Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

”If we’re going to make the lands ready for planting,” Darion said, still looking at the skull on the wall, ”Do we actually have seeds to plant on them?”

Garren thought for a moment. ”Not in any organized store, no. But most of the villagers keep small plots behind their homes, they’ve been doing it for years, growing what they can in poor soil just to supplement whatever food they can get. They’ll have seeds. Probably more variety than you’d expect.”

”So we ask them to donate.”

”We ask,” Garren said. ”I think most would agree. The way they received you this morning—”

”They’d still want to know what they’re getting out of it,” Darion said.

Garren acknowledged that with a slight tilt of his head. He wasn’t wrong, and Darion knew it. The cheering on the road was genuine, these were people who had watched their barony decline for decades and were looking at the first signs of something different.

But enthusiasm and material calculation were two separate things, and people who had been hungry for a long time were understandably precise about where their resources went and what came back.

They would donate seeds if they understood the return. Some of them might donate regardless, out of the genuine goodwill he had seen that morning. But the ones who asked questions deserved answers that made sense.

The first harvest was the obvious answer, a portion of whatever the farmland produced in its first productive season would go back to the people who had contributed to making it happen.

Not everything, not indefinitely, but enough to make the connection between their contribution and their benefit legible. You gave seeds, the land produced, you received a share of what grew from what you gave.

That was a simple enough exchange that it didn’t require persuasion, just explanation.

After the first harvest it would be different. The land would be established, the crops ongoing and the system running.

At that point the relationship would shift from communal contribution to something more structured: people buying from what the farmland produced, paying with coin, the same way any functioning market worked.

That wasn’t exploitation. That was a barony with an economy instead of a barony without one.

But the thing that would actually change people’s lives, the thing that made the farmland’s restoration mean something beyond just producing food, was work.

Darion looked at the window, at the pale morning light coming through it, and thought about the numbers.

Farmland that size, worked properly, required people. Not just during planting and harvest but throughout the year. People for soil maintenance, irrigation if they could build it, pest management and the hundred small ongoing tasks that productive land generated continuously.

A full operation would employ dozens of workers at minimum, more as the scale expanded. And the expansion would come, if Seren could actually restore the land’s productivity, and if the livestock multiplied as livestock did when properly maintained, the operation would grow faster than a single season’s worth of planning could account for.

Beyond the farmland itself, more workers in the castle as the castle’s situation improved. More trade, which meant more need for Gregor’s smithwork and whatever other skilled trades were currently sitting underemployed in a barony where nobody had enough money to hire them.

The knight order would grow as the barony’s population recovered and young men from Percvale had somewhere viable to build a life.

People who had left when things got bad would start returning when word spread that things were getting better, which would bring more skills and more labor and more people paying into whatever small economy Percvale managed to build.

It was the logic of recovery. Each piece enabled the next one, and the whole thing started with seeds and soil.

He had good plans for this barony. The gap between having good plans and executing them was what kept him from feeling too satisfied about any of it, execution required time, and time was the thing Valdenmoor was currently threatening to take away in the form of a thirty-day deadline on the eastern farmland.

But he would deal with that.

He had been dealing with things since he arrived and he would keep dealing with them.

He and Garren had gone quiet, both of them looking at the skull on the wall, both of them not quite in the room anymore.

Darion had been thinking about seeds and jobs and the arithmetic of recovery and he suspected Garren had been somewhere in his own version of a similar calculation, though Garren’s calculations tended to be more tactical and less visionary in their nature.

The silence was comfortable enough that neither of them had felt the need to end it.

Darion ended it now.

”Go get Seren,” he said. ”Tell her it’s time.”

Garren stood without comment, pushed his chair back, and went toward the stairs.

Darion remained at the table for a moment longer, looking at the skull on the wall.

Then he stood, picked up his sword from where he had set it against the table leg, buckled it on, and walked toward the door.

He waited for Seren outside, doing nothing but looking at compound. He noticed that Wulfric had been a doing a really good job this past days, the place wasn’t as bushy as he first met it weeks ago when he first came to Percvale.

Then the castle had looked like one of those you saw in horror movies, those abandoned buildings with ghosts. The tall grasses around the castle then had added to that abandoned look.

But since that first hunt till now, Wulfric was doing his work diligently and happily.

Perhaps the reason he hadn’t been doing it so well before was because there was no food, he surely had been starving and didn’t have the strength to engage in the hard work of cutting grass.

Darion had changed it. Made the man more active.

Still looking he heard footsteps and when he turned he saw Garren and Seren walking out of the castle’s door.