Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 4: Percvale

Darion was transported to Percvale in a prison cart (not even a proper carriage).

The prison cart had no cushioning, no covering, and was clearly designed to move something from one place to another without any particular concern for its comfort.

Darion sat on the bare wooden floor of it with his back against the side and his knees drawn up slightly, watching the imperial roads pass beneath him through the gaps in the planks.

Two knights had been assigned to take him. Ralf handled the horse and Nigel sat beside him on the driver’s bench, and from the moment they left the palace gates neither of them paid Darion very much attention at all.

"Ay mate," Nigel started. "The prices of whores have been on the rise lately."

"I can barely afford them these days," Ralf replied, clicking his tongue at the horse.

Nigel smirked. "Guess this is a sign we get married?"

"Married?" Ralf shook his head slowly. "I don’t think I can afford that either."

"Then you’ve got to be careful with the whores when you do afford them," Nigel continued, "So you don’t end up producing a bastard like the one we’re currently carting off to the ’death land’."

They both turned around to look at Darion.

Darion looked back at them, then down at the floor.

Nigel turned back around, his smirk fading into something a little more thoughtful. "I do pity the lad, honestly."

"Same," Ralf agreed, nodding slowly. "I genuinely don’t understand why everyone keeps blaming the boy for something that isn’t his fault."

"His fault?"

"Think about it. If the Emperor hadn’t gone and slammed a whore at some brothel, the kid would never have been a bastard in the first place. He’d probably still be in heaven somewhere, or at least born into a proper household."

Darion found he agreed with every word of that. None of this had been his choice, his doing, or his fault, and yet he was the one sitting in the back of a prison cart on his way to a barony that everyone in that hall had reacted to like it was a death sentence.

He looked out through the gaps in the cart.

The journey took three days. Ralf and Nigel pushed a decent pace but stopped when the horse needed rest, and through the nights they took turns: one steering, one sleeping on the bench while the other kept the animal moving.

They had brought food supplies and water and passed some to Darion.

The landscape had been changing gradually throughout the journey. The lush, well-maintained greenery that surrounded the imperial capital, its wide roads and healthy trees and the general feeling that the Emperor’s eye was on everything, had given way slowly to something considerably less maintained.

The fields here were grey and patchy, the soil thin and pale. The trees along the roadside were bare despite the season and the few farmsteads they passed looked like they had been surviving rather than thriving for quite some time.

Then Percvale appeared on the horizon and Darion understood why the crowd had gone quiet at the mention of its name.

The walls surrounding it were the first thing he noticed, or rather the state of them. Stone that had probably been solid once but had not been properly maintained in years, entire sections leaning slightly, others patched with material that did not match the original.

Beyond the walls the buildings were visible, looking skeletal and grey.

Villagers stood near the entrance as the cart rolled through the gate and they watched with eyes that had a hollowness to them that Darion recognised instinctively as the particular look of people who had been hungry for long enough that they had stopped expecting it to change.

The keep was at the centre of it all. It was standing, technically, though it communicated this fact without any real confidence.

The roof had been patched in at least four places that were visible from the outside and one of the upper windows had been boarded over with planks that had since warped and split.

Ralf brought the cart to a stop in the small courtyard in front of it.

The two knights climbed down and Darion followed, stepping onto the cracked stone of the courtyard and looking around at what was apparently now his. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

Nigel cleared his throat and straightened up, affecting the tone of someone performing an official duty.

"By decree of Emperor Valdris," he announced, to no one in particular since the courtyard was mostly empty, "Darion is Baron of Percvale."

A small group of people had gathered near the keep’s entrance to watch. None of them looked particularly hopeful.

Someone produced the Baron’s seal. It was tarnished and old and the engraving on it was worn enough that Darion had to squint to make out the shape. Someone else brought forward a ceremonial sword in a scabbard and when Darion drew it an inch out of curiosity the blade was visibly rusted along the edge.

He slid it back in.

Ralf patted him on the shoulder.

"Good luck, lad," he said.

Nigel patted the other shoulder. "Truly."

Then they climbed back onto the cart, turned the horse around, and left through the gate at a pace that suggested neither of them wanted to spend any more time in Percvale than was strictly necessary.

Darion watched the cart disappear through the gate and then stood in the courtyard alone for a moment, surrounded by crumbling stone and hollow-eyed villagers.

"Lord Baron."

The voice came from his left. Darion turned.

The man who approached him was older, somewhere in his fifties, with a grizzled face that had been weathered by what looked like several decades of outdoor living.

His armor was functional but had clearly been repaired multiple times, the plates mismatched in places, the leather straps replaced at different points with material that didn’t quite match. He carried himself with the posture of a soldier, back straight, hands at his sides, but there was a tiredness behind his eyes that had nothing to do with the hour.

He stopped a respectful distance away and gave a short, proper bow.

"I am Sir Garren," he said. "Commander of your forces."

He said it plainly, without mockery.

"How many men?" Darion asked.

"One hundred and twenty one," Sir Garren replied. "Most are in poor condition. We’ve had difficulty with food supply for the better part of four months. The last Baron passed from disease three months ago and since then things have not improved."

Darion absorbed this quietly. "And the barony itself? Financially?"

"We owe debts to several lords in the surrounding regions. In total, a little over fifty thousand gold coins."

Darion stared at him.

"Some of the lords," Sir Garren continued, "Have sent word that if payment is not made within a reasonable period, they intend to claim portions of Percvale’s land as compensation."

The courtyard was very quiet. Somewhere behind him a shutter was banging softly against a wall in the wind.

"I’d like to see my chambers," Darion said finally, because it was the only thing he could think of to say at this point.

He wasn’t particularly exhausted, he had slept through most of the journey, having little else to do in the back of a prison cart for three days.

He didn’t think he was cut out to be a Baron, leader of some dying kingdom. But that was how he saw life and had to go with it.

"Of course, my lord." Sir Garren replied and led him inside.

The interior of the keep was not better than the exterior had suggested. The main corridor was cold and dim, the torches in the wall brackets burning low.

The stone floor was uneven in places where the foundations had shifted and one of the doorways they passed had been partially blocked by a beam propped against the frame, presumably to stop it from collapsing further. A tapestry on the wall had faded to the point where whatever scene it had once depicted was now completely unreadable.

The chamber Sir Garren brought him to was at the end of a narrow staircase on the upper floor. He pushed the door open and stepped back.

Darion walked in.

The bed frame was solid wood but one of the legs had been replaced with a stack of flat stones, giving it a slight tilt. The mattress on top of it was ’Meh’ by any standards.

Dust lay over most of the surfaces in the room and in the corner, hanging slightly crooked on the wall, was a mirror, cracked diagonally from the upper left corner down to the lower right, splitting his reflection cleanly in two.

"I’ll leave you to rest, my lord," Sir Garren said from the doorway. "If you need anything, I’ll be below."

The door closed.

Darion stood in the middle of the room and looked at his cracked reflection for a long moment, then sat down on the edge of the tilted bed. The frame groaned under even his modest weight.

Darion wanted to weep but decided against it, there was no use weeping after all.

"What am I supposed to do," he said quietly, to the empty room, "With a crumbling barony, starving men and dead knights?"

There was silence, one that stretched out and then, somewhere in the space just behind his thoughts, something stirred.

[DING!]