SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 771: What Happened

Aubrelle folded her hands in her lap, and the room turned its attention to her the way it always did when she chose to hold it.

"My father called me home," she began. "Officially, for the border. Our land sits close to a great deal of movement, and lately there's been more of it than anyone likes."

"Officially," Trafalgar echoed. "And unofficially?"

"There was a family gathering as well. Formal. The whole house in one room, a few words traded with the neighboring lines, the sort of thing that has to happen now and again to remind everyone we're still on speaking terms." A dry curve touched her mouth. "You know how families are."

"I know." He tilted his head. "Should I have been there for that? I'm bound to your house now. If your people are sitting down to talk, I'd have thought the husband might be expected to sit with them."

"It wasn't anything that important." She said it lightly, meaning to close the door, and it closed. "Ceremony, mostly. If it had needed you, you'd have had a summons of your own. I wouldn't leave you out of something that counted."

He let it go, though not without filing it somewhere. Aubrelle rarely wasted a word, and rarely spent one to make a thing sound smaller than it was without a reason of her own. If she wanted the gathering left alone, he'd leave it alone. For now.

"The border is the real reason I was gone a month," she went on. "That part I can tell you, because it's finished, and because you of all people should hear it." Her fingers found Pipin where he'd hopped to the arm of her chair, smoothing his feathers without looking, because she couldn't. "You know how our house works. We don't line a wall with soldiers. We keep eyes. Bound eyes, everywhere it counts, and they see things a patrol would walk straight past." It was what the Rosenthals were, under all the fine manners: the foremost summoners alive, a house that watched and fought and worked through bound creatures the way other families did through steel. If something moved wrong near their border, the border felt it.

"Summons watching the roads," Cynthia said. "That's how you'd catch movement no one else would."

"Exactly that." Aubrelle nodded. "And they caught it. Some of the minor houses near our border have been moving things they shouldn't. Quietly. In loads small enough that no single shipment would raise a flag, spread over enough hands that no single name would either." Her head turned toward Trafalgar. "Artifacts. Ingredients. The sort of materials a person only needs if they're building something they don't want anyone to see."

The table had gone quiet again, but it was a different quiet now, the one that comes when two pieces of a thing start to fit together.

Trafalgar had gone very still. "Ingredients," he repeated. "What sort?"

"That's the part we couldn't pin down all the way. Whoever's buying has been careful, and careful people don't leave an easy trail." She paused. "But Pipin found the routes. Old paths, half-forgotten ones, running through places no honest trade has used in years. And more than once, presences on them that didn't want to be seen. Nothing we could catch and hold. No name we could drag in front of a council and call proof." Her voice stayed even, but there was an edge folded into the calm of it. "A pattern, though. A direction to it."

Trafalgar set his cup down slowly.

He didn't say it out loud, not with Mayla already worn thin and the whole point of the night being to feel like home for once. But the two halves of it sat there in front of him, plain as anything. Someone gathering alchemical materials in secret, through hands too small to notice and roads too old to watch. And a mine turned into a weapon out of alchemical work, by someone who walked into Morgain land like they held the deed to it.

He didn't believe in that many coincidences.

"It's the same thing," he said at last, low. "Or near enough that I'd be a fool to call it chance. Whatever hit that mine and whatever your family's been chasing, they're drinking from the same well."

Aubrelle's expression didn't change, but she let out a slow breath, as though she'd carried that thought the whole way home and could finally put it down beside someone who saw the same thing in it.

"That's what I was afraid you'd say." Her voice was soft. "It's why I wanted you to hear it tonight, and not in a week, once it's grown teeth."

For a moment no one spoke. The food had gone half-cold on their plates, the warmth of the reunion shoved sideways by the weight of what sat beneath it.

Then Mayla, of all of them, laid her hand flat on the table.

"All right." She said it gently, but there was iron under the gentleness, the plain mercy of a woman who knew exactly how much a room could carry in a single night. "That's enough of it. All of it. Mines and materials and old roads, they'll be there in the morning, and so will your heads, the better for a night of sleep." Her eyes moved over the three of them, warm and tired and certain. "Trafalgar came home today. Aubrelle came home tonight. I am not spending the first evening the four of us have been under one roof in a month talking about who wants us dead. It can wait for sunrise. It will have to."

Trafalgar looked at her, at the set of her jaw and the hand resting on the swell of her belly, and felt his mouth twitch.

"You heard the lady of the house," he said. "Business is closed."

And with that the weight lifted off the table, and the night was theirs again.

Cynthia was already reaching for the wine. "Good. Then pass me that, and Trafalgar can finally prove whether this food is half as good as he's been telling us it is."