Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 53: Disrespect

Darion and Garren were in the middle of a conversation when the doors opened.

Darion heard them before he saw who it was. He turned in his chair.

Three knights came through the door and two of them didn’t make it past the entrance before their legs gave out.

The third managed four more steps and went down on one knee, catching himself on the floor with one hand, head hanging.

They were in their undergarments.

All three of them, nothing else. There was no armor, weapons or boots on two of them.

Their faces were split and swollen, like they had been hit repeatedly by people who weren’t in a hurry about it.

One had a cut above his eye that had bled down his face and dried there. Another was holding his ribs with one arm.

Garren was already moving, crossing the hall and crouching beside the nearest one before Darion had fully processed what he was looking at.

Darion stood up.

The knights hadn’t gone to the barracks first, stopped anywhere, or reported to anyone else in the castle.

Instead they had come straight here, which meant whatever had happened to them was recent enough and bad enough that the normal sequence of things hadn’t occurred to them.

"What happened," Darion said.

The knight on one knee looked up at him. He was breathing in a careful way, mostly likely because breathing fast hurt very much.

"We were on the road," he said. "Passing near a village, the one Sir Garren said had root vegetables to trade." He stopped to breathe. "Suddenly warriors came out. Six of them, maybe seven I don’t know. They asked where we were going with the meat."

"We told them," the one on the floor said, without lifting his head. "Said we were from Percvale, going to trade."

The moment the word Percvale left his mouth the other two knights’ expressions said everything about what had come next, even before the man on his knee continued.

"They laughed," he said. "Started laughing the moment they heard Percvale. Then they just took the meat, pulled it off the horses. We pushed back and tried to stop them but..."

"They were stronger," the third one said simply.

"They beat us," the first one continued. "Told us that if we didn’t start running they’d do worse. So we ran."

The hall was quiet for a moment except for the sound of the three of them breathing.

"What of the horses," Darion said.

The knight on his knee looked at him.

"They took them."

Darion kept his face still. "And your armor."

"Took it."

"What of your armor and clothes."

The knight nodded slowly, which clearly hurt his neck.

"Everything m’lord. Whatever we were wearing under the armor too. Left us with what you see." 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

Darion looked at the three of them on the floor of his great hall, in their undergarments, beaten and barefoot, having run however many miles it was from that road back to Percvale’s gates because someone had decided that men from Percvale were people you could do that to and walk away from without consequence.

He looked at the table in front of him.

Then he flipped it.

The table hit the floor and split down the middle, the two halves skidding apart on the stone, the cups that had been on it going in different directions.

"Bullshit!"

Darion stood over the two halves of the broken table and looked at them for a moment.

Three horses gone.

Three horses from a stable that had started at twenty and was now sitting at fifteen after the forest losses.

Eighteen had become fifteen in one afternoon because some village warriors on a road had decided the men in front of them were from Percvale and that meant they could do whatever they wanted.

The meat. Four large carcasses, the ones the wolf had killed while he slept, the ones he had tied to the horse and walked back to Percvale on foot because he didn’t want to push the animal under that weight.

Sold or traded, that meat would have brought back vegetables and grain, the variety the barony had been lacking, the first real step toward a diet that wasn’t exclusively whatever they had hunted that week.

It was now Gone!

Pulled off the horses by people who had laughed when they heard where the knights were from.

The armor too. Three full sets, stripped off his men who were already outnumbered and being beaten, taken because the people doing the taking had decided they could.

Armor in Percvale was already a managed resource, he had seen the barracks assessment, fifty-seven sets damaged and twenty-six nearly unusable.

Three functional sets walking out of the barony’s possession in one afternoon was not a small thing.

And then the knights themselves. He looked at the three of them still on the floor of his great hall, the one Garren was helping into a sitting position, the one with the dried blood on his face and the one holding his ribs carefully.

They had been sent out to do something reasonable. Trade meat for food. A simple, errand. They had come back like this.

Because they were from Percvale.

If they had ridden out from Valdenmoor or any of the more established territories, the village warriors would have weighed the consequences before touching them.

The outcome would have been different. But Percvale meant nothing to those people, less than nothing, apparently, since the name had made them laugh before they started hitting.

This was what years of decline produced. It wasn’t only poverty, or some debt, or a barony that couldn’t feed itself.

It was the reputation all things gave out.

It produced a reputation that told everyone within a day’s ride that Percvale was a place you could take from without expecting anything back.

People didn’t attack it again though, since it was basically a desert, what was there to attack? Dying starving humans?

Darion picked up one of the unbroken cups from the floor and set it on the shelf, not because he cared about the cup but because he needed to do something with his hands that wasn’t breaking another piece of furniture.

"What village," he said.

The knight with the cut above his eye looked up. "They called it Gonnb, m’lord."

Darion looked at him.

"Gonnb?"

"Yes m’lord."

He turned the word over for a second. "What an ass name."

The knight didn’t disagree.

Gonnb. A primitive village on a trade road with enough warriors to strip three of his knights down to their undergarments and steal everything they came with, apparently operating on the understanding that doing this to people from Percvale was without consequence.

They weren’t wrong, historically. Every barony and kingdom and village in this region had spent years operating on exactly that understanding because Percvale had spent years confirming it.

Garren had stood up from where he was helping the knight on the floor and was looking at Darion with the expression he used when he was waiting to see which direction something was going to go before he added his own weight to it.

The anger was still there, it hadn’t gone anywhere, the table hadn’t actually resolved it, but it had settled from the hot immediate kind into something cooler and more useful.

He was thinking now rather than reacting, which was where he needed to be.

He looked at Garren.

"What do you think of this."