CHAPTER 5

The slave protection notice that Lord Suzuki gave to the Vindex Regis guarding the Mansion seemed to finally start bearing fruit. Slaves began secretly coming to the Mansion to beg for protection. Lord Suzuki himself had been disappearing more and more often these days, and as the head housekeeper and one of his mistresses, Amelie couldn’t help but worry.

To be very frank, she had numerous things to be worried about. She had to make sure that her maid corps didn’t slack off on their job—not that they would, and she knew this for a fact, but a job was a job—and then she would have to help with the general administration of the house. Although not technically part of her job, one of the perks of being a former maid of a ducal House was that she could read and write. Lord Suzuki’s general education program was still on its starting swing, with only approximately one year since it began, and although the results were starting to show, most of the youngsters preferred to go to the ninja corps, anyway. Someone had to take care of the finances of the house, and while Amelie knew that the noble ladies Lord Suzuki courted were more than capable for that job, she decided to tackle this one herself.

After all, the ladies were incredibly busy—even busier than ever, now that it’s been half a year since the Demon King had been defeated. Everyone was getting back to the real groove of their jobs; rather than focusing on war efforts, they now had to actually take care of their domains. And, oh dear, there were so many things to take care of.

A domain could have thousands of houses. The Mansion was just one house, despite its size and number of rooms. If nothing else, at least Amelie felt that it was one of the few ways she could help out the other ladies.

The fact that she would have extra time to stay in the Mansion rather than going out on errands also meant that she had more time to play with Little Miss Karin, and she couldn’t be more thankful for the opportunity.

Oh, there’s also her management of the Servants’ Aid Society. But that’s a whole other story.

All this said, managing the expenses of the Mansion was no easy task. Lord Suzuki’s well-being was pretty much guaranteed by the entire Alliance in return for his decisive victory in the Thousand-Year War, but this courtesy was not necessarily extended to the entire family—at least, on paper. This was mainly because Lord Suzuki adamantly refused to be given territory and a title, which Amelie both found to be a pity and also found to be endearing, as it was such a Suzuki-like thing to do. He certainly had his own reasons to fight, even as someone from out of this world, and as he was from a world without nobility, it wasn’t particularly surprising if his reasons did not include lands or titles.

Lord Suzuki’s refusal of land and title, however, meant that he could not be allocated the average rewards that would be associated with land ownership. Taxes, for example. With the lack of people to govern, Lord Suzuki would not be able to extract living tax to maintain the kingdom’s circulation of money. His refusal of the title also prevented the King from investing in him a certain amount of money in hopes of stimulating local growth, which should return in various forms.

By staying a Plebeian, Lord Suzuki prevented the King from gaining turnover gains through his management of land and trade, so He had to reward him in other ways. The Alliance decided on reward money, paid in installments over several decades, since all kingdoms had only just got a little wiggle room with their budget given the reconstructions that they must do post-war. Although Lord Suzuki would’ve naturally tried to say no, Lady Charlotte managed to convince him to take it—Lord Suzuki was not the most business-minded, and he would not make much money through commissions with the Travelers’ Guild as he’d done during his travels … not with the most powerful beasts already defeated and no new ones created by the Demon King.

Lord Suzuki used to be a champion Traveler thanks to his power to defeat even the most fearsome of the Darklands’ beasts, but there was no longer such need—most Travelers and mercenaries could very much handle what remained.

All that said, the industrious dwarf Miss Haraldina was business-minded. While Lord Suzuki was the one who came up with the various little conveniences from his world nonexistent in theirs, from various cuisines to countless devices, Miss Haraldina was the one who brokered their production and sales. In addition to the Alliance’s rewards, there was income from these links to merchantry, and Amelie was the person in charge of taking care of this cash flow.

It was not an easy path. The Mansion’s finances were by no means simple, especially with the merchants involved, but Amelie had handled significantly worse back where she was originally from. The Dukedom of Aetius was a relatively rich territory. It was a trading hub—located on the higher ground just right by Mons Palatino, one of the seven mountains around which the Kingdom of Lenamontis was named after. The mountain was a dormant volcano, so with each time the ground shook around it, each time it bellowed and spat out the flames hiding in its belly, the darker the soil around it became: a very fertile soil from which plants grew with no abandon.

The original settlers that later owned the territory relied on this rich soil by the flowing water, and so did their descendants, and so on until Duke Aetius could inherit all the wealth his predecessors had built up over the ages, even if that wealth had diminished bit by bit with the constant war efforts against the Demon King’s invasion.

While the Dukedom of Aetius was not the frontlines like the Dukedom of Constantius was, the fact that the Dukedom of Aetius was a trade center made it very important still in the war efforts. It was this war behind the rearlines that Amelie had to live through.

Amelie was a maid. She was the youngest recruit, a freshly hired young face from the Marchion of Testudo, her eyes wide not in awe but worry as her family’s fortune was slowly dwindling down with one failed crop after another. Her parents figured out that her quickly-developing figure and rather pretty face would fetch for a price should a lord come to fancy her, and her days spent assisting her parents helped shape her physique and mentality for menial work. When someone from the Aetius servants’ registry came around to Testudo, her parents didn’t miss a beat in registering their eldest daughter—to ‘sell their flower’, as they’d say it around there. Amelie herself was not informed of this until after the fact, although she had considered a life of domestic service before, so she didn’t have any particular qualms.

As the registry promised, she soon found employment under none other than Duke Aetius himself.

The Duke was a man of mystery. It was said that he turned Aetius upside-down when he was but thirteen years old, finding loopholes his father was too careless about in how the dukedom was regulated, ever so slightly increasing the various ways tax could be extracted without turning the heads of those in the Capitol Court. The merchants were exasperated at first, until they found that the young man was willing to … listen to their more dire needs and accommodate their wants at a good price. Soon after, not long after his sixteenth birthday, his father passed away and he took the mantle of Dux Aetii.

With nobody else left in his way, the Duke took it upon himself to negotiate with each and every single powerful player in the market, turning the thriving hub into a place of well-controlled monopoly—and not one of pure connection, of simple-minded nepotism, but one of merit. The Duke’s deathly selfish pragmatism seeped into each and every single aspect of life in the dukedom, and as Amelie would later learn, that would include the profits her family failed to generate in the Testudo markets.

But that story was yet to come. Amelie was a welcome addition to the manor, which was struggling for undisclosed reasons. Like all new hires, she began her work as the between-maid, or a ‘tweeny’: a position where she had to answer to all the servant heads at once, sometimes even if their orders conflicted with one another. If they did, she was in no position to question the order. Amelie learned to juggle all the odd jobs she was stuck with—anywhere from weeding the garden to putting large vases in impossibly high places—and, soon enough, she was accepted as a scullery maid.

Her work had just begun. Although she no longer had to grapple with orders that didn’t make sense, she was at the very bottom hierarchy of the kitchen’s function—every dirty job that needed doing in the kitchen was basically hers, from washing all the cutlery to the kitchen floors, and all had to be done right on time so that the kitchen maids didn’t get mad. This of course included working even when the kitchen maids were taking their supper, and oftentimes Amelie had no choice but to only dine with her fellow scullery maids.

At that time, she was too busy to notice, but after a particularly grueling day of washing dishes and cloths, one of the parlor maids accidentally saw her work and apparently recommended her to be a laundry maid. This was where things began to change.

Although she still wasn’t directly involved with the Duke, she began to see more and more of his study and library as she had to occasionally assist the chambermaids in keeping any sewn pieces there clean; with careful observation and enough time, she could deduce that the dukedom was struggling with wrestling market control from a particularly powerful merchant, which happened to be backed by the Merchants’ Guild. She had no idea what that truly meant, at least until she overheard the Duke angrily rebuking someone in the reception room that it made no sense for merchants to hold greater power in a dukedom’s market than its own duke. The little gears in her head started to click, following her little experience with helping her parents sell their crops, and this was her first exposure to real merchantry. This was what prompted her to make what little time she could spare to practice reading, writing, and arithmetic—with her making a habit of overhearing what little discussions her master had, her learning was notably rapid.

It was around the same time that the older maids began talking of how their neighbors began purchasing slaves. Half of them were envious: slaves provided free labor, which meant that for what little expense the House could afford just to make sure the slaves stayed alive, they would have all the hands they needed on deck to keep the House running smoothly. The other half was more cautious: slaves were, more often than not, untrained labor, and they weren’t sure how educated those slaves were. The servants’ registry at least checked that the ones they registered had had prior history of domestic work or related jobs, but slavers were laxer when it came to that, as they had to deal with and move so many people at any given time.

All in all, House Aetius ended up not buying any slaves, and it was then that Amelie’s nightmares truly began.

It started when she was suddenly promoted to a chambermaid. The call came out of nowhere, and the annoyance in the head parlor maid’s expression was a lot less than curbed, but Amelie took the job gracefully. She had no idea why she was promoted, so she just rolled with it. She probably did a good job again somewhere and somebody noticed her for it, like when she was moved from the scullery corps.

At least, that’s what she had hoped.

Then, following her promotion, the maids suddenly grew colder around her.

That one she could not explain.

The older maids would keep their responses very curt and businesslike, which Amelie didn’t particularly mind, but even the younger maids would avoid her. Whenever she came across her old friends in the scullery corps, they would ignore her. Whenever she saw her old superiors in the kitchen, they would scoff at her. Whenever she saw her fellow chambermaids, they would not talk to her unless it was necessary.

Soon enough, Amelie was left with virtually nobody. She tried writing to her family, as she regularly did, but she stopped getting replies for some reason.

After a few months of this, Amelie was desperate to talk to somebody—and that’s when Duke Aetius first gently called to her from his study.

The study was located right next to his library. It was a small, well-lit room with a working table placed right in the middle, allowing the large window to shine light from the outside upon its entirety; a door connected the study to the library, but the room itself could be locked from both entries if needed. The Duke occasionally used the room that way when he wanted to avoid distractions.

Amelie was always fascinated by the study: a dedicated room to sit down, read books, and write things. A room of knowledge, so to speak.

That’s what she thought she would get to do when the Duke called her.

She was wrong.

And it continued. Day, after day, after day—Amelie would be isolated, called upon, and she would be sworn into secrecy. She had no other maids to call for help to, she couldn’t write to her family, and she couldn’t go to the registry because her name would be struck down for ‘failing’ to work the domestic services she was supposed to provide.

Even if what she was made to do was clearly beyond that purview.

It only began to change when one of her fellow chambermaids, who had until then never even turned her way, suddenly talked to her one day.

“He does that,” she whispered under her breath as they washed the sheets, “and nobody could help. Nobody cares about us enough to want to go against him.”

Amelie learned a few things that day. The first was that her newfound ally was actually not the only one she had—the Duke had a history of harassing his own servants. In fact, that was the very reason the manor was struggling: their maids had been escaping; most of the workers there had grown older, but the Duke had a particular fondness for younger women; he paid the servants’ registry enough to recommend fresh maids to the manor, and they had a massive turnover rate. They would employ new blood, the Duke would pick one he liked; those with enough boldness or desperation would choose to stay and endure it until they grew old enough beyond the Duke’s scope of taste, while most had run away at the first chance they got.

The reason the maids grew cold around her was because the Duke would command them to isolate her so that she would heed his call without a second thought.

The second was that this chambermaid’s name was Gisele, and that she’d been there for around three years—she was the Duke’s victim before the two other maids who ran just before Amelie was hired.

“In other words,” Amelie surmised, “we can’t ask for help?”

Gisele bitterly laughed. “Our only way out is if this house suddenly crashes and burns.”

Amelie knew better than to play with literal fire—she almost burned down her barn once, and her neighbor actually lost two of their sons to an unrelated house fire—but Gisele’s offhand comment gave her an idea.

And it all began in the library, all those months ago.

One of the things Amelie learned about merchantry ever since she began eavesdropping in her master’s conversations was that there was no such thing as allies. In trade, everyone was an enemy who expected their opponents to act in their best behavior so that they could all at least trust each other enough to do something together once in a while. However, at the end of the day, everybody who traded was a slave to their own needs and desires, and in trade, the only such need was to obtain riches—the more, the better.

In other words, should there be an opportunity to strike gold, any good merchant would take it—even if it meant stepping over someone else’s dead body.

And it was clear that the Duke was struggling to regain control of his own market, even though he and the merchants still maintained a friendly professional connection on the surface. They would still come together to have tea. They would still give each other friendly visits. But Amelie knew the sweltering hatred underneath the façade, and given enough time, she knew how to tip the balance.

Literally.

There were balance books hidden in the manor, somewhere only the Duke should know, which would have always been the case … if not for the fact that the Duke requested Amelie’s presence in the study room one time too many.

So one day, while cleaning up the room, with shaky fingers she forcefully trained to be nimble, Amelie took those books after she knew the Duke had checked them—he would not be checking them again anytime soon, which gave her a window of action.

By the time the next tea party was carried out, she would ‘mistakenly’ put those books in the hands of someone she knew the Duke disliked—someone who hated him in equal measure. She left them to check the veracity of the books on their own. She knew that a wrong step here could mean certain death: what if she were caught? What if the merchant was apparently in bed with the Duke? What if she was outed by her own allies amongst the maids?

But none of that happened.

Instead, the merchants moved swiftly—by the time the Duke realized that his books were missing, before he even got to launch an investigation into who the thief was, something happened at the markets. Amelie didn’t know what. All she knew was apparently the Duke was suddenly thrown into an impossibly large debt, and he had run out of alternatives to pay. Within the count of weeks, the house was stripped of all its riches; the mantle of the duke was vacated, and the manor’s premises were locked. All manpower were returned to their respective registry, including Amelie, who later found out that her letters to her parents had been withheld by the Duke’s messengers. She returned home in tears, and after a couple years of supporting her parents’ failing farm, she finally set out again to find work from the registry. This time, she was warned that she would be hired somewhere highly perilous: the very frontier between the Kingdom and the Darklands.

She was to work in the March of Lupus, in the Dukedom of Constantius, on the borderline where war had been waged for a thousand years.

Despite the clear dangers, however, work in Lupus was significantly easier for her. It was probably due to the situation in the frontline, but nobody really bothered Amelie—if anything, camaraderie there was very strong. It was after Lord Suzuki rescued her from a lengthy demonic infiltration into the territory that she realized how much the maids had depended on and strengthened each other, and it was his rescue that inspired her to begin the Servants’ Aid Society. She knew she was not the only one to suffer as a maid, and she knew how it felt like to have nowhere to run.

She knew how important it was to have somebody to talk to, and more importantly, she knew how important it was to have somebody who could help.

Somebody who, even if they couldn’t change the system, could help her change the course of her own life.

Somebody who, even if they couldn’t shield, could aid with an escape.

She established the Servants’ Aid Society to aid all other servants in need of help, and it was why she understood Lord Suzuki’s desire to save the slaves.

The slave protection notice that Lord Suzuki gave to the Vindex Regis guarding the Mansion seemed to finally start bearing fruit. Slaves began secretly coming to the Mansion to beg for protection. Lord Suzuki himself had been disappearing more and more often these days, and as the head housekeeper and one of his mistresses, Amelie couldn’t help but worry.

Unlike her, what Lord Suzuki attempted to do was something much bigger. However, also unlike her, Lord Suzuki himself was somebody who was larger than life. If anybody could do what he was doing, it would have been him.

All Amelie could do was press her palm to her chest as she prayed to the Goddess for his safety, for the safety of the slaves, and for the safety of the maids she helped escape.

May all suffer no longer.

*