The old man didn't answer.
He turned the mug slow in his hands, and for a while the only sound was the ship breathing around them, the wind sliding along the hull somewhere far off.
Whatever Trafalgar had braced for, it wasn't this. Alfred always had something to say. A joke, a jab, a fresh complaint about his knees. The quiet coming off him now put ten years on his face in the space of a breath.
"You know," Alfred said at last, and he wasn't looking at Trafalgar anymore, only at the middle of the table, "I've never told you a single thing about your father. Not once, in all the years I've been hauling you across the sky." He let it sit. "Your real one, I mean. Not the one whose name you wear."
Trafalgar went still.
