Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

The next morning.

Darion woke up.

He lay on the tilted bed for a moment, then sat up and called for the servant.

The chubby woman, whose name he learned this morning was Maret, appeared at the door quickly enough that he suspected she had been nearby already. He asked for a bath, hot, and she went to arrange it without comment.

He bathed quickly, dressed, ate a bowl of deer meats served by the cook, and came downstairs to find Garren already moving through the great hall.

They fell into step together, moving out into the castle compound, the morning cold enough that their breath was visible between words.

”How’s the meat sales,” Darion said.

”Underway,” Garren said. ”I put three knights I’d trust with my own coin on it, which in Percvale isn’t saying much but it’s saying something. They’re in the market now.” He paused.

”The average citizen here can afford the price we’ve set. Barely, in some cases, but they can manage it. Word was already moving through the streets before sunrise.”

Darion nodded. He had considered simply giving it away, there was a version of that which felt right, the new Baron arriving and feeding his people without asking for anything back.

It was heroic actually and would have made the people of Percvale see him as some Messiah, a blessing upon them.

But then, the problem with free meat was that free meat disappeared immediately.

People took more than they needed because there was no reason not to. The poor got crowded out by the less poor. And when it was gone it was gone, leaving nothing, not even the coins that could be used to start building toward the next thing.

Selling it cheaply kept it moving at a pace that was sustainable, got coin into the castle’s empty coffers however modestly, and meant more people actually got fed rather than fewer people getting fed a great deal.

”Good,” he said.

”Can you take me to Percvale farmlands,” Darion asked after some time.

Garren nodded. ”Yes m’lord.”

Darion decided that he had to start taking steps that would guarantee making Percvale a normal place again. Getting it how it was before and this was just a little step in the process.

Inspecting the farmlands...

They were walking toward the stable now. The compound was quiet at this hour, the morning light still flat and grey, winter asserting itself more clearly than it had even two days ago.

”Eighteen horses remaining,” Garren said, as they came through the stable door.

Darion counted. Eighteen horses, where there had been twenty when he first arrived.

The two they had taken into the forest yesterday had made their own decision when the Bogoarts arrived and had not been part of the return journey. He had known they were gone but the actual number sitting in front of him made it concrete.

He was certain the horses would no longer be alive, they surely had been eaten by some wild animal already.

They picked a horse each and mounted up. Garren took the lead without being asked, which was the correct call given that Darion still didn’t know where anything in Percvale was, even the farmlands they were currently riding too.

He did know one place though and that was the Grave yard.

The streets were more alive than they had been on his first morning.

People were out, more of them, moving with smore energy than when he had passed here yesterday.

Several recognised him and called out. A woman near a doorway pressed her hands together and bowed her head as he passed, which he wasn’t sure what to do with so he nodded back and kept moving.

Garren glanced sideways at the exchange.

”I think you should be riding with a knight escort,” he said. ”At least two, ideally four. A Baron moving through his own streets without protection is—”

Darion laughed. It came out before he could make it more polite.

”Sir Garren. I have undead knights I can call in seconds. If something happens to me between the castle gate and wherever we’re going, the problem will resolve itself before an escort could unsheathe a sword.”

Garren considered that and smiled, shrugging.

”I forgot you are a Necromancer.”

Darion chuckled.

Crazy how him being a Necromancer was now taken this casually.

They rode on through the streets and out toward the eastern edge of the barony, where the buildings thinned and the ground opened up.

The farmland arrived gradually, or rather, what had been the farmland arrived gradually, because what was there now was something that required a moment to see and process properly.

It was large, seemingly the only good thing about it.

The scale of it told you what it had once been: you didn’t clear and level ground this size for anything small.

The fields stretched out in a wide expanse, bounded on the far side by a low stone wall that had partially collapsed in sections and never been repaired.

The soil was pale and dry, cracked in places, the surface thin and almost powdery where it should have been dark and dense. Here and there the remnants of old furrow lines were still faintly visible, the ghost of a pattern that hadn’t been used in years.

At the near edge, stood two structures that had been farm buildings.

One was still standing, more or less, the walls intact but the roof partially gone, open to the sky on one side.

The other had come down entirely, the timber rotted through at the base and the whole thing collapsed inward on itself, a pile of grey wood slowly becoming part of the ground it had fallen onto.

No livestock. No crops. Nothing growing anywhere that hadn’t grown there on its own.

Darion sat on his horse and looked at it.

”This was a working farmland,” Garren said, from beside him. ”Before the Varrels. Crops on this side, livestock on the far fields past that wall. It fed the barony and had surplus to trade.”

Darion said nothing for a moment.

”How long would it take to get it producing again,” he said. ”Realistically.”

Garren exhaled. ”The soil needs work before anything else. Whatever they did to it, whether it was the burning or just years of nothing growing in it, it’s not in a state to support crops without preparation. It needs seeds, tools and people who know what they’re doing.” He paused. ”Months before the first harvest. If everything goes correctly.”

Darion looked at the collapsed building, then at the pale dry earth, then at the far wall and the fields beyond it.

What was he going to do to change this.

How was he going to start...