novelraw Chapter 104: A Way Out
Chapter 104: A Way Out
The evening meal was quieter than usual.
Darion sat at the table and ate without tasting much of it.
Garren sat across from him doing the same thing, occasionally looking at his food and occasionally looking at the wall, the way Garren looked at things when his mind was somewhere else and his eyes needed somewhere to rest.
Seren looked at both of them.
She looked at Darion first. He was present in body but somewhere else entirely in his head, the fork moving to his mouth at intervals. Carrying this patience of someone performing eating rather than actually doing it.
Then she looked at Garren, who was at least consistent. Garren was always somewhat contained, but even by his standards there was a flatness to him tonight that was different from his usual quiet.
"We are all gloomy today, eh?" she said.
Darion looked up from his food, then back down at it.
"We’re about to lose the farmlands," he said. "And by soon I mean faster than I can blink."
Seren set her fork down.
He told her. Not like... too.... everything, not the full history of Percvale’s decades of decline, but the shape of it.
The debt he had inherited when he became Baron, the fifty thousand gold coins owed to various territories across the region.
One of those debts was fourteen thousand gold to Valdenmoor. Aldric had sent a thirty-day letter demanding payment or the eastern farmland as compensation. The thirty days had ended today. He had refused to sign the transfer papers.
"You were actually there when one of the letters arrived," he said. "The day we came back from the walk. The knight interrupted us."
She remembered. He could see it on her face.
"So now they’ll march," she said.
"Probably within the week." He pushed a piece of food around his plate. "They have over three thousand knights. We have a hundred and some, plus twenty new recruits who have been training for less than a week." He paused. "There is no version of that fight where we win."
He almost added something about dimensions and parallel universes and the fundamental impossibility of the size. A hundred knights against thousands. But kept it in his head.
In any dimension or multiverse or hypothetical configuration of the laws of physics, he thought, a hundred against three thousand ends the same way.
Seren was quiet, chewing.
Garren hadn’t said anything. He was doing the same thing he’d been doing all evening, which was existing in the room while being mentally elsewhere.
"What about asking for help?" Seren said. "Surrounding territories. Tribes, baronies, anyone within reasonable distance. Promise them something in return."
Garren came back from wherever he had been. "We considered it." He set his fork down. "The problem is what we have to offer and how anyone in this region sees Percvale."
He looked at Darion, and Darion found himself thinking about the Emperor’s court.
He had stood there, in so much shame when Percvale was announced as his posting. He had seen the faces. Not cruel faces, mostly, just the expression of the nobles hearing a name that meant something specific and unambiguous to them.
Percvale. The dying barony. The place you sent people who had stopped mattering. The court hadn’t reacted with horror or pity. They had with:
’Yeah, he’s definitely a dead man at this point.’
The most broke place on the continent of Valvanos. That was the reputation. It wasn’t the worst governed or the most troubled, not even the most dangerous. It was just the most thoroughly, comprehensively, historically failed. The kind of failure that had become its defining characteristic.
In the prison cart that took him to Percvale, driven by Nigel and Ralf. He had heard them discuss how they were sending him to death land, a place that would be his death and how they pitied them.
This solidified that the name ’Percvale’ wasn’t one someone would hear and expect something good from it.
And him surviving this long and even hoping to survive further, was because of his Necromancer ability.
It had helped with the first hunt, it had helped with many hunts, it had helped in attacking Gonnb and getting a soil singer.
It was the reason he was alive this long.
But... from the looks of things now, he wasn’t sure it would be helping with Valdenmoor. It had surely helped initially, with the infiltration but then, maybe Percvale was just a ’Death land’ that he was destined to die anyway.
"Any territory we approach,"Garren continued, "Will know what Percvale is. What it’s been for years. We tell them we’ll pay them for their men and they’ll look at us and do the calculations. A barony that couldn’t pay a debt for three decades promising payment for military service." He shook his head slightly. "They’ll see us as desperate and trying to make our problem into someone else’s problem."
"Which we are," Darion said.
"Which we are," Garren agreed. "That’s the difficulty."
They were right. Imagine they went to a neighboring Barony to ask for help. Just the name: ’Percvale’ would be enough to let them be rejected immediately.
Like what had happened with his knights when he had sent them to sell the meats. When Gonbb warriors heard they were from Percvale, they did not hesitate to attack.
The table was quiet for a moment. The fire in the fireplace made its sounds. Outside, somewhere in the barracks, a distant voice said something and was answered.
Seren had been looking at her plate while Garren spoke. Now she looked up.
"I think I can help," she said.
Darion looked up from his food.
Garren looked up from his.
They looked at each other briefly, the same question on both their faces.
"How?" Darion said.
Seren picked up her fork again and looked at it for a moment, as though she was still deciding something, and then set it back down.
"It would have to involve my mother," she said.