For a breath the whole crowd held where it was, caught between hope and dread, not one of them daring to be the first to guess.
Gerhardt broke first, and came forward, and the words tumbled out of him half in relief and half in fear. "Oh, my lord. You're all right." His old eyes ran over the blood and the exhaustion and found the man whole beneath them. "Thank the deeps, I'm glad to see you on your feet. How did it go down there?"
Trafalgar dragged in a breath of the cold air and gave it to them plain, because they'd earned plain.
"It's done. All of it." He let that reach the back of the crowd before he went on. "You can go down and get to your work now. There shouldn't be a single thing left alive in that mountain that wants you dead." A tired, dry edge crept into it. "But if something slipped off into a side tunnel while I wasn't looking, you'll have the captain down there with you. Nothing's getting past him."
It took a breath to land, and land it did, all at once.
