Chapter 78: Deadline
Darion stood with the knight’s words sitting in the air between them.
Valdenmoor.
Valdenmoor!
He couldn’t exactly believe it.
He had been tracking the deadline loosely, not with a precise daily count because there had been too many other things to track, but he knew it was close. Close enough that a messenger arriving now made immediate sense.
He had hoped the infiltration would have changed something by this point. Some sign from Valdenmoor that the internal situation had shifted enough to delay any external pressure. Men dying in the barracks without explanation, healers called in with no answers: that kind of crisis had a way of reorganizing priorities.
A kind of crisis that was to make a kingdom stop thinking about a debtor’s farmland when their own soldiers were collapsing.
Apparently not.
Or the illness had been noticed and since it stopped, life had moved on and Aldric had shoved it under bad luck and kept his eye on the thirty-day clock regardless.
"Let him in," Darion said.
Seren stayed where she was, a few feet behind him, watching without comment.
The messenger came through the gate a minute later, a formal one, properly dressed, the kind Valdenmoor sent when they wanted to communicate that they took themselves seriously.
He bowed, produced the letter from his jacket, held it out, bowed again, and left at a pace that said his instructions were deliver and depart, not wait for a response.
Darion broke the seal and read.
To Baron Darion of Percvale,
I write as a courtesy, as agreed, to remind you that the period of thirty days granted for settlement of Percvale’s outstanding debt of fourteen thousand gold coins draws to a close. As of the delivery of this letter, fifteen days remain before the agreed deadline.
I trust you have used the time available to you to arrange affairs accordingly. Should full payment not be received within the remaining period, the matter of the eastern farmland transfer will proceed as outlined in my previous correspondence, and documentation to that effect will be dispatched.
I remain willing to receive payment at any point within the stated window. Beyond that window, I am afraid the arrangement stands as described.
— Aldric, King of Valdenmoor
Fifteen days.
Darion folded the letter and looked at the courtyard wall for a moment.
Fifteen days, no payment, no realistic path to fourteen thousand gold coins in that time and the farmland that Seren had been restoring section by section every morning was the specific piece of land Aldric intended to take.
If they claimed it in the state it was before Seren started working on it, barren and dead, the pain of losing it would be lesser, still enough to deeply trouble him but better than it being restored and with lots of crops on it.
He scratched the back of his head.
The infiltration hadn’t done what he needed it to do. Or it had done something and Valdenmoor had absorbed it, treated the deaths as an illness, grieved what it lost, moved on, and kept its attention on the outstanding debt regardless.
Which was, honestly, what a human being running a functional kingdom would do. Aldric wasn’t going to let internal difficulties distract him from a straightforward creditor claim.
The two things existed in separate categories for him.
The problem with the first infiltration was that it had been a single event. One night, four venomous undead, one pass through the barracks. Significant, probably, he didn’t know the actual numbers, had no way of knowing from here, but a single event created a crisis that passed. You recovered from a crisis. You couldn’t recover from something that kept happening.
He thought about the bats.
That was the difference between the first infiltration and what came next. The undead knights moving through a barracks in the dark were effective but slow: four of them, one building, constrained by the need for careful positioning and the risk of being seen.
The bats covered ground that the knights couldn’t reach, moved at a speed that made interception nearly impossible, and were virtually invisible in the dark. A bat moving through an enclosed space at night was something people swatted at and forgot about.
Nine nights of bats.
Not a single event. A sustained, progressive degradation — men falling ill one night, more the next, the pattern continuing without resolution, healers cycling through with no answers, the barracks population declining steadily while the cause remained invisible.
That was a different kind of problem from a bad week. That was something that ate into operational capacity in a way that didn’t recover between sessions.
And if he was doing it nightly with the bats, he could run the venomous undead knights through on alternate nights targeting the officers specifically — captains, senior commanders, the people whose absence broke the chain of command rather than just reducing headcount.
Because it was easier to direct something with human instinct than a bat.
Aldric might still send his representative for the farmland transfer in fifteen days. But if fifteen days from now Valdenmoor’s barracks was operating at significantly reduced capacity with no explanation and no solution in sight, the calculus of marching on Percvale to enforce a land transfer became more complicated than it had been.
Garren came through the castle door and crossed the courtyard toward him, eyes on the letter in his hand.
Darion held it out.
Garren took it, read it and handed it back. His expression didn’t change in any dramatic way. It just confirmed what he had already anticipated.
Darion turned to Seren.
"Another day of running a barony," he said. "They come with headaches."
She looked at the letter in his hand, then at him. She didn’t ask what it said. She had observed enough of the situation to construct a reasonable guess.
He turned to Garren.
"High time I did another infiltration."
Garren looked at him steadily. "Tonight?"
"No, I will leave tomorrow morning and arrive there at night."