Chapter 545: Isabell’s War (Part One)
Twenty years ago, the Isabel who stood atop a ridgeline overlooking Umwelt City was even more severe than the one who sat across the table from Baron Hanrahan. Her long, raven black hair whipped about her in the wind and the fitted black dress she wore had been cut to resemble the tunics of the Emerald King’s soldiers. Only the slender emerald green and silver sash across her modest bust and the ceremonial sword at her waist gave any color to the Engineer of Destruction as she surveyed the city below her.
Umwelt City had a great deal in common with the Town of Hanrahan. A few thousand people living simple lives, packed into a walled town that resembled a rectangle someone had shorted on one side. Neither settlement felt well planned and both of them had opted for a location in the lowlands where water was easier to obtain rather than a more defensible position on one of the many ridges or hilltops in the region.
The biggest difference was that Umwelt City had been there for far longer, existing in a quiet and forgotten corner of the Emerald Kingdom in the shadow of vast mountains. For the people of Umwelt City, the fact that they were part of the Emerald Kingdom only mattered twice a year, once when the tax collector arrived from the royal capital, and a second time when the entire kingdom celebrated the ruling monarch’s Reign Day.
All that changed when the old king passed and his younger brother Pasqual attempted to claim the throne instead of allowing it to pass to his fifteen year old son, Marius. Pasqual’s coup might have succeeded if he’d managed to hold on to the Royal Capital. Seizing the Royal Palace and the city while young Marius was away at the Emerald Academy should have been a stroke of genius that carried him to an easy victory once his forces captured the crown prince.
Unfortunately for Pasqual, Marius was a charismatic young man who had built a loyal following among the future lords and even the commoner scholars who studied at the Emerald Academy... Commoner scholars who included a foreigner from across the sea who had come to the Emerald Kingdom to study the system of tunnels that kept the city’s cisterns full and carried sewage away from the ever-growing Royal Capital.
If not for her help in guiding Marius’s band of loyalists through tunnels under the palace that few were aware of and even fewer fully understood, the crown prince’s counterattack wouldn’t have been nearly as effective, but when Pasqual fled the royal capital to build a coalition among the outlying lords in the countryside, it brought years of bitter war to every forgotten corner of the kingdom, including the City of Umwelt.
"Do you think they’ll surrender?" Isabell asked the knight standing next to her overlooking the city. Sir Rafael Soteras and his ’Winged Lances’, a company of nearly two dozen light cavalry men, had been tasked with Isabell’s security for much of the war and the two had long become comfortable with each other despite the gap in official station.
"Baron Balleste is a stubborn man," Rafael said, shaking his head. "All he cares about is that Duke Grandee Pasqual has promised positions on the ruling council to every lord who supports him, regardless of rank, and a ten year exemption on the taxes on wheat and wool." In the end, it had been promises of wealth and power that had brought dissatisfied country lords under Pasqual’s banner in droves, even though the kingdom would come close to bankrupting itself to keep all of his promises.
"That, and I don’t think he believes that you can do what we claim," the armored knight added, giving the slender woman an appraising look. Year after year, he’d watched the light fade from her gray eyes as she cracked fortresses like eggs.