novelraw Chapter 98: Dead Ends
Chapter 98: Dead Ends
Killing Aldric...
It sounded decisive when he said it out loud. A good solution, remove the man making the demand and the demand dies with him. But he knew it wasn’t that simple and he had known it wasn’t that simple even as the words were leaving his mouth.
Valdenmoor had advisors. A council filled with men who had been managing the territory’s affairs alongside Aldric for years and would continue managing them if Aldric disappeared overnight.
The debt existed in ledgers, not just in one man’s memory. It had documentation, correspondence and agreements that predated Darion’s arrival in Percvale and would outlast Aldric’s death regardless of how that death came about.
Killing the king didn’t erase the debt. It just changed who was collecting it.
And the new person collecting it might be angrier about it than Aldric had been.
Aldric had been patient, by his own account, patient for years before sending the first letter.
But why did he have to send the letter when Darion just took charge of Percvale! All those years before he came into power, with Barons that only drowned the Barony in more debts, Aldric could have came for the coins.
Then when there was no hope for Percvale.
And now, when he finally about to change the situation of the Barony, Aldric had requested for his coins and giving an ultimatum that unless the coins are paid within the given timeframe, they would be losing the farmlands.
And what if he managed to kill Aldric?
Whoever stepped into the vacuum after his death might not start from that same position. Might look at the situation and decide to attack Percvale, taking control of the farmlands by force and potentially wiping the entire power force of Percvale. Or becoming the new ruler of Percvale.
So it might make things worse.
But... he had just six days left.
He had been keeping a loose count and now he ran it precisely and arrived at six.
Six days until the deadline Aldric had set expired and the farmland transfer process began. Six days in which he needed to either produce fourteen thousand gold coins he did not have, negotiate an extension with a man who had already refused one extension, or find some other way to change the situation.
The farmland was not negotiable. He had been clear about that in his own mind since the beginning and nothing had changed it.
The livestock were on that land. Seren’s restoration work was on that land. The seeds were in the ground on that land, already showing green in the sections she had completed.
Handing it over was not losing a piece of terrain, it was cutting out the foundation of everything he was trying to build and handing it to the kingdom who had helped strip Percvale bare in the first place.
He couldn’t do it.
Which meant he needed something to happen in six days that changed Aldric’s position. Not necessarily killing him. Just something that made the farmland deadline irrelevant, either because Valdenmoor was too occupied with something else to enforce it, or because the political situation had shifted enough that the transfer became complicated to execute.
Killing Aldric might do that. The chaos of a king dying suddenly, the questions about succession or regency, the internal focus required to manage a transition, that could buy months. Time for Percvale to establish itself enough that renegotiating the debt from a position of some strength became possible.
Or it might not. It might accelerate everything or cause Valdenmoor to act faster rather than slower, the council deciding that showing strength immediately was the right response.
He didn’t know.
And beyond all of that, going back to Valdenmoor now, after being caught and chased out of their treeline, was either very smart or very stupid.
If their security posture had shifted entirely to the barracks and the treeline, Aldric’s personal quarters might actually be less heavily guarded than usual, the attention having moved outward.
Or they might have tightened everything across the whole territory in response, doubled guards everywhere, lit every approach to every building.
He had no way of knowing without going back.
His mind had been running through all of this since he sat down and it was getting him nowhere.
The thoughts were chasing each other in circles, each option producing a new problem, each problem producing a new option. He needed sleep. He needed to approach this when his head was not still full of the adrenaline of knights storming over a fence at him.
He rubbed his face with both hands.
"My mind is all over the place right now," he said, and stood up. "I’ll come up with something tomorrow."
Garren nodded, covering a yawn with the back of his hand. "Whatever you decide, m’lord, I’ll be here."
Darion looked at him for a moment. The tired face, the heavy eyes, the man who had been pulled out of sleep in the middle of the night and had sat up without complaint and listened and thought and asked the right questions without once suggesting that any of it was unreasonable.
He couldn’t remember anyone he knew doing this back in his previous life. If anything, if he woke someone by this time of the night and start discussing, he was certain they wouldn’t respond the way Garren had done.
"Go sleep," Darion said. "We’ve both earned it."
Garren stood and moved to the fireplace, damping the fire down carefully until the light in the room dropped to almost nothing. The warmth would hold for a while yet.
Darion went to the stairs, his mind still filled with vague thoughts.
He would think about them in the morning. He would rebuild the inventory, that was the first thing, graveyard in the morning, fill the slots back up. Then think. Then decide.
Who knows, he might not eventually kill Aldric. He might find a better way to go about this.
He reached his room, locked the door, and sat on the edge of the bed for a moment in the dark before lying back.
The ceiling was the same as always. Cracked plaster, the faint mark where water had come through the roof at some point before he arrived.
He closed his eyes.