It truly was ambitious.

"I know," Darion said to the senior knight, thinking now.

The obvious alternative was total destruction.

Kill Aldric, kill his officers and kill enough of the force that Valdenmoor couldn’t threaten anyone for a generation.

Clean in one sense. Final in another. But even with what they had, with the compounds and the undead and the wolves and the Rops, two hundred of Valdenmoor’s knights had just marched into Percvale and left with fifty-two of his people dead.

Valdenmoor’s full strength was considerably more than two hundred. Killing everything in that barracks was not the same as killing Valdenmoor’s capacity to retaliate.

And even if they killed Aldric, someone stepped into the gap. An advisor, a senior knight or a relative with a claim to the territory. That person would inherit the ledger. He or she would inherit the record of what Percvale had done to their barracks over weeks of infiltration and then to their king.

They would have considerably more motivation to act on it than Aldric had ever had, because Aldric’s motivation had been a debt. Their motivation would be revenge.

Killing Aldric didn’t end the problem. It transformed it into a different and possibly worse problem.

He needed Aldric alive and bound.

He didn’t just a signature on a document. Signatures could be repudiated. A king who signed under duress and then returned home and declared the signing void was not a secured outcome, it was a delay.

How straight forward was signature on Paper?! In a region abandoned by the Emperor, they couldn’t take it to him to judge if Aldric refused to comply with the agreement he would sign.

More worse when it involved Darion, someone he declared was no longer his blood and had long abandoned.

Aldric was a practical man and practical men found practical ways around obligations they had accepted under impractical circumstances.

But an oath was different...

An Oath!

He thought about the warmth in his chest when he had sworn to Vera. The sensation of something noting the words and filing them somewhere permanent.

Vera had made that oath, had constructed it so that it was bound to intent rather than just words, if he chose to break it when payment was within his power, the consequence arrived. Not a loophole or a technicality. But intent!

If Aldric swore the same kind of oath, that Percvale’s debt was cancelled, that Valdenmoor would not act against Percvale in retaliation, that the matter was closed, and if Vera bound that oath the same way she had bound Darion’s, then Aldric couldn’t retaliate later.

Not because he lacked the resources or the soldiers, but because the magic would not allow the deliberate choice to break it.

A captured king with a magical oath around his neck was a fundamentally different outcome from a captured king who signed a paper.

He sent one of the knights to go call Vera from her room.

Everyone in the room remained quiet, they knew Darion was cooking something so they waited.

Normally, Vera should be on her way back to Ghlk by now. The agreement had been simple: provide the compounds, advise on the plan, then return home. She wasn’t a soldier. She wasn’t part of Percvale’s force. She was a contractor who had done her job and was ready to collect her payment.

But if she went, doing the oath would be harder. The distance from Ghlk to Valdenmoor was significant. By the time they captured Aldric and sent word to her, by the time she traveled back, things could go wrong. Aldric’s officers could mount a rescue. The political situation could shift. A lot could happen in the days it would take to bring her from Ghlk to Valdenmoor.

He needed her to still be here.

The knight returned with Vera. She came into the great hall, looking at him with a face that asked one thing:

What?

Darion explained his plan. To capture Aldric, not kill him. To bind him with an oath rather than a signature. To make the cancellation of Percvale’s debt permanent in a way that paper couldn’t match.

He hadn’t told the people in the table about this before and they were just doing so now. Something like ’That’s not a bad idea’ was evident on their faces.

Vera listened. Her expression didn’t change much, but he could see her thinking it, more like Calculating it. The same way she had calculated when he first walked into her house. The same way she had calculated the five hundred silver coins.

He sensed she might not agree. The oath-binding was one thing when it was him, a desperate Baron with nothing to lose, swearing to pay what he owed. That was to her. It had been done so that she would be sure to receive her payment, whenever he had it.

Now it was something that would be used for him.

So he added something.

"Two hundred additional silver coins," he said. "On top of the five hundred. If you come with us to Valdenmoor and administer the oath."

Vera looked at him for a long moment.

Then she said: "That’s seven hundred total."

"Yes."

She considered that. Seven hundred silver was not a small number. It was the kind of number that made people willing to take risks they wouldn’t normally take. Darion could see her doing the math behind her eyes. Weighing each one against the others. But this wasn’t a risk...

"So... after we take Aldric," Darion said, "you can administer the oath?"

Vera looked at him. "Yes, if he’s willing to swear."

She agreed!

"He’ll be willing," Darion said. "Because the alternative we’ll be presenting him with will make him willing."

Vera didn’t smile. But she seemed to respect Darion more than before. That this Baron, this young man who had shown up at her door with her daughter and a desperate story, was actually a smart leader. Smarter than the previous Morons that had ruled Percvale.