Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 52: The Return

The citizens saw him coming before he reached the gate.

He didn’t know how — he had been on foot, leading a heavily loaded horse, approaching from a direction that wasn’t the main road — but by the time he came through the gate there were people lining the path toward the castle, and the noise started before he had fully processed that it was happening.

His name, mostly. Some variation of Baron, some just shouting without words, the particular sound of people who had decided that something good had happened and needed to express that at volume even though they did not know what happened.

A few of the knights near the gate had joined the edges of the crowd, grinning in the way soldiers grinned when something had gone right and they weren’t sure of the details but were happy to celebrate anyway.

The four carcasses on the horse drew their own reaction, the size of them, the number and the unexpected weight of the animal’s load.

People were pointing, talking to each other, doing the quick mental maths of how much meat that was and how many days it would last.

Darion walked through all of it, nodding when people met his eyes, raising a hand once when the chanting got particularly loud.

He was too tired to perform anything more elaborate than that and the crowd seemed to accept it.

And for some reason there seemed to be some Aura to his presence. The way he was moving, the flat-footed pragmatic walk of someone running on the last of their reserves, that apparently communicated as really cool.

Garren was at the castle gate.

He looked at Darion. Then at the horse. Then back at Darion with the expression of a man reassessing his prior estimate of how a thing would go.

He was shocked. And by shocked, this one was actually visible on his face. Garren was a man to control his emotions, not exactly ’emotion’ but the look on his face.

When he was really happy about something. Something that should have been very visible on his face to be very obvious, he would control it, so that it was seem like he was just slightly happy.

Same for being extremely shocked, he would control it so that he was slightly shocked, same applied for other things too like being sad...

But this, staring at Darion, he couldn’t hide it.

"The meats," he said, "Suggests a successful outcome."

"It does," Darion said, handing the reins to the nearest knight with a look that meant please deal with this.

They went inside.

Garren listened to the full account over a table in the great hall.

Darion narrated the tree, how he used the perspective glass, the entrance guard asleep at his post, the infiltration, the four working through the barracks, the moment the second one had nearly been seen and the recall, the three completing what they could before the shouts started.

He listened without interrupting, the same way he always listened to things he wanted to understand properly before he responded to them.

When Darion finished, Garren was quiet for a moment.

"I’ll be honest with you," he said. "I thought the plan was good on paper. In practice I thought it had a high chance of falling apart in the first ten minutes."

"It nearly did."

"But it didn’t." Garren looked at him across the table. "You recalled the one before it was seen, kept the others in place, waited and continued. In the dark, from a tree, directing four of them simultaneously." A pause. "And then came home with four large animals."

Darion almost laughed. "I didn’t kill those. The wolf did. I was asleep."

"You made the wolf," Garren said. "And you had the sense to sleep when you needed to sleep instead of pushing past it and making mistakes on the road. That’s not weakness." He leaned back slightly. "Strength isn’t only about fighting, m’lord. It’s the mind behind the decisions. The ability to see what’s available and use it correctly." He looked at him plainly. "You have that."

Darion absorbed that without responding to it directly, which was the only way he knew how to receive a genuine compliment without it becoming awkward.

He looked at the table for a moment, thinking.

"The meat," he started.

"What about it?"

"We have enough. More than enough. Between the hunting over the last week and what came back with me this morning, the barony has meat coming out of its walls." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Honestly I’m sick of the sight of it. If I eat another bowl of Bogoart soup I’m going to develop strong feelings about Bogoarts that have nothing to do with hunting them."

Garren’s mouth moved in something close to a smile.

"We need variety," Darion said. "Vegetables, grain, something that isn’t meat. The knights need it, the citizens need it, and practically speaking the barony can’t run on hunting alone indefinitely." He thought for a moment. "Take the new carcasses, all four of them, and send knights to the nearest neighboring villages. Not to sell for coin. But rather exchange. Meat for food items, vegetables, whatever they have that we don’t. Make the trade favorable for them so they actually want to do it."

Garren nodded slowly. "There are two villages within half a day’s ride that we’ve had reasonable relations with historically. They farm primarily, root vegetables, some grain storage from autumn. They’d likely trade well for fresh meat of that quality."

"Then do it today. While it’s still fresh."

"I’ll send a group this afternoon." Garren stood. "Four knights, the carcasses, and clear instruction on what we’re looking to bring back."

"Good." Darion pushed back from the table and stood.

Every part of him was requesting the same thing simultaneously and had been for the last several hours.

"I’m going upstairs," he said. "I don’t want to be woken up unless Valdenmoor is literally at the gate."

Garren smiled to that and bowed his head. "Rest well, m’lord."