Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 867

Capítulo 867: Legacy(1)

Hard times breed great men. Great men create good times. Good times create fickle men. And fickle men bring the hard times again.

It was a wheel that turned and turned. No one could step off, no matter how high they climbed.

Alpheo had learned that lesson long before he wore silk. He’d crawled through gutters, through blood and shit, and discovered early that surviving mattered more than looking brave. He wasn’t a hero. Heroes died young.

He was a cockroach, the last thing still crawling when the fire burned out.

When he looked at the world now, he saw where the wheel rested. This was the age of hardship again. The ground was shifting, the air heavy with the scent of war and ruin. Yet for men like him, there was opportunity in the cracks,if you were quick enough to slip through before they closed.

An all-against-all.

And somewhere in the spin of it, a new order would rise. For a time, at least. Until the wheel turned again. He hoped to have his time up there, even if short…

He stood among the flowers and cypress trees of the palace garden, sunlight glinting through the branches like coins scattered by a careless god. The wind carried the smell of damp earth and citrus. He sank slowly onto the grass, legs crossed, the warmth of the soil pressing through the fine cloth of his trousers. Tiny insects crawled over him, their paths unconcerned with crowns or bloodlines, that was something so abstract and yet so loaded with shit that only humans could make it.

Half the legacy he’d leave behind played among those trees.

A crack of twigs behind him. Then a familiar voice.

“I didn’t expect to find you here.”

Jasmine’s tone was gentle, but the surprise in it made him smile faintly.

He didn’t answer. Just lifted a finger to his lips and pointed toward a tangerine tree a few paces away.

She followed his gaze, confusion flickering across her features before giving way to exasperation.

“I swear,” she sighed, “something is wrong with that boy.”

Alpheo said nothing. He only tilted his head slightly waiting for her to explain.

The subject of the stare lay on one of the branches, a book tucked beneath his arm as he stretched one hand toward a cluster of ripe tangerines. For a moment it seemed he’d lose his balance. Jasmine gasped softly,but then the boy caught a branch, swung upward with surprising grace, and pinned the book between his feet while freeing the fruit with a triumphant grin.

He landed back on the branches, legs dangling, tangerine and open book in his hands, unaware of the worry of his mother.

Jasmine’s sigh softened into something warmer, gentler. “He’s too much like you,” she said quietly. “He never listens.”

Alpheo’s eyes never left his son. “He listens,” he murmured.

The princess turned to him. Her features softened. “And who does he listen to, then?”

“Me,” Alpheo replied, a small shrug of his shoulders.

Her brows rose. “So he’s selective now? Isn’t a mother owed to be listened to? I carried the boy for nine months,you’d think that at least earns me a little obedience.”

Alpheo smirked, his gaze still on Basil. “It’s not the end of the world if he sometimes goes his own way.”

“Oh, you would say that,” she said, the faintest laugh behind her irritation. “He always has time for you.Aren’t you lucky to be his hero? You see him half as much as I do, yet he adores you twice as fiercely. How unjust life is…a mother overshadowed by her own son’s love for the father.”

Basil, oblivious, tossed the last tangerine peel into the grass and shoved the fruit whole into his mouth before returning to his book.

Jasmine sighed, at the bad manners.

Alpheo chuckled under his breath. “I suppose it’s a matter of quality.”

She shot him a puzzled glance.

He turned his head toward her, explaining. “You spend half your time nagging him about manners. When he’s with me, I take him riding, let him carry my tools, give him tasks he thinks matter. The boy wants to feel useful. That’s all.Nothing wrong or strange with that”

Jasmine exhaled, half a sigh, half a smile. “He is kind,” she admitted not knowing how rare that was.

Alpheo knew very well how easy it was to be a bad man rather than a good one…but that was not a good thing.

Good men did not last long.

After a pause, Jasmine went on, her voice quieter now. “I worry for him,I admit. He keeps to himself too much. The servants tell me he slips away for hours; sometimes he even manages to avoid the guards I send him. No friends his age, no playmates. Only his books, his thoughts, and whatever shadows he talks to when no one’s looking.”

Alpheo watched his son for a long moment before saying, “He seemed friendly enough with Morkir.” He recalled how the two boys had walked together when Egil had last brought his son to the estate.

Jasmine scoffed softly. “He put on a show for you, you fool.He spends lots of time with all of your friends and looks up to them, he wouldn’t do anything that could displease any of you.Unfortunately I am not in that category”

He turned his gaze toward her, a dry smile twitching at the corner of his mouth.

“I know we disagree on how to raise him,” she continued. “I’m still puzzled by some of your choices regarding his upbringing.”

“I’ve spent long enough fighting men,” Alpheo said “to know they are the perfect example of what a child should not aspire to be.I am just making sure that does not happen”

He extended his hand toward her, palm open, eyes on the grass. For a moment, she hesitated, concerned for the fabric of her gown, perhaps, but his silence drew her in. She sighed and sat beside him, the scent of roses brushing faintly through the air.

“I believe how a child grows depends mostly on how he’s brought up,” he said, voice steady, eyes fixed on the shifting light between the leaves. “But the same method doesn’t always yield the same result.” He looked at her now, his tone soft but unflinching. “Your father, he didn’t show you much attention, did he?”

Her lips pressed into a thin line, but she didn’t answer. The silence told him enough.

“A son should have his parents’ attention,” Alpheo continued, “but it doesn’t mean he’ll thrive under their expectations. When a child feels he can’t meet what’s set before him, it grows into two things hostility or self-loathing. Sometimes both.”

He glanced back toward Basil. “He’s a sharp boy. Every tutor says the same, curious, hungry for knowledge, respectful in his duties. But every person needs something that is theirs. Take that away, and he’ll close off.”

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Most of what I decide for him is to keep him from growing into the sort of men I’ve defeated, vain, entitled, blind to their own rot. I’d rather have a ruler grounded in the dirt of reality than one drunk on the perfume of his own arrogance.”

His eyes hardened slightly. “Privilege makes a man pregnant with expectation. It swells his ego, weakens his bones. He must understand that all he achieves will stretch only as far as his skill reaches.Humans are only owed their death, nothing more, nothing less.”

A deep breath escaped him. “There are things I don’t like about him too,” he admitted. “But I’ve learned not to name them outright. Most of his flaws come from the comfort of the world around him, he’s never had to crawl through hunger or bleed for warmth so there is an inherent softness in him.”

Jasmine turned toward him, brows knitting. “You’ve had him training since last year. I have seen him wake up barely after sunrise while a child his age should sleep.”

Alpheo lifted an eyebrow. “Training,” he repeated, the word almost bitter. What was that supposed to mean?

“Since I was a child, all I knew was hunger. When I grew older, hunger was joined by pain, of the body, of the soul. You think a few laps in the morning or a lesson in swordplay is the same as not eating for two days and bashing a man’s head with a rock just to steal his shoes during a cold winter?”

Jasmine’s face flinched at the bluntness, her breath catching as though she’d tasted iron.

He softened his voice, not his words. “No. They’re not the same. And that’s the point. For now, he’s too young. He still thinks the world is a kind place, that everything good is his to reach for. He will think that, for a while. When he’s older, the world will strip that innocence on its own, we have to make sure it won’t also spoil what is good in him.”

He looked back toward Basil, the boy now perched higher, bathed in sunlight like some creature untouched by dirt or war. “When the time comes, we’ll change the shape of his upbringing. Twist it just enough that he learns how to bend without breaking. Because one day, the weight of the crown will try to crush him, and if he’s not ready, it will.”

Jasmine’s lips thinned. “I don’t like how you speak of him,” she said quietly. “Am I to be worried for our son?”

For a heartbeat, Alpheo almost told her no. He almost offered comfort. But lies had never come easy to him.

Instead, he met her gaze. “You should not,” he said, voice steady.

“He may be our son, Jasmine,” Alpheo went on, softer now, “and we will love him for that. But he is also heir to a throne. That means it’s our duty to shape him into something the world cannot easily destroy. We’ve been blessed with a kind, clever boy.

That is good; he is less leaning towards arrogance and more prone to listen to others and change his mind with enough knowledge. With time I will help him develop his skill and his mind and attune it to warfare, rulership and management.

It’s our task to keep him on the right road to success, not make him grow comfortable under what he had not earned.”

The wind stirred the grass around them. Basil reading quietly to himself above, before reaching for another tangerine, his hands grasping for sweetness, not knowing of the dust that he was to expect.

And for a long time, neither Alpheo nor Jasmine spoke, each wondering in silence what kind of man their son would become.