Darion didn’t answer immediately.

He looked at Aldric across the table and thought about the question.

Why bring him here instead of killing him back at Valdenmoor. It was a reasonable question from a man who had just watched his barracks burn and his guards torn apart and was trying to understand what kind of situation he was in.

The answer was simple enough.

Dead kings were problems. Dead kings had successors, advisors, officers who survived and inherited the situation and had every reason to be angrier about it than the original king had been.

Although Darion had eliminated the advisors and head of the Valdenmoor knights his knights brought to him. How could he be sure that was all of them.

What was the possibility that he didn’t have a son somewhere in another kingdom or a relative or some Heir to the Valdenmoor throne.

Or what if some of his council men managed to escape?

This meant that Aldric dead in Valdenmoor meant Valdenmoor without leadership and with a story to tell about what Percvale had done, and that story would travel, and the next person who sat in Aldric’s chair would build their entire relationship with Percvale around it.

Aldric alive and bound by an oath was a different problem entirely. Aldric alive meant continuity, a king who could go home and govern and tell his remaining people that the matter was settled, or that it wasn’t from Percvale to begin with and he did not know who sent the attack.

Aldric bound meant that telling held.

But Darion didn’t explain any of this. He just looked at the man and let him sit with the question for another moment.

Then he leaned forward slightly.

"I want you to cancel the fourteen thousand gold debt Percvale owes Valdenmoor," he said.

Aldric looked at him.

He said nothing for a moment. His face was doing several things at once. He had tiredness in his eyes, someone who had been pulled from sleep, bound, transported in a carriage for hours, and deposited on a stone floor, sitting on top of whatever he was feeling about what had happened to his barracks.

Darion thought, briefly, about the coins in the bags his knights had brought back. The treasury they had taken from Aldric’s building. It was possible, actually possible,to count out fourteen thousand gold from what they had seized and hand it across this table as payment.

He was not going to do that.

Paying Aldric back with Aldric’s own money was the kind of thing that was technically settlement and actually absurd, and more than that, Percvale had earned what was in those bags. The fifty-two dead knights had earned it. The burned houses had earned it. The slaughtered livestock had earned it. That gold was not debt repayment. That gold was compensation!

"Forget about the farmlands," Darion said. "That’s the second condition. Valdenmoor releases any claim on Percvale’s eastern farmland. Permanently."

Aldric was quiet for a moment.

Then he looked at Darion and said: "I just accept these conditions and I’m free to go?"

There was something in his voice that Darion caught immediately. Not relief exactly. Surprise underneath the exhaustion. Maybe he had been expecting a something worse and this sounded too easy.

Darion kept his face still. The grin that wanted to form stayed where it was.

"I accept," Aldric said.

Darion said nothing.

He waited. Because Aldric saying I accept was exactly what a man in Aldric’s position said when he wanted to go home. It cost him nothing to say it in this room. The question was what it cost him after he left.

Aldric seemed to read the silence correctly.

"It’s not as if I have a choice," he said, his voice flatter now. He looked at his hands on the table. "I watched you burn my kingdom from the carriage window. My men many of them. Gone." He paused. "I left in a carriage with my hands tied. Whatever I had this morning when I woke up, I don’t have it anymore."

He looked up.

"So yes, I accept. The debt is cancelled. The farmland is yours. What else do you want me to say."

Darion looked at him for a long moment.

He understood what the man was going through. Not sympathetically, but he understood it. Watching something you built get destroyed in front of you while you could do nothing about it, he knew that feeling.

He had walked into Percvale and seen the burned houses and the dead livestock and the torn-up farmland and felt it.

The difference was that Percvale had done nothing to Valdenmoor to earn what was done to it. Percvale had just refused to sign a piece of paper.

Darion looked Aldric in the eye.

"You sent your men to Percvale," he said. "They killed more than half my fighting force. They destroyed my farmlands. They killed every animal we had, goats, cattle, breeding stock, all of it." He paused for a moment, thinking of something. Back on Earth, people had animal rights movements, vegetarians, entire philosophical frameworks built around the idea that animals deserved not to be brutalized.

In this medieval world that concept didn’t seem to exist in any formal sense. But it was still uncivilized. It was still the deliberate killing of animals that had done nothing, that had been alive and healthy and useful, because making a point required something to destroy.

"And your men burned the houses of people who had nothing to do with any debt. Citizens and families."

He kept his eyes on Aldric.

"I took your farmland, your livestock, your treasury, and your military capacity," Darion said. "But I left your citizens alive. I left your buildings standing." He leaned back. "You sent your men and they killed more than half my forces, destroyed my farmlands and killed every animal we had."

A pause.

"I returned the favour," he said. "And I was merciful enough to spare the people of Valdenmoor, which is more than you did for mine."