Chapter 7: How Big Is Bichi Village?

Freya never expected that Farra had actually told the truth. Ever since she refused to kill those bandits outright, Farra had never let her fight again. During the dozens of ambushes that followed, he personally charged in with his sword each time. Not only did he step forward… he also won. Every time, at least twenty or thirty bandits swarmed toward him, and in the end only five or six fled in terror. At first, he even chased them down to finish off the stragglers, but after too many ambushes he grew tired of pursuing them. Freya finally understood why Farra called her a Saintess. Compared with his ruthless style of cutting down almost a hundred people along the way, she did seem rather merciful…

After leaving the Bried region, the two spent another month crossing Laquiura. They stuck to the main roads and barely stopped at all, yet roadside bandits in Laquiura appeared several times more frequently than in Bried. At the edge of Laquiura, Freya looked at fields that had clearly lain fallow for a long time and could not help asking, “Why is no one farming these fields?”

“Because the cultivated land isn’t located here,” Farra replied.

“Why not here? We passed more than a dozen starving caravans. Why don’t they farm here?” Freya asked, puzzled.

“…You really don’t know?”

“I don’t.”

Seeing the naive bewilderment in her eyes, Farra sighed. “How old are you this year?”

“* years old.”

“When did you start hiding everywhere as a witch?”

“Uh… about three years ago.”

“Where did you originally live?”

“I don’t know… I think it was called Kabika Village…”

“What kind of backwater is that?”

“Well, it’s normal you don’t know.” Because of her age, Freya appeared extremely innocent in many ways. When he first met her, Farra had thought she was a cold-blooded witch who killed without blinking. After all, she had managed to survive constant pursuit, so he assumed she was very clever. Now, it seemed her escape owed less to her brains and more to luck.

“Look at this land; do you think it belongs to no one?”

“It doesn’t?”

“No. It has an owner… the local landholder. If that landholder holds a title, then everything produced here belongs to the lord. If not, half is his and the other half he must turn over to the surrounding nobles.”

“…”

Freya listened in a daze, then asked, “Then why don’t they cultivate this land? Isn’t it all his?”

“If you owned a thousand mu of land, and a hundred mu fed you comfortably and let you curry favor with nearby nobles, would you bother with the extra nine hundred?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“…Ha. Forget it. Even if I explain now, you won’t understand.”

Freya, utterly confused, lay against the carriage window, watching the scenery outside. It was the first time she had traveled so far. She had always cherished countless fantasies about the outside world. Unexpectedly, fate had given her a chance to see it. However, the world outside was nothing like what she imagined. Everywhere lay wasteland: broken mud roads, dried-up corpses, and lines of ragged, starving refugees. Everything in sight was desolate. It was nothing like the cities where she and Farra had briefly resupplied.

“So this is what the ‘outside world’ really looks like…” she muttered. It was nowhere near as beautiful as she had imagined.

The road was terribly bumpy and grew worse the farther they went. It took them half a month to cross Bried, a month to cross Laquiura, two months to cross Briwo, and then they reached East Mead. They spent another two-plus months traversing nearly all of East Mead before arriving at a wretched place on the extreme eastern edge… the most remote and barren of all. All told, it took Farra six months to travel from the royal capital to his fief. Only the gods knew how rough the journey had been. He alone had cut down more than four hundred roadside bandits, and his Constitution kept him alive despite the dangers.

When Freya stepped off the carriage, her legs were weak and her face was pale. The jolting ride and everything she had seen had completely shattered her longing for the so-called outside world. “I never want to ride in a carriage again…” she groaned.

“I don’t want to ride either! That damned king… when I storm the palace, I’ll make him take this road once! No, ten times! Twenty times! Until he dies doing it!” Farra cursed the king’s entire family line eighteen generations back. He had done so seventy or eighty times during the journey, and Freya’s ears had grown calluses from hearing it.

“It looks like a welcoming party up ahead,” Freya said, rubbing her ears and looking into the distance.

Farra reined in his irritation and led the three hundred canine beast-man slaves he had picked up at a supply post toward the group.

“Baron.” Led by an elderly man, the sparse crowd behind him all knelt, pressing their foreheads to the ground in extreme reverence… bordering on terror. The people of this remote backwater had never imagined that a Kingdom noble would one day rule them.

“Enough. Get up,” Farra said as he walked forward. At his command, the kneeling people slowly rose. All of them were sallow and emaciated, clearly long deprived of adequate food.

“Are you the village chief?”

“Yes, Lord… my name is Mas.”

Ordinary folk generally had no surnames, and the lowest had not even a given name. Farra had originally lacked one as well, but upon his ennoblement he was granted the surname Jago… a name arbitrary and devoid of positive meaning, decided by the Noble Council because of his low birth.

“You must all know that from today on, Bichi Village is my private domain. Everything here belongs to me personally.”

“Yes, Lord…” Mas replied without surprise. As far as he knew, everything on land granted to a noble belonged to that noble.

“Good. Very good.” Farra nodded, then asked, “Mas, do you know how big Bichi Village is?”

“Ah? Well…” Mas glanced back. There were only a pitiful dozen or so crude houses, with a total population barely a hundred. It was decidedly desolate. “Just this big…” he said, pointing with his hand. He did not know what words to use.

“All right,” Farra said with a chuckle. “So the locals of Bichi Village don’t know how large Bichi Village really is.”

“Eh? Baron…?” Mas stared, puzzled.

“One more question: whose land is that over there, and whose land is that over there?” Farra casually pointed left and right.

“That side belongs to Master Kone,” Mas answered honestly, though he had no idea what Farra meant.

“The other side belongs to Master Kaida.”

“Excellent,” Farra nodded. “Send them all back. You come with me so we can determine exactly how big Bichi Village is.”

“All right…” Mas followed behind Farra, completely bewildered. He had no idea what there was to determine.