The Undead wild wolf continued fighting, tearing through the guards.

It did so brutally, as it always did when commanded to fight anything. Against animals, it tore, against humans, it tore.

The eight guards outside the stone building had formed up properly, swords out, their stance one of determination.

Against a living wolf, even a large one, eight trained soldiers with swords was a manageable problem.

The original undead wolf was not a living wolf.

It hit the line at full speed and went through it the way water went through a gap, not fighting the resistance so much as finding the path of least resistance and taking it, which in this case meant the space between the first two guards before they could close the gap.

One of them got his sword into the wolf’s side and the wolf turned its head and bit the man’s arm at the elbow and kept moving. The arm went one way. The man went down. The wolf was already at the next one.

Darion’s knights came through the gate behind him and hit the remaining guards from multiple angles. It was fast and it was not clean but it was thorough, and within ninety seconds the area in front of the stone building’s door was empty of everyone except Percvale’s men and the wolf.

The wolf stood at the door and looked at Darion, awaiting another command.

Darion tried the handle, it was locked.

He looked at the wolf and pointed at the door.

The wolf hit it at speed. The timber frame held on the first impact. On the second it didn’t. The door came in and the wolf went through with it.

They followed.

The stone building’s interior was narrow but actually alright. It had a corridor and doors on either side.

At the far end of the corridor, a room with light coming under the door. The wolf had already stopped in front of it, standing still, looking back at Darion.

He opened it.

Aldric was standing in the middle of the room.

Not armed and not in armor. He had clearly been woken by the fire and the noise and had not yet made it to either. He was in a sleeping tunic with a heavy robe pulled over it, and he was looking at the door with the expression of Fear.

He looked at Darion.

The Baron of Perc... perc... vale?

He was visibly shocked to see Darion standing at the door of his room, staring at him with cold vengeful eyes.

He had underestimated this man, he had made fun of him some days ago, making fun of his not signing the farmlands. Why risk the lives of your people.

He had planned to send knights to march to Percvale in a day’s time, to let him sign the farmlands or that would be the end of Percvale.

That supposedly weak Baron was standing in front of him...

He looked at the wolf.

He said nothing.

Two of Darion’s knights moved past him and took Aldric by both arms. He didn’t resist. There was no point resisting. Not when clearly the numbers were against him.

And the wolf..., if terrified him. He wouldn’t attempt resisting so as to not be torn apart by this horrific nightmarish creature that was somehow physical and standing in front of him.

Darion looked at him for a moment and Aldric stared back.

"You should have given the extension," he said. "You shouldn’t have killed half of my men, burned houses of my people and destroyed my farmlands."

Aldric still said nothing.

"Bring him out," Darion said.

They had come prepared for this part. Rope for the hands, cloth for the mouth. Garren had organized it before they left Percvale.

Aldric’s hands were bound behind him and the cloth was tied.

They put him in the carriage that two of Darion’s knights had found in the stable at the side of the compound, a proper one with two horses, better than the tired vehicle that had carried Darion to Ghlk.

He told them to take Aldric to Percvale and fast.

Garren climbed in after him with four knights. Two more took the driver’s bench. The carriage went through the compound gate and onto the road at speed.

Darion watched it go, then turned back to the stone building.

He went through the rooms.

The room Aldric had stayed this night, Darion discovered, was different from his personal quarters.

Aldric’s personal quarters were at the back, more comfortable than the administrative rooms. It had a proper bed, a desk with documents, and against the far wall, a heavy chest that had a lock on it that had not been designed to stop anyone who had already come through two doors and a wolf.

He opened it.

They contained Gold coins. Several boxes of them, stacked, the kind of treasury reserve that a king kept close rather than in a central location. He looked at them and turned to the knights behind him.

"Bags," he said.

They had brought bags. They filled them. He didn’t count, there wasn’t time for counting, but the weight of what they were carrying out was significant and would be counted later.

Outside, the fighting was winding down.

The barracks was a ruin. Still burning in sections, the fire having consumed most of what was combustible and now working on what remained. The undead knights were moving through the grounds still, dealing with the pockets of resistance that had managed to organize themselves despite the disorientation and the fire and the initial shock. The wolves were visible in the far section, moving between two groups of Valdenmoor knights who were trying very hard to be somewhere else.

Not many of Valdenmoor’s force were left standing.

Darion found the senior knight he wanted and gave the instruction.

"Take Seren and the archers to the farmland. The pens... the fields," A slight pause. "Burn it!"

The knight looked at him, then nodded and moved.

Seren came down from her tree when the knight reached her. He explained the instruction. She looked at the fire accelerant arrows she had left, counted them, then instructed the other Archers to come down.

They did and went to the farmlands with the Archers. Or at least, close to it. They found trees and climbed on them, checking for any harmful insects or snakes that would bite them, seeing none, they all climbed, in position.

With the help of his wild wolf, Darion was able to climb on top of the stone building, the one they had taken Aldric from.

It was high and would give him an elevated view.

Darion watched from there as the first arrow went into the largest livestock pen.

The accelerant caught the hay and the fencing and the wooden structure at the pen’s edge with the same speed it had caught the barracks wall. The animals in the pen saw the fire and panicked, which was its own kind of chaos, and the chaos spread to the adjacent pens before the arrows even reached them.

He had thought about taking livestock back to Percvale. The appeal was obvious, Percvale’s animals had been slaughtered and Valdenmoor had animals and the logic of taking them as compensation was good.

But animals moved slowly. A herd of goats and cattle on the road between Valdenmoor and Percvale was visible from a long distance and raised exactly the kind of questions he didn’t want raised while he was also transporting a bound king in a carriage.

It would slow them, expose them, and create problems that the animals themselves weren’t worth.

Burn them!

Same thing that had been done to Percvale’s.

He watched it happen with the same cold absence of satisfaction he had felt watching Gonnb.

He thought briefly about the houses. Valdenmoor had burned Percvale’s houses, not all of it, but enough.

Houses where people had lived for years, gone in an afternoon. The idea of returning that was not hard to follow.

But Vera’s accelerant was not normal fire. He had watched what it did to the barracks. It moved too fast, spread too far, took too much with it. If he put that into Valdenmoor’s residential buildings with people still in them, people who had not sent two hundred knights anywhere, who had woken up this morning with no particular involvement in their king’s decisions about Percvale’s farmland, the fire would not stop where he intended it to stop.

He couldn’t call himself a good man. He had burned Gonnb. He had directed venomous undead through sleeping soldiers. He had just commanded the intense burning of a knight Barracks and their deaths, he had just overseen the capture of a king and the looting of his treasury.

But he could spare the people of Valdenmoor lives. That much he could do.

’I’ll Leave the houses,’ he decided.

The farmland burned. The pens burned. The stored grain at the edge of the eastern field caught and the smoke from it rose black and thick into the morning sky.

Seren watched it from her tree, the bow lowered, the last arrow unshot.

The farmland, Valdenmoor’s farmland, the fields that had been feeding the territory that had destroyed hers, burned the way hers had been destroyed.

The smoke rose.