"This is Aunt Portia, sir. She and her husband are the finest tailors in town. ”

The fat aunt's ass was next to the chair, but her buttocks were only half in contact with the chair, and she nervously glanced at the "knight master" opposite her with a serious face and a somewhat unhappy face, and didn't say anything for a while-

Fortunately, the militia belonged to her old acquaintance, and quickly introduced her.

The militia looked at Oliver again.

"Oliver."

Oliver simply said his name and fell silent.

The work of inquiry, it seems, has only a quiet and unusually strange beginning.

"Master, do you want to know something about little Raphael?"

After a while, the fat aunt who had settled down finally asked. Her right arm was still in the basket, and her fingers were cramped over the apron at her knee.

Oliver nodded.

He suddenly felt very uncomfortable with the current status, he thought that he should be a free bandit, a mercenary who was comfortable with revenge, and not with this cold and arrogant attitude towards ordinary people like the officials-

His heart seemed to be in some kind of inextricable chaos at this moment, but he didn't know that what he showed was cold and arrogant in the eyes of the militia and "Aunt Portia".

"Mr. Knight" sat upright in his chair, his arms hanging naturally between his legs, and on his belt he wore a long black sword, which was not unsheathed, it was only a scabbard made of nitrate leather, which had been stained with some dark reddish-brown traces after more than a dozen battles of various sizes with his master.

He squinted his eyes, occasionally showing a wild and untamable beast, and Oliver didn't know that his appearance frightened the woman in front of him, called "Aunt Portia", and the other became more and more nervous, until he raised his head to stare at the chubby face, and then spoke again.

"Sir—"

"No, I'm not some shit."

Oliver corrected the wrong name on the spot.

"Knight."

Oliver retorted, "I'm just a mercenary. ”

"Ah, that's it...... Little Raphael's family was a neighbour of ours, and his father, Mr. Svensson, was a carpenter in the town, and he was very good at his craft, and many of the doors and windows of the nearby homes were in Mr. Svensson's hands, including furniture, such as the tables and cabinets of my family, when Lily was married...... Well, my lord, Lily is my youngest daughter, she just turned sixteen last year, and she is the prettiest girl in town...... Do you know? Her cheeks were pink and full like ripe apples, and she had a mouthful of white, neat teeth...... It's like when I was younger......"

With a series of unexciting, even nagging statements, "Aunt Portia" gradually let go of her original uneasy emotions, and she observed the face of "Mr. Knight" on the other side as she spoke, and after finding that she was still expressionless, she finally paused and breathed a long sigh of relief.

Oliver's right hand held his chin.

Motionless.

He seemed a little stunned.

"Aunt Portia"'s eloquence doesn't seem to be bad, but she spends a lot of saliva on introducing her daughter-

Such an act may be understood as a sales pitch for a young man like Oliver, but when she talks about her daughter Lily, who was married last year, she seems to have a taste of something wrong.

What the hell is it?

Oliver was not stupid, and when he figured this out, he quickly came back to his senses, he shook his hands into a fist and put them to his mouth and coughed lightly, his tone was still cold:

"To get to the point, about that boy, little Raphael."

"Little Raphael, he's such a poor little fellow. The undead attacked the town the other day, and his father and mother died, leaving him and his sister, Lily's husband...... Woohoo......"

The last word?

Oliver was stunned for a moment.

He seemed to understand something.

But he remembered the work at hand—and he reacted, quickly shifting the focus of his inquiry to the serious.

In the bits and pieces of "Aunt Portia", Oliver finally learns everything he wants to know.

It seems that Raphael Jr. stole the baron's flour just to fill his belly and that of his sister Jesse.

Oliver was silent.

He got up and left his place and walked to the windowsill. The morning breeze outside was blowing on his cheeks, and he raised his right hand and inserted his five fingers into the thick brown curls.

……

"Mr. Knight, I do not deny the theft of flour, and I am willing to accept any punishment for it."

After talking to Farmer Ford, Scott returned to the room where the boy was—little Raphael was sitting on a dusty chair, and when he saw the appearance of "Mr. Knight", he jumped down and said with a serious face.

However, Scott just stared at the boy and didn't speak—

He learned from Farmer Ford that it was not the first time that the boy had stolen flour from the Baron's estate, and that according to the laws of the kingdom, the lightest and lightest were to be whipped twenty lashes—

Again, this is because of the value of the flour itself.

Since the beginning of the Red Moon, the price of grain in the Northland, which had been low due to the wars of the nobility, has also increased, and according to Farmer Ford, if you want to buy two bags of fine flour from the town's shop to make white bread, you will need about three rael.

Three rael.

For Scott, who has been following Gross, three raels is no longer a great number, but he still clearly remembers the true meaning of three raels for an ordinary civilian family-

Scott came from the Northland Legion, and before that, he was a wandering orphan.

He had experienced a lot of humiliation in the hierarchical and orderly local legions of the kingdom, and he had also eaten a lot of whips, and he was still a ten-year-old young man at that time, although his heart was full of grievances and unwillingness, but in the end he still lived tenaciously until the end of the war-

He remembered who he was, a deserter who only wanted to survive.

He still vividly remembered that when he fled from the defeated battlefield of Anjou, he only had two reels and seventeen soles, and instead of stripping the relics of his dead robes like the others, he fled all the way until he met the original bandit Gross—

Gross who looted for a living.

He still has the last eight sols left, and for these eight sols, he is even willing to fight hard with red eyes!

This is Scott's first meeting with Gross! I want to talk about "Gross the Thief" with more like-minded people, pay attention to "excellent reading literature" on WeChat, talk about life, and find confidants~