and not on a mountain packed with the dead.

He carried three plates to the long table.

Only three. He looked at the fourth place a moment before he let it go. Aubrelle had been gone the better part of a month, called back to Rosenthal over some quiet trouble at the border her family wanted her eyes on, and the house had felt the gap of her the whole time, a room with one lamp left unlit.

"Sit," he said. "Before it goes cold and takes all my effort with it."

Mayla lowered into her chair with a small grateful sound, a hand bracing her back. Cynthia dropped into the seat across and reached straight for the bread, because Cynthia waited on no ceremony she hadn't personally called for.

He'd barely pulled out his own chair when a flicker of pale crossed the window.

The doors at the end of the hall swung wide on their own draft, and something small and pale swept into the room low over the table, a rush of feathers and a soft beat of wings, banking once around the lamps before it came to rest on the back of the empty fourth chair.

Pipin.

The little bird folded his wings and took the three of them in one by one with small crimson eyes, bright and knowing, a presence crammed into that slight body far too large for the size of him. He loosed a single bright chirp, the sound of a herald who found the announcing beneath him and did it regardless.

Cynthia set the bread back down. "Well. Look who scouted ahead."

"Hello, Pipin." Mayla's whole face opened. She put out a hand, and the bird let two fingers smooth the feathers at his breast, leaning into it the way he only ever did with her. "You could have knocked."

Trafalgar was already on his feet.

He didn't need the doors, or footsteps, or a word from anyone. Pipin came before her, always had, going ahead into every room to take its measure so that when she stepped through, she stepped through already knowing it. If the bird was here, perched and preening and pleased with himself, she was only a breath behind him. Home at last, a month of the border and her family's troubles finally at her back.

"She's home," he said, and something moved through his chest he didn't bother to name. A month. It had no business feeling as long as it had.

He left the food steaming on the table and went to meet her.

She was already in the corridor when he reached it, her cane tapping light and unhurried against the stone, that quiet grace about her that a month away and a hard road back had done nothing to wear thin. She'd left the blindfold off.

The old scar ran pale and unhidden across her eyes, and beneath it her red eyes drifted, unfocused, fixed on nothing and taking in everything through the bird already sweeping back down the hall to land on her shoulder.

Her head turned toward him, guided by Pipin's sight, and her mouth curved before he'd made a sound.

"Trafalgar." Her voice was soft, and worn from the road, and glad. "You cooked something good I'm sure. I could smell it from the door."