AN: I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to note that the rest of the fic won't be as battle heavy as things have been lately. You know what that means? Politics, yay!

ooOoo

The sounds of celebration filtered through the walls of my tent. I was alone, staring down at the folding table where an array of reports had been gathered. I wasn't reading the words on the page. Instead, my mind kept replaying scenes from the battle. An Unsullied soldier rising from the ground just far enough to drive a spear upward into the thigh of a legionnaire. Another impaled twice in the stomach, methodically throwing a javelin from point blank range. Another left for dead stabbing straight upward, spitting an unfortunate legionnaire.

Over two hundred dead. More to come as the maester dealt with the wounded.

Brynden Tully had been introduced to war as a young man with little more on his mind than to close with the enemy in pursuit of glory. He grew into a leader of men, often taking charge of scouting detachments. He was no stranger to life and death decisions. But while his advice was often valued, he had never been responsible for deciding whether a battle was worth fighting in the first place. Weighing potential loss of life against potential gains was a new experience for me.

Now that the potential loss of life had turned into actual deaths I was having a hard time deciding that it was worth it. We'd won a greater bounty from Qohor, but in exchange we'd lost upwards of one in ten of the men. Everyone in the Sunset Legion lost a friend today. It would take an awful lot of gold to make up for that loss.

A knock on the tentpost drew me from my thoughts. I looked up to see Rodrik Lolliston lingering in the doorway.

"Will you be joining the victory feast, captain?"

I snorted. "Another couple victories like that and we won't have an army left."

Rodrik smiled and shook his head. "To hear the other companies talk nobody else would have an army left at all doing what we did. The Unsullied have never been beaten like that before."

That was something. Not just the bragging rights, though those were nice too, but to puncture the myth of invulnerability carried by the Unsullied. If some poor bastard had to face down a line of slave soldiers marching through the Riverlands, at least he'd do it knowing they could be beaten. With luck we'd provide the blueprint others could follow.

We'd paid a high price today but if our efforts kept the Unsullied out of Westeros it would be well worth it.

I stood, squared my shoulders and pasted a smile on my face before following Rodrik outside. Whatever doubts I might harbor, it wouldn't do the men any good to see me moping around.

ooOoo

The end of the battle has gone about as smoothly as we could reasonably have hoped. Finishing off the Unsullied was a nasty, dangerous business, but the rest of Qohor's troops proved more human. The sailors in the galleys cut and run long before we could reach the shore, rowing hard up the Qhoyne. The ragtag band of missile troops fled before doing any noticeable damage to our men, and proved easy enough to round up. A bunch of them helped us finish off the last knot of Unsullied, and I suspected they'd be willing to join up with us if we were willing to trust them that far.

Prying apart that last group revealed the location of the Qohorik commander. Our impromptu allies set upon him with a will, killing him in brutal fashion before he had a chance to surrender. Our men on the scene were at first too shocked to react then rather disinclined to risk themselves protecting an enemy. Once he was dead his killers were all too happy to explain themselves.

As they explained it, Qohor is run by a city council. They had their own fancy name for it, but that's basically what it was. There were five or six major political parties, depending on how you counted it. They would ally with each other to achieve temporary majorities but none of them really trusted each other. They were all savvy enough to recognize that control of the Unsullied was a de facto monopoly on force within Qohor, and paranoid enough not to want another party to have that level of control. The usual practice was to divide up the Unsullied between the parties. They were only put under unified command in times of crisis.

When looking for a commander the wise elders of Qohor were not looking for a brilliant military mind. They were looking for a man who would do his duty and then relinquish control of the Unsullied. In other words, they needed a diehard, hidebound, fanatical patriot. Once they found their man he was put in command of the Unsullied and a mix of supplementary troops drawn from the city watch, private security forces, slaves, and volunteers.

What I had taken to be a reserve force had actually been assembled by the commander as his personal guard when his non-Unsullied troops expressed their opinion of his intention to defend the city to the last drop of their blood. He had kept them in line through threats of immediate execution by Unsullied, and had decided to follow up on that threat rather than try to relieve his overextended forces after our breakthrough.

After hearing all that I couldn't blame them for extracting some rough justice. I would have liked to have the man as a hostage, but it didn't sound like anybody in Qohor would have put a particularly high value on his life.

The remainder of the march up the river passed without incident. Our pirate friend kept his boats close to the shore in case Qohor tried to launch a surprise naval attack, but we were within sight of the city walls before we saw another galley. I would guess that our last battle exhausted the Qohorik appetite for taking chances.

The city walls themselves were quite well constructed. Twenty-odd feet high, very solidly built. I was happy that that was all there was to them. No absurdly high dragonproofed fortifications. No esoteric fantasy materials used in the construction. Just a well built, well maintained wall. It could have been a significant barrier, if Qohor had an army to man it and hadn't had a surrounding forest that could be used to build siege machinery.

I didn't want to have to storm the city. I'd lost enough men fighting in this war already. Of course it wouldn't do to let our enemies know about that. If I wanted to convince them to surrender they would have to believe that I was perfectly willing to take what I wanted through force. The upcoming parley would be as much about attitude and showmanship as it would be a rational discussion.

We set up for the parley out of bowshot from the city, but not far out of bowshot. We arranged three covered wagons on either side of the road leading to the main gate, then set up portable chairs on the road itself for each of the members of our party. The Tattered Prince, Irrys, and myself were there, of course. I also had Petyr, Rodrik, and Walder with me. Jon Connington sat on the far side of our group, while the last member of our party was a man from the Windblown who claimed to be able to speak the Qohorik dialect of low Valyrian. A handful of armed men lurked behind us, acting in concert with the mounted Long Lances a short distance away to discourage our negotiating counterparts from trying anything underhanded.

Irrys and the Tattered Prince had agreed to let me take the lead in the negotiations. They had seemed more willing than before to defer to me in general after the victory over the Unsullied, although I hadn't tried pushing anything outrageous. For the moment my leadership dictated that we plant the flag of parley in the road and sit back and wait for somebody to show up.

It didn't take long for the gates to open. The group that rode out to meet us was one of the oddest that I had ever seen. There were ten of them, and their armor was amazing. Beautiful, rich color, intricate detail work, stunning artistic design, the works. The only armor I had seen back in Westeros that could even compare was Tywin Lannister's monument to golden excess. The problem was that the men wearing the armor were sat atop horses that would have looked more at home pulling carts than riding into war, and from the way the men were sitting they may well have been driving those carts this morning.

The man at the head of the group at least seemed to have some martial training, though he still fell well short of the standard I would have expected of somebody in his getup. It was full plate armor in gleaming black steel worked so as to appear that an enormous snake was wrapped around him. The uppermost coil merged into his helm, a gleaming piece of art fashioned into the likeness of a snake's head. Precious metals had been shaped to form individual scales, and a pair of rubies gleamed from its eyesockets.

I couldn't resist turning to the Tattered Prince. "Armor that fancy has to have a name. What do you think? Snakebit? Snakebiter, maybe?"

"I couldn't possibly say," he replied, shrugging. Sometimes Essosi just don't get it.

"What about you, Petyr?"

"Brightfang Souldrinker," Petyr said, not missing a beat.

I whistled. "You're right. That is exactly what my brother would call that monstrosity if I brought it home with me."

As we watched the group of them formed up in a ragged line even with the farthest pair of wagons. The serpent armored man swung off his horse and walked forward. As he did, he opened his visor-the helmet was designed so that it looked like a snake opening its mouth-revealing a young man of two and twenty, at most.

I turned to our translator.

"Tell him to piss off. We're not here to waste time talking to messengers. If anybody in that city wants to see another moon they'd best send out somebody worthwhile to negotiate."

The translator said something in that gobbledygook language of theirs. Judging by the way the snake man's face darkened as he spoke, I'd say he managed to get across the gist of my words. When the translator fell silent, I could see the jaw muscles on his face working as he ground his teeth. Rather than say anything, he snapped his visor shut and mounted his horse before riding back to the city. The other nine men stayed in place. We sat there in a rather awkward silence for what felt like a much longer wait before the gate opened once more.

Four older men walked out of the city under their own power. They didn't move particularly quickly, but they didn't strike me as particularly decrepit. They seemed far more comfortable in their rich clothing than their honor guard did in their fancy armor. Coupled with what seemed to be a faintly disdainful attitude, it seemed to me that we had some real decision makers on our hands. They walked into the center of our parley grounds and one of them began to speak.

I held up my hand to silence him. I didn't really care what he had to say, and I wanted him to know that. I spoke directly to him, trusting the translator to relay my words.

"Do you know this man?" I asked, pointing at Connington.

He nodded before the translator finished asking the question. I suppose it made sense that somebody leading a trading hub like Qohor would be multi-lingual.

"Ask him if the Golden Company will be coming to save you."

He did, in lightly accented common tongue. Connington shook his head. Unprompted, he asked why.

"They're gone," Connington said, his eyes focused on a battlefield only he could see. "All gone."

I felt a little bad about dragging him through this, but his obvious emotional pain conveyed the truth of what had happened in a way that words never could. I saw the lead negotiator's eyes widen before he smoothed out his features into a near-expressionless mask.

I snapped my fingers. The men arrayed around the carts by the road whipped off their covers to reveal the grisly contents within. Each cart contained a pyramid of human heads. Each head was topped with the distinctive spiked cap of the Unsullied.

"You're welcome to count them yourself. We made it..." I turned to Petyr.

"Two thousand, nine hundred and ninety six."

The negotiator's jaw tightened, but he remained silent. I leaned forward, spreading my arms.

"Nobody is coming to save you. Your city will fall. The defenders will die if we fight, as will their commanders. We will take all the riches we can carry."

I leaned back. "The good news is, we will not kill your children. We will not rape your women. We will not pull each stone from stone and burn the rest until nothing is left to mark where your city once stood. We do not do such things."

I paused for a moment. "Of course, you might consider whether the next Dothraki mob to show up will be so considerate."

The negotiator glared at me. "Why do we speak, then, if all this is inevitable?"

"If you don't want a horselord running wild through what's left of your city," I said, then smiled, "you'd better make us one hell of an offer."

ooOoo