Having gained Nia’s consent, His Highness gave the order to Count Farlon to show the three of us to the cell housing Balthazar, second prince of the Kingdom of Sylvario. This confused the count.
“Your Highness, while I can understand Sir McGuine coming along, why would you need to have the viscountess accompany us as well?” he asked. “I do not believe that it would be appropriate to bring a lady to a place like this.”
“You’re not really wrong there,” His Highness replied. “But there’s a reason she needs to be there.”
“I see,” the count replied. “Understood. I will obey your order.”
When His Highness answered like that, Count Farlon didn’t seem completely convinced, but he couldn’t put up any more resistance against the idea. It probably helped that both Nia and I, her husband, were acting like it was completely normal. He immediately sent one of his subordinates to the jail and another one to gather His Highness’s guards. When that was all finished, we headed to the cell.
“Wh-Who are you lot? Do you somehow have business with me?!”
Inside the cell was a flustered man who might have been Balthazar. Given the haughty way he was acting and the crest of the Sylvarian royal family engraved in the armor, it was almost certainly him, but it technically wasn’t confirmed yet. At least, publicly.
“A-Are you abusing me like this even knowing that I am Balthazar, second prince of the Kingdom of Sylvario?!” he continued. “Is this how you treat royalty?! Wait, right. I demand you treat me in a way befitting my status!”
While I had been skeptical, the guy spilled the beans himself. Did he know he was just tightening the noose around his neck? Nah, probably not.
“I see. Now we have clear reason to hang you for impersonating a member of the royal family,” His Highness said.
“What?!”
Oh, His Highness was already using that card. That meant he must’ve been trying to get Balthazar out of the picture ASAP.
“W-Wait, I really, truly am a member of Sylvario’s royal family! I’m the second prince!”
What is he, a kid? That was the first thing that ran through my mind when he started panicking even more. And he took His Highness’s words at face value too! Was His Highness gauging Balthazar’s capacity by his reactions? With what we’d seen so far, it had most likely dropped to an absolute zero.
“You’re the one insisting that, aren’t you? Oh, that’s right. You had the royal family’s crest on your armor, but...”
“S-See?! That’s proof that I’m—”
“It’s a serious crime to forge a crest for the sake of misuse. Maybe we should crucify you upside down instead.”
“You’re wrong! You’ve got it wrong!”
As His Highness continued to speak so matter-of-factly, Balthazar rushed to object. But it was ridiculously pitiful how clear it was that it was all emotional drivel instead of anything believable.
What Balthazar could have done was argue that no skilled artisan would willingly participate in such a serious crime as forging a royal crest. The armor he’d been wearing was truly grand, a masterpiece that the artisan who made it would have surely boasted about. There was no sign on the armor that the crest had been roughly engraved after the armor’s creation by some backstreet artisan.
There was a chance that there was someone with amazing enough skills to make it in the underbelly of society, but the Special Battalion’s intelligence network hadn’t found anyone like that, and if they really did have skills that rivaled those of an artisan used by the royal family, there was no way they would ever take such a risky job.
So even though it wasn’t completely unbelievable, the man hadn’t thought of that. Judging by how he’d acted up until now, Balthazar probably didn’t even have a sliver of interest about the armor, who made it, and who purchased it, and he had never had any respect for the artisan’s work. It was pretty obvious to see, but to witness it firsthand was something else.
“In the first place, who would believe that a person who attacked a country with an army of mercenaries was a member of the royal family?”
“Wha?! That’s because you damned Brigandians exhausted our military!”
“Then why wouldn’t you have waited until your military was back up to par? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Ghh, th-that’s because...” Balthazar started arguing before going silent. It seemed even he realized that it wouldn’t be a good idea to talk about the antagonism between himself and the first prince, though it might’ve simply been his pride getting in the way.
“There’s a lot more circumstantial evidence that you aren’t a royal. How did you even manage to employ this many mercenaries?”
“I-I used my privileges as a member of the royal family!”
When His Highness asked that, Balthazar started frantically explaining everything. The source of his funding and the methods of transportation, such as the boats that he used. He must’ve understood that his life was on the line, because he told us everything, without noticing that Prince Alphonse had threatened him for that exact reason.
It was a pity. If he’d actually disciplined himself, he might’ve turned out to be a great strategist. But whether it was because everyone around him babied him, or his personality, or maybe even both, he’d come this far without building on his abilities. And it had led to this.
“All right, I understand the chronology of how you got all of your soldiers, but what I don’t understand is how you got the amount of provisions you would need for them.”
“Th-That was simple! There’s a merchant named Gorthuk.”
Wow. He blabbed that too. From his perspective, it had probably been easy to betray the man whom you could call his accomplice. He even told us where the merchant was currently waiting.
“Have you known Gorthuk very long?”
“I have, but now that I think of it, none of his schemes to make money ever worked out. It was the same thing a while ago.”
Balthazar went on to tell us the absolute worst thing he could have. From what Nia had told us, we’d known that he and Gorthuk had probably been working together to drag out the dispute in the provinces so as to profit off of them. But what we hadn’t thought of was that the war we’d just had was another one of those moneymaking schemes as well. He seemingly thought nothing of getting another country caught in the mess, nor did he think twice before harming soldiers and the citizens of the area in order to line his own pockets.
I thought my blood was going to boil over, but I got so heated up that my mind was strangely clear. What end would be suitable for this guy?
“I see,” His Highness said. “It kind of adds up.”
“Right?! So, I—”
“But we can’t ignore the possibility that you were simply aware of that information.”
“Wh-Why?! You want more?!”
While I was thinking violent thoughts, the two princes were still continuing their chat. Actually, Balthazar had seemingly gotten so worried for his safety that he was blabbing things we hadn’t even asked him about. It looked as if he didn’t have a single shred of pride as a member of a royal family. But it definitely benefited us.
There was some intel that we’d already known, but the fact that a royal like him was telling it all to us to save his own skin gave it legitimacy, so it would be useful. But emotionally, I had a hard time stomaching the whole thing. It looked like Count Farlon felt the same.