Vera called him in on the fourth morning.

The table had been cleared of everything except five items arranged in a line. He looked at them and she began.

"This first," she said, pointing to a bundle wrapped in dark cloth, tied with a cord. It looked like something you could hold in one hand. "Incapacitation dust. Throw it into a concentrated group, the cloth burns on impact and releases the compound into the air. Anyone within a close radius goes down. Disoriented and unable to stand, some will lose consciousness entirely." She looked at him. "At high concentration, it kills. At lower concentration, they wake up. You decide which you want based on how close the bundle lands and how tightly packed the men are."

"How many of these?"

"Six bundles. Each one covers a group of fifty if they’re packed tight. Less if they’re spread out, which is why you wait for the right moment." She moved to the next item, a smaller container, sealed. "This is a disorientation compound. Different from the former. This one is wind-carried, slower to disperse and covers a wider area. Men exposed to it lose their spatial sense. They can’t tell which direction they’re facing, can’t coordinate movement and can’t follow orders they’ve just received because by the time they try to act on the instruction they’ve forgotten which way is which." She paused. "It doesn’t kill. It creates a window, several minutes of complete combat ineffectiveness. You use that window to advance, to flank and to do whatever you need done before it wears off."

Darion was already thinking about how to use it. A force advancing through a gap in an enemy line that couldn’t respond because the men holding the line were trying to remember which way they were facing. His undead didn’t need coordination. His undead would walk straight through a confused formation and hit whatever was on the other side of it.

"The third," Vera said, and picked up a small clay vessel no larger than his fist. "Fire accelerant. This one requires precision in application." She set it down carefully. "Applied to an arrowhead, just a small amount, properly sealed until the moment of use, the arrow on impact ignites with considerably more heat than a fire arrow. Stone resists it. Timber does not. Armor does not."

She looked at him to make sure he was following.

"Your archers," she said. "If they position themselves in elevation, trees, walls and high ground. And use these arrows against a bunch of knights, the first hit sets fire to the man it strikes. The second hits the man beside him, already close, and the fire spreads laterally. A line of mounted knights in formation, horses shoulder to shoulder, one archer in a tree working from left to right could put an entire row on fire in under a minute."

Darion thought about that image for a moment.

Ten archers in trees. Each one with a set of accelerant arrows. A Valdenmoor column advancing on Percvale’s position in the formation they had used when they marched in and destroyed everything, which was organized and predictable. Thier horses close together because that was how knights on formation moved on a road.

Row by row.

It would not be a pitched battle or a hundred knights against three thousand. Instead it would be ten people in trees turning Valdenmoor knights into a corridor of fire while the people on the ground moved through the confusion.

"How many accelerant arrows can you make?" he asked.

"I have enough compound for sixty arrows. Applied correctly, sixty is considerable." She paused. "Applied incorrectly For example too much per arrow, arrowhead not properly sealed or discharged downwind of your own people, it becomes your problem instead of theirs. Your archers need to understand the application before they use them. I’ll show them."

"They’re good I suppose," Darion said. "Seren trained them well."

Vera looked at him without expression, which was as close as she got to acknowledging anything positive about Seren’s work.

"The limitations," she continued. "The incapacitation dust and the disorientation compound are both affected by wind. Strong wind disperses them before they can concentrate. You need calm air or wind moving toward the enemy rather than toward you. Check conditions before you deploy." She looked at the bundles. "These are finite. Six incapacitation bundles, one disorientation container, sixty arrows worth of accelerant. When they’re gone, they’re gone. I can’t make more in the field."

"It’s enough," Darion said.

"It might be," she said. "That depends on how you use it."

She stepped back from the table and looked at him.

"Now for the oath," she said.

He had known it was coming. He had been thinking about it since Ghlk...

He looked at the items on the table. At what she had spent about four days making. At what it represented, which was the chance to do something about what had happened to Percvale, to the fifty-two, to the livestock and the farmland and the houses.

So he took the oath:

"I, Darion, Baron of Percvale," he said, "Swear to pay five hundred silver coins to Vera of Ghlk, from the first treasury surplus Percvale produces that can sustain the payment. I swear this not under obligation of circumstance but by my own intent and will. If I choose to break this oath when payment is within my power, I accept whatever consequence is bound to these words."

He felt it.

He hadn’t been sure he would.

He hadn’t known what a magical oath felt like, whether it was dramatic or subtle or nothing at all. But now, he felt that it was subtle. A warmth in his chest that wasn’t physical warmth, there briefly and then gone, like something noting the words and filing them somewhere permanent. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

Vera looked at him for a moment.

"It is done," she said.

He had fifty living knights. Fifty undead in inventory. Ten venomous bats, two wolves and three Rops. The archers, ten of them, trained and good at what they did. Vera’s arsenal distributed among the force too.

’Now, we need a plan of attack.’