Wulfric opened the door.

Darion had seen Wulfric’s face in many states over his time as Baron. Tired, focused, occasionally surprised and usually just neutral.

But the look on his face now was different. The man’s face carried something he hadn’t put there on purpose and couldn’t quite hide. Sadness, maybe. Worry underneath it.

"Evening, m’lord," he said. "Welcome back."

"Where’s Garren?" Darion said.

"Upstairs. In his room."

Darion went up. Seren and Vera stayed where they were in the entrance hall, not speaking. He didn’t ask them to follow.

Garren was in his bed, which was already unusual. Garren was not a man who lay in bed unless he had no remaining option.

He was propped up against the wall with a blanket over him and his left arm bound against his chest with cloth that someone had wrapped too loosely and that Darion could see would need to be redone.

His face had that particular grey color that pain produced over a long period.

He looked at Darion when he came in.

"Welcome back, m’lord," he said. "I would stand but—"

"Don’t," Darion said. He pulled the chair from the corner and sat. "Tell me what happened."

Garren told him.

He went through it in order. Started with the smoke visible from the wall, the Valdenmoor knights arriving...The archers going up, the kills they made before the lines met. The push forward that couldn’t be stopped.

He described the farmland and the livestock without embellishment, just the facts of what the Valdenmoor knights had done.

Darion sat and listened and didn’t say anything.

"How many did we lose?" he asked when Garren stopped.

"Fifty-two."

Fifty-two?!

Damn!

More than half the fighting force he had built since arriving. Men who had been starving two months ago, who had gone into the forest and come back with Bogoarts, who had followed him to Gonnb and fought in the dark and come home with livestock.

Men who had believed he was the ’Man’. The Baron to change their situation.

He thought about whether he should have just signed the papers.

He didn’t let himself stay in that thought for long because it was the kind of thought that once you started following, you didn’t come back from easily.

The answer was probably yes, in the narrow short-term sense that fifty-two people would still be alive. And no, in the longer sense that signing meant handing over the farmland, which meant handing over everything he had been building, which meant Percvale went back to exactly what it had been before he arrived, which was something dying slowly with no one doing anything about it.

He had known there would be a cost. He had not known exactly what the cost would look like. It looked like this.

"The archers," he said. "They’re okay?"

"All ten survived," Garren said. "Took thirteen of Valdenmoor’s before the fighting moved to close range. They did everything right."

Seren’s training worked it seemed. The archery program wasn’t for waste. Ten people who three weeks ago had been regular citizens of a barony that barely fed them, and they had taken thirteen of Valdenmoor’s knights because someone had spent weeks teaching them where to aim.

He looked at Garren properly. The bound arm, the grey face, the way every breath was slightly too controlled, the kind of breathing you did when breathing without thinking about it hurt too much.

"You almost died," Darion said.

Garren shrugged, which clearly cost him. "More innocent lives than mine were lost today."

Darion looked at the cloth binding his arm. "That needs to be redone. And your ribs need looking at." He stood. "Vera is downstairs. I don’t know what she can do for injuries but she’s a sorceress and I’m going to ask her."

Garren looked at him. "Who?"

"Seren’s mother. Don’t move, I’ll be back..."

"I wasn’t planning to," Garren said.

Vera and Seren were in the great hall when he came downstairs. Vera had found a chair at the table and was sitting with her box in front of her, not opened, just present. Seren was standing near the fireplace looking at the floor.

"Attacked?" Vera said when she saw his face. It was not a question.

"Yes," Darion said. "Houses burned. Half our fighters dead. All the livestock killed." He sat down across from her. "The farmland was destroyed too. From what Garren described."

Seren looked up.

"The farmland," she said.

"Yes."

She was quiet for a moment. "All of it?"

"From what Garren said. The restored sections and the planted rows."

She looked back at the floor, angry about what she had just heard.

Darion looked at Vera. "The man upstairs who runs this barony when I’m away, the commander of my forces, he’s badly injured. Ribs, arm and head. Can you do anything for that?"

Vera looked at him steadily. "Healing isn’t what I do."

"Do you know anyone or anything that would help?"

"There are compounds in the box that reduce inflammation and slow internal bleeding. Not healing but management. He won’t be fighting for weeks regardless." She stood. "Show me."

Aldra appeared from the corridor and Darion told her to take Vera upstairs to Garren’s room. He watched them go and then sat back down across from Seren.

She wasn’t looking at the floor anymore. She was looking at him.

"We go see it in the morning," she said.

"Yes," he said.

Neither of them said anything else.

Morning came grey and cold.

The three of them walked out to the farmland together.

Darion, Seren, and Vera, who had tried her best with dealing with Garren’s injuries.

She had done what she could, apparently. It would have to be enough.

Percvale looked worse in daylight than it had in the dark. In the dark the burned buildings were just dark shapes. In the morning light they were specific: this was someone’s house, that was the market stall where the hard bread had been sold, this foundation belonged to a building that had been there since before anyone currently living in Percvale could remember.

The stone was still there. The rest was gone.

They reached the farmland.

The animals were still where they had fallen. The goats Darion had brought back from Gonnb, the cattle, the breeding stock. They lay at angles that looked awkward in a way. Some of the females had been visibly pregnant. He looked at them and then looked away. The sight was just sad to look at.

Seren walked out onto the restored section of the farmland. The section she had spent weeks on, coming out every morning with her pack and her tools, working through the soil section by section, the dusts rising and settling and the earth coming back to something that could sustain life.

It had been trampled into something that looked like what it had looked like before she arrived.

She stood in the middle of it and looked at the ground.

"All my work," she said. "For nothing."

She said it quietly, not to anyone in particular.

Darion stood at the edge and looked at what was left, saying nothing.

He had nothing to say that would help.