Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 962: Farewell(1)

The boy who sat upon the velvet chair was draped in the heavy, stiff silks of the Romelian silks makers, watched Alpheo with a gaze that flickered between profound gratitude and the wide-eyed recognition for a child who had just seen his father hunt a lion and presented him with his pelt.

Alpheo took his seat, the leather of his travel-worn chair creaking under a weight that felt heavier than it had a week ago. Outside the royal pavilion, the newly conquered "Fingers" loomed, he was tired to look at it.

So he did not.

For the last seven days, the spoils of the siege had been sorted, measured, and divided among the participants of the war. It was, by all accounts, a lackluster bounty. In any other campaign, Alpheo would have been besieged by a horde of southern lords, their faces red with indignation, howling for a fairer share of the gold or additional rewards, they believed their "duty" had earned them.

But the silence in the Prince’s pavillion in recent times was absolute. The sheer scale of the blood Alpheo had spilled to take that rock, along with the personal cost he had paid,had sobered even the most avaricious lords.

As they all tapped into the conclusion that the normally head-strong , irable and short-handed prince would be most unapproachable in previously noted circumstances, which spared the prince form further head-aches coming from his own side. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

A small grace that was.

"As I promised, the Fingers is yours. And with it, the Eternal City and the crown," Alpheo began, his voice a low vibration in the quiet tent. He wrapped his fingers around a silver cup of cider, tilting it to his lips.

No doubt they had popped out the good stuff, thinking he’d delight in it.

They were right on that.

"Your brother has fled us for a second time. His army has vanished into the mist, and his standing with the nobility has rotted beyond repair. He is a emperor of shadows and dust now." he raised his cup in a short toast

"You have done so much for us. You have our eternal gratitude," the small boy with the crown muttered.

Gratitude, Alpheo thought, his eyes tracking the steam from a nearby candle. A pale prize compared to the price paid in marrow.

"I have brought you a hard-earned peace," Alpheo continued, his gaze shifting to the boy’s uncles. "There is no longer any army in the Western Continent that can threaten you so long as you hold this pass. You are the masters of your own house again."

"We do not know how to thank you," spoke Tyrios, the Patriarch of the Achean family and uncle to the young Imperator.

Of the two brothers standing behind the throne, Tyrios was the one who allegedly resembled the the old lion the most. Rumors spoke of his courage, and he had indeed moved to stabilize the center during the initial charge. Yet, Alpheo knew the truth: it had been a desperate, clumsy maneuver that barely averted a total rout.

Tyrios had contributed nothing to the final victory, a fact that clearly gnawed at him. His arm sat in a sling, and his face was a mask of suppressed shame, the look of a proud man who had been humbled on his own soil by a foreigner.

"I have buried a good number of my men for that rock," Alpheo said, his voice hardening. "If it remains in your hands for the foreseeable future, that will be thanks enough. We have already discussed the cost of my aid. My architects and my treasury eagerly await your support in finishing the Magna Strata."

"We will, of course, keep true to our word," the young Imperator blurted out.

As he said so he failed to notice the sharp grimace that flickered across the face of his other uncle, the one who managed the ledgers and knew precisely how hollow the royal treasury had become. Alpheo saw it, but he was in no hurry to tighten the noose.

He recognized they were in a financial pinch; he would grant them a few years of breathing room before he came to collect the debt .

"Danger is no longer poised above your necks," Alpheo declared, leaning forward. He was moving now to one of the business that had brought him into this tent. "What you do with that security is your prerogative alone. However, considering I was the one who made that security possible, I feel a certain responsibility to offer my thoughts on the matter. Whether you heed them or not is your choice."

Mesha, looked up with a small, shy smile, a look that gave Alpheo the uncomfortable weight of a surrogate father. "We would be most wise to lend our ears, Prince Alpheo. More than once, we have found our hearts beating with a common purpose."

Alpheo had lent his counsel three times before. The first had shattered a superior force on the open field; the second had pinned the enemy within the Fingers; the third had brought those very walls crashing down. Each piece of advice had been a rung on the ladder of victory.

But this fourth offering was different. Alpheo had his own prerogative, a vision that did not necessarily involve a stable, unified Romelia. A neighbor who is a giant is a threat; a neighbor who is a bleeding, bickering ruin is an opportunity.

"Your brother’s army is no more," Alpheo began, his voice smooth as polished glass. "The lords have scurried back to their fiefs like rats to their holes, and the Pretender’s shield was shattered beneath these very battlements a week ago. But let us not confuse a clear field with a healthy one."

He leaned back, his eyes roaming the faces of the council, lingering on the young Imperator. "You have not come through this unscathed. Your provinces are scorched earth, and if the grain stores are not managed with the precision of a jeweler, famine will be your next invader for half your Empire. Half your lords ignored your summons, watching from the hills to see which way the wind blew. And let us not forget the final spite of the Marshal, Willios.

He collapsed the outer walls facing the East. He turned your fortress into a sieve. The enemy will have a direct path to your throat, and if you lose this rock again, we will be forced to bleed for it a second time."

The silence in the pavilion grew heavy. The fervor of conquest was a heady wine, but Alpheo was pouring cold water into their cups.

"Your sword is bloodied with the enemy’s life, it is true," Alpheo said, his voice dropping an octave. "But it is also chipped and cracked. If you stubbornly decide to thrust it into the heart of the Rebels now, it will shatter the moment you need it most. You are standing in the ashes, Mesha. The real crux of the matter is whether you can sustain another campaign before the rot seal the passes."

He paused, letting the weight of the word hang in the air.

"You cannot. And even attempting it risks losing everything we have trudged through the mud to achieve."

"But wouldn’t the time we spend recovering give the same mercy to the Usurper?" Tyrios shot back, his uninjured hand gripping the arm of his chair. "As you said, he is on his last legs. One push, one final, decisive march, and the East is ours. If we give him a year to breathe, to tax his people, to hire new blades... are we not penalizing ourselves more than him?"

It was a sound argument. It was the argument of a soldier who wanted to finish the kill. It might even have been the correct strategic move for Romelia.It probably was.

But Alpheo didn’t want that. He wanted a stalemate that would grind on for another decade, a slow-motion collapse that would keep the leviathan busy eating its own tail while he built his own empire in the south.

"So, a wager is it?" Alpheo’s voice turned soft. "You want to gamble every drop of blood we’ve spilled on one final, desperate throw of the dice? You want to march through fields of shit, hoping that when you reach the end, the world will suddenly be clean and dandy.

You want a shortcut. Don’t you?"

He leaned forward, the shadows of the pavilion deepening the hollows of his eyes. "If you go ahead with this madness, you shall do it alone. I have returned the favor I owed your house ten-fold. My army is a battered, exhausted animal, and my commanders are staring at the horizon, dreaming of home. My patience, like my coin, has reached its limit."

He turned a cold gaze toward the Imperator. "I wonder,your Imperial Majesty how many of your own lords will answer a second summons? It is easy to speak of honor and duty when the cost is theoretical. But after they have seen their fiefs scorched and heard their peasants scream while their highest liege ignored their pleas of aid, which they were promised at the start of all of this, how willing will they be to unsheathe steel for another campaign? If this march fails, the enemy will find a sieve where a fortress once stood. They will retake the Fingers in a fortnight, and you will be left where you were before I marched north to your aid."

He paused, letting the silence ring like a struck bell.

"At the end of the day, this is not my land. Your prerogative is yours alone to nurture... or to wager on a hand of lackluster cards."

He watched them, gauging the hunger in Tyrios’s eyes against the absolute, soul-deep exhaustion on the young Imperator’s face. He was selling them safety, but he was delivering them stagnation...

He hoped, with a cynical spark of humor, that they wouldn’t realize the difference until the rust had already set in.

"Victory is a feast," Alpheo added, his expression shifting to one of weary, fatherly concern. "But only a fool eats so much he chokes on the last bite. You must chew the meat you have fought for before you reach for the dessert, Tyrios. Unless, of course, you wish to starve amidst plenty."

The young Imperator looked at his uncle, then back at Alpheo, his small hands trembling on the gilded armrests of his chair. The logic of the Southern conqueror seemed correct, and the boy seemed ready to buckle under it.

’’So what is to do?’’

When he lowered his eyes to the ground Alpheo knew it.

He had him...