Darion stood with the knight's words sitting in the air between them.
Valdenmoor.
Valdenmoor!
He couldn't exactly believe it.
He had been tracking the deadline loosely, not with a precise daily count because there had been too many other things to track, but he knew it was close. Close enough that a messenger arriving now made immediate sense.
He had hoped the infiltration would have changed something by this point. Some sign from Valdenmoor that the internal situation had shifted enough to delay any external pressure. Men dying in the barracks without explanation, healers called in with no answers: that kind of crisis had a way of reorganizing priorities.
A kind of crisis that was to make a kingdom stop thinking about a debtor's farmland when their own soldiers were collapsing.
Apparently not.
Or the illness had been noticed and since it stopped, life had moved on and Aldric had shoved it under bad luck and kept his eye on the thirty-day clock regardless.
