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Salomon and the Count Palatine departed, leaving me alone in the tent with Timona.
“Ah, right,” I said. “I almost forgot. I’ll be having you relive your days as an agent, Timona.”
The personal attendant had once spent a period of time being trained by Count Palatine Vodedt. It had left him with better swordsmanship than me and movements as nimble as any agent out there.
“Understood, Your Majesty,” he acknowledged. “But, if I may be so bold as to speak out of line...”
“What, are you going to object to my participation too?” It seemed my guardians had had much to protest as of late, springing Nadine and Vera-Sylvie on me when I’d declared my intent to go to the front lines, and now objecting against my participation in the raid.
“No,” Timona said. “Your Majesty may be as reckless as he wishes, so long as I am there beside you. I was simply curious as to your thoughts.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Your Majesty is the emperor,” he said, expression as emotionless as ever. “By all rights, you could remain in the imperial capital, where it is safe, and entrust this campaign to your generals. Certainly, there is merit in your presence forcing the self-proclaimed Duke Raul to also make an appearance, but it was not by any stretch of the imagination necessary. He might have attacked the hill regardless. And even if he had not, I believe Your Majesty to be strategically adept enough to devise another plan to pacify his territories, similar to how you divided the Agincarl.”
For some time now, Timona had served as my personal attendant and secretary, and nothing else. It had given him little reason to speak in the presence of my lords. Even despite that, it was rare for him to be so talkative.
“That would take too much time,” I explained. And time was the enemy. Especially as far as the Raul territories were concerned.
In the first place, we were at war with the self-proclaimed Duke Raul because I’d killed the Chancellor (his father, no less), publicly announced his crimes, and declared that I would be seizing his holdings. Sigmund hadn’t taken kindly to that, stirring up a rebellion and proclaiming himself the next duke.
It also happened to be the case that the self-proclaimed Duke Raul was betrothed—via the Chancellor’s mediation—to Maria, my father’s younger sister. The Chancellor had done this to ensure that, in the event that I died, the next sovereign would be born of his son’s wife. Unfortunately, the marriage had not been finalized, and Sigmund currently had no heirs. I mean, there was nothing to say he didn’t have a kid or two born of a commoner lover running around, but going by the Empire’s inheritance laws, they didn’t matter.
I should begin by explaining that the Bundarte Empire—well, the Western Orthodoxy, to be more accurate—allowed polygyny among the nobility. This differed depending on religious denomination, as there were some that pushed for monogamy as a hard rule. The reason for this divide could be traced back to Ein, the founder of the First Faith himself, who had stated that monogamy was preferable, but that polygyny was allowable so long as the concubines were given the same rights as wives.
This had resulted in certain denominations enforcing the ideal, while others made a compromise with reality. Incidentally, my understanding was that, in monogamous countries, nobles still had concubines—they just treated them as mistresses or kept lovers rather than wives.
It seemed that when Ein had first arrived on this continent, it had been common for the nobility to keep slaves as concubines, with all the human rights violations you can imagine that entailed. I suspected that he’d decided the unfaithfulness of polygyny was preferable to the inhumane treatment of slave concubines and, possessed of his knowledge of Earth’s history and a more advanced set of morals, had made several compromises in order to better spread his teachings across this world. No wonder they’d caught on like wildfire on this continent.
That being said, there were still nobles who kept unmarried concubines. After all, marriage for the nobility was a contract between two families. If the house of a nobleman’s wife was in trouble, he was expected to help them, and both families were expected to treat each other more favorably than they did other nobility. That was why wives were given various rights and privileges—Rosaria’s new quarters in the imperial demesne being an example.
The fact that married concubines held actual power was the reason the regent had felt forced to imprison Vera-Sylvie and Lady Norn of House Mardrusa. In contrast, mistresses were not a part of contractual marriages, meaning fewer strings attached for the husband. It was far less restrictive than multiple marriages.
For the record, having unmarried concubines was forbidden in the Empire, so everyone just called them “lovers” to nudge it closer toward the gray zone. Um, Western Orthodoxy? Are you sure you’re cool with that?
But I digress. My point was that even if the self-proclaimed Duke Raul had a mistress, he would be unable to recognize any child born of that relationship for as long as the Western Orthodoxy had any say. Thus, it didn’t matter how many illegitimate half-common children he did—or didn’t—have.
Additionally, since he was betrothed to a member of the imperial family, he would have no other choice but to make her his first wife. He couldn’t take any other wives before finalizing the marriage with her either, or he’d be insulting the imperial family—something his own father, the Chancellor, had forbidden him from doing to prevent giving the regency political ammo.
All of which was why, currently, the self-proclaimed Duke Raul had no children. And since he had no siblings either, the ducal house of Raul would end with his death. I wouldn’t even have to seize his title; I’d be the natural inheritor. If that happened, House Raul’s vassals would lose their entire justification for the civil war.
In other words, my objective for the battle at Chelán Hill technically wasn’t to defeat the Raul army, but to kill the self-proclaimed Duke Raul. I had briefly considered assassination, but discarded the idea: There was no guarantee of success, and it could severely damage my reputation. And since killing an enemy general often meant you had to get through their army anyway, a victory was what I needed—and an overwhelming one, at that. Hence all the planning and preparation I’d put into this.
However, if I took too long settling this civil war, it was possible that the self-proclaimed duke would marry another noble’s daughter and conceive a child, resulting in a lawful heir to the Chancellor’s titles. They wouldn’t be legitimate in the eyes of the throne, but the Raul faction nobility would be able to maintain their justification for rebellion.
That being the case, I didn’t want to give the self-proclaimed duke any more time than I already had. If I could remove him from the board in one battle, then—at least by my reckoning—it would be easy to get the Raul territories to fall in line. But if I let him slip from my grasp, the civil war could drag on forever, a constant drain on the Empire’s national power. You can see why I’d want to avoid that.
Incidentally, the self-proclaimed Duke Raul’s betrothed, Maria, was currently in the imperial capital under close surveillance. It was house arrest in all but name, really. She had also been quite stubborn about refusing to meet with me. It seemed she hated me—not that I could blame her.