“Nobody expects a surprise inspection!” - Old dwarven proverb.

The Free Lances stayed peacefully in Zephirous for a month and enjoyed the downtime in the city. During that time, their recruitment drive also gained them hundreds of enthusiastic recruits. Even after weeding out those who were clearly unfit for mercenary work – those that lacked the fortitude and mentality, mostly, as that was harder to train than physical prowess – they still had several hundred new recruits, which when combined with those still in training pushed their trainees to over a thousand members.

Their peaceful stay was slightly interrupted when Reinhardt saw a small group of dwarves entering the city and heading to the Mayor’s office, though, as he thought he saw an all-too familiar figure that should not be there. Thankfully he had Elfriede by him at the time, and thus an easy source with whom to check whether he was hallucinating in broad daylight or not.

“Friede, am I going crazy, or had the Crown Prince just passed us by in that carriage just now?” he asked. It was only a glimpse from the corner of his eye, but Reinhardt had honed his instincts and peripheral vision to notice things, since those were often crucial on a battlefield. The ebony-skinned straw-haired visage of the dwarven crown prince was something he believed he wouldn’t mistake for another.

“It’s him,” Elfriede said bluntly without needing any time to think. Like Reinhardt, she too had noticed the Crown Prince’s passage. While she could not see with her eyes, her magically attuned senses allowed her to recognize any individual within her range even if they only stayed there for a brief moment. As such, she was far more certain than he was about the Crown Prince’s presence. “Did you see where his entourage was headed?”

“Towards Varsha’s office. Should we head there too?”

“Might as well. I’m curious what brought the Crown Prince of Knallzog to visit us here all of a sudden,” replied Elfriede with a shrug of her shoulders. “He looked like he was trying to go incognito too, at that.”

By the time the two of them reached Varsha’s office, the occupants of the carriage Reinhardt saw the Crown Prince in were already inside. Elfriede noticed that the Crown Prince was in Varsha’s office, talking with her grandmother, so she politely excluded the area from her magical senses as she and Reinhardt waited for their discussion to come to an end.

“Oh, Captain Edelstein, Mrs. Edelstein. Good to see you,” said the Crown Prince when he exited the office together with Varsha a few minutes later. The dwarven prince grinned widely and gestured with his open palm towards another older dwarf that Reinhardt recalled being one of the guards that always stood by his side back during the Holy Kingdom campaign. “See, I told you they noticed. Pay up!”

The older dwarf grumbled something unintelligible to Reinhardt and slapped a gold coin on the Crown Prince’s awaiting hand.

“Anyway, good for you two to be here. We were going to look for you next since your Company was in town,” said the Crown Prince with a cheeky smile on his face. “Mayor Creussens, if you would do the honor of explaining the situation?”

“Certainly, Your Grace,” said Varsha with a polite bow. Varsha ushered Reinhardt and Elfriede to a side room, while the Crown Prince and his guards – Reinhardt noticed another three waiting outside the room, in another side room – adjourned to a meeting of their own. “Anyway, as you two saw, His Highness Aethelbald is here in town, and his arrival here isn’t a public one.”

“We noticed,” replied Elfriede bluntly. “What’s up with that? Surprise inspection?”

“That’s the reason he’s officially feeding those in the capital, yes,” admitted Varsha with a conspiratorial tone of voice. “The actual reason he’s going around with so few guards is to try to lure out a snake from its den, with himself as the bait.”

“Political conflict, I assume then?” asked Reinhardt. “I heard that there were some clashes in court from pops when he visited Knallgant to get some material a while ago. Didn’t expect that it was growing to a serious one, though.”

“How familiar are you two with the Royal Uncle, Karl Stahlfaust?” queried Varsha.

“Only as much as what Pops told us. We haven’t been here for nearly a decade and he was the one who usually kept track of the political changes here,” admitted Reinhardt with a shake of his head. “Radical conservative and dwarven supremacist if I remembered it right?”

“About right. Add being second in line for the throne and I think you should get the situation at hand,” said Varsha with a nod.

“Oh.”

“So the Crown Prince is baiting his uncle to try to off him in order to get a reason to get rid of him then, I assume,” said Elfriede as she thought over the situation quickly. “Sounds risky, but the Prince wasn’t a fool from what I knew of him, so I assume he took precautions to make it hard for his Uncle to make a move?”

“You always catch on fast on shit like this,” commented Varsha with a sigh. “That’s the gist of it, yeah. The Crown Prince is traveling with his most trusted guards, as well as Mæster Goerenbrandt, the greatest healer who had ever graced the kingdom since its founding. The man is considered a national treasure, so any harm to him would result in a hideous amount of trouble for the perpetrator.”

“So he’s giving his uncle the opportunity but at the same time forcing him to adopt a more careful approach, which reduces the options available,” Elfriede reasoned. “Probably aiming for a more personalized attempt, which would hopefully result in a captive then, do I get that right?”

“That’s what he had in mind, yeah. With Mæster Goerenbrandt around, anything not instantly fatal should be curable, so it’s not as risky as you’d think,” said Varsha with a nod. “He wants some of your people to be available to covertly be ready to grab any assassins as well as some more to overtly guard him. What do you think?”

“We owe the Crown Prince quite a bit from back then, so I’ll accept the job on behalf of the Company.”