The county of Greshen didn’t have a throne, per se, but if it did, Kelvun would have sat uneasily on it. It had an audience hall, but most of the important decisions were made around the table in his family’s parlor amongst the real power brokers of the city, long before they were ever aired in the grand gallery.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that many of the decisions he was forced to make over the next few months had already been decided elsewhere, and that they were only brought to him to rubber stamp. Everything was just going a bit too smoothly that autumn, he decided. The waterfront was practically back to normal, the gold being sent from the mine was more than his treasurer had forecast, and the king himself had sent a royal decree by messenger, thanking him for avenging his father and putting down the goblin menace before they could do further damage to the kingdom.

The only thing that had gone wrong was that the damnable mages he’d hired to carve his canal had just disappeared one day. It wasn’t his fault, of course. They’d finished their work and been paid of course, but according to the Magica Collegium in Abenend they’d just disappeared sometime after that. Their entire party had. They’d vanished without a trace. The collegium had blamed him of course, and weren’t happy about the situation, but he was blameless.

Kelvun’s patron might have something to do with it, of course, but if it had, he didn’t want to know. That would lead to too many unthinkable thoughts, too much worry about why the swamp might have decided they should perish, and why he might be next on the hit list. That blow never fell though, and even though it was the worries about his court that forced the young lord to winter in Fallravea, the idea that he might just disappear one day was never far from his mind.

The dreams still came through the winter, but less often, and they were less clear in what they wanted. The only one that even gave Kelvun something like a specific task, was that in the spring, the darkness wanted a temple built to honor the Oroza. That was an easy enough request that would have happened eventually even without his assistance. Many small shrines already existed up and down the river. The dreams were very clear though. It wanted a shrine to Oroza the flood-dragon, the most powerful and unpredictable of her forms.

That at least was unusual, as this far north the river was usually venerated as the gentle water bearer or the languid serpent, but Kelvun wasn’t going to argue. It mostly just left him wondering. Why would an evil spirit that dwelled in a swamp want to venerate a river goddess? Had building the canal forced the swamp to change its ways or altered its elemental alignment somehow? So many warriors had tried to slay the undead threat for so long, when the whole time, all that needed to happen to take the wind out of its sails was to drain the damn thing.

It was a start at least, but his dark master took a back seat to his other worries. Even with the snows piled high, no one attempted to poison him during any of the midwinter balls he attended, and even on the nights where Kelvun slept alone, no one attempted to garrote him. Nonetheless, that gnawing sense of uncertainty and precariousness never left him. By the spring, he’d doubled his spymaster’s budget to make sure that everyone worth watching was being watched, but even that bore no treacherous fruit.

“Maybe the only one after you is me,” Adanna told him one frosty winter morning while they were in bed together. He’d taken advantage of the pleasant afterglow to whisper some of his doubts to her in an unguarded moment, but she didn’t see what he was worried about.

“Well, that can’t be true,” he said, with a hollow smile as he tried to figure out whether he’d made a terrible mistake by telling her anything at all. “If that were true then how would you explain Fahraah, or Susanna, or …

“Oh, you monster,” she said with a light slap that was followed up by a kiss. Even if his imagined enemies at court weren’t real, he certainly wasn’t imagining the women that hunted him. He was the region's most eligible bachelor, and if one thing had been true since all of this had started, it was that there had been no end to the marriage offers from the other important families of the area.

Once winter broke he would leave the city again for Blackwater Landing for a few weeks, just to escape them, he decided, once Adanna had finally left to get dressed. A few seconds later, he decided he should probably have her watched too. He trusted her, but jealousy could do strange things to people, and everyone was envious of his successes lately.

It was shortly before spring that he proposed his biggest plan to date: free land for the peasants that would farm it. The nobles were against it, even after he assured them that none of their holdings would be reduced to make this region. That seemed to anger them further, which had been entirely unexpected until his advisor had explained to him the reasons why.

“Even if you increased their holdings, it would do no good,” Temonen said after he’d pulled him aside. “Their peasants will still flee for the better offer, leaving no one to work the existing lands.”

That at least made sense to Kelvun. There was a critical shortage of strong, able bodies after the carnage the goblins had caused last year. Fields were already going fallow for a lack of both plows and plowmen, but he wouldn’t let that change his mind. Not only would changing his mind after making that kind of announcement make him look weak, but there would have been no point in draining that damn swamp if he wasn’t going to be sending people to there to take advantage of the fertile land. Farmers would bring their gods and their shrines with them, and with a little luck Kelvun was sure that within a few years he could bury that giant evil with the prayers of thousands of the devout.

In the end he mollified his nobles by announcing that they would use the newly vacant land to recruit immigrants from other parts of the kingdom. They would rebuild Greshen and make it a home worth defending.

“Why should we have outsiders in our fine lands,” Baron Barrington boasted. “Rhuzens? Duttons? They’ll never be true Greshens like the rest of us.”

Even if he wouldn’t admit it publicly, he would privately concede that the Baron had a point, but that point didn’t matter just now. “Either we import the manpower to rebuild this great county, or we’ll forever be known as ‘that backwater that was burned to the ground by the goblins.’ Is that what you want? To be a laughingstock?”

At that moment, he took the xenophobic pride of his fellow nobles and turned it against them. No matter how much he might agree that the people of the river were better than their rivals on the sea or the plains, the last thing any of them wanted was to see their local prestige lost to a string of defeats at the hands of mere goblins. The short but violent war had made Kelvun look good, but it had made the domain, and the previous ruler of it look both feeble and ineffective. They would have to change that lest he lose the favor of the king.

In the end Kelvun commissioned several bards to spread the word of his new decree, and soon songs like ‘the green hills of Greshen’ and ‘Black Earth Bliss,’ were being spread from inn to inn to go along with his tales of goblin slaying and the older tales like ‘To The Last Man.’ It would take time for this strategy to pay off, he was sure, but Greshen surely needed the new blood. The swamp receded half a mile since the canal had been cut, in all directions that weren’t abutting the river. Even without all the new land that had been reclaimed from the swamp, though, many of the villages that had been ruined in the heartland between Fallravea and the Red Hills had never been rebuilt.

If new farms and communities weren’t established to fix that, it would not only be catastrophically bad for his tax revenues in future years. It would let the lands go wild, and if that happened then who knew what monsters would occupy them. No, everyone knew it was better to handle this as quickly and decisively as possible, they just wanted him to bear all the costs. These expenses at least would be borne by all the nobles of the region, though, no matter how they might feel about it.

After all of that was set in motion, Kelvun’s fears redoubled, but it wasn’t until a poison tester of his died shortly after he announced the new temple to Oroza the dragon, that he finally had something to hold on to. The doctors said that it was an acute illness, and not an allergy or a poison, but Kelvun was unconvinced, and shortly after that he made plans to relocate to Blackwater Landing for a season at least.

He was popular enough with the people of Fallravea, and did not fear his subjects, but the county capital also held almost all the other noble families, and one or more of them was definitely out to get him. He thought about asking the darkness for help, but decided the last thing he wanted was to owe that unknowable creature any more than he already did. If left alone he could smother it in its sleep, but giving it some new goal or intrigue might reverse all the progress that Kelvun had made so far.

Blackwater Landing was safe enough. It wasn’t nearly as comfortable as Garvin manor of course, but enough money and time would fix that, and in a few months once everyone had calmed down and his spymaster Wurmnth had figured out who had tried to poison him, he could come back to be reunited with his stable of lovers. He might even find a few new ones while he was there, he decided, perking up at the prospect. An artless country girl might be just what he needed to help him get over his brush with death.

“But what if it really was sickness,” the old fool had asked him, the night before Kelvun was to depart. “What if no one tried to poison you?”

“I’ll be back in three months, Wurmnth. Five at the very latest. And when I get back I’ll expect a very short list of names. If you don’t have one of those for me, well then I might have to make one myself. You wouldn’t like to see me pluck those from the air at random, would you?” Kelvun let the threat hang there in the air for a moment before he spoke again. “Who knows who I might decide belongs on there. After all, I’m not half the expert that you are in these things.”

“Of course not my lord,” the old spymaster said, swallowing hard.

Kelvun had clearly made his point, and that fact alone made him smile all the way to his destination.