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-VB-

Werdenberg Castle looked like a regular castle I expected out of the Late Medieval Age castle: sturdy, spartan, and stony. The castle\'s position on a small, grassy hill right next to a lake showed that very easily.

In contrast, the Toggenburg Castle was a castle built on top of a forested hill and far enough away from the village of Lichtensteig to the west, which was supposedly - according to the town\'s own mayor - the largest village in Toggenburg lands with a population of four hundred people.

If push came to shove, then climbing the forest hill to attack that castle would be disastrous for us. The southern and eastern side of the castle was not quite a cliff but may as well be. The only way into the castle, really, was from the northern forest and the narrow western ridge. The latter, however, was archery practice waiting to happen, while the former was heavily forested to dissuade any army from approaching from that direction.

The Count of Toggenburg knew the advantages of his castle and lorded it over me from the way he was smirking down at me from atop his horse.

I glared up at the well-shaven, short-haired, and brown-eyed and haired man.

The two of us, along with a handful of guards, met just northeast of Lichtensteig, because that\'s where the road led from this village towards the Toggenburg Castle.

"So you will apologize, pay the reparations, and sign the treaty?" I asked.

I had done the same song and dance with Frederick III, the Count of Toggenburg, as I had done with Albert, the Count of Werdenberg. Unlike his more reasonable and savvy neighbor, Frederick was less reasonable and more belligerent.

"No, I think it will be in your best interest for you to bow and beg for forgiveness," he retorted. "You are not the lord seeking his rightful land but I am!"

This guy…

"Besides, I have called upon my allies. They will crush your people now that they are defenseless."

I raised an eyebrow. "Is that what you really think?" I asked him. "You realize we had to walk through Werdenberg\'s land to get over here, right?"

He paused before frowning. "You did not use Walensee?"

Walensee? That lake west of Sargans?

I blinked before smirking. "Oh, did you allies lie to you? I guess that makes sense," I chortled as the count glared at me. "I mean Sargans is busy attacking the bishop and Werdenberg signed a peace treaty with me."

"What?!" he hissed.

I dangled the treaty to my left and let him see the wax sigil of the Count of Werdenberg.

Oh, he looked furious.

"So you have three options," I spoke before he could. "First, you can try to weather out my kind of siege. I assure you that you will not enjoy this. Second, you can surrender, give me what I want, and I\'ll leave. Third, you can try to fight me in the field with your army, but you and I both know I will win."

"Arrogance of a filthy peasant against -!" he hissed before he cut himself off. He pulled at the reins of his horse. "Try all you want. You and your peasant army won\'t ever conquer my castle."

And then he rode away with his men.

Grumbling, I turned to my own soldiers. "Guess we\'re gonna have to fight them."

"How are we going to fight a lord in his castle, though?" Arnold asked him.

I paused. It was true. I didn\'t know the exact details of a siege weapon. We might outnumber them, but not enough to try to storm the castle when the entry point was so narrow. We would lose far too many men.

"Give me a day," I told him as I gave him a reassuring shoulder pat as I walked back towards the village, which our army had commandeered to serve as our camp. I did, however, put down strict rules about looting and harming the villagers. "I\'ll have it figured out."

"If you say so, Hans," he replied and the other soldiers who\'d come to guard me all nodded along with him.

I paused and looked at him. "You\'re awfully okay with me doing all of this."

Arnold blinked at me before looking at the others in confusion, who just kind of shrugged. When he looked back at me, he had this "Are you serious?" look.

"Hans… You got a lord, a count, to be cordial with you. You brought us to victory against armies that we would never have been able to win against," he replied to me as if all of this was obvious.

"I … guess?" I replied in turn. "But doesn\'t it make you feel insecure not knowing what I do when I do?"

He frowned a little. "It is not for everyone to know everything. You just … know a lot. More than us. It\'s hard to believe that you came from a family that lives exactly as my family does. Enough to get a noble to accept your terms of peace."

"It was a generous term for people at war with each other," I replied. "He knew it, I knew it, and both of us knew that regardless of who won the siege, his "allies" would turn on him the moment the war was over. If they had men leftover after fighting each other, that is."

"But why? Why go after their allies?"

"Because they\'re not friends," I replied. "Look around you. What do you see?"

He looked around. "Mountains. Lots of mountains."

I nodded. "And how does one survive here? Not up in the mountains, right? They farm in the valleys between the mountains." They nodded. "In these valleys, they can\'t grow power by cultivating the land, because the land itself is a limited commodity. To grow in strength, prestige, and influence, they must grow outward."

Arnold paused. "Wait, so all of this-?"

"It\'s the noble\'s great game, and peasants like us die for their prestige."

Some of the men possessed resigned disgruntlement among them. Others, usually young like Arnold, looked outraged.

"It is especially so for this particular war," I added with a sigh as we reached the edge of the village. "But I\'m talking to the choir here about it."

"What is a choir?" someone asked.

I waved dismissively. "Just a word I know," I replied. "Well, I better get planning to bring down a castle, right?"

The men clapped me on the shoulders as I walked towards my personal lodging.

-VB-

The next morning saw my army and I standing just outside of bow range. Thanks to the slope, we stood further away than I would have liked.

The messenger that I had sent with a white flag returned.

"So?" I asked.

The plan I had come up with would result in a lot of casualties, and I knew that there were more than just fighting men in that castle. I hoped to reduce unnecessary casualties.

The messenger shook his head.

"The count doesn\'t wanna talk. He told me to fuck off and get bent."

I snorted. "What did the count really say?" I asked, and he looked a bit embarrassed.

"Ah, he, uh, told you to get shafted on a spear."

I sighed.

"Well, I guess that\'s that, then."

"We fight?" Arnold asked from my side. As my unofficial right-hand man, he acted as the bridge between the rest of the Compact\'s men and myself, relaying orders where he could and instructing the rowdier men to not go looting, raping, and pillaging.

"We fight," I sighed before turning to Kraft, Arnold\'s father and my official right hand man in this campaign. "Fire the signal arrow."

Kraft nodded and whistled thrice.

One of the bowmen pulled his bow and notched arrow up and pulled.

Then he loosed with a twang of the bowstring.

The arrow screamed as it flew high into the air.

I waited for the disaster to strike.

See, the plan I had come up with was one I took from Oda Nobunaga\'s pages. When faced with an unassailable castle, I had to change the environment.

So I waited as my men, who surrounded the castle on all sides in groups and surely heard the signal arrow, began to light the forest around the castle on fire.

As smoke began to rise, I saw panicked movement in the castle.

"Spare the women and children if they flee," I commanded loudly. "But kill them if they fight back with any weapons."

"Yes, commander!"

The fire began to grow. And grow. And grow.

And soon, the easily defended castle choked in the fire and smoke from the forest that once protected the castle from heavy advances. Fire from the south side was especially quick to climb the steep slope that the forest there grew on while the fire from the north side and west grew at a slower face. This only left the cleared northwestern slope as the only exit, and from how the garrison looked towards us from the battlement, they knew it as well.

My army and I waited for the sally.

It never came.

The fire choked up the castle, and soon, few of the wooden structures within the castle also caught fire. I heard shrieks of people burning to death. It gnawed at me, but I held firm without so much as a twitch of my face.

The fire continued to spread, and soon, the entire castle was on fire.

I watched with faux-impassiveness but with hair-gripping confusion and frustration as no one walked out to surrender.

Why?

Why?!

The roaring flames offered me no words of explanation.

My eyes widened as the gates finally opened.

… Only to collapse forward and reveal that there was no one on the other side.

I finally allowed myself to grimace.

Why?

The fire continued to burn until dusk fell, at which point, it finally subsided from a lack of fuel.

I … knew that I had to check, so I ordered my men to go in and do so.

When my men returned deep into the night, I met them as they dragged five people to me.

"We found them in the cellar, Commander Hans."

I looked down at the four filthy and soot-covered children and one young woman who kept on trying to get in between the children and me. I saw their fear-stricken faces in the harsh light of the torches surrounding us.

"What are your names?" I asked.

"T-They-!" the young woman tried to speak, but I leveled her with a glare and a dose of [Intimidate], a magic spell variant. She collapsed into a quivering wreck, looking up at me with deer in the headlights look of defecating terror.

I kept my glare on her for a moment more before turning the spell off (my only spell still) and turned back to the children.

"Names."

The oldest boy quivered.

"J-John v-v-von T-T-T-Toggenburg," he whispered quietly.

I crouched down to get to his eye level, but I was still heads taller than the sitting boy.

"And the others?"

"M-My b-brothers and s-s-sisters."

"I see," I muttered before looking up. "Where is the count?"

One of the men who reluctantly went to search the castle under my order came forth and brought out a silver circlet. It was the same circlet that the count had worn yesterday when we met.

"I found it on a pile of ashes."

I took the slightly twisted silver circlet, and let out a sigh. "So the count is dead."

John looked like he was about to cry.

I finally turned to the woman. "And who are you?"

She quivered still, unable to shake off the fear that I\'d instilled in her.

"M-Maria… v-von…"

Oh, another noble? Shit, was this the countess?

"H-H-Ha-"

Oh God, no. Was she going to say what I think she\'s going to say?

"H-Habsb-b-burg…"

Well.

Hmm.

Shit.

"Relation to the probably now the Count John here?"

"M-Mother…"

Shit.

"Then you are now the regent."

She seemed to steel herself at my words. "I… I am."

"Good. Signing peace treaty with children leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Do you know what I talked about to your husband yesterday?"

"Y-You asked him to sign a …" she caught herself before she said something stupid in front of people who just burned down her husband and his castle along with probably everyone else in it but them. "A peace treaty…"

"Yes," I replied. "Because he attacked us first. Now, I have you and your children at my mercy because your late husband was too stupid to think that another human being was not as smart or even smarter than him. So you have two choices here. You can sign an amended peace treaty or you can pick up a weapon and fight on… but the consequences of the latter is that I cannot afford to keep the Toggenburgs alive if they choose to pick up a weapon right now. They will all die."

I didn\'t want to kill children and I wasn\'t going to. But I wanted to scare this woman into accepting the peace treaty.

"I-I-I\'ll sign, I\'ll sign," she started sobbing.

I brought out a parchment and wrote a peace treaty similar to what I gave Werdenberg but with a few key differences that came with the kind of total victory I just achieved.

First, Toggenburg would pay war reparations totalling one thousand florins. It wasn\'t the most common or ubiquitously used coin in these Swabian Alps, but it was used regularly enough because of the trade between here and the Italians down south. One florin was equal to three sheeps (according to the last merchant I managed to price check some of the goods I had), and one florin was equal to ten silver hellers, the local coin people preferred to use around here while florin came from Florence, Italy.

Second, John von Toggenburg, the Count of Toggenburg, would be my ward until he became an adult at the age of sixteen. He was to be a hostage as well as a possible means for me to ensure that far future relationship between Toggenburg - and thus Habsburgs indirectly - and the Compact.

Third, Toggenburg signed a treaty acknowledging the political independence of the Compact of the Seven, its people\'s right to trade freely within Toggenburg lands, a lack of trade barriers between the two lands and polities, and renouncing all claims to the lands that the Compact of the Seven occupies currently; they could no longer claim that the valleys, starting from Schiers and Maienfeld to Davos, of the Compact were theirs by any ancestral or current means.

Fourth and the most important part, there would be peace between the Count of Toggenburg, the war leader on their side, and the Compact of the Seven for the next decade, putting a stop to all wars directed at the Compact of the Seven.

This was the end of the Nine Lord-Compact War, as they would call it in the future, and the end of the Unruly Year as the Sargans, upon hearing of their ally\'s demise, quickly pulled out of Chur\'s lands and an uneasy peace settled in these valleys.

-VB-

End of the Toggenburg Arc