Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

”Isn’t that your fifth cup? The pond is barely thirty steps fr—” Jarza began, voice floating somewhere above Alpheo’s head, until his eyes narrowed, then widened. ”Hold on... that’s red. Where in the frozen depths did you find wine?”

”Well, my towering friend, the same way we’ve acquired every blessing in our miserable lives, from the air in our lungs to the freedom in our chests. By luck.”

He threw a gaze at Alpheo,and smiled.

His hair, long and blond, though it had spent most of his life a filthy, matted black, caught the firelight like pale wheat. A miracle born from that hidden pond they’d stumbled upon: water cold enough to bite the bones, clean enough to feel like rebirth. They’d bathed, scrubbed their canteens, and for the first time since breaking their chains, actually looked like free men.

Two weeks of freedom.Two weeks of stolen air.It felt like they had lived and died entire lives in that span.

”So, while we were busy hoarding every scrap from those bastards’ camps,” Clio said, tone hard but eyes warming, ”you set off to hunt for Ambrosia?”

Several eyebrows climbed skyward at that, even Asag, who rarely reacted to anything and was silent on those days, turned his head in mild disbelief.

”Ambrosia?” Egil scoffed with a grin so broad it could have thawed the whole desert night. ”We’re using noble words now? Where’d you even hear that? Our masters were piss-soaked soldiers, not storytellers.”

Clio’s ears reddened. ”Actors,” he muttered. ”A troupe came to my village once. When I was... well, smaller.Heard the word and it stuck”

They laughed, loudly, freely, the kind of laugh that rattled something loose in the chest. Then they cornered Egil until he surrendered the cup, holding it out like an offering. Jarza took a hefty swallow, grimaced at the burn, and passed it on. Alpheo followed suit, savoring the sting across his tongue, before sending it along the circle.

”Were you planning to finish it alone?” Jarza asked.

”Just testing it,” Egil replied. ”I was saving the rest for the right moment to share.Cannot allow my honor to give you a drink of dubious quality.”

”I think we are two weeks too late for that special moment,” Asag murmured, smile faint but still present.’’We have held our freedom long enough to become unsurprising.’’

”We were too busy running for our lives then,” Egil said with a shrug. ”Not a great time to sit around drinking. Not that I’d have complained. Live fast, die young, that’s our way.”

”That explains your face,” Jarza muttered.

Egil chuckled. ”And yet the ladies still swoon for me.Or at least they did” He lost himself in thought ’’Gotta look see to that when we stop at the next city...I hope I haven’t lost my touch..’’

”We do need a reason if we are to celebrate,” Asag said at last, voice low but steady, eyes drifting toward the quiet glimmer of the pond. ”Maybe... maybe we toast on finding water?”

He winced when Egil suddenly shot to his feet, a viper rising out of the sand.

”Our silent friend is right!” he declared, slapping Asag’s shoulder hard enough to sting, causing the man who was to be known as the Mountain of Aracina to blush. ”This day should be special. And since we’ve no whores, no feast, no bards, and no damned reason to celebrate... I say we make a blood pact!”

Alpheo blinked. ”Where in all the hells did that come from?”

”Brotherhood!” Egil proclaimed. ”Where I come from, there are brothers of blood and brothers of honor. We can’t be the first, so we’ll be the second.”

Before any of them could object, he bit into his finger, grinning even as the skin split. He knelt, dug a small hollow in the sand with his thumb, and let the blood drip into it. Then, looking up, he waited expectantly for them to do the same.

Jarza sighed and sliced a thin cut across his fingertip, letting a line of red fall beside Egil’s.Clio and Asag followed, solemn, almost reverent.

Alpheo hesitated.

Not because he feared pain.But he believed cutting himself when they were so dirty wasn’t the best of thing to do.

Still, peer’s pressure was a bitch.

So he knelt and bit into his own skin and let his blood join theirs.

The others erupted in cheers.It was so strange...they had not even cheered so loud when they escaped their master’s leash.

They spoke then, the expected words, voices joining under the open night sky:

Never betray.Fight together.Die for one another if fate demanded.

Just words you’d find on any oath.

Alpheo had known then that promises meant nothing to the world. Chains broke, oaths broke, men broke. But even so, he couldn’t deny the strange warmth that flickered in his chest when his voice joined theirs.

He was so young then.So stupidly hopeful.A boy with sand in his boots and a future in his eyes.

Now... there was only the man the world had carved from him. And he was lacking in all of that he had sworn that night.

The screams of dying men finally tore him loose from the memory, dragging him back into the world where he now belonged,a worse world.

He lowered his gaze to the soldier sprawled a few steps from his boots, a man whose breath came in erratic gasps like a bellows with a broken lung. Two arrows protruded from him,one jutting from the shoulder like a branch of a dead tree, the other buried deep between the ribs where Alpheo knew it had either torn through the liver or pierced the stomach. Judging from the way the man clutched at his side, red spittle spilled down his chin, Alpheo wagered the arrow had kissed both.

The fellow writhed in the trampled green, staining the grass with a wide smear of crimson mud while he bellowed every cry a mortal man might utter in the last miserable beats of a failing heart. He pleaded for his mother, cursed the gods by every name he could recall, begged them in the next breath for mercy and rescue, then cursed again as if the godly sky were little more than a stubborn mule refusing to move.

Please don’t tell mother.

What in the cold void did that mean to Egil...Who was Enkilae?Why a goat?Why then, on the edge of death?What meaning did that carry for him, more than the decade of brotherhood between them and he had lost to a beast...

So many questions, and no man who could offer answers.

In that, at least, Alpheo felt an unexpected kinship with the wretch. The dying man had no answers to give, and Alpheo sought none, for he no longer cared whether those last frantic pleas were prayers, memories, or nonsense from a shattered mind.

Had the man been one of Alpheo’s own, one of the Black Stripes, one of the sons of Yarzat,he would have already been hauled off the grass, carried at a sprint to the physicians who stood waiting in the rear lines. His men would have been bound, stitched, drugged, and dragged back from death’s grip with oils and powders that only the elite could afford.

But these?These were not Stripes.These were not Yarzati.These were the scraps the traitors brought to Mesha when they slithered back into his shadow, nothing more than fodder to soak the walls with their blood and fill the trenches with their corpses.

Alpheo felt no kinship to any of it.

The assault bled around him, crawling across the first wall of the Fingers like a tide made of shrieks and splintered bone. Hundreds pressed against the stone incline, laboring under a rain of quarrels, rocks, and boiling oil hurled down by defenders who held the higher ground with all the calm and cruelty only men could muster against other men.

Bodies tumbled backwards, crushing those behind them. Shields split under hammering stones. Spears caught men in the throat or jaw and pinned them to the earth like specimens in some cruel collection.

Alpheo watched arrows arc down from the parapets in perfect, coordinated volleys that shredded the climbing masses. Men threw ladders onto the walls only for them to be shoved away, sending entire bundles of soldiers crashing back into the mud.

The Fingers stood untouched, unscarred, unbothered by the screams beneath them.The attackers died like cattle driven into butchery.

He was so lost in the spectacle before him that he barely noticed the heavy steps crunching through the grass behind him. Only when a familiar shadow leaned over his shoulder did the world regain its shape.

”Our allies are having a meeting,” Jarza murmured, his voice unusually subdued for a man of his size, ”They are waiting for the victor of the field.”

Alpheo turned, slowly, as though tearing himself away from a painting he despised yet could not stop staring at. He looked at Jarza for a long, quiet stretch of time, saying nothing.

Alpheo thought then, not for the first time since Egil, that he did not deserve this friend, not anymore.

”Egil was the victor of that field,” Alpheo finally answered, voice low, brittle in places he no longer tried to hide. ”I just reaped what he sowed.What right do I have for such acclaim”

Jarza nudged him lightly with the toe of his boot, a gesture that once would have ended in a playful wrestle in the sand but now carried only worry. ”Would he want you to think that?”

”Our wants and unwants,” Alpheo replied, exhaling as though the words cost him something, ”have as much power over truth as children have over lions. Truth does not bend for grief, nor for memory, nor for what a dead man might wish me to believe.

I deal in facts, and here is one: I give two bloody shits about their meetings. I could make a statement by pissin’ on it.”

He let his eyes drift back to the field, to the corpses that lay scattered like discarded tools. ”How unjust it was, for a man like him to die for the mistakes of a few. I shudder to imagine lands where the fate of nations is decided by betrayers and cowards, and yet here we stand, fighting for a home that is not ours. Egil died for the sins of men not worth his breath.It is their cowardice that brought that battle. What right do they have to summon me as If I were their servant?They should bow in thanks for my presence here, not mingle in complaint and summons.”

A cold quiet followed. Jarza did not attempt to soothe him with arguments he didn’t believe. Instead, the giant simply placed a hand on Alpheo’s shoulder, the gesture gentle despite the size of his calloused palm.

”They are waiting for us,and we both know that is not you talking,you’ll come to regret it if you don’t go. We all have the same aim. As long as that rock is no longer standing against us, we can forget about them and go home” Jarza said softly.

Alpheo snorted. Home, somehow that word felt distant once more.

”Do they truly have so little trust in their own troops? The assault hasn’t failed yet.They could at least have the decency to wait for the horn.”

Jarza angled his chin toward the field again. ”Look again.”

Alpheo turned just in time to see the advance falter completely, the mass of men peeling away from the walls in disorderly clumps, dragging comrades, stumbling over the dying, screaming at one another as the defenders above loosed another volley that sent chaos rippling through the ranks.

There was no need for any horn to make it happen, curious....

The retreat had already begun.

”Ah,” Alpheo muttered, watching the collapse unfold with weary eyes, ”Just in time. I suppose...you may lead the way to our shit-faced allies.”