They arrived back at Percvale as the sun was going down.
Darion unsaddled his horse himself, which he had started doing out of habit rather than necessity, and walked back to the castle without speaking to anyone. Garren followed at a slight distance.
They sat down in the great hall. Maret brought food without him asking, she’d figured out by now that when the Baron ca back from sowhere, he usually needed sothing in front of him.
They ate for a bit without talking until the plates were empty.
Then Darion said: "So... tell everything."
Garren put his cup down.
He started with the Varrels. Darion already knew so of it. Garren had earlier explained how they started the invasion, burned fields, and took livestocks.
But now Garren kept going. He talked about how it wasn’t just the Varrels, he had ntioned this before too, about how after the first invasion, the neighboring territories saw Percvale was weak and decided to take their turn. He rattled off nas, years, what each one had taken.
Darion just listened.
Then Garren said: "Valdenmoor sent n in the third wave."
Darion looked at him.
"They certainly weren’t the first," Garren said. "By the ti Valdenmoor showed up, the farms were already burned and the animals were gone. They ca for whatever was left."
He stopped for a second.
"Grain, mostly. What the others hadn’t taken. Three months of food we’d been trying to hold onto. Fourteen knights died trying to protect it." He paused again. "I knew two of them."
The room was quiet. Darion stared at the table for a mont, not really looking at it. Just thinking.
"And then," he said, "Years later, Aldric’s father lent money to the sa starving barony that his n helped rob."
Garren’s face didn’t move. "Yes."
"With interest, I assu."
"There was interest. The debt now is more than what they borrowed."
Darion leaned back in his chair.
"Isn’t that just wicked it feels so stupid to ," he nodded his head sideways slowly, scratching his beardless chin. "I don’t know... I don’t know. They contributed to Percvale’s downfall, shouldn’t they at least be nicer?"
It was like he was talking to his self.
He could feel anger sitting in his chest. Not hot anger, but sothing steady and cold.
Aldric had sat across from him that afternoon and talked about debts and obligations and thirty days like he was just being reasonable. His father lent the money in good faith, he said. The barony received it.
What he didn’t ntion, maybe because he didn’t know, maybe because he didn’t think it mattered, was that Valdenmoor had helped tear Percvale apart before they ever offered to put it back together. If you lined up the events in order, it told a pretty clear story.
Darion kept his face blank and thought.
The straightforward approach was dead. Aldric had been polite about it, but he was done talking. Thirty days, hand over the land, end of story.
From the look of things their definitely was no extension, no negotiation or amount of reasonable argunt was going to change it.
Because it wasn’t about reason. It was about naive stupidity, at least to Darion. And Aldric was certain the land was safer than a promise from Percvale.
Fighting wasn’t an option. Garren had said it straight, a hundred and fifteen living knights against three or four thousand wasn’t a battle, it was just a slaughter.
So that left sothing else.
Darion turned the problem over in his head the sa way he had with the Bogoarts before the first hunt. Not what he wanted to do. What he actually had to work with.
He had undead that didn’t sll like anything. They didn’t get tired or feel fear.
They didn’t have any of this stuff —heartbeat, breath, warmth. None of the stuff living people give off that guards learn to notice.
He had four venomous knights specifically, carrying venom that didn’t hurt when it went in and took a while to kick in. At least that was what he learnt from the system so days ago.
Soone who got bit wouldn’t know right away and wouldn’t yell. He or she wouldn’t even feel off for a few minutes.
He concluded with certainty that this was what had happened during the first hunt, when the knights had been bitten by the Pachian Serpents.
The pain and feel didn’t hit till about two minutes in.
He walked through it slowly in his head.
A military camp at night has guards, but guards listen for living things. Footsteps that have audible sounds behind them. Breathing. The sll of soone who’s been moving.
His undead had footsteps and nothing else. If you moved them slow enough and careful enough, the footsteps beca manageable.
And so there would be no sll, no breathing and no warmth, only shapes in the dark.
Send them into Valdenmoor’s barracks. Not to fight, fighting makes noise y’know and noise ends everything.
They would he sent just to move through. A bite here, a bite there. Slow and careful. Then pull them out before the venom started doing its thing. By the ti n started getting sick, his undead would have been back in Percvale for hours. No bodies and no evidence. No way to trace it back.
Now he did not know if the bites of his venomous undead knights killed fast like the Pachian serpents who had bitten them.
Well, he would find out later.
Back to the plan...
Soldiers dropping in their barracks. No visible wound, no clear cause either. Spreading through the ranks like so kind of illness.
Panic!
Healers who can’t figure it out. A king trying to deal with a crisis inside his own walls while also trying to squeeze a neighboring barony for money.
That thirty-day deadline would stop being the priority pretty fast.
The king would now focus on this sudden weird and strange sickness (or so they would think) ravaging through the knights Barrack, killing his knights.
What was a kingdom without knights?
It would be a Harvest ground for neighboring kingdoms or villages and this would be big problem to Aldric, he would try all he could to stop it, to find a cure for the slow downfall of his kingdom.
Darion thought about what could go wrong.
The main thing was control.
His venomous knights needed to move quiet, pick their targets, and stop when he told them to stop.
They needed to follow orders in the dark, where he couldn’t see them and couldn’t talk above a whisper.
There was basically no room for error.
One undead doing sothing unexpected. One noise. One guard sounding the alarm. The whole thing falls apart, and suddenly he’s exposed in a way that’s way bigger than the debt.
He pulled up their loyalty stats in his head.
All four of them were in the low twenties. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-four.
This would be the problem...
He’d thought about what low loyalty ant after that hunt.
He didn’t for sure know why they had those little numbers. But he ca up with reasons.
Maybe the venomous knights had those numbers because the way they died, fast, painful and chaotic, hadn’t bound them as tightly as the graveyard knights, who had been sitting still and quiet for decades.
Low loyalty ant there was a gap between what he wanted them to do and what they actually did. A clear command might co through with a slight delay. A command in the dark, at a distance, in a situation that needed fine judgnt about when to act and when to hold? That might co through wrong.
In the forest, during the Bogoart fight, that was manageable. The stakes were high but everything was loud and ssy. A half-second delay or misinterpreting a command didn’t necessarily ruin everything.
A silent infiltration of a military camp was the exact opposite. Everything had to be perfect. One undead misunderstanding an order, or falling back on its broken combat instincts instead of listening to him, and it was over.
The plan was right. The tool was right also. But the tool just wasn’t ready.
He sat with that for a mont.
"You’re planning sothing," Garren said. It wasn’t a question, it was just an obvious reality.
"I’m thinking," Darion said.
"Those are sotis the sa thing with you."
Darion almost smiled. He stood up and pushed his chair back.
"I need to work on sothing before anything else," he said. "A few days. Keep the hunting going. Keep the at sales going. Keep the knights training." He headed for the stairs. "Don’t send anything back to Valdenmoor yet."
Garren watched him go. "Should I ask what you’re working on?"
Darion stopped on the first step.
"Huh..., sothing about making my undead to be more obedient," he said.
He went upstairs.
The loyalty problem had to co first. Everything else waited. He had twenty-eight days left on Aldric’s deadline, and he was going to spend the first few making sure that when he moved, it moved exactly the way it needed to.
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