It was evident from the first moments that Varten didn’t stand a chance against Simon. In the time since they’d last met, he’d grown older and lazier; his steps were not as sure, and his sword strokes were not as decisive as they’d once been. He was obviously out of practice.
Simon had grown older, too, but he’d spent the last several seasons using his sword constantly, and he was as sharp as he’d ever been. So, he parried each blow easily, getting inadvisably close to the Baron and practically daring him to do something about it just because he was pretty sure the man couldn’t lay a finger on him.
“What are all of you doing!” Varten yelled to his soldiers after half a dozen slashes, and a few thrusts showed him how one-sided this was likely to be. “Kill this man!”
They’d already made their decision, though, and stood there silently in a wide circle, watching the duel. “They’d fight for a ruler that commanded their respect or their fear,” Simon taunted the Baron. “You have neither, though. Not like your father did before the Orcs brought your whole family down a peg.”
“You know nothing!” Varten raged, lashing out wildly with a series of strokes that forced Simon to give ground for the first time. “My father was a great man, and the people love me.”
“There’s been no love in Crowvar for a long time, and I blame you for that more than anyone,” Simon answered, smiling grimly, knowing that his opponent would never understand the comment, not even if Simon explained it to him.
How could he? The world that Simon remembered had never happened. Crowbar wasn’t important to anyone but him anymore. That was plain to see on the map he was slowly making.
It was the backwater of a backwater at the very edge of the Kingdom of Brin. That was part of the reason he’d thought it was a safe place to settle with Freya so long ago. Now, though, well, if the desert were to encroach a little further north, and the Barony were to dry up and blow away, no one except the King’s treasurer was likely to notice when the annual tax receipts never arrived.
“Your family's stewardship, if you even want to call it that, has ruined this place,” Simon taunted. “You hid behind the walls of your fine fortress while everyone else died or fled. Even you can see it's nothing more than a shell of what it was like in your childhood.”
“That’s not what happened at all!” Varten said, fending off Simon’s words even less successfully than he was fending off his attacks.
“And now you feast while your people starve!” Simon yelled, growing angrier. “You are a vulture, picking at the bones of this place, and when there’s nothing left, the centaurs will sweep across the land, and it will be like Crowvar never even existed!”
Each word was a cut, of course, but most of them were also accompanied by actual cuts too. Simon was in no hurry to kill Varten; he’d done it before, and he’d do it again. For now, he seized every opportunity, slicing at the man’s arm or leg whenever his guard was insufficient or his reach exceeded his grasp.
No one would miss him, Simon told himself as he rained down a series of blows on the Baron that left him increasingly frantic as he faltered beneath the storm of steel. No one. He…
As Simon knocked the man off his feet and sent his rapier skittering across the floor, he delayed only a moment before making the final blow.
“No, please. I—” Varten cried out, about to beg for his life.
No words could have softened Simon’s heart, though, and instead of listening, he brought the long sword down into the chest of his enemy. Then he stood there long enough to watch him die, surprised to find that it gave him no joy or peace as it had in the past. He stayed there long enough that he was forced to step back because of the growing pool of blood. It was only then that he regained his senses and turned to the onlookers who were looking at him, unsure of what to do next.
Simon could see some guards looking at him with relief and others with greed. This had been a fragile situation before he’d gotten here, and he had no doubt that any one of them might try to become the next ‘legitimate’ warlord of the area. What would follow would be a particularly ugly civil war that would continue until someone who was even more ruthless than a Raithewait took control, and the only way to prevent that, and all the bloodshed that would come with it, was for that someone to be him.
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“Ding dong, the dick is dead,” Simon said to himself as he flicked the blood free from his blade and resheathed it before he cleared his throat to address everyone else.
“Alright, everyone,” Simon said, raising his voice so that no one would misunderstand what he was about to say. “The leech you’ve called your leader for your whole lives is dead. That fixes one problem but creates a lot of others. So I’m going to need people to go fetch everyone of any importance. I want the captain of the guard, the heads of any important guilds and leading families—”
“So you can kill them too?” someone asked, obviously expecting some kind of palace coup to follow.
“No one else is dying,” Simon answered wearily. “I mean it. No one, that’s why we’ll post a guard at the door of the Baron’s family. So, no one gets any ideas. I just want to bring everyone together so that the people of Crowvar can decide what’s next. If they want me to leave, then I will. If they want me to stick around until the centaurs are under control, then—”
“What if they want to hang you for killing the Baron?” one of the guards shouted at Simon, making him laugh.
“Well, you are welcome to try, though I do not think that will end well for you,” he said as he walked over to a chair and sat down.
People milled around for a few minutes, and they discussed everything that happened with each other and tried to decide what they should do before going off to do as he instructed. That let Simon breathe a secret sigh of relief before he asked one of the serving girls to bring him something to drink. Even if killing Varten had been on his to-do list for this trip, toppling the government and taking over hadn’t been the plan for today, so he was just sort of winging it.
Less than an hour later, everyone of any importance had been assembled, and though the Baron’s body had been covered with a linen tablecloth, everyone’s eyes kept wandering the bloodstained lump it hid on the floor. The guards there testified that it was an honorable duel that the Baron had started, leaving out their reluctance to help the man. That wasn’t so unbelievable, at least when he was younger; Varten was fond of such things since he lost so rarely.
There was no agreement among the group. Instead, there was bickering about what should be done and who should be the one to do it.
“We must send for advice from the king!” the city tax collector advised.
“That will be months in the waiting,” one of the rich men who ran some vineyards to the north of the city sighed. “We should appoint someone, me by preference, as the regent to Lord Raithewait’s son and then elevate him from Viscount to Baron.”
“But the lad is only four!” another man cried out in frustration.
Simon let these conversations go in circles for almost half an hour before he finally stood and said, “All good advice, gentlemen. Thank you. We will do exactly what you have suggested.”
“What we said?” the guard captain asked, confused.
“Who are you to—” another started to say.
“We will notify the King, inform the populace, appoint a reagent, and get to work against the greatest challenges the kingdom faces: the centaurs,” Simon said, smiling as if he had all the confidence in the world they’d accept his plan.
“But who will be the Reagent?” the tax collector asked.
“Why, me, of course,” Simon said. “I have no intention of staying longer than I have to, but it’s clear that Crowvar is facing problems right now that only a warrior can solve, and if none of you will pick up the sword, then it falls to me and my men to do it.”
For a moment, the room exploded in bickering, but Simon ignored it. Instead, he started to give orders as if he expected them to be obeyed, and shockingly, they were. No one was happy with it, of course, but he’d very clearly reminded them he was the one with the small personal army, and though many of them might disagree with his methods, he doubted there was a man in this city who didn’t think something had to be done about the depredations of monsters that was currently grinding this country to dust.
By the time he returned to his small camp next to the Inn hours later, most things had been settled. The widow had been informed, the bounties had been paid at the usual rate, and people were coming to grips with the new reality: the Baron was dead, and though perhaps not in name, Simon was the new Baron. He was well aware that many of the men he’d talked to only obeyed him out of fear and that they hoped the King would strike him down or that they’d poison him or stab him in the back, given the chance.
Simon didn’t plan to give them one, of course. He planned to stay as far from the center of power and out in the field as much as possible. In the morning, he gave his men the short, short version of what had happened.
“So he tried to cheat us of our due, and you did what you had to to make sure we got paid?” Jak laughed, slapping him on the back. “I knew I liked you for a reason.”
I knew I liked you for a reason. Simon didn’t linger too long that day. He had everyone start packing up and returned to the Baron’s walled compound at the center of town only long enough to get a few proclamations written and stamped. He didn’t expect a lot of help from Crowvar, but with these, the rest of the towns and villages in the regions should be a little more useful, and Simon had a plan.
Well, he had several, but right now, the one he was most interested in was the most straightforward: push the centaurs and everything else that thought that humans tasted like a delicacy back away from the largest towns and agricultural areas. Nothing was going to get fixed if people were afraid to live their lives. They would just continue to flee north, and the desert and the centaurs would chase them.