Discussing How to Improve Hasse

Discussing How to Improve Hasse

Discussing How to Improve Hasse

With the Italian restaurant business taken care of, I wanted to focus on taking care of my mission in Hasse. And since the Gilberta Company was already in my hidden room, now was the perfect time to ask them for help.

“Where do you all think I should start?” I asked. “Now that I know Hasse could be burned down at any moment, I’m having a bit of a hard time focusing on anything else.”

Benno lowered his dark-red eyes for a moment while rubbing his chin. “The biggest problem with Hasse is that the people there just don’t know enough about nobles; they don’t understand how grave the sin they’ve committed is. Fixing that should be your first step.”

People living in the city of Ehrenfest knew not to complain even if a noble killed their daughter, so they certainly wouldn’t dare to act over some orphans who didn’t matter much to them being taken away. And never in a million years would they be dumb enough to attack a building owned by the archduke.

“But just to be clear here—you messed up too. If the mayor there already had a contract to sell those orphans to scholars, then this little incident’s going to get him a lot of complaints from nobles. His connections are as good as dead.”

“Assuming he was selling them to support the city over the winter, that was money he could not afford to lose,” Mark added. “For commoners, whether or not one has connections with nobles can be the difference between life and death.”

Seeing the situation from a new perspective, I couldn’t help but empathize with Hasse a bit more. Maybe I really was a brutal tyrant for stealing the orphans away from them.

“I can probably only tell all this because I’ve been going to the temple’s orphanage a lot, but...” Lutz prefaced, before going on to explain how much the orphans raised in the temple differed from other orphans.

Here, kids born to gray shrine maidens were raised in the temple, along with those who lost their parents before they were baptized. But orphanages outside the temple were part of an independent community—a community that the orphans were still a part of, only they were raised by the city authorities rather than their parents. For this reason, they were also seen as the community’s property—they were fed on the city’s dime, then forced to work to make that money back. If need be, they could even be sold wholesale to an outsider.

“I heard that from Ferdinand. He said the mayor has the right to sell the orphans since he took them in and raised them. In the temple, that’s what the High Bishop does.”

Which meant the temple didn’t care what I did with the temple orphanages. I could lavish the orphans with unearned comforts, or I could work them to the bone to save some money—either way Ferdinand wouldn’t be able to do anything but complain. The final say went to me, the High Bishop. That was precisely why Ferdinand had been largely unable to do anything back when he served beneath the previous High Bishop.

“Plus,” Lutz continued, “the temple orphans end up as gray priests and shrine maidens, but they stay in the orphanage even after growing up, right? Well, the men in Hasse are given fields once they’ve grown up.”

In the temple, some orphans were sold as servants to nobles and others became the attendants of blue priests and shrine maidens, but most did indeed stay in the orphanage.

In Hasse, however, orphans were given independence as citizens when they came of age. But women were given such small plots of land that it was impossible for them to survive alone, forcing them to find a marriage partner. Men without parents were considered a great catch since the woman’s family could add him to their own without losing their daughter, but since women without parents had no funds for a dowry, they tended to end up in miserable marriages. According to Lutz, they either ended up as the second wives of older men who needed to be cared for, or trapped in abusive marriages.

“Everywhere in the world, people without support end up suffering,” Benno spat out, shaking his head as if symbolically shaking off his painful past. “You’re the archduke’s daughter so, diplomatically speaking, you’re well within your rights to take the orphans. But if you think of the orphans as products, this basically looks like a noble using their authority to steal away merchandise someone invested a lot into. They can’t complain publicly, but you can be sure they’ll hold a grudge. You need to tie up the loose ends here so they don’t come back to bite you later.”

Benno went on to say that I needed to use my position as the archduke’s daughter to talk to the scholar, cancel the contract, and then pay the mayor what the orphans were worth to stop him and the city from resenting me. I wrote it all down on my diptych; this was much more practical and understandable advice than anything Ferdinand had given me.

“Also, don’t just agonize over these things on your own. If you’re not sure about something, ask the High Priest. Tell him the conclusions you’re coming to and he’ll give you concrete advice and corrections, no doubt about it. He did say he’d teach you, didn’t he?”

I looked up from my diptych, my gaze shifting from Benno to Lutz to Mark, then nodded slowly.

“On top of all that, you’ve been stuck inside for so much of your life that you’re lacking a lot of common sense. Plus, the common sense you do have is coming from a number of clashing lifestyles—your experiences as a merchant, a shrine maiden, and now a noble are all fighting for dominance, which has made your perspective on things weird in literally everyone else’s eyes. If you don’t make it clear what your thought process is, then the High Priest isn’t going to understand what’s going on in your head.”

Much like everyone else, Ferdinand couldn’t grasp what I was thinking on his own. He only knew the life of a noble, so Benno was telling me to use my words to bridge that gap. But no way could we have a conversation like that using confusing noble euphemisms; we’d need to have a one-on-one in a hidden room.

“Either way, you should check how much time you have to do something about Hasse. Ask if you can save the rest of the city by only having the mayor executed, and whether that’s what he’s expecting from you. Talk to the scholar who tried to buy the orphans, pay the mayor for them ahead of time, and then talk to the townspeople themselves once that’s all done.”

I gave an affirmative nod, writing everything that Benno was saying down on my diptych.

“And one more thing—ask him if you can spread a rumor using merchants,” he continued.

“What kind of rumor?”

“Let’s see here... A rumor that the merciful, compassionate High Bishop is grieving over Hasse, as an attack on the monastery has put the entire city at risk and made it likely that even those not involved will be executed,” Benno said.

Mark gave a smile. “That will not only emphasize your merciful nature, but also make people aware of both the mayor’s stupidity and how terrifying nobles truly are. The news that outsiders are distancing themselves from the city will worry them, and they will stress over who is going to take responsibility for the attack. We shall stir fear and discontent, establishing a deep-set and ultimately long-lasting fear of nobles among the populace.”

Strangely enough, thinking up what rumors to spread seemed to have made Mark even livelier than usual.

“If we spread this rumor to the owners of big stores and warn caravans leaving through the east gate to be careful around Hasse, every merchant in the city’s gonna know by the end of the day. If there’s one thing merchants have, it’s a crazy good information network,” Lutz added, placing a contemplative hand on his chin. “Pretty sure they’ll all believe it too, since they just met you and Master Benno in the Italian restaurant. Anything the Gilberta Company says about the High Bishop’s gonna have a lot of credibility.”

I hadn’t expected that my connections to store owners would prove so valuable so quickly. My eyes started to shine with excitement, but Benno raised a hand to calm me down.

“Lutz is right, and spreading these rumors will be easy. The problem is, they’ll also make it public that Hasse attacked the monastery. Not sure whether the High Priest wants that information getting out.”

“Please contact us as soon as the High Priest gives you an answer; battles of information such as this are my specialty. That mayor deserves neither mercy nor compassion, and this is an opportunity for me to destroy him using everything I have,” Mark said. His eyes were gleaming with life, and a dark smile had spread across his face.

He was normally such a kind butler that I recoiled a bit in surprise, and as I looked at him with wide-open eyes, Benno laughed and muttered that Mark had been offended by how rude the mayor had been to them.

Oh, right. They did say that the mayor and scholars had treated them terribly. I guess this is the perfect opportunity for Mark to get revenge.