Save the Master! (Part 2)
“I see. But really, is it truly all right for me to come along? For real?”
“You were the one throwing a tantrum, demanding I take you, Your Highness.”
“When did I ever throw a tantrum?! I just said it wouldn’t be fair for you to go alone when we’re searching for my master!”
“Let’s just say that’s what happened. Now please hush and climb in quickly. We must depart at once.”
“Fine, fine. Always nagging.”
Edwin pouted, sticking out his lower lip as he clambered into the carriage. It was a private hire summoned from outside the palace walls, chosen deliberately lest requisitioning one from the Imperial Stables leave an indelible trace in the records.
“Still… if anyone finds out I snuck out, it’ll be a disaster.”
“Do not fret. I asked Catherine to cover for us with a plausible excuse.”
By imperial law, princes were forbidden from stepping outside the Ventrum Imperial Palace before their coming-of-age ceremonies. Yet rumor had it the First Prince and Second Prince slipped in and out to visit their maternal kin dozens of times a month. At this point, the regulation was practically ornamental—ignored if you went unnoticed, brushed aside if you were caught.
“Won’t Catherine get into terrible trouble if we’re discovered, though?”
“Worry not. She said she was delighted to help.”
Of course, had Catherine been present to hear that blatant fabrication, she would have keeled over in sheer horror.
“It’s far too dangerous, Nanny! If anyone catches on, all our heads will roll!”
She had resisted tooth and nail before finally relenting to my stubborn plea. After all, what sane head maid would happily send off a young imperial prince outside the capital without a single royal guard? Had I not spun a bold lie about hiring seasoned escorts once we were outside, she never would have backed down.
“I instructed her to spread the rumor that Your Highness suddenly came down with an upset stomach, leaving you running between bed and the washroom all day. No one will suspect a thing.”
“Wait… of all the excuses you could invent, why did it have to be that…?”
Edwin grumbled in sour dismay for a few moments, but the cloud soon passed, replaced by his usual spirited bounce. It seemed the sheer thrill of his very first venture into the world outside outweighed any wounded dignity.
“So, where are we actually going?”
“To Luxen Village.”
“Luxen Village?”
Edwin tilted his head in brief confusion before his eyes snapped wide in sheer terror, as though he had just heard a name forbidden to human ears.
“No way. You’re… you’re joking, right?”
The boy, who only seconds ago had looked like an eager child on an afternoon picnic, went instantly pale as chalk.
“You don’t mean that Luxen Village, do you? It’s some other village with the same name, right? Tell me it is!”
“Since when did our empire have two Luxen Villages?”
“I—I don’t want to go! Let me out! Stop the carriage and let me off!”
Edwin thrashed about, looking ready to fling himself out the carriage door that very second, but his panic was entirely in vain. The carriage was already galloping at full tilt toward its destination.
That was right.
Our destination, lying a three-to-four-hour carriage ride from the imperial capital, was indeed Luxen Village—the Ventrum Empire’s sole plague village.
“Does Catherine know about this too?” Edwin asked, his voice trembling on the verge of tears. “Luxen Village… That’s insane!”
Shivering uncontrollably as if unable to process reality, the boy began nervously gnawing on his fingernails. I gently pulled his hands away from his mouth and replied in an even, unhurried tone.
“Catherine knows.”
“Liar!”
“……”
“You! I knew it, you’re lying!”
In truth, our trip to Luxen Village was something I had kept entirely hidden from Catherine. She had already thrown an absolute fit over the lack of guards; had I dared mention the plague village, we never would have set a single foot outside the palace gates.
I gazed quietly at the terrified boy.
“Are you truly that frightened, Your Highness?”
“Of course I am! Who wouldn’t be terrified of going to a plague settlement?! We could die if we go there!”
His hysterical reaction was perfectly understandable. To any citizen of this empire, such terror was second nature.
The plague colony of Luxen Village was an isolated quarantine settlement on the far outskirts of the capital, built exclusively to hold those afflicted with the fatal Scale Disease. To this day, the malady possessed no proper worldly cure and boasted an atrocious fatality rate. Even on the rare occasion someone survived, their flesh withered and warped into grotesque petrification, earning the contagion the dread moniker of the ‘Devil’s Curse.’
The only known remedy was prolonged, repeated exposure to potent Divine Power. Yet obtaining such treatment demanded astronomical fortunes. Clerics capable of channeling sufficient divine authority to purge the rot were extraordinarily rare even among the ordained priesthood, and the mere cost of securing their presence was staggering.
Unless one belonged to the imperial family or the highest echelons of the nobility, commissioning a cleric was an impossible dream. Impoverished commoners had no choice but to lie in the dirt and wait for death.
“When I told you it was too dangerous, you were the one who insisted on following me to the bitter end, Your Highness. You promised you wouldn’t regret it.”
“That was before you told me we were going to Luxen Village!” Edwin cried out in indignance. “If I’d known, I never would’ve let you go either!”
“Which is precisely why I did not tell you.”
“What if we both catch the Scale Disease? What then?!”
“Worry not. We will be fine.”
“How could you possibly know that?! Turn the carriage around! I’m getting off!”
His face drained of all color, Edwin scrambled to his feet inside the swaying compartment.
“What are you doing?! Sit down this instant!”
“Halt! Stop the carriage—!”
“It is dangerous! I told you it is dangerous, so sit down!”
“Stop it, stop it right now—!”
“You were the one pleading to come along! Cease this nonsense at once!”
“No, no! I won’t go! I refuse to go!”
I massaged my temples, thoroughly flustered as the boy flung open the carriage window and screamed out at the top of his lungs.
“Your Highness, trust me! Even if we set foot in Luxen Village, we will not contract the Scale Disease!”
“Stop lying! Why should I believe you?!”
“Because I was completely fine when I went there in the past!”
“What? What does that even—!”
Before the bewildered prince could finish his sentence—
Neigh—!
A shrill, panicked whinny echoed through the air as the horses bucked, and the carriage jerked to an abrupt, violent halt.
“D-Don’t tell me… we’re already there?”
“…Stay still, Your Highness.”
From beyond the thin wooden walls, I sensed dozens of distinct presences encircling us. A cold, ominous prickle washed across my skin.
“In all my years as a bandit, I never thought I’d see the day we’d starve to death.”
The burly man spat a thick gob of phlegm onto the dirt road, his yellowed eyes sweeping across the scruffy underlings gathered before him.
“Well, you useless morons? What do you have to say for yourselves about this mess?”
Not a single man dared utter a sound. Even if they knew the answer, speaking the naked truth would only earn them a brutal beating.
“If you’ve got mouths, use ’em, you brainless bastards!”
“Aaargh! B-Boss!”
Then again, keeping silent didn’t save them from a beating either. The leader cracked a heavy boot directly into the nearest lackey’s shin. As he gnashed his teeth in fury, cold sweat drenched the backs of every bandit present.
Finally, one scrawny thug gathered the courage to step forward.
“B-Boss… but this is the road heading straight into Luxen Village. Barely anyone ever travels this way anymore. Seems to me like we picked the wrong turf to ambush.”
He wasn’t wrong. Nearly twenty years had passed since the Scale Disease first tore through the empire like wildfire. Perhaps because of that, even the devout clerics and desperate wandering healers had long since ceased their pilgrimages to Luxen Village. With no travelers passing through, highwaymen in the surrounding mountains were languishing in an unprecedented drought.
The Jerry Bandits, to which this miserable pack belonged, were no exception.
Jerry, the crude leader of the gang, unleashed a foul string of curses at his subordinate’s obvious observation.
“You piece of filth! Who the hell doesn’t know that?! I didn’t ask for excuses, I asked for a plan! A damn solution!”
“Boss!”
Just then, a lookout who had been sent down the ridge came sprinting back toward them, panting frantically for breath.
“What is it?!”
“A mark! A mark has appeared!”
“What did you say?”
Jerry’s face brightened at the rare news of incoming prey, though his joy lasted only a fleeting second before his brow furrowed with deep suspicion.
“It isn’t another flock of broke, sanctimonious hypocrites, is it?”
The few stragglers who still journeyed toward Luxen were usually austere clerics seeking self-mortification and penitence. Such zealots didn’t have a copper to their names, and their fanatic minds were utterly warped anyway. There was never anything worth looting from them—no one in their right mind walked into a pestilence pit willingly, after all.
The scout shook his head vigorously, a wide grin stretching across his grimy face.
“No, Boss, they aren’t! There isn’t a single escort guard in sight!”
Even the most penniless cleric traveling outside their sanctuary were invariably shadowed by at least one or two paladins. That was the inviolable law and custom of the Holy Kingdom.
“Not clerics, then… What else did you see?”
“There’s a woman inside the carriage!”
“What? A woman?”
“Yes! Just a woman and some young brat!”
At the words ‘a woman and a child,’ greedy sparks ignited in the eyes of the entire gang. If their captive was a woman, it mattered little whether she carried coin. If she was young and reasonably fair, slave traders would pay handsomely for her.
‘A woman riding in a private carriage without a single guard… She won’t be high nobility, probably the daughter of some merchant house. Talk about striking gold.’
Even if they couldn’t offload the daughter of a wealthy merchant to the flesh peddlers, they could easily bleed the family dry with a hefty ransom.
‘And the brat with her is probably a page or an apprentice. Well, who cares?’
Boy or girl, young children with decent faces always fetched a tidy sum on the black market.
“Bwahahaha!” Jerry roared with booming laughter, rising to his full, towering height. “I knew it! The heavens wouldn’t let us starve!”
A stroke of sheer fortune had rolled right into their laps after months of famine. Jerry slapped his knee in delight.
“What are you lazy pigs waiting for?! Get moving! Let’s give the lovely lady a proper welcome!”
“Yeeaaah!”
The bandits erupted into feral cheers and surged down the mountain ridge like a pack of starving wolves, entirely oblivious to the fact that the future awaiting them was not paved in gold, but soaked in crimson.
“Come on out while we’re asking nicely, little lady!”
“We’d hate to get rough with someone so delicate, wouldn’t we, boys? Hahaha!”
The Jerry Bandits encircled the stranded carriage, brandishing rusted weapons and hooting lewd taunts. Before long, the carriage door unlatched and swung outward without a sound.
A lone woman stepped down onto the stony road.
A glance into the carriage interior revealed the young boy sprawled across the plush cushions, seemingly fast asleep.
Meanwhile, the brown-haired woman standing before the armed mob displayed not the slightest tremor of fear. Her cool, indifferent eyes simply swept over the circling bandits, taking them in as though they were nothing more than roadside pebbles.