"Evil sorcerers," a knight near the back said.
A few others picked it up from there.
"They raise the dead and use them against the living."
"In the old stories, every Necromancer ends up turning on the people around them. It's just what they do."
"My father used to say that a Necromancer's loyalty is to death, not to people. That they see living men the same way a farmer sees seeds, something to plant and harvest later."
"There was one, years back. Raised an army of the dead and marched it through three villages before anyone stopped him. Killed everything in his path."
More voices added more versions of the same picture — Necromancers as figures who existed at the edge of the world where normal rules stopped applying, who treated the living as future material, who built power on the back of other people's deaths and called it strength.
The reputation was consistent and it was old and none of the men describing it sounded like they were exaggerating for effect.
Darion listened to all of it without interrupting.
When it quieted down, he looked at Garren.
"And you?"
Garren was quiet for a moment. He had the manner of someone choosing words carefully rather than someone who didn't have words.
"My opinion isn't so different from theirs," he said finally. "I've lived long enough to know that most things people say about Necromancers come from somewhere real. The ones in the histories weren't misunderstood men. They were dangerous, and they were dangerous on purpose." He paused. "I won't pretend I wasn't unsettled by what I saw in that clearing today."
Darion nodded slowly.
"Right," he said. "So. What do you all think of me being one?"
The courtyard went quiet. The knights looked at each other, at the ground, at the Bogoart carcasses laid out behind Darion, anywhere that wasn't directly at him. Nobody wanted to be the one to say it to his face.
Darion let the silence sit for a few seconds, then spoke.
"I'll make it easier. I'm going to tell you what I think, and you can decide what you believe after."
He looked across the group.
"Not every Necromancer is evil. I know that's not what the stories say, and I know that's not what your fathers told you, and I'm not going to stand here and tell you that every Necromancer in the histories was actually a good man who got misunderstood. Some of them probably were exactly as bad as described." He paused. "But I'm not them. And I can prove it, not with words but with what I've already done."
He let that land.
"Yesterday evening I rode into those woods alone. No knights, one horse with five skeleton undead that I'd dug out of Percvale's graveyard the same afternoon. I did that because this barony was starving and somebody needed to find out whether hunting was possible. I could have sat in the castle and waited. I didn't." He looked at the faces in front of him. "If my interest was in getting people killed so I could revive their corpses, that was a strange way to go about it."
A few heads shifted. Not agreement exactly, but something…
"Today I took every knight in this barony into a forest that has been killing your brothers for years. Six of you died, and I'm not going to pretend that doesn't matter or that the plan was perfect, it wasn't. But one hundred and fifteen of you are standing in this courtyard right now instead of being carried back through that gate, and we have enough meat to feed every person in Percvale for days." He gestured at the carcasses behind him. "That's what happened today."
He let his voice come up slightly.
"They sent me here to die. The Emperor, his court, my dear half-siblings, all of them. This posting was a punishment. I was told I wouldn't last a day." He looked at some knights right in the eyes, who had the grace to look at the ground. "This is my second day. Look at where we are."
Nobody said anything.
"Now think about this. What ability, given the situation I walked into, would actually be useful here? A weapon summoning class? A mythical beast class: one creature, one battle?
This barony has hundreds of dead knights in its graves. Thousands of people who served Percvale and died for it over decades of invasions and wars and abandonment.
They're already gone. Their families have already mourned them. Their names are already on whatever markers are left in that graveyard." He paused. "I can bring them back. Not as the men they were, I won't insult you by pretending otherwise. But as soldiers, bound to this barony, fighting for Percvale. Every one of them."
He could see it working through the group. The resistance was still there but it had shifted, from instinctive rejection toward something more like thoughtfulness.
"And when you die in battle, because that is a real possibility, we're not pretending otherwise, your body doesn't just lie in the dirt and become a number. It becomes a resource. You continue. Percvale continues." He looked at Garren directly. "I'm not going to kill you for your corpses. I don't need to. This barony has been filling graveyards for years, decades even. I have more raw material than I could raise in a lifetime at my current rank."
Garren held his gaze steadily. His expression had changed. The idea that Darion being a Necromancer was a bad thing, it was slowly going away. He had spent decades making pragmatic decisions and recognized pragmatical reasoning when he heard it.
"I'm the bastard son of Emperor Valdris, ruler of the continent of Valvanos," Darion said, his voice clear and carrying. "Cast out, sent here, written off. They gave me a death sentence and called it a barony." He looked across every face in the courtyard. "The corpses of the dead are my witness. I am the voice from beyond the grave."
He let a beat pass.
"I will lead you to paradise."
The courtyard was completely still.
Then Hojj, who had survived the forest and lost an iron coin and watched his Baron revive dead wolves and snake-bitten knights without flinching, straightened up and said:
"Hell yeah! That's what I'm talking about, I'm in!"