Now this was a different breed of man. He was closer to fifty than forty but stood straight, with aristocratic bearing. His scratched breastplate sat over a well-used gambeson. He wasn’t a knight in name alone, but a seasoned warrior. His companions were also clearly professional soldiers; knights or squires.

  I straightened up in response. No point in hiding. “These men kidnapped two of our children. We have come to retrieve them.”

  I flicked a hand behind my back, signaling the rest of our men to melt into the trees. Better to keep this new party in the dark about our exact numbers.

  He spat on the ground. “We've been tracking this scum for days, and were about to pounce on them. You have my thanks, stranger.” He looked me up and down with a discerning eye. “We were not aware that anyone civilized lived beyond the Treacherous Bog. Which realm do you serve?”

  “The world is a big place. We are-”

  Our tense conversation was interrupted by a scuffle behind me. I turned around to see a soldier grappling another, struggling to hold him down.

  “Please excuse me,” I said hurriedly and ran to them.

  “He was about to shoot the man you were talking with,” hissed the soldier who was trying to restrain the agitated one.

  “That's Sigmar!” the restrained soldier spat, his face red with rage. “He killed my younger brother, an innocent boy of fourteen!”

  I pried his crossbow away from his grip. “Gag and bind the idiot, then take him back to the outpost,” I ordered two nearby soldiers, who moved to comply.

  I returned to the knight. “My apologies. The soldier had a seizure.”

  “I'm Sir Sigmar of Brunthal, Knight of the Nanon Kingdom,” he introduced himself in a restrained voice.

  “I'm Jack, Commander of the First Troop, Armed Forces of the Republic of Chadom.”

  Shit. Should've thought of a pseudonym to give to dangerous strangers. I looked at him with a blank expression. Not giving you anything more than necessary, old man.

  “I've never heard of the Republic of Chadom.”

  “The world is a big place, Sir. So big that sometimes even realms can make new friends,” I said, smiling.

  “I will need the heads of those brigands to prove they've been dealt with.”

  “Certainly. We will get them for you,” I said, hiding my shock. They actually do that in these times?

  “Are you not going to offer us your hospitality?” he asked, incredulous.

  “I'm afraid we're not well suited to host eminent guests such as yourselves at the moment. My deepest apologies.”

  He looked like he would have insisted, but the ferocity with which we dispatched the brigands probably gave him pause.

  “We need something in their possession,” he said cagily.

  “I will get it for you.”

  “No,” he replied abruptly. “I must retrieve it myself.”

  “Their possessions are ours by right, though.”

  “I will compensate you for it. The rest you can keep,” he said, grimacing.

  He motioned for others to follow, but I cut him off with a gesture of my hand. “Just you, Sir.”

  He gave me a flat look, but complied. I escorted him back to the camp, where he rifled through the leader's body. He patted it, looking for something small. He apparently didn't find it and searched other bodies, then went through the tents, ignoring the significant amount of loot which made my eyes boggle. Not satisfied, he checked the horses’ packs, but came up empty handed.

  “Did you really not take anything from them?” he stared at me intensely, as if he could read my mind.

  “I've been with you, ever since we dispatched the brigands.”

  “Are you sure nobody took anything?” his eyes flicked meaningfully toward my men.

  I turned to them. “Did anyone take anything from the bodies? Do not lie about it!” I shouted, but no one answered.

  After one last look around, he turned and walked away. Meanwhile four iron willed Hunters beheaded the brigands and stuffed the heads into sacks. I didn't want to give the bodies away, as even their shoddy armor was much better than what most of us had at the moment.

  While Sigmar’s party withdrew, we went through the tents and freed the other boy, who was bound, gagged, a bit beaten and bloody but otherwise healthy.

  We also freed the real prize I had been eyeing ever since I laid eyes on the camp: the brigands' horses. Most of them looked well-bred. How the hell did a bunch of brigands manage to get their hands on such expensive beasts?

  We could've arrived even earlier and escaped this encounter with Sir whats-his-name, if only we had some sooner. Well, not really, but a man could dream. I had four soldiers, who had some experience with them, take the beasts and the shaken boys back to the outpost, while we gave our new “friends” the brigands’ heads. We politely but firmly told them to get lost, by not moving away from the camp and keeping an eye on their retreat.

  ---

  “My lord, why did we back off?” Sigmar's new second-in-command asked as they retraced their steps. A capable but brash young lad. He missed the old dependable Korrin.

  “You saw how quickly they dispatched the brigands. They had a lot more men hidden in the forest. It would have been foolish to be more… insistent. Did you notice anything unusual?”

  “I think their crossbow prods were made of steel, and their bows had something odd attached to them.”

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Not a group of yokel peasants, then, but they sure dressed like them.”

  “Why were we sent to dispatch a bunch of brigands, though? Isn’t that beneath us?”

  “Who knows,” Sigmar lied.

  He knew. The brigands had been exceptionally lucky during a raid and taken possession of a very dangerous letter, which he hadn't found. Did these strangers take it while distracting him with that scuffle between soldiers? Or had the brigand leader sold it? No, he wouldn't know its importance.

  “What are we to do with these heads?”

  “Throw them away.” He had thought it would intimidate or inflame the other party, but they had remained stoic as a stone.

  If Sigmar wasn't facing an unknown foe, he would have ripped the answers out of their throats. No matter, he was protected enough that he could report the results truthfully without losing his head.

  “You don’t have anything to say?” he said to Zock’s man. He had expected complaints for the failure to retrieve the letter, but the man had been silent ever since the encounter.

  “It can’t be...” He murmured.

  “What?” Sigmar asked.

  “That man... I believe that was the Viscount. Jack Nobart. He was supposed to have died saving those refugees.”

  “What?” Sigmar asked in confusion, and shook his head in disgust. He hated family drama.

  ---

  We looted the camp of everything we could: armor, weapons, tents, a surprising amount of jewelry, and some rather large pouches of gold. The brigands had recently made a big haul but hadn't had time to spend or stash it.

  “Commander of the First Troop, huh?” Lothar asked, amused.

  “What's wrong with that? I am the Commander, Supreme or otherwise, and this is indeed the First Troop.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I named it. I wasn't about to tell him I'm the leader of our people while wearing these ragged clothes. Those things matter a lot to these people. I might as well have said, 'We are a weak pathetic people waiting for you to conquer us, your Eminence.'”

  “Aren't you one of 'these people', Sire?” He teased.

  That reminded me that Jack was a noble as well, and that I better not forget that. Who knows how even people like Lothar, who completely trusted me, would react if I told them the truth. They would probably think I'm a lunatic and confine me 'for my own safety'.

  “Yes, but I'm not a prick who thinks everyone who didn't come out of a noble cooch is beneath me.” I replied.

  “I'm amazed how they managed to cross the Bog with this many horses though,” Lothar mused.

  “With this,” Theo said, waving a map around. “They had a route mapped through the Bog.”

  “Where did you get this from?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “The leader's horse,” he said innocently.

  Alarm bells went off in my head. Sigmar had looked distraught and angry when he didn't find whatever he was looking for. Something quite important, but it wasn't gold or jewels. His eyes had glossed over them, despite the significant amount. It must have been information of some kind.

  “Why didn’t you give it to me when I asked for anything you had taken from the bandits?” I asked, keeping my anger in check.

  “It wasn’t me,” he said defensively. “Wenik picked it up. It must’ve fallen from the horse’s pack upon our attack. He had it with him when he went back to escort the angry idiot.”

  “He took anything else?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “No,” he replied, waving the map again, when a parchment fell out from its folds. He picked it up, frowned and handed it to me. “It's all gobbledygook.”

  The text looked like a collection of random characters, but I didn’t think it was the scribbling of a madman. For one thing, the parchment it was written on was of very high quality.

  I sat on the ground right there and began scribbling on the dirt with a stick. It took only a few attempts to figure out the text was a simple substitution cipher. The more I figured out the contents, the higher my eyebrows rose and the dried my throat became.

  “Fuck!” I erased my scribbles with a swipe of my foot. Cursing my curiosity for wasting time decoding the document, I ran back to the outpost. There, I selected the fastest looking horse, and was about to chase them down to give them their damn letter back when my mind finally began working. I took long breaths to calm myself.

  “Wait! What happened?” Lothar panted, catching up.

  “This is a letter incriminating a certain ‘Lord Ox’ of colluding with some people in the interest of their ‘mutual friends.’ He was giving them information about court politics and time tables, in exchange for gifts and future considerations.”

  “Friends?”

  “Most likely Zoran’s agents. They’ve been subsuming other realms rather quickly the last few decades. Haven’t you wondered how?”

  “Nobody has been able to figure that out. Refugees speak of magic and whatnot that can bring down castle walls, but there is no evidence.”

  A shiver went down my spine. They have cannons.

  “Powerful weapons can be game changing, but I think these people are even more sophisticated. They prepare for an invasion by weakening their target first.” I waved the parchment. “Sigmar’s men were either employed by Ox to destroy the proof of his treachery or by other parties to find it.”

  “We can give it back.”

  “Too late now. The rest of you can't ride, so we can't catch up to them. If I go alone, they'll kill me, just to be sure. That still doesn't leave you safe, as these,” I lifted my crossbow, “won't be enough to protect you from the full might of Nanon. Whether we give the letter back or eliminate Sigmar's party, their employer will still send more men.”

  “So what now?”

  “We prepare for war.”

  He nodded curtly, worry about the future written on his face.

  “We need to claim this forest as ours, making its other end our border. That will give us strategic depth.” I told him. Action was the best antidote to worry.

  “Strategic depth?”

  “A margin of safety. Land that we can afford to cede to the enemy and still survive. But we really shouldn't; this will be a much more advantageous battlefield for us as the smaller force. I should've had sentries watching the far end, damn it.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up over it. We needed every able bodied man to focus on food and the castle. It’ll be much easier now,” he said, patting the horse’s flank.

  We decided to stay close to the camp to make sure we could greet our new “friends” if they decided to return.

  Emotionally wrung out from the encounter and the revelation, I wanted to do nothing more than sleep, but had one more thing to address; the idiot who almost shot Sigmar.

  I visited the outpost, which was a bunker, hidden under layers of soil and rocks to blend it with the mountainside. The angry young man was still bound and fuming.

  I removed the gag from his face and sat in front of him.

  “What is your name, soldier?”

  “Leor,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “Leor, that man killed your brother, I can understand wanting justice for that. What do you think would've happened if you had killed him?”

  “He would've gotten what he deserved!”

  “What else?”

  All I got was a blank stare in response.

  “He was here on behalf of the Kingdom. As the operation's commander, he represents his country. Killing him unprovoked might’ve led to a war with Nanon. Do you think we could win that fucking war?”

  “...No,” he replied meekly, averting his gaze.

  “Nanon has more fresh recruits every year than we have people. Our resolve and weapons will mean nothing if they truly want to destroy us.”

  Well, if I could figure out cannons and rifles, we could effectively protect our valley from almost any direct threat at the choke points, but I wasn't going to tell that to the doofus.

  “Five lashes in front of the whole army and the Council, after you’ve told them what you did and what could've happened as result.”

  He nodded, head hung in shame.

  “This was a big blunder that could've doomed us all. You will not get another chance,” I growled, then softened my tone. “I am sorry about your brother, but a proper military needs discipline. Discipline sometimes comes at a high price, such as letting go of revenge.”

  I wasn't going to tell him that he might just get a chance to get that revenge soon.

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