Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

How cruel, that a man could not even have his own time to grieve , for the world, indifferent and insatiable, simply kept going.

Five days had passed since the battle, and still the plains reeked of blood and ash. The camp was quieter now, though the silence wasn’t peace, it was simply the byproduct of exhaustion of man that gave even more than their all.

The aftermath had been handled , the wounded tended, the dead burned, the prisoners gathered. Life, it seemed, had already decided to move on without him.

Of course, there had been incidents.

One of the Hounds had learned where the captured nobles were being held. The man had stolen a servant’s tray , dropped his armors and slipped inside the makeshift prison with a calmness that fooled everyone. It was only when the screaming began that anyone realized what he’d done.

By the time the guards forced the door of the cage open, two of the noblemen were on the ground clutching what remained of their ears, another howling where his nose had been. The Hound had stood there, drenched in someone else’s blood, calming look down as if he were gazing at a turd of his own making.

Alpheo had been told he laughed when he was asked why.

When they brought him before the prince, the man hadn’t begged or explained. He’d just said, ” I’ll pay the rest of my life if you allow me to get one more, if need be.”

Alpheo could not bring himself to punish him.

He’d withheld the man’s pay for two months and banished him to foraging duty ,a far cry from the vengeance the nobles, not only the prisoned one, demanded. But right now Alpheo was too tired and complacent to care.

If he were not a prince, Alpheo knew, if he were not watched by history and court and crown alike, he might have done worse to those prisoners himself.

Still , no god of sky, or sea, or dirt, would stop him from one day turning the Second Prince into a his own work.

All he needed was to get his hands on him.

But vengeance was a luxury he couldn’t afford , not yet. For now, duty called. Even hollowed by grief, he was still a prince. The men still looked to him. The war still waited.

They had won , Egil had died for that, that had to mean something.

So he stood beneath the white canopy of the command tent, while the Imperator offered his condolences.

Useless as they were, it was required of him

”My condolences for your loss,” he had said softly. ”I did not have the honor of knowing him well, but I know few men who would have pressed on even after such wounds. We owe our lives and our victory to your friend.”

Tyrios and Keval, the Imperator’s uncle, followed suit. Tyrios lowered himself onto a stool with a grimace ,his shoulder was still bandaged, a souvenir from when his horse had gone down during that monstrous charge.

”We shall build a monument in his honor, if you’d allow it,in this place” Tyrios murmured, voice roughened by pain and tiredness; they all were.

The Imperator’s eyes flicked toward Alpheo. ”It’s only right.”

But Alpheo barely heard them. He only saw flashes from that pyre.

The talk of monuments felt hollow.

Still, he nodded again. It was expected of him. Everything was expected of him.

The Imperator and his retinue, for all their rank and lands, knew the truth even if they would never say it aloud: without Alpheo’s White Army, they would have been annihilated.

Egil’s sacrifice had turned the tide , but it was Alpheo’s legions that had held it.

Even three times their number wouldn’t have saved the Imperator’s host if Alpheo’s men had broken.

The victory had done what six southern battles never could: it had carved the name of the White Army into every court and kingdom that had once mocked it as a rabble of peasants with spears.

From the salt-courts of the pirate lords, to the sandstone keeps of the Azanian princes, to the marble halls of the Southern Realms , now all would know of the White Army.

And though Alpheo did not yet realize it, that name baptized in the death of his dearest friend , would save his dream.

But for now, he was too hollow to feel anything of the glory and honor given to him.

He let his eyes travel over the Imperator’s tent. To call it luxurious would be to cheapen it; even the shadows here wore embroidery. Gold caught the light in tiny, imperious sparks. Rich carpets swallowed sound. The place smelled faintly of incense and old power. Alpheo was too hollow with fatigue to admire it. Right now the tent felt like everything it should not: a theatre in which men pretended calm while the world burned.

”I thank you for your condolences,” he said instead, voice flat. ”It is a hard time for my men. Egil was more than a vassal to me, more than a commander to them.” He let the words hang, then gave a tired exhale. ”I suppose we are here to talk about what comes next.”

They nodded. Tyros stepped forward, the old man’s face cut by the weather and the scar of worry. ”We have won a great thing these past days,” he said, as if rehearsing the line. ”But victory revealed more than we expected, but not unwanted. The Usurper’s hold here was thinner than we believed. ”

That did not suprise him much, just as he had received his surrender when his forces rolled around, who knew they wouldn’t do the same now the enemy was reaching them? Turncloaks were like water, if they wanted they could take all forms. If you were winning, all was good, the moment things turn sour, they are, however, the first to jump ship and swim ashore.

”So where does he go?” Alpheo asked. He already suspected the answer. Probably the only place he was sure would not turn to the enemy

Tyros did not keep him waiting. ”He is heading for the Fingers.’’

His first thought was not strategy or prudence. It was the old, cruder feeling of revenge.

”Can we catch him?”

Tyros’ face tightened. ”No. He has the lead. He moves faster. He has the shorter route and no garrisoned towns to slow him. We are still tying up the mess he left behind. We cannot hope to overtake him before he reaches the Fingers.”

The answer was expected and yet still unwelcomed, Alpheo had wanted blood. He had wanted to make an example. Instead he got the slow arithmetic of logistics and seasons.

He made a dry sound,with his mouth. ”It is late October,” he said. The words were practical, not lament. ”Winter is soon to come. If we spend the rest of the year chasing turncoats and burning small towns, by the time the snows melt we will be miles from the border you had. The Fingers are the gate. If he holds them through the winter, he can reset and strike again when the thaw comes.

Two years from now you could be fighting the same fight from worse ground. And then I admit, I do not know if I’ll be impeded from aiding you.This year it went like this, the next?Only gods know.”

Mesha looked at him, a boy in an emperor’s robes but with worry carved into his features like someone reaching too far into a cold well. Alpheo met his gaze steadily. He had the tiredness of a man who had lost friends and the impatience of one who wanted to stop losing more.

The boy did not hold the gaze for too long.

”The only objective that matters now,” Alpheo said slowly ignoring his ally, ”is the Fingers. ’’ He stopped for a moment finding his throat dry, he swallowed some saliva, but it didn’t work.

’’Take the Fingers and you choke the route from east to the Core. You deny any army the simple, safe march to the Eternal City. You force the Usurper to either fight you there and waste his armies instead of your garden with the cockroaches that laid there. Hold the Fingers by winter, and you do not have to doom yourselves to face invasion every time the enemy feels he can.”

He leaned forward, lowering his voice until it was almost private, even inside the leadership tent. ”We cannot afford to be sentimental. We cannot allow the court’s justice, or our rage, to scatter our strength. For now, sacrifice the itch for vengeance. Sacrifice the easy triumph over this county or that petty lord.If you wish their time will come in the future.’’

”Are you seriously proposing we offer them peace?” Keval asked.

Alpheo met him without heat, only a flat, hard calm. ”Why not?” he said. ”Look at the facts. We cannot crack the Fingers with our rear still crawling with rebels. The prince is falling back; his panic has hollowed out the countryside and left garrisons thin. That leaves the roads, the houses, their levies ripe to be reclaimed. If we spend the next weeks hunting petty vengeance, we hand him the time and the space to stitch his losses together. We’ll be fighting on two fronts next year: the enemy outside and our own mutinous provinces behind us.”

He leaned forward, fingers splayed on the table. ”We need men to throw at those walls. I will not, for obvious reason, squander my best troops on partisan reprisals nor throw them against rebels standing on high ground.

Let us take the traitor’s levies, their town guards, their conscripts , whatever they’ll part with and hurl them at the fingers. Once it falls we hold the strategic choke; then you can meet out justice as if you were the Great Father himself, you’ll find it easy to impart from a position of overwhelming strength and in secret. If you wish so”

He let the point hang, then added, quieter, ”Right now the lords of the East think they have means to turn around next year. We either give them cause and means to return,and give the pretender room to breathes, or we make sure the debacle of today does not repeat itself...”

He sighed, a long, tired sound that settled into the canvas of the tent. His eyes dropped to the ground as if the dirt would answer better than any man.

Tyros’s expression tightened, but before he could speak, the Imperator raised his head slowly.

”My grandfather told me something similar on his deathbed,I did not know he striked true so precisely then.” Mesha said, voice small but steady. The name of the old man was not needed to make the lesson sting.

Alpheo let the Imperator’s recall land between them.

The boy then lifted his eyes and met his uncles’. ”His grace has lost much more than us today; we have no excuse to sacrifice our future for the desires of revenge,when he himself is looking at the bigger picture. I have no excuse not to trade strategy for rancor. Not now.As we all know I am young, I have a full life ahead of me where I can impart my revenge over those traitors. I can wait a few years.”

He nodded to the tired prince

’’We shall heed your plan your Grace. We shall march to the Fingers and bring it back once anew.’’