“Be careful with who you give your trust to.” - Old mercenary saying.

“So, anything new from your chat with your father last night?” Reinhardt asked Salicia soon after Dacia took Bernd Adenauer away with her to watch how they trained the mercenary trainees.

“Several things that I feel aren’t secrets at all,” replied Salicia with a shake of her head. “Pops was very open in our talks, but also remained guarded about things that should be guarded. I think he realized all too well that I’d be obligated to report what he said and stuck to what’s relatively common knowledge, or things he would tell you anyway in the future.”

“Is he always guarded like that?” Reinhardt couldn’t help but ask. He had hoped that the former nobleman might have let slip of some things while talking to the daughter he had not met for decades, but apparently that wasn’t the case.

“The lord had always been that way, Boss,” replied Grünhildr with a shrug of her shoulders. “My mother worked as the guard captain for the lord’s mansion back then, and I was pretty much raised there as milady Sal’s playmate, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the lord drop his guard… other than maybe the time when he sent us back then.”

“A consummate professional then,” noted Reinhardt. “Always good to have those types on your side, I guess. So what bits did he offer during the talk?”

“We’ll skip the bit about our family doing relatively well despite the conflict since that’s unimportant,” said Salicia, to which Reinhardt nodded in agreement. “Probably the most important bit he told us was the Free City’s situation as a whole. As the name suggests, they hold the area around the former imperial capital and its surroundings, but they’re… a rather different faction than what we had expected.”

“How so?”

“There are some nobles in the Free City’s government, but they’re not as influential as you’d expect. The Free City is governed by a council that so far has been mostly chosen by the people itself. Some of the nobles managed to earn themselves a seat by bringing their territory into the mix, but not all of them do,” explained Salicia. “Needless to say, many of them are not satisfied with only being a member of the ruling council.”

“Since they hadn’t tried to take things over, I assume they lack the force to do so,” commented Reinhardt.

“About right. The Free City’s main military force is in the form of their citizen militia, and put together, those outnumber the forces of the nobles by more than twenty to one, even if all the nobles banded together,” she clarified. “Most of those nobles are small landowners, barons, mostly, trying to link themselves to a bigger power. My father was one of the nobles with the most power prior to the civil war that joined the city, but he’s fully on the council’s side rather than seeing himself as one of the nobles.”

“Ah, hence his dropping his noble title,” said Reinhardt as some things clicked in his mind. Nobles in most places rarely dropped their titles, so for Salicia’s father to request exactly that was an oddity. “What is your father’s standing in the city then? Did he inform you?”

“Pops said he was part of the city’s council and no more,” replied Salicia. “Some bit of background that’s relevant here, Boss. The Free City came to be after the people of the former imperial capital got fed up with their home being treated as a trophy by the various nobles fighting over it and rising to claim it for themselves. It’s practically a peasant uprising, at its core. They don’t often view the nobles too kindly because of that.”

“Definitely explains why they would look far afield for mercenaries like us to train their people, then,” said Reinhardt as he scratched his chin in thought. “They couldn’t afford to have the knights associated with the nobles do it in fear of those being trained switching allegiances over time, even if some of the nobles managed to gain their trust to an extent.”

“That’s what we thought too,” said Grünhildr as she nodded.

“Father did mention that he was quite trusted by the majority of the council, but that the smaller nobles who joined later never saw eye to eye with him,” continued Salicia. “I guess it made some sense if they sent him to hire us with the rights to negotiate on top. I think he’s also hinted that he wouldn’t mind seeing some of the other nobles get taken down a peg or two.”

“That counts for political jobs, and we charge extra for that. We’ll see if he broaches that topic in our next meeting, though,” said Reinhardt as he pondered the implication. “Anything you feel might deserve a warning or two from what you heard?”

“The Free City itself is a risky spot,” replied Grünhildr as she crossed her arms. “It’s the largest city in the whole former empire, so all the nearby powers would be looking to take it for themselves,” she clarified. “In exchange, the city only got a huge peasant militia and its walls to fall back to. Put them together and they could resist most attacks for a long while, but if they kept getting attacked, they might end up having logistic issues in the long run.”

“For the time being, they have money to purchase supplies from neutral parties,” added Salicia. “One of their neighbors, Caroma to their north-west, is also allied with them, so they could purchase food from Ezram or further west and deliver it through their territory. Otherwise, Levain itself is practically encircled from all other directions by Podovniy to the east, Anduillas to the north, and a smattering of smaller breakaway powers to the south and west. There’s just that one corridor to its north-west where Caroma is that allows them to bring supplies from elsewhere.”

“Well, wouldn’t be our first time in that sort of situation,” said Elfriede as she chimed in from the side. “Besides, if all those powers couldn’t handle militia on a wall for so many years, I feel rather confident that we wouldn’t have too much issues working there.”