Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

Basil felt fundamentally altered, as if the boy who would have fled into that medical tent in a cloud of shame had been stripped away replaced by someone sturdier.He was proud of himself , one could say.

Though he gave no hint of it as he just followed.

They walked through the camp in a companionable silence, the air cool against their faces as the tents of the camp rose and swayed around them. Before they had left the healers’ care, Alpheo had finally allowed his bandages to be changed. Basil had caught a glimpse of the wound.

To say his father’s ear had been ”nicked” , as the prince liked to refer to the wound, was like comparing a hummingbird to a vulture; three-quarters of the flesh was simply gone. Only the dark cavern of the ear canal and a lonely scrap of the lobe remained.

The surgeons promised that, in time, his hearing would return to that side, but Basil didn’t need a doctor to tell him what his father had truly bought with that flesh.

He had purchased time. Time for the state to breathe, time for his family to live, and time for his father to work. This hadn’t been a war for borders or gold; it was a war for the right to exist. The sword had given the state life, and death had been the conduit for every breath they would now take.

”You and I are completely different, you know?” Alpheo said suddenly. He turned away from a cart piled high with looted Oizenian plate,many different banners sewed upon it would need to be unsown, his boots finding the dirt path that led toward his command pavilion.

”Different?” Basil asked, tilting his head to keep pace. ”In what way, Father?”

”In every way that matters.” Alpheo’s hazel eyes flickered toward his son, then away, darting toward the horizon.

Basil tried to tug at the thread of the conversation, but his father retreated into that familiar, stony silence. No matter how the boy prodded, the Prince offered no further explanation.

They reached the pavilion next, and Alpheo held the heavy canvas flap open. Inside, the Prince’s quarters were strikingly bare. There were no gilded trophies, no silken tapestries celebrating the victor of the field.

There was only a bed of goose-down wrapped in modest silk and a wall adorned with shields. A large one bore the black-and-white of the Legions, while four smaller shields sat beneath it in a sharp triangle: a fish, a flame, a mountain, and a hound.

Alpheo did not need to be told what those represented.

The only real sign of life was the desk, a chaotic sea of parchment, maps, and ink pots that spoke to the workaholic nature of the man who ruled from it.

Basil considered making a jest about the austerity of the place, but he bit his tongue. He knew exactly what his father would say: ’The exterior make for a poor cloth’or, ’Too many times and too much meaning is given to a poor substitute of actual substance.’or some other sharp, pragmatic barb.

That was the grain of the man, substance over shadow, always.

Alpheo walked past the desk and stopped before a small, unassuming wooden drawer. The mood between them grew weary, Basil couldn’t name the reason but he felt his palms grow damp.

The dry scrape of wood on wood announced the closing of the drawer. Alpheo straightened, his shadow stretching long against the sloped canvas of the tent. In his hands, he held a simple clay bottle and two ceramic cups.

He poured the liquid with a steady hand, sliding one cup across the scarred surface of the desk toward Basil. The boy took it, lifting it to his nose with a suspicious squint.

He relaxed instead, when the bright, citrus scent of crushed oranges filled his senses.

Good, his father had mantained his promise.

He took a sip, the sweetness a sudden but welcome relief, to the smell of the hospital tent and the tiredness not of body, that still clung to his clothes.

”It would have been better with ice,” Alpheo remarked, sinking into his chair. He took a long swallow, letting the juice run down his throat as if he were trying to wash away the grit of the day.

”Ice?” Basil looked at him as if he had suggested drinking liquid silver. ”In the middle of a campaign?”

”No need for that look. It is actually doable, if you have the right way and enough coin to burn,” Alpheo said, a ghost of a smile playing on his lips. ’’Perhaps I could make some money out of it too....’’

”I see...” Basil took another sip. There were a thousand things about his father that were strange but the boy usually just filed them away under the general enigma that was the Prince of Yarzat.

His father had never explained them, and Basil never asked.If he would say , he would do it on his own.He already knew his father had been comfortable to share many things about himself, he did not wish to press for more.

A thick, heavy silence settled between them. The only sound was the distant, rhythmic hammering of the camp and the flapping of the pavilion’s silk. Alpheo stared into his cup for a long time before he spoke.

”That man in the tent,” the Prince began. ”The one you comforted. Did you know him?”

Basil shook his head. ”He offered me a sip of vinegar once, on the road. That was the extent of our acquaintance.” He watched his father’s attentive gaze, feeling a sudden prickle of anxiety. ”Did I... did I do something wrong, Father? Was I out of place?”

”You made no mistake,” Alpheo said, though he looked deeply conflicted. He hesitated, his fingers tracing the rim of his cup with a slow, deliberate motion. ”I was eight.’’

’’What?’’

’’You had asked me. Do you remember two years ago? We were at dinner with the Legates. ’how old were you when you first took a life’.”

Basil nodded slowly as his father’s earlier words made sense. ”Mother was furious. She said it was no question for a child to ask, nor for a father to answer.”

”She was right. I didn’t answer you then,” Alpheo said, his hazel eyes finally locking onto his son’s. The warmth was gone from them now, replaced by a cold, flat light. ”I was eight.”

”Eight?”

”Eight years old. I was a slave in a house that saw me as less than the dust on the floorboards.

I was starving, not the hunger you feel when a meal is late, but the kind of hunger that makes your teeth ache and your vision blur, your stomach eat yourself and makes you more leaning on doing things a civilised person should never do. But that is the conception of slavery, no?To make what is human,not.

I had snuck into the kitchens at night to steal a heel of bread.”

Alpheo took a slow sip of the orange juice, his voice hiding what his eyes did not.

”I wasn’t alone. A little girl was there. She couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. She was sitting in the dark, no soot was on her face. She was a servant, not a slave you see. She was higher than me and she was passing through.

I didn’t hate her. I didn’t even know her name. But the moment our eyes met, I saw the terror in her and the possibility. She could cry out. she could tell the others and have that pitiful slave whipped or worse. She was a witness to my theft, and she could have been my death.

Alpheo leaned back on the chair, his eyes moving away from the boy and toward the white wall flapping under the wind.

”I didn’t think. Didn’t pray. Didn’t explain myself. Didn’t reason. Didn’t beg.Didn’t ask.

I just moved. I clamped my hand over her mouth so hard I felt her teeth cut into my palm. She struggled. She kicked and she clawed, her small fingers tearing at my arms, but I was stronger.Man may have made me a slave, but nature made me stronger than a pitiful servant child.

I dragged her to the heavy oak table in the center of the room, hitting her liver to quiet her reistance and smashed her head against the edge. Once. Twice.Perhaps I did it three times. Cannot recall now, the details had become bleary nor I wished to remember.

I didn’t stop until I heard the sound of her skull giving way, and I pressed my finger to truly see a small hole in her skull’’

Basil’s hand began to tremble as his throat went dry, the orange juice sloshing perilously close to the rim of his cup, until it fell in droplets on his clothes.

”I watched the blood pool on the floor,” Alpheo continued, his voice devoid of emotion. ”I took the crumbs of bread from the table and scattered them near her hand. I took an empty cup from the shelf. Made it look like she had tripped in the dark while trying to steal for herself.

The next morning, the servants found her. They lamented the poor, greedy thing who had fallen and hit her head while trying to thieve.She was a servant, so small thieving of food was permitted.

They never suspected the eight-year-old boy sitting quietly in the corner looking down at his red hand.Had they bothered to check my hands I would not be here now. But they did not and now many are going to pay the price for that”

He looked at his father when he realised the story was over, the man who had just dismantled the south’s coalition, who was now casually admitting to what he had done, and felt a chasm open between them.

What had he to be proud for?Just holding up the courage to speak to some wounded men that died for his cause?

Basil swallowed hard, his throat dry despite the sweet juice. His mouth moved tentatively, searching for the right shape of the words.

”Is that what you meant?” Basil asked, his voice barely a whisper. ”When you said we were different? Did you mean that because I’ve never truly struggled, never known the ache of that kind of hunger, that I could never truly understand you? That I’ll never be on par with your works?”

The Prince remained motionless. He didn’t blink, didn’t recoil from his son’s horror. He sat like a statue carved from the very obsidian of a past that would haunt him forever.

”You have it entirely wrong,” Alpheo said, his voice flat and calm. ”You will be more than enough to take after me. You have the mind for it, and soon the skill. My works are just foundations; yours will be the towers built upon them.”

He leaned back, the shadows of the tent swallowing his features until only the cold glint of his hazel eyes remained visible to the one he laid himself bare to.

”What I meant when I said we were different, was that you had something I dont.

I lack the very thing you displayed today in that tent. Empathy, Basil. I do not have it.

I do not have that virtue of yours.’’