It had all started with Viola and Prince Louis’s child. I had only meant to wipe away the filth clinging to the Rijeka family as a favor to the two of them, but the matter had snowballed far beyond anything I’d imagined.
It became a massive embezzlement scandal that entangled even princes, yet rather than exposing those princes directly, I focused on cutting off their money supply. Dealing with princes is the grand duke’s job, not mine.
That’s not to say I avoided the eastern princes out of fear. But if I had attacked the Counts of Ulm and Dellingen directly, the west would have jumped in as well, and everything would have descended into chaos all over again.
The civil war had already drained the nation’s strength, and now was the time to focus on recovery. Princes going at each other’s throats again was the last thing Altringen needed. So I left them to the grand duke.
What mattered was that this reached all the way into the political factions of Breisburg’s court. Taking the heads of the Lord of Schafen and Heinlein wouldn’t put an end to the embezzlement scandal.
And in the middle of all this, out of nowhere, Bodo had been kidnapped.
Why kidnap Bodo? Simple coincidence? Bad luck?
It was far too convenient to be either.
Anton was deeply worried about Bodo’s safety. He had always felt genuine pity for children who had lost their parents; his was a compassionate heart. That was why he had accepted Bodo, a boy who snapped at everyone, without prejudice.
He was probably the retainer who donated the most to the orphanage. And so Anton cherished Maria, the daughter of his dead friend, as well as Bodo, who had lost his mother.
"They wouldn’t hurt Bodo, would they?"
"Brother, if they wanted to hurt him, they wouldn’t have bothered kidnapping him."
Oscar shook his head.
He also believed Bodo had been deliberately kidnapped in order to demand something of me. There are always corpses in the streets of the slums, and no one pays them any mind except the cleaners and the gravekeepers.
But Bodo was a noble’s retainer and a boy with a certain reputation in the slums. There were too many strange things about this to call it a simple kidnapping. Anyone who recognized Bodo would have steered well clear of him.
Even if they hadn’t known him, the moment they seized a boy in fine clothes they would have looked into his background so they could demand a ransom. And then they would have learned that his master was the Gale Knight, the man who smashed the slums to pieces.
Laying hands on that man’s retainer? Sheer madness.
And yet Bodo had been kidnapped, and so far they hadn’t sent us a single message.
"Even if they meant to threaten you, Master, the timing and the location don’t add up."
"They seem to be plotting something using Bodo, but I can’t even begin to guess what."
The biggest headache was that I couldn’t fathom the kidnappers’ motive at all. Before becoming a retainer of the Streit family, Bodo had lived as a prostitute’s son, a child of the streets.
Bodo was a free spirit who came and went through the brothel district and the slums as if they were his own backyard. He was cunning, but perhaps thanks to his mother’s upbringing, he kept to the straight and narrow and never turned crooked like the criminals of the slums.
What could anyone possibly gain from kidnapping a boy like that?
"Haah, this is worrying. I’ve been blindsided, hit from a direction I never expected."
"Shouldn’t we go and look for Bodo?"
"I want to go looking for him this very moment, but with all the plates I have spinning, it isn’t that simple. At the earliest, I can’t move until I’ve handed the Lord of Schafen and the count over to His Highness the grand duke. There’s an order to how things must be done."
"But if something happens to Bodo in the meantime..."
"If something happens to Bodo, I will find them. I will find them and kill them. Down to the last man. Every single one!"
The price for laying hands on a retainer of the Streit family is a gruesome death, nothing less. Even if the enemy were a prince or the royal family itself, I would never let it stand.
Only then would no one dare look down on the Streit name.
That was what power and honor meant in the world of nobility.
When I came back to my senses, everyone was watching me nervously. I could hear people choking back groans or letting out deep sighs. The air around us had turned impossibly heavy.
It seemed I’d been radiating intense bloodlust without realizing it.
I should be careful. After all, I do have the killing of an old man on my record.
Perhaps sensing how serious I was, my retainers held their silence. Damn, the mood had grown far too stiff. To change the subject, I commended Oscar and Ted for their hard work.
"It must have been rough traveling all the way here from Feuzen. Nothing serious happened on the road, I hope?"
"Actually, deserter gangs were wreaking havoc around Feuzen as well, so with no troops to spare, Ted and I originally planned to cross the east on our own."
"Just the two of you, as fearless as that? Please tell me you didn’t actually come alone."
Crossing the east with only two men would be madness for anyone without exceptional skill. Outside the cities, the lands east of Breisburg and the eastern territories, the main battlegrounds of the civil war, were practically lawless.
You shouldn’t assume commoners or serfs are good-natured simply because of their station. Decent people are decent, but ill-natured ones exist in abundance at every rank of society.
It goes without saying that deserters, bandits, and mercenaries were running wild, but farmers with nothing to do in winter would band together into bandit packs, and soldiers released from captivity would take up robbery.
Most of them figured they’d score big in some other territory before heading home, and it was an age ruled by the selfish logic that plundering weighed nothing on a man’s conscience so long as it wasn’t his own hometown.
They also believed that if they went to the church in their hometown, made an offering, and confessed, their sins would be washed clean. This was why I didn’t carelessly release captured soldiers. It was obvious they would go and raise hell.
Noble prisoners were no better. Knights who had paid enormous ransoms needed to recoup that money somehow, and that was how the infamous robber barons and bandit knights were born.
They could rob another territory and flee without fear of being caught.
Try to catch them, and you had a war between territories on your hands.
That was why releasing prisoners demanded extreme caution. So far, the only nobles who had properly paid their ransoms were the Count of Basel, Baron Valent, and Baron Hildrant.
Bavaria’s Viscount Wittenfeld had been taken back by the Bavarian grand duke, but his ransom hadn’t been paid yet. If we couldn’t collect it, we would have to take the matter up with our own grand duke. Hm, I’ve wandered off topic there.
Oscar waved his hands.
"We wouldn’t attempt anything that reckless in times like these. The mistress was worried about our safety and told us to visit the Capital Sentinel Command."
"Hilda handled it perfectly. That’s the lady of our house for you."
"Yes. The viscount assigned us a detachment of duchy cavalry."
Viscount Loewenbert was my father-in-law’s right hand, a high official trusted to take full responsibility for the capital’s defense in the grand duke’s absence. He was one of the few nobles I respected, a man I could rely on.
"I’ll have to thank him properly when I return."
Wouldn’t he be delighted with a pouch of pepper as a gift? Come to think of it, I’d meant to give a gift to the imperial crown prince as well, but thanks to his little prank, I sent him off without one.
"And in Dellingen, we happened to run into the Beren Lance Cavalry. When Cavalry Commander Pensler heard our situation, he assigned us some of his lancers as well."
Commander Pensler did? The Beren Lance Cavalry was stationed in Dellingen at present. We had originally requested their support to intercept the Bavarian vanguard, but the distance made any real help all but impossible.
Fortunately, I had crushed the vanguard and ended the battle, and the Beren Lance Cavalry had stayed on to keep order in Dellingen. But I knew Commander Pensler’s character.
No doubt he had found a widow in Dellingen who caught his fancy and decided to settle in. That husband to every widow never gave his lower half a moment’s rest. Still, I was grateful that he had recognized Oscar and Ted and lent them his support.
His intentions probably weren’t pure, but whatever his reason, we had received his help, and expressing gratitude is simply how nobles conduct themselves. On the way back, I’ll make a point of stopping by the Beren Lance Cavalry garrison in Dellingen.
Hm, pepper for that gift as well, then.