Sellswords & Free Companies
The mercenary companies of the Free Cities ÔÇö the Second Sons, the Golden Company, and their like ÔÇö swords for hire whose loyalty lasts exactly as long as the pay.
The fuller tale
The Free Cities of Essos run on mercenary companies the way Westeros runs on sworn houses ÔÇö bands of swords for hire with names like the Second Sons, the Windblown, and the Company of the Cat, loyal to whichever paymaster is currently solvent and prepared to switch sides the moment the coin does. Coin Before Crown is not a formal motto so much as an accurate summary: a sellsword company's contract is its only real oath, and the companies that survive are the ones canny enough to break a contract before it breaks them.
The Golden Company stands apart from the rest by reputation alone ÔÇö founded generations earlier by exiled supporters of a defeated Targaryen rival claimant, it has never broken a contract in its entire recorded history, a boast most other free companies cannot make and one the Golden Company treats as more valuable than any single payday. Ten thousand strong with war elephants in its train, it is the largest and most disciplined mercenary force in Essos, and precisely because it never breaks its word, whoever manages to hire it is buying something rarer in that world than swords: certainty.
Bronn represents the sellsword tradition's Westerosi cousin ÔÇö a common-born blade who fights for whoever pays best and says so without apology, first for Tyrion Lannister, later for whoever outbids the last employer, treating loyalty as a market rather than a virtue and surviving, largely because of that honesty, considerably longer than most of the highborn characters who look down on him for it.
The page and the screen
The Golden Company's ultimate allegiance is one of the more consequential divergences in the entire saga. In the show, Cersei Lannister hires the company directly to bolster her defense of King's Landing against Daenerys. In the books, the company's contract lies elsewhere entirely ÔÇö with a young man calling himself Aegon Targaryen, raised in Essos and believed by many to be the son of Rhaegar Targaryen thought killed in infancy, whose planned invasion of Westeros with the Golden Company at his back is a major unresolved storyline the show cut in its entirety, along with the claimant himself.
