Silence rolled on through the tent. Some men wanted badly to speak. One look at the boy on the ground, and a second look at the emperor standing over him, shut a great many mouths that had been half open.
Some stared at the boy with pity. Others simply looked past him, the way a man looks past a dog struck by a cart. Yet above all one thought moved quietly through every skull in that pavilion, identical and unspoken.
Damn fool. Have you lived your whole life beneath a rock?
It was common knowledge, as common as bread, that the mere mention of that mercenary company's name before the emperor was forbidden outright. Thirty years ago, at the battle of the Falling Eagle, the entire empire had trembled from the repercussions of one single afternoon, and it was trembling still in the places that counted.
The previous sultan of Azania had thrown his weight behind a rebellion against the Empire of Romelia, which had fallen into civil unrest over a succession crisis within one of its most influential houses, the Vhalassos. Two twins vied for the title of Authorite Pater and for control of their family, and neither would yield an inch.
Arlion, the latecomer by a matter of minutes that decided everything, had been forced to flee into Azania with his life hunted by assassins his own brother had paid for. After three long years he returned at the head of an army of hired swords, recruited and funded by Farfah II, who saw in the whole affair a splendid opportunity to sow chaos within the empire at someone else's expense. It mattered not at all to him which twin emerged victorious, so long as the casualties ran high on both sides of the field.
The emperor came to the aid of Arlion's brother, as everyone had known he would.
The two armies stood facing one another like opposing forces of nature. Arlion knew well enough that his smaller and less disciplined host would crumble beneath the full weight of the imperial army in any honest exchange. So he did not offer one. He had a plan instead, daring and dangerous in equal measure.
He would use his enemy's own pride and rashness as the weapon, since they had brought so much of both.
He placed his most elite unit in the centre and dressed it to look vulnerable, flanks hanging open like an unlatched door. Those soldiers marched forward beneath a banner depicting an eagle with its head struck off, a blatant and deliberate insult aimed at the then emperor, Gratios' father, a man famed for his courage and infamous for his temper.
It worked like a charm.
The enraged emperor took the bait whole and charged with his fellow hot heads and their fierce clibanarii behind him. The ground shook under the thundering hooves of hundreds of horses galloping toward their doom in good order.
Of eight hundred heavy cavalry, one hundred and twenty came back out of it alive.
The incident was later dubbed the Charge of Fools, and nobody at court ever called it anything else once the name had stuck.
Through the battle Arlion's army gave ground deliberately, drawing the emperor further and further from his allies, and then the hidden troops sprang out of the bushes behind the line and closed the ring. The imperial horsemen fought valiantly.That was widenly know, though It made no difference whatsoever. Among the very first to fall was the emperor himself, a spear through the chest before he had properly understood what was happening to him.
And in a cruel turn, it was the Order of the Betrayed who claimed the head of their former ruler, hacked it from his shoulders, and raised it above their standard where the whole field could see it.
As for the emperor's son, upon seeing his father's head displayed in triumph by his enemies, he flew into a rage and charged forward with everything he had left to him, which was not much.
The plan had achieved its chief objective, to kill or capture the ruling family. Though It came at a heavy cost to the battle itself, for the young heir led a desperate charge to avenge his father and rallied the troops that the news of the emperor's death had all but broken.
Amid the chaos and the blood the new emperor Gratios fought valiantly. Bravery is no armour, however. A sword pierced clean through his hand and tore the flesh of his palm open, and the wound later turned foul, and the hand had to come to be chopped off to save the life.
Strangely enough, it did save it.
Even so the battle raged on, and it grew plain that victory would not be sitting on Arlion's side of the field that evening. He attempted to flee and was captured within the hour and brought before the emperor.
On his knees he came and on his knees he went.
Moments later Arlion's head stood mounted upon a pike, set beside the very spot where the old emperor lay slain.
But the bloody vendetta between the empire's ruling dynasty and the Order of the Betrayed ran deeper still than that day, and traced back centuries before any man in that tent was born.
Legend held that the company's founder had been a noble himself once, his family brutally purged by the imperial house, one hundred and fifty years past. Along with other survivors of that purge he had banded together and formed the company, fuelled by a burning desire for revenge and for the restoration of their fallen dynasties.
Even now most of the commanders were direct descendants of those exiled nobles, clinging fast to the hope of reclaiming their rightful lands and exacting retribution upon their enemies.
Though if you were to ask any of them precisely where those ancestral lands lay, they would most likely shrug and say somewhere in Romelia, and change the subject to the price of horses.
All of this was common knowledge among the nobles of the empire.
Or so they had all believed, until the battered figure on the carpet proved otherwise.
Taking slow deep breaths, Gratios forced himself back toward calm as the moaning young noble slunk out of the tent in shame, one hand clamped over his ruined mouth.
The other men stood silent, none daring to speak, none daring to meet the eye that mattered.
It was Gratios himself who broke it, rising from his throne like chair and crossing the carpet with purposeful strides, his gaze blazing.
"Thirty years," he said, and he said it quietly, which was worse. "Thirty years I have carried this hand. Do you know what I remember best of that day? Not the spear. Not my father. The laughing." His fist closed until the knuckles cracked. "Lowly commoners, men who would sell their own wives for a fistful of coin, and they laughed as they lifted his head above their standard."
No one answered. No one was meant to.
"And now the gods, in their long silence, have finally set those same men on a field in front of me." He turned, and the smile that found his face frightened the room more than the shouting had. "I have prayed for this. I am not ashamed to tell you I have prayed for it like a beggar prays for bread."
"Then we take them, Your Grace," said one of the older nobles, and there were eager nods around him.
"We do not take them." Gratios' voice dropped lower still. "Taking implies there is something worth keeping. I will purge that company of every soldier who marches beneath that despicable rag they still fly. Every man. Every officer. Every boy who carries their water." He let that sit. "And I will nail what remains of them along the road from Baarsha to Romelia, close enough together that a traveller need never lose sight of the last one before he reaches the next. Let the merchants count them on the way home. Let them run out of fingers."
The plan had been a simple thing when they set out. Amass the gold, take the bribe, leave the principality, be home before the rains. But now, with their honour trampled underfoot by an Arlanian prince who should have known better than to buy the one company in the world his overlord could not ignore, there was no road back to simple.
"Your Grace," another noble ventured carefully. "And the prince himself? He will send envoys before the week is out. He will offer three times what we came for."
"Let him offer thirty." Gratios drew his sword, and the sound of it filled the tent. "No amount of gold will give me back neither hand nor father.
Arlania shall become true Imperial land once again. Not tribute. Not a bribe renewed every spring by whichever rabbit happens to be sitting on that wheel of a throne. Land. Ours."
He did not care how many years it took. He would see it done.
"And it is time for new nobles to rise in this forsaken country," he roared, sweeping the blade toward the assembled men, and every one of them understood exactly what was being offered and to whom. "True nobles. Men of Great Romelia!"
Steel came out of scabbards all around the tent, and their cries went ringing out across the camp.
"For Romelia! For the Emperor! For the Empire!"
They shouted it in unison, voices thick with bloodlust and vengeance, and if a good many of them feared the man who had set them shouting, not one could deny the weight he carried simply by standing in a room.
It was no longer about gold, nor about power, nor about the tedious arithmetic of tribute.
It was about dignity, and about restoring themselves to their rightful place in the world.
And finally, many of them were already reasoning, a proper war. With proper land at the end of it.