This is serious!
A few soldiers under some knight were nothing worth mentioning. Along the long border between two powers, the deaths of a handful of people were hardly worth a thought.
But an earl being attacked was an entirely different matter!
The Gold Coin Federation had no dukes. Its highest-ranking nobles were two marquises, beneath whom stood fourteen earls. Five of those fourteen were their vassals, while the other nine were independent. This was the result of political wrangling during the founding of the nation. In truth, those nine independent earls were very powerful. Though none could match a marquis one-on-one, two or three joining hands would be enough to overwhelm one. The nine houses watched out for one another, forming the "local nobility" within the Noble Faction, and often clashed with the "central nobility" centered around the two marquises.
Even so, when facing the Merchant Faction, they were still comrades standing in the same camp.
Even if... each of them wanted the others dead—preferably with their entire families dead, without even a single bastard left behind.
"Who exactly were the people who attacked me?" The assaulted earl was wrapped in bandages and looked gravely injured. Leaning against a couch in a sitting room where magic regulated the temperature to make it comfortably pleasant, he frowned deeply at the advisers before him.
"I believe they may have been assassins from the capital," said a thin adviser. A faint cold gleam flickered in his eyes, and now and then a savage look flashed across his face.
Among the earl's advisers, he was not the most outstanding, but he was exceedingly decisive. To put it in Earth terms, at critical moments he could make a decision without the slightest hesitation, then withstand every pressure and carry that decision through to the