Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 41: Road to Valdenmoor

They left at first light with three knights behind them, ones who Darion barely knew and did not know their names.

But they seemed alright and competent.

The morning was cold and still. Percvale’s streets were mostly empty at this hour, a few early risers watching the small group ride out through the gate. They looked curious but not enough to ask questions.

Darion rode without speaking for the first stretch, letting the town fall behind them and the road open up ahead. The three knights kept a respectful distance. Garren rode beside him.

The road out of Percvale was in the same shape as everything else in Percvale. It existed. You could ride on it. That was about it. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

The surface was uneven where the ground had shifted under it and never been fixed, the edges overgrown. Weeds pushed through the packed earth in places. A section of low stone wall that had once marked the road’s edge had collapsed and nobody had bothered to do anything about it.

It wasn’t a pleasant place to pass through, infact it looked like one of those abandoned roads in movies Darion watched back on Earth, ones who had been invaded by some zombie apocalypse and no one was left, leaving the place looking sombre and desolate.

People lived in Percvale, but then it felt like they didn’t.

They crossed out of Percvale’s territory and the road changed.

There was no gate, no marker, no line drawn across the ground to indicate that this was no longer Percvale’s territory.

But within half a mile past the boundary, the surface smoothed out, the edges were clear, and the general sense of disrepair just stopped.

The ground on either side went from pale and thin to darker and denser: soil that had been worked, not abandoned.

Fields appeared. Actual working fields, the furrow lines of recent plowing still visible, winter crops growing in neat rows. A farmhouse sat back from the road with smoke coming out of its chimney, the walls whitewashed and intact, the roof solid.

Darion looked at it as they rode past.

"It’s harder to see from inside," Garren said. "When you’re in Percvale it just feels normal. Out here you see the difference."

"I still can’t understand how Percvale is how it is now, I mean..., it’s surprising. Like it’s running on some different air, soil and even cloud." Darion said.

"The decline was gradual," Garren Said. "Years of small losses adding up. But the visible collapse was was not too long ago."

Garren paused.

"The last Baron before the one who died of disease simply stopped trying. He collected what little tax there was, spent it on himself, and waited for the posting to end."

Darion thought about the graves he had been digging through.

The knights buried in that ground had served Percvale through the invasions and the wars and the slow decline and ended up in mass graves with no coffins.

Were Barons buried in the graves too?

So far he hadn’t encountered any.

"Baron’s are buried in the grave yards too right?" Darion asked Garren who was a bit amused by the question.

"Yes, some," he replied. "Ones which corpses were seen when they died, many died in wars or in the forests so they weren’t buried because their corpses were no where to be found."

Darion changed the topic. "Tell me about Aldric," he said.

He noted Aldric was the also the name of one of his knights who had died when faced the Bogarts for the first time.

"Aldric the Second is fifty-one years old," Garren said. "He inherited Valdenmoor from his father at thirty-two, so he’s been running it for nearly twenty years. By most measures, he’s done well. The mines are producing, the farmland is managed properly, the knight order is trained and fed and equipped."

"He’s not a cruel man, from what I’ve heard. He doesn’t raid his neighbors, doesn’t expand by force and doesn’t make enemies he doesn’t need to. He’s a sensible man. Doesn’t waste time on what doesn’t work."

"Sensible men respond to sensible arguments," Darion said.

"Usually. But sensible men also understand leverage, and he has plenty of it here. He knows what Percvale is worth and he knows what Percvale can currently do. Walking in and telling him you need more time is only persuasive if he believes you’ll actually use that time."

Garren glanced sideways at him.

"So be specific. Not just ’we are rebuilding.’ Tell him what’s actually changed in the last week. What the plan is for the farmland he seeks to take if we do not pay. What the trajectory looks like if you get six months instead of thirty days."

"You want me to give him numbers?" Darion asked.

"I want you to give him something concrete," Garren replied. "Men like Aldric don’t respond to goodwill. They respond to information they can evaluate."

Darion nodded slowly, thinking about that.

It almost seemed as though Garren was commanding him but then that wasn’t the case.

The man was only giving advice, in a serious tone to him.

Darion appreciated it, he did not know much about ruling a Barony, that was where Garren came in, helping him out.

The landscape kept improving as they rode. More farms, better maintained. A small mill beside a stream that was actually working. A village they passed through where the buildings were solid and the people moving through the streets didn’t look hungry, a look Darion had almost forgotten was normal instead of something you had to work for.

He watched it all without commenting.

By midday the road had widened into something that was closer to a proper road than anything Percvale had, and then the walls of Valdenmoor appeared on the horizon and grew steadily larger as they approached.

They were impressive in that plain way things look when they’re built right and taken care of.

The stone was actually the right color, which meant it hadn’t spent years getting rained on without anyone repointing the mortar.

The gates hung straight. The guards on the wall stood properly instead of leaning, and their armor matched because it had all come from the same place instead of being cobbled together from whatever was left.

Darion pulled his horse to a stop at the top of a low rise and looked at it.

The knights beside him murmured, probably impressed on how good looking valdenmoor was.

Darion clicked his horse forward.

"Remember," Garren said, drawing level with him as they descended toward the gate. "Be specific. Be honest about what you’ve done, not what you hope to do. And don’t let him see how much we need this."

Don’t let him see how much we need this?

"We do need this more than he does," Darion said.

"Yes," Garren said. "Which is exactly why he shouldn’t see it."