Chapter 196

Gustav Montagnés stood looking at the ruined village, smoke still rose up from the ruins which the elves left behind, the bodies were in a sorry state of affairs. The wrath of the slaves had been turned on men, women, children, old and young. All of them bound to stakes, all of them filled with arrows.

"They turned them into target practice…" He said while Kelart stood at his side.

"The same as the last four villages." She said while her soldiers cut the bodies free to let them crumple into dead heaps onto the dirt.

"At least they aren't hitting towns yet." Gustav said with a grimace, a few paces away several soldiers were busy digging a mass grave to dump the naked bodies of the villagers into.

"Yet." She retorted, "It won't be long. They collapsed the mines, remember, those employed a lot of very strong slaves, if they keep at it, they'll have enough strength to hit towns soon, and we're hard pressed to stop them. We can't guard everywhere, but they can raid anywhere."

"It was a mistake to let the South engage in this trade with the Theocracy." Gustav said and spat into the bloody mud churned up by fighting, bleeding, and recent rain. "We just brought our enemies home to us, and now look."

As if to follow his own orders, he looked at the broken and toppled shells of what used to be human peasant huts. They were blackened from fire and mostly toppled, only the skeletons of the homes remained standing, if anything at all. In a few cases, only the door frames. The crops were burned in the fields, and if he were to take a guess, many were taken as well for the elven rebels to eat.

"So how do you think they did it this time?" Kelart asked.

Gustav pointed to the distant fields, "I would guess that they started a fire in the fields, got people to come running to put it out, and then hit the village and the young rushed to douse the fires at the same time. Divide them both, kill them both. That's my guess anyway, since some of the bodies in the fields had buckets with them."

"We need to catch them." Kelart pointed out.

"Alright," Gustav said with scathing sarcasm and a steady unblinking glare at the advisor to the Queen, "let's just chase the elves into the great forest, that will surely have no drawbacks whatsoever. It isn't as if they don't have centuries of experience in combat in those conditions. And when we get there, we can cut our own throats and create a flood of blood to drown them all."

She stared back at him and flicked back her long chestnut brown hair, "Fine. Point taken."

Gustav slumped at the shoulders with her concession, he heard the thud of a body being tossed into the hole. Another thud followed after it.

"If we can't catch them… maybe we can… I don't know? Confine them." He pointed out, "If we establish a series of forts and keep patrols outside the forests we should be able to minimize any damage that they can do and slowly wear them down."

Kelart thought that over, forts were not expensive, the elves did not have massive armies, and all they needed to do was protect the villagers and deter elven attack. It made sense. "I'll bring it up to the lords who have land around here."

It took weeks of haranguing the local lords and explaining that they would have to prepare some security responsibilities of their own… along with one arrogant lord's slaughtered expedition into the forest, to convince them that Gustav and Kelart were correct.

But little by little, forts began to appear and the Southern Holy Kingdom's peasants were taught how to man and defend them, along with each being provided with a dozen or so trained soldiers to help man and maintain these small positions.

Further, the mounted knights of the various lords began to ride out on the fringes to look for elven activity.

Mines continued to fall, places that had any sizable elven slave population suffered attack.

But the troubles began to drop off.

Which is why Gustav and Kelart toasted their success in the dining hall of a local duke, their feet propped up on the table, leaned back with contented smiles. The problem was not completely solved as the elves still held the forests, but the threat was removed nonetheless.

The frothing beer was a tad warm on the tongue, but the mug was big, heavy, and above all, full.

They drank deeply and faced one another, Gustav's face was flushed red beneath his bushy brown beard as he said in an almost festive voice, "Now all we need to do is get this tax situation taken care of and we can head home, they should have no further issues paying what they owe to the Crown, and if they object at this point?"

"Then they're just in rebellion, and we'll need to use the force we brought for show." Kelart responded, her face was more serious, her lips drawn into a thin line after consuming a deep draught, and then split into a smile, while it was possible, and she considered it more likely than Gustav did, she didn't think it much more likely.

Until…

"Do you think Kelart and Gustav have gotten word of what happened yet?" Queen Calca asked.

Her brother sat opposite herself and beside the bedridden Remedios.

Days of travel over open roads were peaceful once the capital was out of sight, though the plumes of smoke continued to be a blight against the blue sky in the eyes of the Queen. Now, safely in Kalinsha, they had the security of an armed force, walls, a more stable and loyal population, and Gotsa was leading a force to reclaim the capital. A force that Remedios doubted was enough.

"It's hard to say, My Queen, but the mob will surrender on their own, I'm sure. They have to, they don't want to risk harming-" Remedios snapped her mouth shut as she spoke when Calca's brother interjected.

"Shut-"

"Up." He spat at her.

"Not everybody believes in my sister's sense of justice as you do, Remedios. They don't value human lives as you do, and that is how we ended up in this mess in the first place!" He slammed his fist on the table where he sat, and Calca jumped a little in her seat.

Casponde's long, rich blonde hair was not in its finest state at that moment, the stress had clearly gotten to him, and when he saw his sister's reaction, he forced himself to relax. "Sister… I'm sorry, but as much as I share your beliefs, we simply can't avoid the reality in front of us! Our brothers are scattered all over the place, the royal family isn't united, the South is withholding taxes, and now we've lost the capital, while the army that could easily retake it is engaged with events in the South. I still can't believe the elven slaves are demanding a separate homeland for themselves in the South."

"Enslaving them was a mistake, they should have been killed instead." Remedios chimed in again.

Calca wrung her hands in her lap, "It's all this corruption, I don't understand it… but… but I don't need to, do I?"

"Sister?" Caspond asked, she snapped her eyes up to her brother's, their clear family connection never more obvious than then.

"I can't do things the way I did them… Emperor Jircniv had a problem with lazy and corrupt nobles, he got rid of it by getting rid of them, we can do the same. My soldiers, people who gave their lives to me, died saving my life and getting me out. We're going to retake the capital by any means necessary, and then conduct a purge. Every single official in the Northern and Southern Holy Kingdom, every single noble family, without exception, will be audited. Every single corrupt individual will be purged. The labor lost in the South with the rebellion of the elves will be replaced with them."

"My Queen-" Remedios opened her mouth, and kept it open when Calca, with tears in her eyes and one fist clenched, slapped her across the face.

"This is your doing also! Kelart told me the truth! And you go and confirm it! And you too, brother! What point is there to a kingdom of laws that has no laws that the rulers respect?! Bribing juries, blackmailing judges, threatening people with lives in their hands?!" Remedios rubbed her cheek as if she couldn't believe the stinging pain and the Holy Queen raged on.

"The one you had condemned had a good reputation for protecting people! For saving lives, maybe what she did was wrong, but that clear corruption rubbed everybody the wrong way! What did you think was going to happen?! How can I be trusted by the people when you act in my name to show that I can't be trusted?!" The Holy Queen spat the words out with such violent anger that spittle flew from her lips to land on Remedios' cheek, and the resurrected paladin could only lay there and take it.

"I was trying to protect people too…" She said in a small, childlike voice, "Sympathizers with the demihumans are too dangerous to leave alive. Spare one today, they'll kill tomorrow. Non-humans have to die, it's that simple. There's no other way for us to be safe, there's nothing fair about a human child dying by a demihuman claw, so there can be nothing fair about getting rid of the ones who help demihumans."

Calca sat heavily in her chair with an audible thump. "We're going to set all this to rights." She said and pointed at Remedios, "And you are going to help me, and you are going to follow my orders in both letter and spirit. Do you understand me, Remedios Custodio?" Calca seethed with outrage, recalling the soldier dragged from his horse and the hate filled peasant's eyes as a spear pierced the mouth of the valiant warrior. 'So much suffering, brought down by people with no real sense of justice… I have to fix all of this… but… I'm going to need help to do it. I can't do it all on my own.' The Queen cursed her ill luck, and Remedios gave a slow nod.

"Yes, My Queen… my sword is always yours, I swear it."

"That's a start." The Holy Queen said, and then rang the bell to call for a servant, at that moment, all she really wanted was a strong drink, her capital may have been denied her, but a drink at least, would not be.