Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

But then, what could stop that, or at least impose a long setback, was Valdenmoor.

Darion rode toward the castle, let the crowd noise settle behind him, and thought about Valdenmoor.

The farmland. That was the problem. Everything he was building: the livestock, the planting, the slow reconstruction of what the invasions had stripped out of Percvale decades ago, it all ran through that eastern land.

The goats needed ground, same with the cattles. Seren’s ability needed ground to work on too. There was no version of what he was trying to build without the farmland at its center, and Valdenmoor had thirty days from the letter’s date to take it if fourteen thousand gold coins didn’t appear.

He had counted the days. He was well inside that window.

Aldric the Second was making a genuinely poor decision. It was not exactly cruel, the man hadn’t struck him as cruel.

Aldric’s picture of Percvale was the accurate one for thirty years. A dying barony, revolving door of ineffective Barons and debt that nobody seriously intended to pay. That picture had been correct for a long time.

It was becoming less correct every day.

Give Percvale six months under current conditions — livestock reproducing, farmland coming back under Seren’s ability, the hunting operation providing food and trade surplus, coin from meat sales accumulating however slowly — and the barony would look fundamentally different from what Aldric’s scouts had reported and what his memory of the meeting had told him.

A barony that actually produced could pay debt. Not fourteen thousand in a lump, not that quickly, but instead steadily, in installments, the way debts were actually paid by territories that intended to pay them.

Aldric wanted certainty. He’d said so directly. The land was certain in a way a promise from Percvale wasn’t.

What he hadn’t accounted for was that taking the land would guarantee Percvale couldn’t pay. And a Percvale that couldn’t pay because its productive land had been seized was a Percvale with nothing left to lose, a different kind of problem from a Percvale that was slowly getting better and had every reason to honor its obligations.

Darion was fairly sure this was going to end in war. Not immediately though. There were moves to make before that, the infiltration being one of them, and he didn’t know yet what effect the venomous undead had produced in Valdenmoor’s barracks.

He had left before sunrise and come back to meet Gonnb, an immediate problem then. He hadn’t had a quiet moment to think about it since. Word would come eventually, through merchants or travelers.

But the trajectory was what it was. Aldric would push and percvale would resist. And at some point the distance between those two positions would close to nothing.

He needed to be ready before that happened.

He needed to do more infiltrations. The bats made it much easier and faster, giving wider coverage with less exposure.

He could continue being wise, hitting Valdenmoor’s military capacity at intervals that looked like illness rather than attack, degrading their readiness over weeks without ever triggering the kind of alarm a direct engagement would produce.

By the time Aldric’s barracks was operating at significantly reduced capacity, he would either accept a renegotiated arrangement or march on Percvale with a force that wasn’t what it had been two months earlier.

And if Aldric marched on Percvale with a weakened force against a barony that now had thirty undead knights, an undead wolf, nine venomous bats, four venomous undead knights, a Soilsinger, twenty-one goats, fourteen cattle, and a Baron who had recently burned a village to the ground and carried its leader’s head home on a spear —

Darion almost smiled.

Invade Valdenmoor. That was a thought he hadn’t been ready to have a week ago. He was barely ready to have it now. A dying barony with a Necromancer Baron and a handful of undead knights invading a kingdom with four thousand soldiers and functioning mines was a stretch by any honest measure.

But a Baron with Necromancy powers could only hope.

He let the thought go and focused on the gate.

The castle courtyard was busy for a few minutes. People were moving and animals were being redirected. It was just the organized chaos of a group arriving with more than it left with. Darion dismounted and started giving instructions before anyone asked.

”The goats and cattle go to the eastern farmland,” he said to the nearest senior knight. ”Tie them for now, the fencing is too broken to trust. Assign seven knights to watch them. I want eyes on those animals through the day and night until the fencing is repaired.”

The knight nodded and moved off.

He looked at the food stores being unloaded and caught Garren’s eye. ”Storage first. Whatever we have that serves as a proper store, I want it in there before noon.”

Garren nodded. ”I’ll oversee it.”

Aldra, the quieter of the two women who kept the castle running, he remembered now, appeared at the castle doorway. She had saw the return and come to see what was needed. Darion looked at her, then at Seren, who had dismounted and was standing in the courtyard with her leather pack and her bundle of tools, taking in the castle with careful neutrality.

”Take her to one of the rooms,” Darion said to Aldra. ”Get it as presentable as you can.”

Aldra bowed and moved toward Seren.

Darion turned to Seren. ”Don’t judge the room too harshly. I haven’t had the chance to fix most of them yet. I apologize in advance.”

Seren looked at him for a moment. ”Eh... i’ve been sleeping in a wooden box for four months,” she said. ”I’ll manage.”

She followed Aldra inside.

Darion turned to the knight still holding the spear, the one he had handed off after cutting the Gonnb leader’s head from his shoulders and mounting it the same way his own messenger had been returned to him.

”Take that to some smith or whoever handles that kind of work,” he said. ”I want the head preserved, treated so it doesn’t decay. Cleaned out properly and dried.” He paused. ”I’m going to hang it on my wall.”

The knight looked at the head, then at Darion. Then he bowed and walked toward the smith’s area.

Garren reappeared at his elbow.

”Food stores are being handled,” he said. ”Your instructions stand.”

”Good. Tell the cook I want something proper tonight. Real food, not just meat. She should use the stores from Gonnb and whatever we have.”

Garren nodded slightly. ”I’ll tell her.”

”Tell her to make enough for everyone in the castle.”

Garren bowed his head and went to find the cook.