The stable had never looked like this before.

Darion stood just outside the entrance beside Garren and looked slowly across the rows of horses occupying nearly every available space within Percvale’s stable grounds.

The difference was absurd.

Just weeks ago they had been down to eighteen after the forest losses. It had looked half-dead, same as the rest of Percvale. Thin horses with visible ribs standing in cramped sections with barely enough feed to maintain themselves. Animals that had looked exhausted even while standing still.

Now? Now the stable was pretty full.

Healthy horses occupied nearly every stall, their coats clean and well-kept from Valdenmoor’s maintenance before the attack. Some stamped their hooves impatiently against the ground. Others lowered their heads into feed buckets, eating heavily.

Darion realized that this would be too much work for Wulfric and that he would have to employ more servants to assist in the handling of things in the castle.

"Over sixty horses now," Garren noted quietly beside him.

Darion nodded slowly.

He remembered arriving in Percvale and hearing how desperate the situation had become.

They had hundreds of horses before but the starvation had gotten bad enough that people had started slaughtering the stable animals because there had simply been nothing else left to eat. The horse count had fallen from hundreds over the years to barely twenty-something surviving animals.

And even those survivors had looked miserable.

Now the stable was overflowing.

Valdenmoor’s horses had changed everything immediately. Not just in number, but quality.

These were warhorses and carriage horses maintained by a functioning kingdom with actual resources behind it. Strong animals with thick muscle and healthy coats, fed properly their entire lives instead of surviving on reduced grain portions.

Darion watched one of them rear slightly. The thing looked powerful enough to kick a man’s ribs inward without much effort.

Good.

Percvale needed strength.

Darion folded his arms loosely.

"So," he said casually. "How many coins?"

Garren looked at him once before answering.

"Twenty thousand, two hundred and twenty-one gold coins."

Darion blinked.

"Gold?" he asked, though he already knew the answer.

"Gold and silver both. Counted separately, converted to equivalent." Garren paused. "Valdenmoor was doing well."

That was understating it. Twenty thousand coins was not the treasury of a territory that was struggling. Aldric had been running a genuinely prosperous operation — the mines, the maintained farmland, the trade routes. All of it had been feeding a treasury that his administration kept stocked. Darion had taken a meaningful chunk of it in one morning.

He thought about that for a moment without feeling bad about it.

"And the gems," he said.

Garren turned and walked and Darion followed him inside, past the main corridor and into the small storage room where Garren had put the items that weren’t coins.

On the table was a cloth laid flat, and on the cloth were five stones.

They were not small. The largest was roughly the size of his thumbnail and caught the torchlight in the room.

One was deep blue, almost glowing beneath the torchlight.

Another was dark green with strange reflective patterns inside it.

The largest one was crimson-red, cut cleanly enough that the surface caught light from every angle in the room.

Darion reached toward it carefully without touching.

"This will fetch a lot of money," he said quietly.

Garren nodded.

"I believe so."

He picked up the red one and held it toward the torch. The light went through it and came out changed.

He set it back down carefully. He didn’t know enough about gems to put numbers on them but he knew enough about what things looked like when they were worth a great deal, and these looked like that. The kind of items that a merchant in a proper city would look at and immediately start doing calculations on their value.

They would sell them. Not now, not here, not in Percvale where the nearest significant market was a day’s ride at minimum.

They would sell them somewhere with buyers who had the coin to pay what they were actually worth, which meant planning the sale properly rather than taking whatever the first person offered.

He would be very careful with selling them so it wouldn’t be another Gonbb situation and they would be stolen.

He set the red gem down and looked at the cloth.

Percvale owed fifty thousand gold coins. That had been the number since Garren first told him on the day he arrived, fifty thousand, spread across several creditors, the accumulated debt of decades of borrowed money that had been spent on things that hadn’t benefited Percvale and then ignored by everyone responsible for it.

Fourteen thousand of that had been Valdenmoor’s. He had just resolved that in the most direct way available to him.

That left thirty-six thousand.

Twenty thousand in coins minus whatever they needed for Percvale’s immediate operations: rebuilding the burned houses, replenishing the food stores, repairing the farmland, paying Vera when that time came, still left a significant amount that could go toward the remaining creditors.

And the gems on top of that, sold well, could cover another substantial portion.

He did the rough calculations in his head and arrived at a number that surprised him.

They could pay most of it. Not all of it, not immediately, but enough to approach the remaining creditors with something real rather than a promise.

Enough to demonstrate that Percvale was not the barony it had been six months ago.

But...he should be hopeful none of them asks anytime soon.

He looked at the gems again.

A month ago he had been standing in this castle with no food, no coin, a hundred and twenty-one starving knights, and a debt that the entirety of Percvale’s assets could not cover.

Now he had sixty horses, twenty thousand coins, five gems that would sell for considerably more than their weight, a Soilsinger rebuilding his farmland, an archery program with ten trained shooters, a knight order that had just defeated a force thirty times its size, and a king’s sworn oath that the largest single debt was cancelled.

This... this was progress.

Significant progress!

END OF VOLUME ONE!