The next morning, Darion was not the first one up.
He discovered this when he walked to his window after waking and looked down at the courtyard. The knights were already there, every single one of them, or close to it, gathered outside the barracks in the early grey light before the sun had properly risen. Some were sharpening weapons, the sound of stone on steel carrying faintly up to where he stood. Others were in small groups talking, gesturing, working something out between themselves.
The energy was completely different from the hollow, seated exhaustion he had walked into yesterday.
He stood at the window for a moment, looking at them.
One dead Bogoart and a bowl of soup. That was all it had taken to change the atmosphere of an entire barracks overnight.
He came downstairs and found the chubby servant woman already moving through the great hall, straightening things that didn't particularly need straightening. She saw him on the stairs and stopped, bowing slightly.
"Prepare a bath for me," he said. "Hot."
She bowed again and disappeared.
He sat in the great hall and waited, doing nothing in particular, turning his ring over on his finger, looking at the ceiling, listening to the distant sound of the knights outside.
After a while the woman reappeared and told him it was ready.
Bathing in Percvale was not the elaborate affair it had been in the imperial palace. There was no dedicated bathing chamber in the keep, at least not one that was still functional. Instead, a large wooden tub had been set up in a small room off the main corridor on the ground floor, the kind of room that seemed to exist purely for storage, half-filled with old crates pushed against the wall to make space.
He decided he would have to build a bathing room later on.
The tub itself was solid enough, and the water was genuinely hot, which was more than he had expected given everything else about this castle.
He bathed quickly, dried off, and came out to find the other servant waiting in the corridor, the male one, whose name he now learned was Wulfric, a thin young man with a quiet, careful manner.
"Help me with the armor," Darion said.
Wulfric had clearly done this before. He moved through the process without needing direction: buckles in the right order, straps pulled to the right tension, the pauldrons seated properly on the shoulders.
Darion stood still and let him work. It went considerably faster than the first time, when Garren had been doing it and Darion had been trying to help and mostly getting in the way.
When it was done he rolled his shoulders, checked the sword at his hip, and walked outside.
The morning air was cold. Winter was genuinely close now, he could feel it in the way the cold sat differently, with more intention behind it than just a cool morning. His breath came out in faint clouds as he crossed the courtyard toward the barracks.
Garren was among the knights, moving through the assembled group with calmness.
He wasn't shouting or drilling them, just talking, quietly, stopping at different groups, saying something and moving on. Keeping them focused. Keeping the energy from tipping into restlessness.
He saw Darion approaching and straightened.
"M'lord. You're up and ready."
The knights nearest to Garren turned at that, and the awareness spread outward through the group until most of them had registered his arrival. A few nodded. Several said good morning in the overlapping, slightly uncoordinated way of a large group doing something simultaneously without planning to.
Darion looked across them.
One hundred and twenty-one knights. Yesterday they had been sitting on bare floors and leaning against walls with the energy of men who had given up deciding anything. This morning they were standing, armed, and looking at him like they were waiting to be told what to do and actually intended to do it.
Then something occurred to him.
Were all of them coming?
He turned it over quickly in his head. One hundred and twenty-one knights walking into a forest that had already demonstrated it could kill twenty-seven of them in a single outing.
That was a large group moving through dense terrain, noisy, difficult to coordinate and impossible to keep quiet. And the Bogoarts hunted by sound and smell. A group that size would announce itself from a considerable distance.
There was also the other problem.
His undead inventory was sitting at one, just the Decaying Tier skeleton he hadn't lost yesterday. He had been too exhausted after the hunt to go back to the graveyard and raise more. Which meant if things went badly today, he had considerably less of an edge than he'd had yesterday, and yesterday had cost him four out of five.
Should he tell them?
The thought had been sitting at the back of his mind since last night, quiet but persistent. His ability — the Necromancy, the undead, all of it, was the reason he had walked out of that forest yesterday with a dead Bogoart instead of being another name added to the list of people it had taken.
Without it, the hunt today would be a fundamentally different and considerably more dangerous proposition.
But Necromancy had a reputation. He knew that. In every story, every piece of folklore and every novel he had read in his previous life, Necromancers were the villains. Dark and sinister, associated with death and wrongness and things that went against the natural order. And that was in fiction written for entertainment.
In a world where this was real, where these knights had buried friends and brothers in those mass graves he had been digging through yesterday, telling them that their new Baron could reach into the ground and pull those friends back out as soldiers might not land the way he needed it to.
They might accept it. They were desperate enough that help might outweigh the discomfort.
Or they might not. And losing the fragile trust he had just barely started building over one Bogoart and a bowl of soup was not something he could afford right now.
He decided to leave it for now. Not forever though, they would find out eventually, and probably sooner rather than later. They might even find out with this hunt.
He wouldn't reveal it to them, he wanted them to find out themselves, seeing him in action.
But not now, at this particular moment, standing in a cold courtyard before the first group hunt, when he needed them focused and willing.
He looked at the assembled knights.
"Are you all ready?"
The response came back in unison, a single rough sound of affirmation from over a hundred men that was more felt than heard.
Darion nodded slowly, then looked toward the stable.
Which raised the next issue.
"We would have taken horses," he said, keeping his voice even, "If half of them hadn't been eaten."
A few of the knights had the decency to look somewhere other than directly at him. Hojj studied the ground with great interest.
"It won't happen again, m'lord," someone said from the back.
"It will not," Darion agreed, and left no room in his tone for it to be taken as anything other than final. "The horses that remain are not food. They are transport, and right now transport is worth considerably more to this barony than one night's meal. If I find out another horse has been slaughtered, the person responsible will be explaining it to me directly. Are we clear on that?"
A general sound of agreement moved through the group.
"Good."
He looked across them one more time, noting the weapons, the armor in varying states of functionality and the faces
"Before we depart," he said, "We need a plan."