Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

A single wax candle flickered on ironwood table, casting long shadows against the weeping stone walls. On the table lay no fruit or fine southern wine, but a scattering of stacks of paper and broken wax seals.

Alpheo stood with his back to the light, his silhouette motionless, looking out through a window into the gray winter mist.It was rare for mist to come to Yarzat, and when it did it was short lived and small.

This time was neither.It lingered from morning all the way to late afternoon.Perhaps tomorrow it would linger too.

His missing ear somehow itched as if burnt. He scartched it , delicately as he could as warned by Agalosios.

Across from him, barely illuminated by the pale candlelight,stood another. Even more grim than he could ever be.

The spymaster of Yarzat, the man high lords and smallfolk alike whispered of as the Carrion Raven, slumped over a towering stack of papers pulled from his personal lock-chest. He looked for all the world like a vulture nesting on a pile of picked bones atop a tombstone. He wore a dark, heavy wool cloak that seemed to actively swallow the meager light, and his long fingers, stained permanently black at the tips from cheap ink and flicked through the parchment as if he had eyes at the fingertips.

Yet, almost every whisper in the south, eventually found its way into his claws.

Alpheo had spent a monumental effort, both in rivers of gold and a mountain of flesh, to see this invisible network bloom across the map. He knew for a fact that half the reason it succeeded was the man currently staring back at him, slowly blinking like an owl in the dim light. Lucius had been given ample rewards, grand estates, and high titles for his service, though Alpheo also knew his spymaster silently misliked every single one of them. To Lucius, those honors were merely the bitter price he paid for a life he had never truly wished for, a fact he had been entirely plain about for a long time.

Lucius was a family man at his core, and that was something Alpheo could authentically warm to and respect him for. But that was where the sentimentality ended. Every man of power required a specialized tool to incite pure terror, a fierce hound he could unleash with one hand against the rabbits and sheep of the realm, while using his other hand to nurture and heal those who came limping to his throne asking for succor.

Alpheo possessed his Hounds of War, Egil’s sons , whom he had raised to be a cruel, callous force to terrify external enemies into absolute submission. Initially, that had not been his grand intent for the boys, but once the slaughter at Aracina had happened, the bloody road was already fixed.

Lucius was simply what the Hounds were, but for the shadows. Send a blunt threat in a formal letter to a disgruntled lord, and he might only grow sour and defensive. But send a basket of fresh fruit bearing the wax seal of the Black Raven, and it would instantly turn the lord’s stomach to ice. He was an exceptionally good tool for the right circumstances.

With a flick of his ink-stained wrist, Lucius dropped a fresh piece of paper onto the King’s desk. It was a pale sheet.

Alpheo stepped away from the narrow slit window, picking up the letter to read. As his eyes scanned the cypher, Lucius’s raspy voice bulled over his reading, sounding like dry leaves scraping across a courtyard.

It was a report.

”Just as Your Majesty suspected, I fear the agents of the Two Towers have started lingering in the keeps of Oizen and Herculia,” the spymaster croaked. ”They are actively sending sweet letters to one lord and the other.”

The King gave a grim nod. The moment the great war had ended, he had immediately ordered Lucius to plant more eyes in the conquered provinces, and more importantly, within the personal courts of the defeated lords.With the road to the Bastion proved far too hard for the Habadians they would attempt Herculia when the opportunity arose.

On the surface, those lords could take their trade wares well enough and sell them on their own ancestral lands by the mercy of the crown; after all, coin was handed through a thousand different hands each day, and it didn’t carry a scent.

Those same men would loudly toast Alpheo’s royal name in cups of fine wine whenever the crown’s tax collectors lingered in their halls as hosts. But Alpheo was no fool. A man who turned his cloak once to save his skin would have very little thought about turning it once more if the wind shifted. If a foreign army ever managed to make its way through Herculia, it could just as easily double in number overnight simply by scooping up disgruntled local lords.

Yarzat may have brought total regional security and easy trade coin to the south, but that grand bounty was mostly felt by the highest lords. For the smaller landholders? They were now strictly denied their lucrative private tolls whenever a merchant bearing the crown’s royal sigil passed through their domains. Their local roads were permanently patrolled by disciplined men of the legions, and heavy taxes were being handed directly back to the central crown, completely breaking that sweet, lawless reprieve they had enjoyed during the chaotic, final years of Lechlian’s rule.

Couple all of that hidden resentment with the fact that many of them still bitterly whispered the word Usurper behind closed doors, and it was easy for Alpheo to feel the hot, bubbling rage beneath the cold veneer of peace.

”Is there anyone who broke?” Alpheo asked, his voice low.

”We heavily suspect one to be Lord Vacci.”

The King turned around in genuine surprise, his brow furrowing. ”Brittle Beard? His father died bravely defending the Bastion for us.”

”And the son got half his face horribly maimed by an Oizenian broadsword on the field at the Ford,” Lucius replied, his tone remaining perfectly flat, entirely devoid of pity.

”One more reason for him not to court with the Habadians or our enemies,” Alpheo muttered.

”He appears to be exceptionally wrought with the meager rewards he was given by the treasury, considering he lost both a noble father and half a functional face in that mud,” Lucius explained, leaning forward into the candlelight. ”The boy did very little to hide his deep displeasure at the victory feast, Your Majesty. More than one servant heard him loudly complaining in his cups about the crown heavily favoring the ’Dog’s prince spawn’. He truly wanted the lordship of Pardonum for his troubles, and he feels cheated of it.”

”There is very little cheat to something he had no rightful claim over to begin with,” the King replied, throwing the parchment back onto the ironwood desk with a sharp flick of his wrist. ”Pardonum was never his to beg for.”

”It is not me you ought to convince of that, Your Majesty,” Lucius croaked

Alpheo picked up the report once more, squinting at the tight cypher under the weak light of the candle. ”Are we absolutely certain of this, Lucius? All this report details are letters coming and going from his keep. It says nothing of where they ultimately go, nor what treason they might contain.Not to do a disservice to your work but...”

”Well, there is only so much a bribed tavern wench or a kitchen maid can see or do,” the Carrion Raven replied, his hair shifting as he shrugged his narrow shoulders. ”I wouldn’t expect a paranoid lord to break a secret imperial seal with half his court watching. What we can actually get from the domestic servants is relatively small.”

”And most certainly not enough to do anything about it under the light of day.Can’t really accuse of treason without proof. Can we intercept the riders bearing those letters?”

”Unlikely. We don’t know the hidden roads they take, nor the hours they ride. It is near impossible to prepare an ambush for a shadow. To guarantee a catch, we would have to clap in chains every single man passing through the western roads on a fast horse, and doing so would achieve very little but make their correspondence even more deeply hidden.”

”If indeed they are corresponding at all,”

”It is a possibility I won’t deny,” Lucius allowed, his dark eyes blinking slowly. ”But in our line of work, a fire usually follows the smoke.There is a line of letter going in and out of the castle, he has the motive and the resources. One coincidence may be just that, but so many?”

Alpheo leaned his heavy forearms against the table, his face hardening. ”Well, there is far too little proof here to use the legal road. I cannot execute the scion of a hero based on the gossip of maids. Do we have any proper dirt on him?”

”Not really,” Lucius admitted, a faint hint of frustration clipping his raspy voice. ”The man is remarkably dull when he isn’t brooding. He doesn’t seem to possess any financial debts or secret vices that we might comfortably blackmail him with.”

The King let out a short, impatient breath. ”So we have nothing, then? Apart from our own dark suspicions?”

”We have a few minor leverage points,” Lucius countered, a cold, clinical smile touching his thin lips. ”The lord keeps a secret lover in a farmhouse three miles outside his estate. A weaver’s daughter. He has fathered two bastard sons with her, and he pays handsomely from his personal purse to keep them well-fed and entirely hidden. Besides if your Grace wishes for proof something can be perhaps done, and if nothing else just for a message?”

Alpheo paused, considering the card before shaking his head . ”No.That is a slippery road I am still not fond of walking. If he is still sitting on the fence, threatening his blood will only serve to push him against us, even worse if he is loyal. A cornered dog bites hard, double if he had been always good to his master.”

The King straightened to his full, towering height, signaling the end of that conversation. He turned his back to the candlelight, his silhouette merging once more with the shadows.

”Up the surveillance on him. ” Alpheo commanded coldly into the damp air. ”Do not provoke him. But the next time you bring a lord’s name to my desk, Lucius, ensure you bring some proof along with it, and do not pursue bloody tool when they are just whispers and doubts. I do not need to have the infamy by my lords , as someone who massacres children and families just for the love of it.

Even if they are bastards.Search harder.’’