Garren leaned back in his chair and thought for a mont before answering.
"Small," he said. "A small roadside settlent, been there for a long ti but never grown into anything significant. The population is sowhere between two and three hundred, maybe a little more in good seasons when people pass through and so of them stay, though that would be rare." He paused. "Warriors, if you can call them that, sowhere around seventy to a hundred. But that number is misleading."
"How so?"
"They’re not soldiers. Not trained ones or organized ones. They’re hunters, mostly. n who have spent their lives in the woods and know how to handle themselves and a weapon, but there’s no formation, command structure worth the na and no training.
What they have is numbers relative to their size and the confidence that cos from knowing the terrain around them better than anyone passing through."
Darion thought about the three knights who had co back in their undergarnts. Beaten badly enough that one of them was still holding his ribs carefully the next day.
They weren’t trained soldiers, Garren was saying. Only hunters and rough fighters who had looked at three knights from Percvale and decided they were easy.
They hadn’t been wrong actually.
"Why Percvale specifically," Darion said. "Is it just us or do they do this to everyone who cos through."
Garren’s expression was honest about the answer before he gave it. "Percvale has a reputation in this region. Has had one for years. It’s known as a dying barony with no food and knights who can barely stand up straight from hunger. There also isn’t a history of retaliating against anything after our fall.
If you were a village warrior on a road and a group of n from Percvale rode past with horses and at and equipnt, the question you’d be asking yourself isn’t whether you could take it. It’s whether there would be any consequences if you did."
"And the answer has always been no."
"The answer has always been no," Garren confird. "We’ve never retaliated against anything. Just one ti things with the invasions. We hadn’t retaliated against the individual incidents over the years, nothing. At so point that stops being restraint and starts being permission."
Darion sat with that for a mont.
"How do they operate," he said. "The village itself. Do they have walls?"
Garren shook his head. "Nothing like that. Wooden fencing in places, the kind that keeps animals in rather than people out. The settlent is scattered, huts and buildings spread across the area rather than clustered behind any kind of defensive periter. There’s no real center to it, no structure that serves as a barracks or a headquarters. The warriors don’t sleep in one place, they sleep in their own hos the sa as everyone else."
"Guards?"
"Rotating watchers on the outskirts. So of them in trees, from what I’ve heard, which fits with the hunting background, n who are comfortable, elevated and patient. But it’s not a coordinated system. It’s informal to be honest. People taking turns watching the approaches and calling out if sothing cos that shouldn’t."
Garren knew a lot about Gonnb like he knew about pretty much all kingdoms surrounding Percvale.
Darion leaned forward slightly, his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor while he worked through it.
He had been thinking about Gonnb the sa way he had thought about Valdenmoor. Sa category of problem, sa general shape of response.
The venomous undead had worked in Valdenmoor’s barracks because Valdenmoor’s barracks was a specific, predictable environnt.
It was a single large building, soldiers sleeping in concentrated rows, a layout he had been able to observe through the perspective glass and map in his head before he sent the undead in.
The sleeping guard at the entrance had been practically a gift, but even without that particular luck, the structure of the place had made the infiltration manageable.
It was a contained space with predictable positions and clear sightlines from outside.
Gonnb was the opposite of all of that.
Two to three hundred people spread across scattered huts with no centralized location.
Warriors sleeping in their own hos, distributed across the whole settlent rather than concentrated in one building.
Watchers at irregular positions on the outskirts, so probably in trees, which ant elevated and potentially with good visibility in multiple directions.
No single approach that gave him a clean angle on the majority of what he needed to reach.
Sending the venomous undead into Gonnb the way he had sent them into Valdenmoor’s barracks ant sending them into a sprawling, irregular settlent where he couldn’t predict movent, couldn’t map positions in advance and couldn’t rely on the targets being concentrated in one place at one ti.
The perspective glass had given him Valdenmoor’s barracks laid out like a diagram. Gonnb would give him a scatter of lights in the dark and no reliable way to know who was where.
The sa plan wouldn’t work.
He straightened up and looked at Garren.
"The infiltration approach I used on Valdenmoor," he said. "It worked because the barracks was a fixed structure with predictable positions. Everyone in one building, sleeping in rows, a single entrance I could monitor."
Darion shook his head slowly. "Gonnb is scattered from what you explained. Different buildings, no central concentration and irregular guard positions. I can’t run the sa operation on a settlent that doesn’t have a single point to operate from."
Garren nodded. "The situations are fundantally different."
"Which ans the response has to be different."
He stood up and walked to the window.
He thought about what Garren had said. Percvale had no history of retaliation. That was the root of it.
The root of it was that Gonnb had made a calculation based on years of evidence and the calculation had said Percvale didn’t fight back.
That calculation needed to be wrong now.
The question was how to make it wrong in a way that was achievable with what he currently had, against a target that didn’t cooperate with the plan that had worked last ti.
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