What It Means to Be Poor Nobility

Alexia noticed my gaze and opened her mouth with a resigned air.

"Did you need something?"

"No… Well, actually. Have you gotten used to this life?"

Alexia turned only her eyes toward me, keeping her face pointed away.

She added a branch to the campfire, and only after a short silence did she finally speak.

"It's dreadful. That's what I'd like to say, but it's more comfortable than I expected. For a slave's life, anyway."

"I see. Well, providing food, clothing, and shelter is part of my job. Just don't go comparing it to a noble's lifestyle."

Alexia let out a quiet laugh at that.

When Master gave her a questioning look, she raised her wooden cup to her lips.

Inside was a mixture of apple vinegar and honey diluted with hot water.

He'd prepared it as a recovery drink, good for fighting fatigue and staying hydrated.

It was a common drink in the Kingdom. Alexia had been caught off guard by it at first, but she drank it without complaint now.

"Tell me something. You know what life is like for the nobility at the bottom, don't you? You're a merchant's son, second generation at that. Surely you can guess?"

"That's…"

Master faltered.

Alexia was a noble the Empire had abandoned.

In other words, a noble the Empire considered expendable. Exactly the kind of bottom-rung noble she was describing.

"Don't hold back on my account."

"Sorry."

"No. Say it."

Her glare brooked no refusal, and Master surrendered.

If he didn't speak, he'd earn her anger for real.

Proud woman.

"Too poor to rest. That's my impression."

"It's worse than that. I live better now as a slave than I ever did back in the Empire."

Her voice held something that could only be called self-mockery.

Nobility. Blue-blooded. Treated as something special, but the reality varied wildly.

At its core, a noble's power came from land and authority.

The greater the noble, the greater those assets, and the greater their ability to leverage them for further growth.

Money followed naturally.

For the great noble houses, merchants would practically beg to lend them coin.

Even a few scraps from a powerful lord's table guaranteed a return.

But what of the lesser nobles?

Poor land. Rights that might as well not exist, or that only produced losses. Yet they couldn't afford to look shabby, because appearances were everything for the peerage. They borrowed desperately, couldn't repay, and many ended up drowning in debt.

Nobles on the frontier had it even worse. They needed military funding on top of everything else. Without extraordinary revenue, ruin was all but inevitable.

The Kingdom and the Empire weren't so different when it came to the inner workings of their nobility.

Merchants joked that having no money was the same as having no head, but for nobles who had nothing but their title, the joke was practically literal. They truly had no coin, and so they were discarded like Alexia had been. Their heads were always on the block.

Alexia's father had been made to disappear, house and all, as the Empire's way of sweeping the matter under the rug.

If Master hadn't bought her, Alexia would have vanished from the public eye as nothing more than someone's plaything.

"My family… it was about two hundred years ago, I think. An ancestor defended the national border from monsters and was granted a noble title for it. Back then, there was martial valor in abundance, and the monster resources made the house reasonably wealthy. Father always said we should follow our ancestors' example."

The crackle of the campfire served as the only reply to Alexia's words.

She lowered her face.

Her hair fell and hid her profile. Master couldn't see her expression.

What little he could make out of her mouth was shaped somewhere between crying and laughter.

"It's laughable, really. By the end, all the house had was shoddy weapons, a handful of soldiers who could barely be mustered, and horses too starved to ride. And yet Father said it was for the Empire and charged in at the front. I saw the outcome coming, but I didn't stop him. I couldn't have. The only thing I could do was go with him."

"I see."

Alexia raised the cup to her lips again, but it was empty.

Master poured the hot water he'd been heating over the fire into her cup, added apple vinegar and honey, and stirred.

Alexia said a small thank you.

"For all my talk of being noble, this is what it amounts to."

"But you helped me, didn't you? You could only do that because you were a noble."

"That was nothing… I just recalled something I'd seen in the Empire. Our liege lord was close with a cardinal of the Church of the Sun God."

Master said nothing.

He poured plain hot water into his own cup and sipped it slowly.

"What should I have done differently?"

"Beats me. From what you've told me, it sounds like it was already too late to do anything."

"The count who was supposed to send reinforcements never came. And then they blamed my father for starting the whole conflict. Even though he was just following the Empire's own orders."

Master listened quietly.

Alexia's father had probably been a fine man.

The proof was in Alexia herself: proud, yet free of malice or pettiness.

Noble, in the truest sense of the word.

To a mere merchant, a noble who chose integrity over survival was sometimes impossible to understand.

Merchants schemed and outmaneuvered at every turn, but a noble of true integrity couldn't bring themselves to do that. Their honor was everything.

And on top of that, the unwritten law of noblesse oblige bound their every action.

Frankly, nobles who pursued naked self-interest made far more sense to Master.

He understood the power of money.

With money, you could develop your territory. That strengthened your authority, which generated more money.

Every prosperous land owed its fortune in part to that cycle. Location helped, certainly, but the flow of capital was undeniable.

And when that cycle reversed…

"Well. It's all in the past now."

Alexia raised her face.

The strength had returned to her voice.

Her expression was the same as always. That beautiful face, equal parts refinement and steel.

After that, conversation died, and time passed in silence.