Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

He broke fast that morning with a persimmon. It was sweet and plump, a soft weight in his palm that felt like life itself, vibrant and fleeting, provided one had the stomach to take it.

The cloying sweetness rolled across his tongue as the juice escaped his lips, a sticky trail descending his chin to stain his tunic. He wore no steel today, wandering the high grass outside the inner walls of the city that was now his by every law of man and gods.

It was his by right of blood, and more importantly, by right of the iron he had used to take it. He had spilled the earth’s red tax here and broken the host his uncle had sent to cage him; he would welcome any man who came to dispute the deed, provided they could pay the bill in bone.

If no one challenged the wolf, then no one could contest his ownership of the den. A crown, he had long realized, was a weight warranted only by the strength required to hold it.

”Have you sent him on his way?” He asked, turning the fruit to find a patch of skin that hadn’t yet been bruised. He favored the firmer parts; they required a bite.

”We did, along with the answer you deigned to give him,” Lord Varo replied. The older man’s eyes were never still, flitting from the shadow of a crenel to the movement of a distant crow. He had been adamant that his lord wear a breastplate even within his own walls.

Your uncle may not best you in the field, but a dagger in the dark does a far cleaner job.

He had told him when he invited him for a walk.

That, he had to admit, was funny. If there was a man in this world capable of claiming his life, then he had no excuses to offer the Five. He was at war, and the time for soft-handed safety had long since passed.

His uncle had seen fit to send an envoy, offering him lordship over Ricorum if he would only cast his sword into the dirt. It was an insult draped in the guise of a compromise. To offer him what was already his by birthright as a reward for his surrender was the height of arrogance.

His uncle hadn’t thought of making such a peace when the rebel’s cause seemed to have no prospect but the headsman’s axe.Of course he wouldn’t have accepted it even then, for that would be admitting defeat.

Even now as he looked around what he had conquered he saw none of it.

In response to that insult he had sent only a sword. No parchment, no seal. Just a blade of cold steel to be laid at his uncle’s feet. He believed the message was telling enough.

He stopped in his tracks, the wind coiling around his neck and tugging at his hair like a restless spirit. He gazed up toward the ramparts where his own banner snapped in the gale. He had changed the heraldry, stripping away the colors of the man who currently sat the throne; if they were to meet in the mud, he wanted no confusion as to which side represented the true blood.

His ,differently from that of his uncle had a crown atop the horn of the beast, that was red mad in colour instead of black.

”How does it feel, Varo?” He called out, tasting the bite of the cold air. ”Long have we labored for this moment, haven’t we? Our lords are raising the levies, and knights are answering the call. True men are finding our cause to be just.”

And they were. Word had reached him from the marshes to the high peaks, sworn lords, both the ancient allies of his father and the newly conquered, were sending their allegiance in ink and their steel in carts.

”It feels like the most pleasing point of my journey with you,” Varo said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble. ”And yet, it is also the most worrisome. Your father bid me to protect you. I wonder sometimes if I need to protect you from yourself as well.”

”Again with that?”

”There was no need to place yourself in such danger. The battle was won, and the lords were already your prisoners. They would have bent the knee eventually, either to a vow or to a blade.”

”And many indeed did, did they not?”

”Only after you insisted on putting a sword back in their hands to test them. That was ill-done. A prince does not gamble his life to prove a point to a captive.The conqueror may impose any condition they please upon the defeated. A lion does not need to impart upon a sheep its magnificence before taking a bite out of it.”

”And yet,” he countered with a sharp chuckle, ”only three of them perished, and the survivors have already sent letters to their sons and brothers to raise the spring levies in my name.How many would have done that without a proper show of force?

If I am to cement my legitimacy, I must show that I am better fit for the crown than my uncles. Tell me, Varo, what is it my uncle can no longer do, besides look down at his own cock without a mirror? He cannot lead from the front. There is no better way to claim a crown than to show the marital skill required to defend it.”

”I doubt many would have required such a show of force after you personally shattered your uncle’s vanguard. There is a time for personal risk, and a time when it is better for others to take the lead.”

The suggestion did not sit well with him. He hated the word ’compromise.’ Already, the vultures were circling, lords offering the hands of their daughters to tie their houses to his rising sun. He would search for a wife only when the state was truly his. He would not trade his bed or his honor for a few extra hundreds spears.

He would either succeed by the strength of his own arm or he would die in the attempt. There were no half-measures here. No middle roads through the woods.

”This is how our story shall be made,” he said, turning back to the view of his lands. ”Not with the treachery my uncle seeks, nor with the safety you desire for me. Steel shall be the final arbiter. If I show myself reluctant to risk my own skin, then I am not fit for princehood.”

”And yet, a prince must also know how to choose the battles that are truly his. That is a lesson, it seems, you have yet to deign to learn.”

Merelao looked down at his old caretaker, the sweetness of the persimmon turning to a faint, metallic tang on his tongue. ”Is that a reproach I hear? Or merely the rattling of an old man’s nerves?”

”We should have been done with the Fox by now,” Varo countered, ignoring the jab. His boots crunched on the wet grass as he kept pace. ”We have paid our part of the blood-debt. We took Ricorum, we severed his enemy’s supply lines, and in exchange, we received the bulk of the armaments currently filling our racks. The transaction is complete. We should be done with him, I say that again.”

Merelao wondered, not for the first time, what deep-seated rot his father’s old friend held against Alpheo. The man was admittedly slippery, and his birth was as low as the dirt he defended, but he had provided the very steel Merelao now used to carve out his destiny.

Plus it wasn’t like the man didn’t own his own good light.

”I am vehemently against throwing away our strength to bolster his,” Varo continued”We will receive no further aid from him than what has already been bartered. To march toward his borders now is a waste of time and a waste of our men that could be better spent here.The food we shall waste for this march?It would do better stored in our warehouse for the next spring against the Fat Prince.”

”A waste of time?” Merelao echoed, stopping at the edge of a flower.

”This is not our war. Our war is here, against your uncle’s throat, not weeks away in some shit-hole ruled by a peasant. You may think him worthy of your trust, but I believe wholeheartedly that he will betray us the moment the wind changes. He is a creature of the mire. He does not breathe the air we do.”

”I would say having him as our only ally is reason enough to intervene,” Merelao said, his gaze fixed on the horizon. ”If he falls, we stand alone against my uncle’s host and whatever family my cousin has managed to buy with his latest marriage. A lone wolf is an easy kill.”

”I doubt he would stand with us even if he wins. He has no reason to provide us aid except to stir the hornet’s nest in your uncle’s backyard. He will give only what is strictly necessary to keep us as a distraction, and he will do that whether we bleed for him now or not.”

Merelao turned away from his old friend and instead gazed at the sky. The cold wind rippling his long blonde hair.

What had happened to them, he wondered. When did people thought living like this was well and fine?

”There was a time’’ He called ’’ when men looked beyond the narrow rim of their own interests. There was a world where a man took pride in an act that brought him neither gold nor land, simply because it was the right thing to do. It was those acts, bundled together, that made a world worth living in.”

Varo expression softened as looked at the man he saw grow up from a child to the man he was now. It was a pity this moments of his true self were rare. The world knew him as a madman, but he was not at least not whole.

He was both rightneouss and madness bungled together in one big soup. They would never know this side of him, he knew that, for their eyes could not look farther than what it appeared to be.

Ignorant of his second father’s thought, Merelao continued.

”A world where treachery was not the common tongue, and where honor and valor were not just empty words we carved onto the headstones of better men. I remember that world.”

”That world died when your uncle put your father in the ground,” Varo said, his voice flat and heavy with the weight of years.He would love the boy, but he knew that if he walked such empty road he would fall and never rise again.

”It was buried in a nameless grave, and the crows picked the bones clean, until all that remained were shaky memories.”

Merelao reached out, gripping Varo’s shoulder with a strength that made the old man’s eyes flicker.

”Perhaps,” the would be Prince whispered, his gaze fixed on the horizon where the winter sun hung like a pale, silver coin. ”But just because a thing has died once, Varo, doesn’t mean it cannot be brought back. If I am to be a prince, I will not rule over a graveyard of broken vows and forgotten honor. I will build that world again. And to do that, I must do the very things others will call madness.I cannot hope to stand alone.”

He leaned in closer, his blue eyes bright with an almost feverish clarity. ”You saw it, didn’t you? In the faces of the lords we captured on the field? When I showed them the way, the proper way! A light came back into them. The only reason the world seems a dark, impossible place is because men are too cowardly to take the second step. But that is the most important step of all.”

He released Varo’s shoulder and turned his face to the sky, a vast expanse of unblemished blue.

”Life is beautiful, Varo, but it could be a masterpiece if only people realized their own power to shape it. To be a pioneer is to taste the sweetest fruit of all, for you can look back at the wilderness where you began and see the road you have carved through the thicket. I respect the Prince of Yarzat for that. He is a pioneer, just as I am. He is the one clearing the path his descendants shall walk.”

A faint, sad smile touched Merelao’s lips. ”A society truly thrives only when old men plant saplings under whose shade they know they shall never rest. We have lost that world, but I would sooner die trying to drag it back into the light than sit rot in the darkness that took my father. I am in need of good men, Varo. Such a dream cannot be walked alone.”

Varo looked at the young man, and for a fleeting, agonizing second, he didn’t see the erratic, silver-tongued rebel who had plunged the south into fire for naught but laughter and leasure. How much of that boy was in him?How much of that dream was bugled in madness and selfishness?

He saw the boy Merelao could have been, the boy who was, the one that seemed like his father most, before the snake his uncle sent had poisoned his mind and driven him toward the precipice of madness.

Tears pricked at the corners of Varo’s aged eyes. Deep beneath the Prince’s obsessions, beneath the cold steel and the manic fits of grandeur, that noble child was still there, reaching out through the cracks to make his presence known. It was a glimpse of a golden child, squashed now back into the depths of a fractured mind that was not his and yet was.

Varo took a hesitant, trembling step forward, his arms aching to reach out and pull that child into a final, protective embrace before he vanished again, before the other one could reclaim him. He wanted to anchor that fleeting ghost of nobility, to hold the boy his father had loved before the world turned to winter.

But it was not to be. Such mercies were rare, and rarer still in the presence of the crown.

As Varo extended his arms, a sudden, piercing shout rose from the courtyard below, shattering the fragile stillness of the ramparts. In an instant, the light in Merelao’s emerald eyes didn’t just fade, it warped. The innocent, dreaming clarity of the pioneer was eclipsed by the bored, hedonistic mask of the master Varo served most of his days.

The boy who saw the beauty of the world was dragged back into the depths, replaced by the man who saw the worth of life only as a mirror for his own ego. The vibrant dream of planting saplings for the future curdled into a cold, manic obsession with the affirmation of himself as the peak of what could be.

He stood taller and yet smaller , his posture stiffening into a rigid, untouchable arrogance, the sudden sight so disgusting and sad, it made Varo’s stomach turn.

The child was gone, squashed beneath the weight of a prince who no longer wished to build a world, but merely to be the only thing standing within it.

How sad that such a life could not be.