The castle had three servants left.
It had been more once, Garren had ntioned it in passing during one of their earlier conversations, the way he ntioned most things about Percvale’s decline.
When the barony started failing in earnest, people had thought of their future and left. The servants had done the sa thing the townspeople had done, the sa thing anyone with options did when the place they were living stopped being a viable place to live.
You couldn’t bla them for it.
What remained was Wulfric, Maret, and Aldra.
Wulfric handled the outdoor work, trimming the grass around the castle walls, feeding and watering the horses at the stable, fixing whatever around the castle was broken enough to need fixing and small enough for one man to address.
He was quiet and consistent and had been doing this long enough that he did it without needing to be told what needed doing on a given day.
Maret ran the kitchen, which in Percvale’s current state ant working with whatever was available and producing sothing from it, a skill that required more creativity than the role suggested. Aldra assisted her and took on whatever else the castle needed that didn’t fall clearly into anyone else’s category.
Three people keeping a castle running. It functioned, barely, in the way that Percvale itself functioned, through the effort of the people who had stayed when leaving would have been easier.
Darion thought about the ones who had left. Not with resentnt, they had made the rational choice, the sa choice that had reduced Percvale’s population to just over two thousand people in a territory that had once held considerably more.
So baronies in this region had knight orders two or three tis the size of Percvale’s entire population.
The thought hit him in a way that was useful rather than discouraging.
Every person that would co back, every family that would return because conditions had improved enough to make returning worth considering, was a direct asurent of how far the barony had co.
He dismissed it as a future problem. First things first.
The al that morning was the best the castle had produced since his arrival.
Maret had worked with the Gonnb stores and what the kitchen already had and produced a proper breakfast.
It was thick oat porridge with dried fruit stirred through it, bread that was actually fresh rather than the hard preserved kind that had been the standard since he arrived, a small dish of soft cheese that had co from sowhere in Gonnb’s food stores, and sliced cold at from the previous night’s supply.
It was simple food, nothing elaborate, but it was complete and better than Percvale’s previous als had been.
It had multiple components and actual variety, the kind of breakfast that left you full rather than just less hungry than before.
The morning light ca through the dining hall window at a low angle, falling across the table and the food and the three people sitting around it.
Darion, Garren, and Seren.
The knights were eating in the barracks, which produced a distant low noise of a large number of people in better spirits.
Here the dining hall was the opposite of the Knight’s barracks, it was quiet. Not uncomfortable exactly, just the quiet of three people who didn’t know each other well enough yet to fill silence naturally.
Darion ate and thought about Seren and didn’t know quite what category to put her in. She had agreed to co, which was true, but the agreent had been made while she was in a holding pen with a burning village as the alternative, which put the word agreent under so pressure.
She wasn’t a prisoner, he had ant it when he said she was free, but she was also in a castle in a barony she hadn’t chosen, eating breakfast with a Baron she had t so hours ago under unusual circumstances.
He ate his porridge and said nothing.
Garren ate steadily and also said nothing, which was his default in situations where speaking wasn’t required.
Seren ate with focus, like her al was sothing that was to be handled delicately.
When the plates were mostly clear she set down her spoon and looked at Darion.
"I start on the land today?"
He looked up. The directness of it caught him slightly, he had been expecting so settling-in period, so ti for the situation to normalize before the real matters ca up.
"You have a problem with the soil. The problem doesn’t fix itself while I’m sitting in a castle room." She looked at him evenly. "I assud that was why you brought here."
It was. He had brought her here specifically because the farmland was a problem he couldn’t solve any other way, and she was the solution, and every day the farmland sat unworked was a day the thirty-day window with Valdenmoor got shorter.
"In about an hour," he said. "I’ll take you out there myself."
She nodded, pushed back her chair, and stood. "Call when it’s ti." She picked up her bundle of tools from where she had set it against the wall and walked out of the dining hall toward the stairs without further ceremony.
Darion watched her go.
He sat for a mont after she left, thinking about what she had said so simply. The problem doesn’t fix itself.
It would with Magic.
She had an ability, a genuine one, not a ’Late Awakening’ one like his, but sothing she had apparently been born with or developed or awakened, he didn’t know for sure.
His own ability was magic by any honest description, dark magic by the description most people would apply to it, and it worked in ways the world he had grown up in would have called impossible.
He was thinking about how her ability would actually look in practice, what it ant to sing to soil, what the physical process of it was, when Wulfric appeared in the doorway.
"A knight wants to see you, m’lord."
Darion looked at Garren. Garren looked back at him with mild curiosity.
"Let him in," Darion said.
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