Chapter 79: It was revealed only after the fall (1)

It was revealed only after the fall (1)

The time that the orcs had wandered through the north had not been long.

It had been two months at most, and they did little damage as Count Balahard’s cavalry had ridden out and then funneled them away from settlements, allowing many cities to escape their flight. Nevertheless, the overall damage the north had suffered in the war had been considerable.

Nine cities had become necropolises, and the nine armies that had once guarded them had been swept away under the orcish tide.

Countless numbers of people who had failed to evacuate had been slaughtered. The economic and human damage that the north had suffered was incalculable.

The worse wound, though, was the damage done to the spirits of the northerners.

So what kind of place was the north?

Countless rivers of blood had flown through this land before the walls of Winter Castle stood as the tall bulwark against the hunger of monsters.

There was not a single place where the earth and the snow had not once been stained crimson with the spent lifeblood of innocents. Many had then come together to protect this land from monsters, to protect those that were also too helpless to defend themselves.

It was only then that the fortress’s tall walls had been raised, and only then could the north truly become a realm fit for humans.

The past of the north was a past of dedication and sacrifice. For the northerners, such a gloried past was the proud history of their ancestors and was the spiritual banner that gave them heart in those harsh climes.

This proud history and spirit had then been trashed by the nobility, by the lords.

These descendants of heroes had fled before the war had even broken out, while their ancestors had protected the people by tooth and nail.

And so, the northerners who stood to fight the orcs were devastated by this betrayal.

While they argued whether they would stand and fight or not, a messenger from Balahard had appeared and urged them to leave the territory.

However, not all those who marched were refugees who chose to evacuate.

Count Balahard was gathering troops to his banner, and the survivors of Winter Castle were preparing for war once more.

Two thousand soldiers waited to see the banner of the Balahards, had waited with hopeless hope.

When they finally stood under the Triple Shield, they knew: How long the Balahards had been waging their lonely war, and how the northern lords had turned away from their pleas for aid. They heard how all those selfsame lords had fled like cowards, which brought resentment and relief to these soldiers’ hearts in equal measure.

Still, they felt fortunate to have at least one noble left, and that remaining one had paid homage to the scions of the noble family who had fought countless wars that no one knew of, and this for many cold centuries. And this last noble had paid his undying respect to the knights and soldiers who had died, fighting to the very end.

These soldiers heard such tales and gathered under the Triple Shield banner of the Balahard family to fight together.

True enough, they were just ordinary folk and not real soldiers. They had never received proper training, not to mention that they had never learned how to fight ferocious monsters.

Never having held swords and never having fought monsters, they couldn’t even say that they were men who had ever risked their lives.

Still, when it came to the bow and the ax, the story takes on a completely different turn.

These northerners were born with axes in hand and arrows in their quiver.

One had to know how to shoot true in a barren land where animals were scarce, and one had to fell trees by the ax if one wished to have any chance at surviving the harsh winters.

They were excellent trappers and trackers as well, yet they viewed such skills as nothing special. It just so happened that what these men grew up with were the skills of the ranger, and so it came to be that the Winter Castle Rangers started to train these men.

Certainly, they couldn’t become full rangers after just a short training session before they had reached the battle lines. Moreover, it would be impossible for them to reach the level of the Winter Rangers of Balahard, who were said to possess the most outstanding skill as rangers upon the entire continent.

However, these men had already met the necessary conditions, and all that was left for them was to acquire the indomitable fighting spirit of the Balahad Rangers through practice.

And a real battle was on the way, a battle against legions of orcs who were led by a great monster called the King of the Orcs, a monster unequaled by any that had existed for many generations. Many of these new soldiers died during that battle, yet more had survived. Those who did survive refused to return to their hearths and their homes.

They all expressed their intentions to continue serving, and so the new Count Balahard had accepted them, forming a new Ranger Corps.

***

It would usually have been impossible, as volunteers were viewed with suspicion, conscripts more so. Some might have been spies for their former lords. Yet, what of the great weapon stockpile?

Most of the lords that would rise already had their sons dead or in prison, and their younger children would probably not be able to fulfill the full duties of a lord.

Ultimately, the responsibility of the armaments and the nobles’ punishment was allocated to the office of the Second Prince.

Maximilian decided to demand great sums of money as compensation for the sinful cowardice of the nobles who had fled from the defense of the Rhinethes. The other nobles, including Count Brandeburg, agreed with the prince’s decision. These nobles now had to bankroll reconstruction and rearmament after the orcs had ravaged the realm, and they knew they would pay for their sins till the end of their days. The money they had paid was just so that they could live on as disgraced fugitives.

Even those that had no part in the war were burdened with the cost of it. Twenty-three of the thirty-six families in the central region paid enormous sums of money, and about half of that entire amount went to the Balahard family. Although the war was over, the atmosphere in the north was still the same as during the war. The major cities had become naught but empty fields, and the families of dead lords battled for succession.

Many who had noble blood in them died, silent and forgotten. Messengers then came from the new Count Balahard, or more precisely, from the First Prince.

He had summoned all the nobles who were in the line of succession to Winter Castle, and he himself would choose the successor of each and every house.

It was ridiculous! Normally, the royal family would have rallied against such an infringement of the nobility’s right to exercise judgment over their personal and familial affairs. However, no protest came.

For hundreds of years, the Balahard family had just concerned themselves with guarding the border between the Blade’s Edge Mountains and the kingdom. Now, they exercised their political power for the first time in centuries as they stood behind Prince Adrian’s demands.

Moreover, the First Prince’s legend and how he had battled against the orcs did not make his demands easy to reject. When the northern nobles miserably died while fleeing, the eldest son of the royal family had fought from the front and led the north to victory.

The northern nobles were far too pragmatic to believe still the unrestrained rumors of Adrian Leonberger: Lecher, idiot, and royal shame.

Thousand of northerners had, after all, witnessed that terrible battle between the Warlord and the First Prince. Even if they hadn’t, the scars of the battle were well engraved upon Prince Adrian’s body.

So there they were: The Balahard family, ancient guardians of the north, and the First Prince, who had come to be called the Savior of the North.

Had the prince fled from the battle, the nobles would have scoffed at his message. But now, as he was the Savior of the North, how could they dare to ignore it?

The young men and women who had suffered through the war were no longer the gentle sheep they had been in the past. Not one house lacked training in the martial arts, and every villager held the swords and shields of their ancestors with as much willpower as they could muster.

It had become clear to the people that they could not trust the protection of so-called noble lords. All across the north, the nobility was rapidly losing their political powers. The First Prince had already fully centralized the military, and the common folk became sick of cowardly aristocrats that lorded over them. Only a slight provocation could cause the commoners to rise in revolt and wipe out the members and even the memory of noble families.

So it came to be that the lords left out of the loop had to sit in their lonely corners, eat their mustard and accept the successors appointed by the First Prince. The people who took over their families had to make a vow of fealty to Prince Adrian Leonberger. The war reparations paid to the Balahards by the central nobles were then paid out to these new northern nobles if they pledged their loyalty.

The money, in turn, allowed them to consolidate their authority without question.

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For the nobles who had been skipped over in the lines of succession, having to pledge to the new lords was impossible. They resented the new lords and were resented back in turn.

Sure enough, these dissatisfied souls sent messengers to tattle to the capital.

They sorely wanted to regain what they saw as their rightful titles and were even prepared to take it by the blades if other nobles would lend them the troops.

Some of the craftier ones greatly exaggerated the situation in the north to the royal family, hoping to take advantage of the discord between the King and his eldest son. Their efforts proved useless.

They had to contend with the First Prince’s political power, who now had the full might of twenty noble houses, including the Balahards, behind him. Only those trusted by the royal family even received replies, and these were curt dismissals with short justifications.

The King’s response was exactly the same as during the war, for he had abandoned the north a second time!

All he did was order Adrian back to the capital to resume his place as heir of the Leonberger dynasty, and yet the First Prince had even ignored this decree! He had written to his father that he would return only if the time was right.

The new Count Balahard and his knights were loyal to the First Prince and were excited by his reforms.

It could be stated with certainty that the north was now beyond the rule of the King and the capital.

Several scheming nobles then contacted the imperial ambassadors, for they knew that the empire would not look kindly upon the large-scale conscriptions that had been enforced in the north.

However, no matter how long these nobles waited, the ambassadors of the empire made no reply.

The true fact of it was that the imperial ambassador, Marquis Montpellier, was now in a great hurry to snuff out the coal that had fell into his boot.

“You have reports from the home country, as I have instructed?”

“As you say, I have made my report without a single error.”

“And what is the answer?”

“I observed the situation, and have made a few discreet promises of financial support so our defenses can be strengthened, I have also… ended a few sources of rumor.”

The Marquis of Montpellier gave contented sighs of relief at the words of his agent.

The recent turmoil in the northern part of the Leonberg kingdom had become a big issue that even endangered his own position.

The ambassador of the empire to the kingdom was given two missions.

Firstly, those unscrupulous serfs who once got it into their heads to fight against the empire could not be allowed to gain the same level of might that had allowed them to do so in the first place.

Secondly, those uncultured serfs were not allowed to become too weak and, in so doing, stop acting as a barrier between the large armies of monsters in the north and the empire itself.

Suffice to say; neither mission was easy. And to have both missions at the same time? Hah!

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Now, the kingdom was about to collapse, and Montpellier knew that his misjudgment of the situation was partly to blame.

He hadn’t taken the orcish invasion in the north seriously and had sent out agents to hinder the Leonberger family’s response to the situation. Montpellier had figured that the kingdom’s unrefined men would use this ‘monster crisis’ as the perfect excuse to build up their armed forces and expand their arsenals.

Especial pressure had been placed on the northern nobles to send no aid to the Balahard family. Montpellier had figured that he could, through bribes and threats, damage the Balahard family via a horde of Orcs, for had they not openly revealed their dislike for the empire and its enlightened ways? Yes!

It was a big mistake.

I had tried to corner a minor competitor, and in so doing, almost burned down the market square.

The turmoil in the north had been far more serious than the Marquis’s wildest estimates, and the fortress of the Balahard family had collapsed, swamping that entire part of the kingdom with those damnable green beasts.

The central government managed to defeat the orcs, but if the true course of events became known in the empire, the Montpellier family could become subject to severe sanctions.

Ah, so I was forced to send my agents out to stop rumors and spread counter-rumors, to reduce the truth of what part I had played in damaging the kingdom. This way, my position will be maintained!

“Fuck!” the Marquis of Montpellier swore, agitated by the state of reality. It has only been a few years since King Leonberger was discovered recruiting knights from outside his kingdom without imperial knowledge. He had been betrayed by one of his confidants, and it had been possible for imperial agents to infiltrate the operation and blackmail the King, further weakening centralized royal authority. Though, since the events of that time, diplomacy between kingdom and empire had become decidedly cool, if not downright frigid.

Although the Leonberg Kingdom was a small country, it had the longest and the hardest history of fighting against the empire.

And my job is to make sure that we don’t war with those uncultured peasants again.

Still, the fiasco with the orcs and his involvement in the affair had not improved peace prospects. Such poor judgment on his part greatly endangered his political life.

“Well, this First Prince can be a blessing if he wants to be,” said the Marquis of Montpellier to himself and laughed.

“So, there is a man who buys the knights of our glorious empire, all to help Marquis’ Boshin, and then this man, well, he defends my country just so that the Marquis can stay! I thought it would be useless, as he was an incompetent, but no! He was surprisingly helpful.”

The prince who was thrown out because he thought he couldn’t build the kingdom that should serve as the shield against the empire was unexpectedly resourceful.

Anyone with the skills of Adrian Leonberger deserved to be made into an imperial puppet!

“Although it was uncomfortable to reveal it at a banquet the other day, I was able to forgive that much, as he was a man who could not distinguish between a fine wine and a tankard of mud.”

He was the man who had traded in imperial knights, after all, so his base personality could surely not have changed.

“I have to try my hand a little, see what I can stir up.”

Only

Montepellier was now intent on putting this man who had stepped from the line of succession slap-bang into the center stage once more.

***

At that very moment, Adrian Leonberger, First Prince, whom the Marquis had decided to groom as a puppet king, was quite happy.

He was overjoyed as he studied the treasure he had accidentally discovered.

“Hah, I thought it had been completely ruined,” he said as he looked at the volunteers, visitors to the fort, who now stood before him.

“But no, it’s not ruined.”

It was if he had recovered that which had been lost.

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