The late Lord Agnellus' mother did not get along with her daughter-in-law, the lady of the house; this the servants knew. At her last visit the old mistress took up a Sinian vase, the one that once sat on the pillar by the foyer, and despite her sagging muscles, threw it at the lady with such force that it took three different healers to give the lady back her face. Even then a finger-long scar remained, meandering along the cusp of her jaw before terminating at the corner of her lips. Before the solar chariot had trod even a jot of celestial loam, one of the maids would be at the lady's bedchamber, dabbing a concoction of powdered soapstone and yellow slime onto the scar, for the days where the mistress caught sight of her blemish were grim indeed.
Today that duty fell to Leontia. This was not usual. Normally, Basina took Wednesdays, but the older maid had come down ill, complaining of a stiff throat. In the maids' quarters, seniority separated the hens from the chicks and so Leontia rose and donned her rough cotton clothes alongside the collar that marked her as an indentured servant of the Skantarii familia. Between the central courtyard of the Skantarii estate and the servants' quarters lay a large garden, rich with marigolds, roses, orchids, and peonies, and organized by a system of hedges, though this early in the morning she couldn't appreciate any of its beauty.
As she walked, she heard chewing sounds. She slowed. There, behind that hedge and through its leaves, she saw something move.
"Sorry the soup's a bit cold." She knew that voice! That was Adagios, the lady's second son.
The young master of the Skantarii now that Sir Demetrios was on campaign. She had cleaned his room once or twice, and he had struck her as a bright and cheerful boy who loved kicking around an inflated boar's bladder. So what was he doing hiding behind a hedge so early in the morning?
Leontia pressed a hand to her mouth. Maybe the young master had a little paramour; a peasant girl from the surrounding farms who he'd taken a fancy to. He was getting to that age, after all. The slurping sounds that filtered through the hedge, and the subsequent burp, reinforced the idea; certainly, none of the clientes of the Skantarii family-- from the dourest blacksmith to the crudest cavalryman-- had a daughter who did not know proper manners and etiquette, especially in front of the young master.
The lady would need to know about this. Leontia made to get up.
"Preindustrial societies don't have microwaves, Ada. And the more important thing is hitting caloric requirements and consuming a balanced diet rich in vitamins and nutrients to ensure proper growth."
That was unmistakably a boy's voice, but rough, deep. Leontia crouched, pressing her ear against the hedge.
"Even if you say that, Balt, I still feel bad when I'm eating warm food and you're not. I've been trying to get the cooks to save a portion for you, but most of them are too scared of mother to hear me out."
"You call her mother?"
The wind whistled through the leaves. Leontia's breathing hitched like a carriage on a pothole-ridden road. This voice...wasn't it the Bastard? The young master and the Bastard were talking? The mistress-- she needed to know-- but if she learned more, maybe her reward would be greater? She fingered the leather of her collar.
"Sorry. I'll not do it again." Said the young master.
She stuffed the cotton sleeve of her dress into her mouth to stifle the gasp that would otherwise have come popping out. Subversion! This was absolutely subversion!
"Ada, what did I tell you about that woman?"
A pause. "That she is merely the implement that birthed me and nothing more. That I am to squeeze her for as many benefits as possible before she suffers a disfortunate accident."
Leontia fell to her knees, her head spinning with the words the young master had said in his still-high, boyish voice. She couldn't comprehend them. Each syllable had been proper Izmirian, and the words themselves of the right order, but together...she had heard all sorts of foul rumors about the Bastard, but to think he...she felt a new appreciation for Basina, being the maid tasked with taking care of such an evil creature could not be easy.
At the same time, a certain glee began bubbling up in her guts, churning them all round. This was it! If she hadn't been up so early, and so curious, who knows how much poison the Bastard could have dribbled into the young master's ears. The lady had to reward her. Oh, how much would it be? Five years off her contract-- no, Leontia, she told herself, she was being too timid. Ten, or fifteen, or maybe the lady would commute the contract entirely, and give her a pouch of silver for her troubles. She gathered up her skirts and ran for the Skantarii courtyard, unaware of the pair of eyes that watched her from a gap in the hedge.
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POV: Balthazar:
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"Is she gone?" Ada asked me.
"It's 'unfortunate'. Not 'disfortunate'."
"What?"
"You did a great job memorizing your lines, Ada, but disfortunate isn't a real word."
"Oh," he said, biting his lip. "It's tough, Balt."
I grabbed his hand with my own. It fit palm-to-palm, the tactile feedback jarring when pitted against an entire lifetime's worth of memories. Ada's hand had curled up, his thumb pinching the web between my thumb and forefinger; he too had assumed that my hand should be much larger than his own. Being as old as Ada was weird.
We both let go. "Umm, Balt, I didn't ask but why are we doing this? That maid...she's going to tell moth-- that woman and then she'll get really angry at you again." Ada said.
"That is precisely my goal. The angrier she becomes, and the more she gives herself over to that anger, the better it is for our purposes."
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I expected Ada to say something like "What? I still don't get it" and then I would've said, "A feigned retreat is an essential maneuver in both business and warfare; the more tangible we can make her hatred and resentment towards me, the more stuffing that scary retired-adventurer granny will beat out of her," and he would've said something to the effect of "Sasuga Balt-onii-sama!" and I would have held his hand and looked off into the distance and said, "All according to keikaku."
Ahem. Before I read Atlas Shrugged and subscribed to MarketWatch, learned about how glorious passive revenue streams were and dipped into the sludge-pool that was trading on margin...I was a weeb. May the invisible hand forgive me, because sometimes it leaked.
"Our purposes..." Ada said, as he turned to me. "What's our purpose, Balt bro? Is getting that scary grandma to beat up that woman until she gets super hurt really what we're going to do? Aren't we supposed to be heroes?"
I stared at him as if I had just seen a cat fly.
"Sorry." He said, "I trust you. Forget I said anything."
I stared at him. Let me put it this way: if your cat apologized after it flew around your room, using its paws to wade through the air, you wouldn't go, oh, what a silly cat, and return to your routine schedule. No, you'd stare too.
His thumb rubbed his forefinger and middle-finger, making a sktch-sktch-sktch sound. "I've always listened to everything you said about stocks and bonds and the other stuff too, Balt bro. When you came to visit, I used to keep a notebook where I'd write down things you said. Umm, a lot of it didn't make sense to me, but I looked up some of it on the internet. And, I'm, you know, not as smart as you but since we got here there's a lot of tutors who've taught me stuff."
That's right. Ada was ten when we reincarnated, and he'd spent another thirteen years here. That made him twenty-three(?), but I couldn't picture him as a twenty-something; every time I tried, I kept seeing his child-like face plus one of those joke mustaches and a long grey beard.
I stared at him. "You going native on me, Adashir Ahu-Vairyo?" I said, without thinking, and then shut up.
Now Ada stared at me. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out, not even air.
Despite being (half) brothers this time around, our circumstances couldn't be more different. As our 'father' Lord Agnellus Skantarii had gallantly impaled himself on a pig-sticker during a failed cavalry charge, and thereafter died like a pig, grunting and moaning, Sir Demetrios, our elder-brother, had inherited the household by Izmirian law; he promptly rode off to war with the remainder of our levy. Total control of the Skantarii household then fell to the Lady Skantarii by simple elimination. And as a bastard child, my existence bothered her.
She dared not poison me, or have the butcher cut me to pieces, but if I hadn't been a reincarnator, I would not have survived those early days. Which, I suspected, was rather the point; even in this fantasy world, infant mortality was rather high. The nurse played all sorts of tricks: she didn't breastfeed me for three days, left me in the coldest corner of a barn without more than a ragged blanket, and even once dumped me in a thicket of poison ivy.
Meanwhile, Ada enjoyed all the luxuries that a family of border nobility could afford, and some that we couldn't. Six tutors, one for each subject, servants to feed him and cloth him, chefs hired from the capital to feed him. Balls, playmates, extravagant gifts like sapphire Faberge eggs.
I didn't mind the difficult circumstances of my new birth. The role I was playing-- this sign stapled to my forehead-- this sign that read BASTARD-- had narrative conventions, and every action that the lady took fell within my expectations. No, if she had been kind and caring, I would have been much more spooked; but she hadn't been, and a tragic backstory was a prerequisite to any great hero. We did have a goddess to impress, after all.
Despite this, I had multiple ulcers by the age of six, though for a different reason. Saying Lady Skantarii spent money like water would be to devalue water! A special occasion? Ball. Dresses? Oh, clearly, she needed one for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all exquisite embroidery and imported Sinian silk. The tableware was pure silver and every sweet served wrapped in thin gold foil.
We were border nobility-- emphasis on border. With each passing year I could see the juicy Portobello mushroom that was the Skantarii familia dip further and further into liability-land. Our ability to secure loans nose-dived, and the day where peasant tithes managed to pay off only the cumulative interest on all our loans was fast approaching. A psychologist might have concluded that her spending habits were a symptom of the depression that had been seeded in her by the grief of losing her husband, and watered by anxieties over losing her eldest son, but I didn't give a shit and the creditors wouldn't either.
I needed the Skantarii estate intact for Ada's sake and mine. A cardinal rule of capital: you need money to make money. If Ada and I went and sighed up for the Izmir Kingdom's army, we would be spear-men, or, at best, light cavalry, the gristle of war. But if we could raise and outfit our own company, we would receive a Captain's Command Tally, the associated prestige and income, alongside a share of the spoils proceeding a battle. To keep Ada and myself safe-- and to entertain the goddess watching the show-- I'd put my plans into motion.
So I'd gotten to work at the age of six. The benefit of indentured servitude was that it ameliorated the downsides of slavery, with servants toadying up their masters in the hopes of shortening their contracts or receiving gifts to the same effect. But an estate like the Skantarii had hundreds of servants, and the lady was known to favor the maids and a few house servants, so the majority lived in a state of frustrated hope.
I acquired capital by having Ada steal for me. Knick-knacks mostly, small items that wouldn't be missed. It took some convincing, but I managed to persuade one of the younger servants to fence it for me, and though he took things seventy-thirty, earned my first gold. Expanding outwards was easier. The key was getting on the right side of their cost-benefit analysis, using principles common to both resistance organizations and terrorist cells.
Take my dinner, for example. Ada and I had pretended that it came from him, but I'd never do anything so stupid. I paid Basina. Basina paid a messenger boy to pick up the meal from a certain corner of the kitchen. Ada paid Humboldt, a carpenter's boy. Humboldt paid the chef to make the meal and leave it there. Neither Humboldt nor the messenger boy or the chef would have agreed if they had known the meal was for me; the mistress was the preeminent power, and it was too much risk for a paltry reward. But by quarantining information, I could tilt their cost-benefit analysis in my favor and have food to eat that wasn't rotten or riddled with worms.
Getting a letter out to retired-granny-adventurer had involved a longer and more expensive chain of people, but the results had been satisfying. Our expenses (aside from the healers) had dropped, and the old mistress had even been kind enough to pay off a good chunk of the debts.
Given all I understood about Ada's probable cost-benefit calculations, his hesitation should have seemed natural to me. I was a dubious asset, and my marginal value worth less than the affection of that woman. Rather, toppling that woman would hurt Ada's quality of life and cause his share of the estate to dwindle. I was his cousin, but gold was many times thicker than blood. In the first place, it was fortunate that he had aided me at all. So why did it hurt?
"I'm not," he said, finally, his face struggling with some emotion I couldn't name. "I just-- we're heroes, so...I-- I'm sorry, Balt. I don't want to get in your way. I won't. But," Tears fell and I embraced him.
Feeling the warmth against my arms...yes, this is what I wanted to protect. From the goddess, from this world, from all troubles...my little cousin, you've grown so big...
"Fine," I said, surprising myself. "If my little Ada doesn't want me to do it this way, I'm not barbaric enough to force it."
"But--"
"No buts." Undoing this chain of events was going to be like snatching an arrow with my bare hands the moment it left the bow. But that was an interesting challenge, too, wasn't it? O' Goddess up in heaven, I hope you're watching. Because I'm going to give you a hell of a show.