Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

For a moment, Alpheo didn’t speak. He didn’t blink either. He just stared at the man he believed he knew everything about.

A slow silence stretched between them, and the clamor of the army behind faded into background noise, like the dull ringing after a blow to the head.

Alpheo’s face didn’t twist or scowl—it just stopped, like a clock forgetting how to tick. A stillness took him. His hands went slack on the reins, and his jaw hung slightly open. It was as if his brain had simply refused to accept what it had just heard.

He had known Jarza for seven years. Seven years. They’d first spoken through rusted iron bars, on opposite sides of a slaver’s cage, more bone than flesh. Every night, after the chains came off and the lashes cooled, they’d talked. They talked about everything—home, pain, dreams, death, what they’d eat if they ever saw a kitchen again. They bled together, fought side by side when taking back their freedom , kept each other sane. In a life designed to strip you of all connection, they had made one.

And now, after all of that, now, Jarza had dropped this—like it was nothing.

”You have a what?” Alpheo asked, voice low, disbelieving.

Jarza didn’t even flinch. ”A boy,” he repeated plainly. ”My son.”

Alpheo blinked slowly. His voice came quieter this time. ”Since when?”

Jarza tilted his head slightly, eyes squinting toward the distant hills like he was searching memory itself. ”Twelve years ago. He was two when they came for me . Debtors sold me off. I barely said goodbye.”

A beat passed.

Alpheo inhaled, then let out a breath like it had been lodged in his chest for weeks. He looked away, up at the cloudy sky, then back at his old friend. ”You—you’ve had a son this whole time?” he said, his voice sharp now, the disbelief finally bubbling over. ”And you never told me? Not once? Not when we were chained in the dark, not when we were shoulder-deep in mud and blood, not when I made you a lord and a general?

Jarza shrugged one shoulder. ”Didn’t seem important then.”

”Didn’t seem—” Alpheo bit off the words, jaw clenched. He looked off again, this time at nothing, his mind whirring through years of conversations, all the confessions they’d made, the broken truths whispered over fires or across tents. All of it, and not once had Jarza said he was a father.

”You could’ve told me,” Alpheo muttered, softer now, wounded more than angry. ’’I could have helped you’’

”I know,” Jarza said quietly.

They sat in silence for a few seconds, only the wind speaking between them, flapping cloaks and banner threads. The golden standard of the White Host shimmered in the distance.

Alpheo finally shook his head, eyes wide again with that same stunned expression. ”Gods, I have a nephew.”

Jarza gave a small smile. ”Probably taller than you by now.”

”And you haven’t seen him in a decade?”

”No,” Jarza said.

The army rolled on ahead and behind them, a tide of armor and pennants kicking dust into the spring air. Alpheo rode in silence for a long while, but his thoughts were anything but still. Jarza’s words echoed in his head like a cracked bell, off-key and hard to ignore.

He shook his head. ”I feel like you just told me I have two cocks.”

That got a slight snort from Jarza, but it vanished as quickly as it came.

”How the hell did you even care for him?” Alpheo asked, more serious now. ”You were a mercenary. Moving from battle to battle. Sleeping under trees and next to corpses more than in beds.Did you keep the boy at your side each time?”

Jarza’s voice came rough, low. ”You’d be surprised. It’s not as rare as you think. Mercenaries having kids, I mean. Some get a girl pregnant and skip town before the brat’s even got a heartbeat. Others... well, they try.”

He looked over at Alpheo, one brow raised. ”I tried.”

He turned his eyes back to the horizon, watching the banners flap in the wind. ”I gave the boy to a woman named Marla. Cook for our company. Gruff voice, arms like boiled ham, heart too soft for her own good. She’d lost two sons to war. Took mine like he was her own.”

Alpheo tilted his head. ”And you just... what? Paid her?”

”From every payday,” Jarza said. ”Every coin I made. Gave her enough to keep him fed, clothed. Told her to keep him warm through winter and dry through storm. She did. As long as I could pay her, she did.”

”And then what happened after your capture?”

Jarza gave a bitter little laugh, though there was no joy in it. ”I don’t know. I’d like to think she took him with her when the company broke up. Maybe found some small town where she could work a tavern hearth. Or maybe... maybe she dropped him in a ditch when the money ran dry. I don’t know. I’ll never do .”

He fell quiet, the clink of tack and armor filling the gap. Then he added, barely louder than the wind, ”I named him Dorian.”

Alpheo looked at him again, jaw tight. ”Well, I could have helped you find him. if you had only told me”

Jarza shrugged. ”And say what? That I had a bastard I left with a cook a decade ago and hoped he didn’t die during the first winter of my slavery? That the boy might be alive somewhere, or dead, or working in some butcher’s shop ? What would you have done, Alph? Scoured the world for every cook named Marla and every boy born in some nameless camp? I didn’t even know where to start.”

”I could’ve sent someone,” Alpheo insisted, frustrated. ” We have agents, riders—”

”No,not where I am from and certainly nothing that you can achieve with just a name” Jarza cut in, voice firmer now. ”No, you’ve had enough to carry. I made my peace with it. It was my weight to bear, not yours.”

Alpheo gritted his teeth, guilt gnawing at the corners of his chest. ”He might still be out there.”

Jarza gave a half-nod, but his eyes were far away. ”Maybe. Maybe not. Doesn’t change what is. I was taken by my debtors when he was barely two. Sold off like cattle. By the time I bought back my sword, half the world had changed around me.”

He breathed deep through his nose. ”Some men lose their sons to plague. Some to arrows. I lost mine to time. Same end.”

The silence between them thickened. The army still moved on, banners trailing like smoke.

Alpheo’s voice dropped. ”You deserved better.”

Jarza cracked a small smile. ”I had my share of better. A warm bed, a good drink, and a man foolish enough to call me brother.I got more than I deserved.”

Alpheo glanced at him.

”I don’t regret what I’ve had,” Jarza finished, ”and I won’t cry for what I lost.”

At that no one said anything.

The silence between them was once again companionable, until Jarza, his voice steady but laced with curiosity, tilted his head slightly and asked, ”What about your blood? Your real kin, I mean. Your parents.”

Alpheo’s gaze drifted off toward the horizon,not liking being the one now under questioning, but there was no wonder in his stare—just dust, memory, and the faint glint of old wounds beneath polished steel. Jarza didn’t press. He already knew the bones of it. Everyone close to Alpheo did. Sold into slavery for four silverii. Not even enough to buy a decent ox.

Still, he asked, ”Do you ever think of sending a rider back? Maybe not to knock at the door, but... to slit a few throats?”

Alpheo’s face didn’t change at first, just hardened like a blade cooling in water. He was quiet for a long while. The rhythm of hooves filled the pause like a drumbeat.

”I did,” he said at last. ”Of course I did.You think I am a saint?”

His voice was calm, too calm. ”Sent them in the first year I became prince, with the orders for them to bring them back to me . As soon as I had riders of my own, coin to pay them, and steel to lend their hands weight, I sent them”

Jarza glanced sideways, silent, listening.

”But fate, you see,” Alpheo continued, ”is a fickle whore. With one hand she gives—crowns, power, men who’d die for me—and with the other she takes with cruel timing.”

He paused, eyes distant, remembering.

”My village was struck by plague the year before the riders reached it. My mother, my father... gone. One of my brothers. Two sisters. All dead. Dust and rot and prayer.”

He laughed, but there was no mirth in it—only something dry and bitter, like ash between the teeth.

”They went quickly, they say. I would’ve taken longer. Far longer.”

Jarza didn’t answer for a time. Then, with a tilt of his chin, he asked, ”Still some siblings left though, right? You were the youngest of six.”

Alpheo nodded slowly. ”Three remains. And I feel nothing for them.”

He turned his head slightly, locking eyes with Jarza. ”No hate. No love. No debt. They are ghosts walking in the daylight—tied to me by blood, and nothing more.”

He looked away again, to the road, to the future always racing away from him.

”I won’t lift a finger to hurt them. But I won’t lift one to help them, either. I decided to let them live their hollow little lives, drink piss-warm beer in a nameless village, forget of the boy they sold off for coin, not knowing that he is now a prince. I’ll not punish them for the sins of our parents—but I’ll not reward them for breathing, either.”

His voice took on a sharper, almost lyrical cadence as if reciting an oath.

”Let them toil. Let their backs break in fields they’ll never own, their children forget them, and the world pass them by. That is the price of irrelevance. That is their inheritance.”

Jarza gave a slow, thoughtful grunt. ”Poetic.”

Alpheo smirked. ”Everything sounds poetic when you have to find meaning for your grief.”

There was silence between them again, but this time it was a colder one. Not cruel—just quiet, like the wind blowing through the bones of something long dead.

And with that, the two men kept riding, leaving behind not just a city, but ghosts neither of them could quite outrun.