“Expect all sorts of unimaginable things to happen at least once, somewhere, someday.” - Saying attributed to the Silver Maiden.

“You know, Captain Edelstein, there is something about you mercenaries I have been itching to ask for a long while now, but never had any proper source to turn to for an answer,” said Publius quietly as he enjoyed the relaxing feeling from the herbal smoke he inhaled. “I wonder if you could satisfy this old man’s curiosity and help provide some answers for me?”

“Go ahead, Marshal,” replied Reinhardt with a nod. The middle-aged Caroman Marshal was a rather humble and straightforward man, which was something Reinhardt hadn’t expected from someone who held such a high position. Much less when that someone came from a long line of what was pretty much nobility where he was from. “If I can, I’ll help with your questions.”

“How do you mercenaries do it?” asked the Marshal with a serious, if quiet voice. He looked thoughtfully at Reinhardt for a moment before he elaborated on his question. “I mean, how do you handle the stress of not knowing whether you will have more work to feed your people in the future, not even considering all the risks inherent to the job? Even I find it stressful enough to manage the army, and they have the Caroman state to fund them!”

“Well, I’ll admit it was a headache, especially early on,” said Reinhardt with a shake of his head. During the first weeks after he took over the Free Lances, he was too worried about survival to think about it much, but bankruptcy would have been a serious worry as well had he not been in that state. “Things were easier to manage when there weren’t that many of us. We could take on many small jobs that would need like five to ten people each and still make enough to support the company. Hard to do that once you reach a certain size, though.”

“That’s what I had thought as well,” noted the old marshal with a nod of his own. “So how did you deal with it?”

“In my case, we got lucky and found a silver lining in the clouds,” admitted Reinhardt openly. “The Theodinaz campaign had pretty much reduced our thousand-strong force to a quarter at best, and even with new recruits that joined us during the campaign, we barely had like three hundred fighters or so. That said, we also managed to recover plenty of salvaged loot and most of the company’s original supplies. That gave us the funds to pay all the condolences money and keep a surplus which allowed the company to rebuild.”

“After that, we made sure to keep a good amount of surplus in our coffers, enough funds to ensure that the company could survive for a good while even without any jobs to do,” added Reinhardt. “These days, we pretty much got enough saved up to idle for up to half a decade or so if needed, even at our current size. Would probably have to halt the recruitment, of course.”

“That makes logical sense,” affirmed the Marshal as he nodded to Reinhardt’s words. “Do you never have worries that your employer might turn out to be a bad one, though? I know the guild helps to make sure that such incidents do not happen much nowadays, but I recall a story from the past that stuck with me all this while about just such a matter.”

“Oh? Which story?”

“It supposedly happened in a small breakaway nation to the south of the Empire, shortly after Maglos was assassinated and the civil war broke out,” said the Marshal. “Details were rather scarce, and sometimes contradictory, but the gist of the information we received was that the local Count, who named himself King and all that, hired a band of mercenaries to work for him, offering generous payout.”

“He then supposedly took the dependents of those mercenaries hostage and forced them to subjugate the people of the region for him. Dirty work, lots of innocents killed in the process, you get the idea. When the mercenaries had enough, this so-called King then killed some of the hostages as an example. We didn’t get much more details after that, but the nation collapsed some months later.”

“Ah, the Wenot incident,” noted Reinhardt immediately. “That one’s rather infamous amongst the mercenary circles, a big example on why we have to pay close attention and check our employers properly before taking a contract. One of the biggest scandals of the past decades, that one. You’d hardly find any mercenary worth their salt who doesn’t know it.”

“Ah. Did you happen to know how it ended?”

“In an ugly way. The band was enraged and crazily attacked the so-called King. Most of them died, but some successfully escaped after freeing what was left of their dependents. From what I know, the band was pretty much disbanded with nine out of ten of their members dead, and only around half of the dependents survived. The King didn’t survive for much longer either, as one of his neighbors made use of the weakness and took the place over shortly after.”

“Honestly speaking, Marshal, with all the conflicts going on all around Alcidea nowadays, it’s a seller’s market for us mercenaries. We have all sorts of job offers coming from everywhere, and it’s up to us which one we would take. The sort of mercenaries who fell into scams like what happened in Wenot were too rash. They were blinded by false promises and failed to properly check things out first.”

“I’m guessing outfits like your Free Lances wouldn’t fall into that sort of issues then?”

“I’ll just say that we have our own sources of intelligence and wouldn’t take on a job without knowing what to expect, both from the opposition and from our employers,” admitted Reinhardt with a toothy smirk. “As their captain, it’s part of my job to make sure that the jobs we take on are to the benefit of the company. I would be failing in my duties if I couldn’t ensure that.”