Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

The morning was birthed in a cold, grey silence. Basil was shaken awake before the first hint of light touched the canopy, the air so frigid it felt like a piece of ice upon his lungs and his skin.

It was cold. Eerily so.

Few words were exchanged. He was cinched into his hauberk, the cold iron links biting through his tunic, and led to his sorrel.

They rode for a quarter of a day, a small knot of shadows cutting through the mist. His father led the way, his back a wall of black plate that refused to bend. Basil wanted to ask where they were going but the look on his father’s face was a locked door.

As they rode, the world changed. The lush, vibrant green gave way to a landscape of black. They crossed a ridge into fields that were no longer earth, but nothing other than black soot and silver ash.

This was the land of Lord Damaris, who had seen his wealth put to the torch so that the Bastion might stand. Basil stared at the charred remains of what must have been a granary, its skeletal timber reaching upward like the fingers of a buried giant.

This land was broken. It would take a long time to wash the salt and blood from this soil. He thought of the hundreds of men who had died , not all had retreated back in land leaving behind all of their lives, some had remained and were left carved open like pigs unburied.

It was as brave as it was foolish.Not to desert the hardwork of a lifetime they lost their lives.

There must have been dozens of such story. And yet he would hear none of them.

Not long after they reached the crest of a high, treeless ridge. His father pulled his reins, and Basil did the same, his breath hitching in his throat.

Down below, snaking along a nasty, rain-slicked road of mud and muck, was the thing his father wanted him to see.

At first, it looked like a great, sickly grey worm, stretching from one horizon to the other, undulating slowly through the treeless flats.

But as Basil’s eyes sharpened, the ”worm” resolved into men.

The Great League.

Or what remained of that idea.

When they had crossed into Yarzat three months ago, they must have been a sight to bankrupt the sun, shining plate, vibrant silks, and ten thousand and two lances catching the light as they trampled the Yarzat grass. But the army Basil looked upon now was a wretched, battered thing.It had just finished rains and the banners were furled and wet so they did not even flutter from the strong wind.

They would have looked better caked in filth, Basil resolved.

The rhythmic thud of their march was no longer even a thunder; it was a wet, dragging shuffle.

The road was narrow, hemmed in by bogs of deep, sucking mire that forced the columns into a thin, vulnerable line.

”We could have broke them here,” Basil whispered above the howling wind ”One charge down this slope... we could cut the worm in half. They wouldn’t even have room to turn their horses and men”

He looked at his father, expecting to see the Fox readying the pounce. But Alpheo remained still, his hands resting lightly on his pommel. He was a man of his word, however bitter the taste.

Maybe It was better to let ten thousand enemies walk out of the house today than to kill five thousand and have the rest barricaded in your cellar tomorrow.

Prudence was a heavier burden than bravery, and yet sometimes it had to be used, no matter how fould that hand was to grasp.

”Never forget the sight of a proud man’s retreat. It is more instructive than his victory.”

Who was that said that?Was it one of his uncles?Maybe it was his father?

He could not recall, but he had heard it somewhere, he knew he had and recently even.

Without answer he turned his gaze from the retreating army to the man beside him.

It was a strange thing.

As the years would pass, the sight of the Great League trudging through the mire like a wounded beast would not be the image that anchored itself most firmly in his mind of that day. Instead, it would be the profile of his father, silhouetted against the weeping autumn sky.

Their eyes met, and in that moment, Basil saw a storm he wasn’t yet equipped to name.

There was hate there, certainly, but it wasn’t the simple, hot spark a man carries for a rival. It was different than that.

Perhaps it was the hate of a man forced into a compromise he loathed? A man who had to swallow the bitter gall of mercy when every fiber of his being screamed for justice and revenge?

These men, now dragging their broken banners through the mud, would have cheered to see his father’s head on a pike. They would have laughed as they put the torch to his life’s work.

And yet he had been forced to spare them. Did he hold hate for himself mayhaps?Hate that he was not strong enough to truly oppose his enemy?

They had won...didn’t they?So why did he appear so angry?So hurt?So sad?

Son looked at father, and once again, Basil saw the contradictions that made the man. He was a titan of iron, yet he was riddled with the insecurities of a sovereign who knew how fragile his world truly was.

He was the great hull of a ship riddled with hole where the eye could not see.

A man capable of immense, tender love for his children and friend, yet he was a vessel filled to the brim with a cold venom. He was great in the eyes of the world that he built, yet he felt small under the weight of the lives he had traded for time.

Twelve thousand spears had crossed the border, and they hadn’t even managed to crack a single castle.

Even the legends of old, the stories of the Red Emperor would have marveled at the Peasant Prince of Yarzat .

Vivrius may had smashed barbarian hordes and laid the foundation for the Romelian Empire, but even he had done so with legions at his back and the wealth of the Fingers in his coffers.

His father had broken an empire of princes with nothing but shadow, stone, and the sheer, stubborn will of a man who refused to break.

That was much more impressive for Basil than what the Red had done.

So deep was he in the thicket of his own thoughts that the world only returned to him when his father’s gauntlet came down upon his shoulder.

The prince had spoken, but the words had been lost to the wind.

”I said I have given you ample time,” his father repeated, his voice as steady and unrelenting as the march of the army below. ”Do you have the answer?”

Basil knew the game. His father had done this with Ratto too, tossing out questions like hooks to see what the mind would reel in. Ratto had once whispered that the Prince often gave the wrong questions entirely, just to see what kind of architecture a man could build out of a lie.

He had envied him when he admitted that, and even hated him for some time.Envious of the attention he had given him when he was a boy.

”I did not bring you with me to watch mindlessly,” Alpheo said, his horse shifting beneath him. ”Was it a mistake to let you witness this? I brought you through the parley to learn. Were you asleep or were you awake?”

”Awake, Father.”

”Prove it. That parlay was filled with deceit.

Men lie.They lie to gain, they lie to swindle, and sometimes they lie simply because the truth is too heavy to carry.Sometimes just because they like to lie.

It is inseparable from mankind, as long as mankind exists deceit and lies will too.

You must learn to weave them, Basil, but more importantly, you must learn to tear them open. Nibadur lied with every breath, but I placed a lie of my own among the stones. Tell me, where was my falsehood?Were you awake only to our enemy’s words or even my own?”

Alpheo turned his horse, setting a slow, rhythmic pace back toward the camp. He had given Basil miles of silence to ruminating, and now his patience was fraying like an old rope. When Basil hesitated, the Prince acted.

”Where did I lie, Basil? Answer me!”

”The prisoner!” Basil blurted out.

His father’s expression didn’t shift. No nod, no spark of pride. Just a cold, expectant silence. Did I miss the mark? Basil wondered, his heart hammering.

”You lied about the prisoner.. about Latio. You told Nibadur you would saw the head from his shoulders if he refused the accord. You wouldn’t have done it. Even if the Habadian had turned his back and ridden away, that boy would have kept his head.”

Alpheo exhaled a sharp plume of mist from his nose, a sound that could have been a scoff or a prompt. ”Is that so? And why wouldn’t I? I promised my ally that, the boy was the key to his victory. Are you accusing me of not being a man of my word?”

Doubt gnawed at Basil’s heart, was he wrong?No, he was not.

”Because you do not want the war in Kakunia to end!”

A sudden gust of wind sent a shower of orange leaves dancing between them, one of them catching for a moment on Alpheo’s black pauldrons before fluttering into the mud.

”Incomplete,” Alpheo barked. ”Give me reasons.Expand.Are you going to built a home withoout pillars?”

”Because this has been too expensive,” Basil said, his voice gaining strength as the logic locked into place. ”Our march was short, yet we have bled for every mile. Our trade is a ghost, our merchants are afraid to sail, and much of our fields are ash.

You’ve had to empty the treasury to repay Lord Damaris for his sacrifice and the construction of the Bastion. We have suffered fiscal ruin and material rot. We spent a fortune to prepare for a campaign that isn’t even truly over. The prince of Habadia could not see that, but I can.”

Basil looked at the blackened horizon, then back to his father.

”If the war in Kakunia ends now, the Princes will simply turn their eyes back to us in the spring. You don’t want peace in the south; you want a fire in someone else’s house. You want the next war fought on Kakunian soil, away from our crops and our people. You want to spare Yarzat further harm and keep that Merelao indebted to us, fighting a war that bleeds our enemies while we rebuild.

You needed Latio alive as a lure, not a corpse.If he were dead then the war would have ended too shortly, giving the chance for Niabdur to focus on us since Kakunia was a lost cause...’’ he looked up at his father’s impassive face, wondering if he had got it wrong.

And yet once more, his father was granite.