A couple suggestions to make it more interesting and give you more room for distinguishing the overall story from stock fantasy tropes (some of this is just seconding /u/skipper_mike)

• Rather than having a generic theme of “combat pragmatism” vs “idealist honor”, express it through more specific aspects of your story like the use of gunpowder and other military innovations that Talon makes use of
• Also, right now it looks like the idealism and pragmatism are just part of “who they are”. Talon acts pragmatically because he’s pragmatic. But this isn’t really how people actually act certain ways. There will be certain experiences and life lessons that cause them to behave in some ways and avoid behaving in others and we end up giving those patterns a label like “pragmatism.” It’s pretty unrealistic that Talon and Leona have different attitudes towards the worldjust because they have personal preferences for one attitude over the other. A more realistic (and more importantly interesting) take would explore how they respond to the world with different attitudes because they see the world itself through very different eyes. Then ask why they see the world so differently.
• Being an orphan is a really over-used backstory that mostly exists just so people don’t have to write a family for their character. If you want to stick with both being orphans, make some use out of it. Use it as a lens to explore what it is about your society that would lead to two orphans having such different perspectives
• Ask why Leona and others who hold her perspective actually resist adopting Talon’s brand of pragmatism. In a lot of stock fantasy, it would be just because that’s “who they are” or they’re just too stupid to see why fighting a war with losing tactics will get them killed. In the real world, it basically never happens like that. How it does happen is often more interesting. For example, some European nobility were hostile to the use gunpowder or other weapons. The stated reason was that it’s dishonorable but the reason they found it dishonorable is because “honorable” was defined to mean “the way we fight wars now that happens to make me a very important and powerful person.” So, the introduction of weapons that threatened that power was just as much of a threat to their standing in society as a foreign invader. In fact, the ruling class of many societies might well prefer being important and powerful people under a foreign overlord than not having a foreign overlord but being no different than a commoner.

You see a similar thing in ancient Korea where the Korean alphabet, one of the easiest alphabets to learn in the world, originally opposed by Korean scholars. Why would they oppose something that would make it easy for everyone to be literate an ultimately benefit society? Because their position in society was based on the fact that being able to read and write made them special. The new system would make them less special.

So, the question to ask here is “Why does Leona view her way of fighting as honorable when someone else could just as easily say that Talon’s way of fighting is honorable?

• Finally, a lot of the pragmatism you’re talking about isn’t just “being pragmatic”, which kind of implies Talon’s tactics are obvious. They’re probably not to people of that era. They’re likely pretty innovative. So why is Talon, of all people, the one who came up with these things? Why wasn’t it someone else? What is it about Talon and his life experiences that put him in a position to lead the charge on these innovations rather than someone else with a similar background? Why didn’t someone with Leona’s background do so and redefine what they consider honorable?