He smiled faintly at the cloth with the gems resting on it, the torchlight shifting across their surfaces.

"Don’t lose those," he said to Garren.

"I will not, m’lord."

Darion believed him immediately.

That realization settled in quietly.

Trust was a dangerous thing in this world. Back on Earth people betrayed each other over far less than gemstones worth small fortunes and a treasury filled with enough gold to change an entire territory’s future.

In this medieval world, it was possible...

A desperate man with access to this kind of wealth could disappear overnight and never be seen again.

Garren could, technically, do exactly that.

Take horses, take coins and ride somewhere far from Percvale and start a comfortable life somewhere nobody knew his name.

But Darion didn’t actually think he would.

Not really.

He looked at the older knight for a moment in silence.

Garren had been the first person he met after waking in Percvale. The first face in this world that hadn’t looked at him with mockery or greed or calculation.

Exhausted, starving, wounded and standing inside a collapsing castle, Garren had still accepted him as Baron without hesitation.

Not because Darion had earned it, I mean, he looked like a kid, not because he was impressive.

But simply because Percvale needed someone.

And since then?

The man had fought for him repeatedly.

He had marched into impossible situations beside him without turning away once. He had stood in front of Valdenmoor’s invasion while injured and exhausted. He had nearly died defending Percvale before Vera healed him. He had followed Darion into a battle against over two thousand trained knights without questioning whether the odds were sane.

That kind of loyalty wasn’t something Darion ignored.

Or forgot.

Garren wasn’t perfect. He was overly serious most of the time, and had the emotional range of a stone wall during military discussions.

But he was loyal, actually loyal.

And in a world where Darion constantly had to think about betrayal, manipulation, hidden motives and survival, that mattered more than almost anything else.

Darion glanced once more at the treasury laid out across the room.

Twenty thousand gold coins. Five gems worth fortunes. Enough wealth to tempt almost anyone.

Yet somehow he still felt safer leaving it with Garren than with anyone else in Percvale.

"That treasury is in good hands," Darion said finally.

Garren looked slightly surprised by the statement, though he hid it quickly.

"I’ll protect it with my life if necessary."

———

Darion walked back to the great hall with Garren thinking deeply about what he would do with the coins.

Actual planning, not the ones that came as vague thoughts in his mind he would attend to later.

He would probably start with animals first.

The farmland attack had killed everything. Goats, cattle, the breeding females that had been pregnant. All of it gone in an afternoon. Rebuilding that had to start from scratch, which meant buying animals rather than having them. Young ones, male and female pairs, the kind you bought with the intention of letting them reproduce rather than immediately using them. Goats were the fastest return. They bred quickly, didn’t need elaborate infrastructure, and meat on a relatively short timeline. Cattle took longer but were worth more per animal when the herd was established.

He would need other animals too. Chickens for eggs. Pigs possibly, though the logistics of managing pigs were their own problem. He didn’t need to figure all of it out today. He needed to start with goats and cattle and build from there.

Before any animals could go back on the farmland, the fencing had to be done properly. Not the improvised rope-and-stake arrangement that had been holding things together before the attack. Actual fencing, built to last, dividing the land correctly, the planting sections separate from the animal sections, each clearly defined, the whole perimeter solid enough that the animals stayed in and whatever came from outside stayed out.

He had the coins to pay for it now. He had the knights to do the labor if he needed them.

Then the castle.

He looked up at the ceiling of the great hall. The plaster was cracked in three places he could see from where he was sitting. The roof over the eastern wing had a sag in it that Wulfric had been managing with buckets whenever it rained, which hadn’t been often, but winter was coming and winter would not be considerate about the castle’s structural situation.

Back on Earth, if you wanted to repair a building you hired a builder. Someone who understood construction, who knew how to assess what was structurally compromised versus what was cosmetically damaged, who had the skills and the tools and the knowledge to do the work correctly rather than just patch things temporarily.

You paid them for their time and their expertise, and they used your materials or sourced materials themselves depending on the arrangement.

It worked the same way here, broadly. Different materials, different tools, different methods in some respects, but the principle was the same. Find people who knew what they were doing. Pay them. Give them what they needed to work with.

Percvale probably had people with those skills somewhere in its two-thousand-person population. If it didn’t, a day’s ride in any direction would find someone. He had coins now. He could hire.

The castle was not an emergency the way the farmland was, but it was coming up on being one. The roof couldn’t wait another full season without becoming a serious problem. He added it to the mental list below fencing and animals but above most other things.

Then there was Vera.

He had sworn to pay her five hundred silver. Then an additional two hundred when she agreed to help with Aldric’s oath. From the first treasury surplus Percvale could sustain the payment from.

The magic was bound to that number. He could pay exactly seven hundred and the oath was satisfied and the consequence he had accepted lifted.

He was not going to pay seven hundred.

He thought about what the morning at Valdenmoor had actually looked like.

The chaos of sixty people against over two thousand trained soldiers. The fire arrows catching the barracks wall. The incapacitation bundles going into the crowd. The disorientation compound moving on the wind. His undead walking through the confusion without slowing. Seven losses on his side. Thousands on theirs.

None of that happened without Vera’s box.

Without her compounds, sixty people did not defeat two thousand. It was not possible. His undead were good and his knights had been willing and the plan had been solid, but the plan’s entire foundation was the fire accelerant and the incapacitation dust and the disorientation compound.

Take those out and you had sixty people walking into a barracks full of two thousand soldiers with swords and torches and optimism, which was not a military operation, it was a very loud way to die.

They would be brutally killed or captured immediately.

But Vera had made the impossible possible. "Garren," he said.

Garren looked up from where he was still working through paperwork at the other end of the table.

"Count out one thousand silver for Vera," Darion said.

Garren looked at him. "The oath was for seven hundred..."

"Yes, I know, I just think she deserves more, without her we wouldn’t have stood a chance.," Darion said. "Count out one thousand."

Garren nodded and stood.