Aldric was in a good mood.
He sat at the head of the council table with his advisors and Bravar beside him, and the mood in the room was lighter than it had been in weeks. The barracks situation: the deaths, the invisible illness, the nights of full wakefulness had been difficult.
He wouldn't pretend otherwise. Nearly five hundred knights lost to something they still didn't fully understand was not a trivial matter.
They found a figure but that figure had not retuned since. He was still on the watch though, and he hoped he found the person soon.
But the Percvale operation had gone exactly as planned. Houses had been burnt, the farmland destroyed and the livestock killed. A message delivered clearly and without ambiguity.
The surviving knights of Percvale had watched and done nothing, because there was nothing they could do.
"Three more days," Aldric said. "Then I send another two hundred with a final letter. Sign the transfer or we come back and finish it."
