Maugis nodded. “For the last twenty years, and there are hidden storehouses underground we’ve been filling since the war started last year. Good grazing, too; it’s not all forest and rock, there are flat areas with plenty of grass, and there’s the devil’s own lot of game, boar and bear and deer and elk. Not to mention tiger and wolf and cougar. We use the high country in dry years for summer grazing; my folk know those mountains. I’m not sending any to Walla Walla to be shipped down the Columbia . . . and possibly never come back.”

Ingolf nodded understanding. The baron was being forethoughtful for his people, and for his own family’s interests as well. There wasn’t any serfdom anywhere in Montival, or slavery. Fifteen years ago the treaty at the end of what everyone but the PPA folks called the War of the Eye, what they termed the Protector’s War here, forbade any law that limited the right to emigrate. Anyone who wanted to leave could, debts or no. But that meant leaving the only home they had, with nothing more than the clothes they stood up in, and no skills but one particular type of farming.

Few would face that if they weren’t impossibly badly treated at home. However, if you’d been shipped to a distant city anyway, with the government footing the bill, heading home away from the bright lights might not seem very attractive at all. Or at least some would stop on a manor where a holding was available from a lord greedy for workers; there was more good land everywhere than there were hands to till it.

“That castle could be held by a corporal’s guard, my lord,” Ingolf said thoughtfully. “Well, them and some catapult crews.”

“And I could do it that way,” Maugis agreed. “Keep a minimal garrison and the most vulnerable noncombatants in the castle. Everyone else in the hills, and then raid out of them with the barony’s fighting men when the enemy occupy the lowlands . . . which they will.”

“Yup, they will,” Ingolf said; he wasn’t going to lie to this man. “Hopefully, not for all that long, but for a while, yeah.”

“Tell me, Lord Vogeler, how many men would you need to comb these mountains against me and my neighbors if we took refuge there? How long would it take?”

Ingolf’s professional reflexes kicked in. He looked up at the peaks to the east—one of them still had a little snow on it and must be around seven thousand feet—and ran what he knew of the terrain through his mind.