MARTIN: The Second Sons are a mercenary company
who sell their services under contracts to anyone who wants to hire them.
Be it a free city, a slaver city,
a lord who wants to take over his city.
Someone who wants to cross dangerous territory and needs a strong escort.
There are a number of these mercenary companies
or free companies, as they call themselves in Essos.
The nine Free Cities do not have great military tradition.
So when they're fighting wars
they prefer to hire mercenaries to fight the wars for them.
And some of the sellsword companies are dominated by one city or another.
But others are made up of people from every different part of the world.
The nine Free Cities, people from Westeros, outlaws and exiles,
and people just looking to make their fortune.
You know these men?
Only by the broken swords on their banners.
They're called the Second Sons.
In a medieval system based on primogeniture, the first son gets everything.
The second son gets nothing.
They were raised in noble families
and they've received all the training for knighthood,
they're skilled warriors.
But they have no property or anything like that.
At least that's the origin of the company.
Of course, this is a company that's hundreds of years old.
And they've passed through many different rulers,
and they've worked for many different people.
But the thing about sellswords, of course, is that they're treacherous.
They have no loyalty to anyone.
They're not trained to loyalty or obedience like the Unsullied.
They're fighting for pay.
And also sellswords like to live.
They're not fighting for land or their wives or any of those things.
They're just fighting for coin.
And if they're faced in a hopeless battle,
"Oh, my God, we're massively outnumbered. We're on the wrong side.
"Maybe we should change that, (CHUCKLES) being on the wrong side."
So that becomes a factor there, too.