"Wait a minute, what do you mean by 'everything'?" Albert asked with a shaky voice.

  "Well, as I said, because of your visitors, our Lord unfortunately demolished our halls in a little fit of rage, and since you, as good hosts, are taking responsibility for your visitors, the whole thing will be on you," Bartold explained slowly in the tone of a teacher dealing with a particularly slow-witted student.

  "But we just..." Albert began indignantly but was interrupted by a patiently smiling Bartold.

  "All you did was, ransom the criminal. The repair payments were not included, of course. I think 80,000 sterling should be enough to cover our damages," Bartold continued in a conversational tone.

  "Are you crazy? We don't have that much! Whatever we can do with the little trade with our neighbors, you're already taking it from us. Where do you think we're supposed to conjure up 80,000 sterling from?" Albert asked, stunned.

  "We're willing to accept the money in other forms too: jewelry, cutlery, weapons, old family heirlooms, whatever. You know, those glasses you're wearing there, for example, are definitely worth a lot. Oh, and it would also be very considerate if you could pack the whole stuff up right away and lend us a few carts and horses for transport. Of course, we would bring those back to you again once we've loaded everything," Bartold explained to them in a patronizing tone.

  "M-my... b-but that's ..." Albert began stuttering but was soon interrupted by Ivar.

  "Well... that's a pretty big request. You can't expect us to start dumping all our stuff in front of you from one second to the next," he said carefully.

  "If you refuse to pay, we would of course have to..." Bartold was about to start with a thinly veiled threat when Ivar interrupted him.

  "Now take it easy. I didn't say we would refuse, just that we need some time to prepare the whole thing. To collect all the stuff and pack it up. That could take a while. If you come back in a few days, we can..." Ivar began to explain in a soothing tone when he was interrupted by a slightly annoyed-looking Bartold.

  "You have until sunset. Don't force us to come through those gates," Bartold explained to them in a warning tone. This time making no effort to disguise his threat.

  With these words, Bartold turned away from their village and walked with his companions towards the edge of the forest.

  Were fucked, Ivar thought as he saw their “neighbors” gradually retreating towards the forest.

  "Do you think they really...", began Mayor Albert next to him.

  "Yes, I think so," Ivar answered the half-spoken question.

  "But they've never...", Albert began again, but was interrupted again by Ivar.

  "Well, you know, there's a first time for everything."

  "Then we're screwed," said Albert in a toneless voice.

  "It certainly looks that way, but I'd at least like to know why we're screwed," he replied and made his way down the palisade.

  After a few moments he also heard Albert's footsteps behind him.

  "Maybe... maybe we can call for help," his friend suggested half-heartedly as he caught up with Ivar below.

  "Help? from whom?" he asked, confused.

  "Well, maybe we can send messengers to Westfold and Emmertal, or we could try to find some mercenaries who can handle something like that. As far as I'm concerned, they can have Aodhan's entire hoard if they help us," Albert continued to formulate his idea, adjusting his glasses on his nose with a nervously shaking hand.

  "Albert, by the time you've found mercenaries who can take on a dragon, they've already finished us. And as for the matter of our neighbors, I guess we could defeat the dragon's men with their help. But that won't change anything about the dragon. It doesn't matter how many more of us country bumpkins we round up. Besides, we wouldn't be able to reach them anyway. Bartold's scouts have probably surrounded us by now," Ivar explained to him in a sober tone.

  "How do you know that he surrounded the village and didn't go back into the mountain?" Albert demanded in an incredulous tone.

  He thought for a moment how to answer that question.

  How did you explain the gut feeling of someone who had spent over 30 years in the military and security service to a local politician?

  At first, he wanted to say intuition, but decided against it because that sounded too feminine. Instead, he snorted and said: "Believe me, I have it in my urine."

  Albert looked at him from the side with a questioning expression on his face.

  Should have gone with gut feeling or something like that, he thought as they continued towards the pub.

  "Are the scouts at their posts?" Bartold asked Miriam, who was aiming a stone at a squirrel that was curiously looking down at her.

  "Yes, they're ready, but they were complained loudly about having to sit in the bushes the whole time without any alcohol," she answered, slowly bending her arm with the stone backwards.

  "As long as they don't complain loudly while they're scouting, I don't care. When we're done here, they can drink themselves silly as far as I'm concerned," he growled, annoyed.

  He certainly wasn't going to let the biggest robbery of his life be ruined by a gang of unprofessional drunks. The last thing he needed was for Emmersdorf and Westfold to get involved.

  Together, the villagers would significantly outnumber them. Sure, they weren’t as well armed or as mean as the scum he had at his disposal here, but he knew from personal experience that one should never underestimate a determined farmer with a pitchfork; after all, he had a permanent warning on his face against exactly this kind of stupidity.

  "Damn it!" Miriam shouted angrily, which abruptly tore him out of his thoughts.

  Startled, he turned to her, his hand clenched on the hilt of his sword.

  "What is it?" he shouted in shock, just stopping himself from asking if this Stephan Sturm had reappeared.

  "Missed the squirrel," Miriam replied slightly contritely, looking at him in surprise when she saw his alarmed expression.

  I'm starting to think someone threw a stone at your head as a child , he thought angrily, his face dumbfounded.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  "No reason to shout like that," he finally grumbled, whereupon Miriam just shrugged and took a handful of berries from her pocket.

  " Tell me, Bartold, do you really think that they'll give us all our stuff? I mean, if they don't have anything left, what are they supposed to do then?" said a slightly unsure Martin, who was sitting on a tree trunk next to Miriam with a drinking tube in his hand.

  After noticing the questioning looks of the other two, Martin swallowed once and continued.

  "For us, I mean, if we take everything away from them, they won't be able to do anything for themselves or for us or anything like that," he shared his concerns, growing a little quieter with each word under the gaze of the other two.

  Not my problem, though Bartold, smiling, while he was already imagining what his palace would look like.

  "Don't worry, we'll leave a little behind," he finally answered, still lost in his imagination.

  "If they're cold in the winter or something, they can come over and ask Aodhan for help," joked Miriam.

  "That's not what I meant," muttered Martin, but finally left it at that.

  "Seriously, part of me wishes they would refuse. I haven't seen Aodhan's fireworks in ages. In that case, will you go up and get him?" asked Miriam, looking at him excitedly.

  As he had just mentally put on a magnificent prince's coat and was on his way to a banquet in his honor, this question rudely brought him back to reality.

  "Don't count on fireworks, they'll pay," he said confidently, hoping to have banished any trace of uncertainty from his voice.

  Everything will go smoothly as long as Aodhan or whoever the guy is doesn't put any nonsense into their heads, he thought, with slight unease.

  Suppressing an annoyed groan, he looked at his lucky dagger, which hung in its small sheath on his belt.

  If only he had had a chance to get to Aodhan inconspicuously, he wouldn't have to worry anymore.

  He had had the dagger for almost 20 years now, and even though he could count the number of times he had actually used it on one hand, it had saved his ass or kept him out of trouble every time.

  He still remembered how, as a young naive robber who had just run away from home and joined his first gang, he had met a traveling sea elf who claimed to be an outcast from his people and was now working on his own.

  Normally, a lone traveler was of course bread and butter for bandits, but the leader of his old gang, a wolf man with forearms as wide as Bartold's head, had heard of the reputation of this knife ears and preferred not to risk a confrontation.

  Having never seen the old beast avoid a fight, the stranger naturally caught young Bartold's attention.

  When it became clear that they were heading in the same direction, the sea elf, who introduced himself as Kalzion, suggested that they travel together for a while, which his old boss accepted with suspicion, although Bartold and the rest of the gang realized that their leader was just afraid to turn down Kalzion's offer.

  As they traveled together, the elf offered them some of his possessions for sale, which was refused by all.

  All except a wide eyed young Bartold, who asked the exiting stranger, in front of whom even his Leader, who at that point was the most frightening person he knew cowered, for a dagger Kalzion had on his belt.

  Of course, he knew nothing about the dagger at that time.

  He just liked the snake pattern on the scabbard, which is why he had listened open-mouthed to Kalzion's story when he told him that there was a small pool of poison on the bottom of the scabbard, which supposedly came from some kind of sacred giant snake or something.

  He couldn't quite remember the story of the dagger that Kalzion had told him back then, but what he did remember was the guarantee that even a scratch with this dagger would paralyze and eventually kill a full-grown bull-man within seconds.

  In disbelief he had asked at the time whether the poison on the bottom of the scabbard wouldn't lose its effect over time, to which Kalzion laughingly replied that this was certainly the case, but that it could take a whole human lifetime for that to happen.

  Presumably after he had noticed Bartold's big eyes, he offered him the dagger for sale and claimed to have a few left himself, even though Bartold had never noticed another dagger on the pointy eared bastard back then.

  Of course, the dagger cost far more than a young vagabond could afford, but he just couldn't get the thing out of his head, so he did something that was basically a death wish.

  One evening, he secretly stole his boss's share from their last robberies and secretly exchanged it for the dagger.

  Kalzion took the money and gave him the dagger, looking greedy but barely glanced at the gold itself.

  Bartold just hoped at the time that no one would notice his little theft until they got close to a town where he could escape.

  Which, in retrospect, was of course more than stupid, because as he now knew, every bandit in a gang checked at least once a day whether he still had all his belongings with him, after all, people like them were not to be trusted.

  The very next evening, the towering gray wolf man attacked him.

  To this day, he did not know how the old wolf knew it was him. All that was going through his head at that moment was that his head was going to be bitten off and all he did was wave his new dagger around in a panic with his eyes closed.

  When after a few moments there were still no teeth around his neck, he opened his eyes and saw his boss lying on the ground in front of him, curled up in a ball and staring at the sky with his eyes wide open.

  For a while, he and the rest of the gang just stood there and stared at the corpse of their old leader.

  A moment later, the others looked from the corpse to Bartold with frightened looks and the next moment disappeared into the undergrowth with panicked steps.

  Young Bartold, meanwhile, was torn from his state of shock by Kalzion's amused clapping.

  He congratulated him on his new win and gestured to the bags that the others had left behind in their panic. Which had quickly brought a grin to Bartold's face.

  Kalzion then offered to continue the journey together, showing him how to use the dagger and a few other useful tricks that he had learned in his homeland.

  Looking back, the years he spent with Kalzion were certainly among the most educational of his life, but also, as he soon discovered, among the most boring.

  Although he learned many useful little tricks, using most of them to follow and spy on random people without ever attacking them or stealing anything from them seemed like a waste of his newly acquired talents.

  As so often in his life, he finally concluded that it was time to move on, and so one day he simply grabbed his things, got some provisions and moved on.

  At first he was a little afraid that Kalzion would come after him to punish him for leaving, or at least to get his dagger back, but he hadn't seen the elf since the day he had left.

  Today Bartold suspected that Kalzion had a whole pack of little rats like him in the city, who were spying around for him, so his departure probably didn't really affect him, and he had claimed to have several of these daggers anyway.

  It probably just wasn't worth the effort to follow him, which was fine with Bartold.

  After all, both the dagger and the ability to sneak away unnoticed had proven more than useful in the years since.

  Originally, he had hoped that the dagger would help him this time too, but unfortunately that wasn't the case.

  Because of Miriam's idea of releasing Aodhan for ransom, he came to the conclusion that it would have been a bit odd to just kill him, it could have led to questions he didn't need right now.

  He had also considered giving the supposed ex-dragon a little stab with his dagger on the way to Schlucht and then playing the ignorant one when he suddenly collapsed, but since he was on Martin's leash the whole time, the opportunity had never arisen.

  Or maybe I've just gotten a bit rusty over the last few years, he admitted to himself.

  Since he had joined Aodhan back then, he had basically gone from being an honest robber to a tax collector and as such, all he had to do was hold out his hand, a role he had of course enjoyed playing, but he still had to admit that this was precisely why he wasn't quite as quick as he used to be.

  Still more cunning than the rest of these idiots, but still.

  None of that would matter anymore soon. This was the last thing he had to do anyway, and even if he wasn't at his best anymore, which was Aodhan's fault in some way, it would still be enough to deal with his own group of idiots and intimidate a few Farmers.

  Unfortunately, the opportunity to get rid of Aodhan hadn't presented itself, but that wasn't something he was too worried about anymore.

  If you're clever, you'll make up some story and get away, you old lizard. Just don't say anything stupid and we'll both come out of this without a scratch. One of us a little richer than the other, but still better than being hanged by a horde of angry farmers, thought Bartold, hoping that Aodhan could somehow hear his thoughts and act accordingly.

  What Bartold couldn't know, however, was that his and Aodhan's thoughts were at least roughly going in the same direction, albeit with different goals.