The departure of the King's bailiff left the courtyard feeling uncommonly wide. The drizzle had ceased entirely, giving way to a soft, pale gold light that broke through the grey cloud-shelf and turned the wet shingles of the weavers' cottages into overlapping plates of silver. The heavy iron bucket of calibration water still sat on the scale pan, its surface catching the reflection of the sky like a clean mirror.
Wat leaned his massive bulk against the ash tripod of the scales, his single good eye tracking the rhythmic, swinging motion of the empty copper wire loops. He pulled off his sweat-grained leather cap, wiping his bald head with a grease-rag that left a dark smudge across his brow.
"We held the line, Thomas," the blacksmith said, his chest heaving with a low, gravelly chuckle. "Did you see the look on that clerk's face when the pointer hit the center notch? He looked as if he'd found a toad in his small beer. He wanted to find a cheat so badly his fingers were practically twitching to notch the iron himself."
"He was looking for an old world, Wat," Thomas said, a faint smile breaking through the exhaustion on his face. He reached out and tapped the rim of the calibration bucket, sending a tiny ripple across the water. "A world where the man with the loudest voice or the longest sword gets to say how much a pound weighs. He doesn't know what to do with a valley where the water tells the truth."
"Aye, well, the water doesn't have a cousin who's a bailiff at the coast," Wat grunted, though his face softened as he looked down the lane toward the smithy. "My boys are already stoking the secondary hearth for the lead run. If we're casting those long sleeves twelve inches deep, I'm going to need a hand with the lifting crane. My bad leg is giving me the devil's own ache with this damp weather."
Thomas stepped forward, catching the smith by the shoulder before he could turn back toward the dark opening of the forge. "Go inside and sit by the fire, Wat. Let the apprentices handle the charcoal baskets for an hour. If your leg fails you on the platform, we'll be casting more than lead—we'll be casting your bones into the pit."
Wat paused, looking at Thomas for a long heartbeat. The hostility that had defined their first meetings months ago—back when Thomas was just a strange lad with clean hands and a mad drawing of a water wheel—had long since dissolved into the grease and the smoke of the valley. "You're a hard man with a drawing-rod, Lord Thomas," the smith said softly, his thick fingers touching the leather of Thomas's smock. "But you're a fair one with the men. Go on up to the hall. The mistress has been staring at that ledger so long her eyes look like they've been rubbed with soot."
Thomas watched the smith limp toward the heat of the forge before he turned back toward the counting room stairs.
Victoria was still standing by the timber rail of the gallery, her master ledger closed and tucked firmly beneath her arm. She hadn't gone inside to escape the wind; she was waiting for him, her dark hair slipping out from beneath the linen square to blow across her forehead in wet, dark strands.
"He will go straight to the Baron, Thomas," she said as he reached the top step. Her voice had lost the sharp, clinical cadence she used when confronting the tax collectors; it was quiet now, carrying a low vibration of weariness that matched his own. "Morcar isn't a fool. He saw the brick houses, and he heard the looms. He will tell De Born that we aren't just selling cloth—we're drawing a circle around this hill that his riders can't cross."
"Let him tell him," Thomas said, leaning his forearms against the oak rail beside her. He looked out over the roofs of Argenton, where the first evening fires were starting to send up their thin, grey-blue columns of woodsmoke. "The Baron is looking at the walls, Victoria. He's looking at the pikes. But the real wall is the fact that the weavers can buy their salt with the paper you sign. Every time a carter takes a sheet of that scrip, he's helping us build the foundation."
Victoria looked down at her own fingers, where the purple manganese dust had left a dark stain beneath her nails. She reached out and touched the linen of Thomas's sleeve, her hand staying there until he turned his head to look at her.
"And what happens when the paper runs out?" she asked softly, her eyes tracking the movement of his jaw. "What happens if the King's men block the salt-wains at the coast? The people can't eat the iron, Thomas. They can't wear the code."
"They won't have to," Thomas said, his hand sliding over hers, his rough palm finding the cool, ink-stained skin of her fingers. "We're going to buy the salt pans at the mouth of the river next month. I've already checked the geological text; there's a limestone shelf near the southern flats that will let us build evaporation vats twice the size of the King's pans. We'll back the paper with the salt itself."
Victoria let out a low, breathless laugh, her head shaking against the wind. "You speak of the whole country as if it were a drawing you haven't finished yet. Do you ever just look at the river and see the water, Thomas? Without calculating the speed of the paddles?"
"Sometimes," Thomas murmured, his thumb sliding over her knuckles, feeling the small, raised scar where a needle had caught her when she was a girl in the manor house. "Usually when you're standing next to it."
She didn't pull her hand away. They stood together on the high gallery for a long time while the twilight deepened into a rich, velvety indigo along the northern ridges. The sound of the valley was changing now—the frantic thud-clack of the looms was slowing down as the shifts turned over, replaced by the low, domestic murmur of families gathering around the hearths in the brick cottages below. There was the smell of roasting salt-fish and fresh barley bread drifting from the lanes, a warm, human grease that defied the cold dampness of the stone hill.
Thomas pulled the glass slab from his tunic with his free hand, the screen waking up with a soft green glow that illuminated both their faces in the shadow of the archway.
Battery: 100%
Text Relay Only (Latency: +86,400.00s)
He checked the messaging interface, his eyes tracking the green characters of the text that had arrived from the future. His mother wrote that she had found his old college engineering ring—the one with the small steel facet—sitting in the bottom of a porcelain teacup behind the toaster. She mentioned that she had polished it with a bit of vinegar and put it on her own little finger, noting that it was a bit loose but it made her feel closer to him while the autumn wind was blowing through the yard.
Victoria leaned her shoulder against his, her eyes looking down at the screen without the fear that had characterized her first glimpses of the device. "What does she say?"
"She says she found my ring," Thomas whispered, his thumb locking the display until the green light vanished, leaving them in the honest, dark twilight of the 12th century. He turned to Victoria, his other hand reaching up to touch the soft wool of her hair square. "She says the house is quiet. But she's holding the shelf."
"Then we should hold ours," Victoria said, her fingers tightening around his before she led him toward the warm light of the counting room door. "Come inside, Thomas. Elias has found a jar of the southern plum wine, and Hamo swears he won't lift another limestone block tomorrow until you drink a cup with the masons."