The first tower went up on the near hill in four days, which Wat considered a personal insult to every stone he had ever laid. He had wanted six. Thomas had wanted three. Elias, who wanted only to see the thing finished so he could stop sleeping on the ridge with a tinder-box and a stack of green wood, had simply started building before either of them had finished arguing about it.
"It's not the height that worries me," Wat said, standing at the base of the timber frame with his arms crossed over his chest, studying the joinery the way he studied a bad weld. "It's the wind. You put a shuttered lantern box at the top of forty feet of green oak, and the first proper gale off the ridge is going to take your signal tower and lay it across the sheep track like a felled tree. I've built belfries that didn't shake this much, and a belfry doesn't need a man standing in it at midnight."
"Then brace it," Thomas said.
"I am bracing it. I'm telling you what it costs to brace it properly, which is four more days and the good elm I was saving for the flume gears." Wat spat to the side, which was as close as he came to agreeing with anyone. "You want a light on this hill by the week's end, you'll get a light on this hill. Whether it's still standing by Christmas is a different conversation."
Elias climbed down from the platform, his hands raw from the cold and the rope-work, a tin mirror slung across his back like a soldier's shield. "The sightline holds," he said, ignoring the argument entirely, which Thomas was beginning to suspect was simply how Elias survived being around Wat. "I can see the second hill clean from the platform, and from the second hill, on a clear day, you can just make the smoke off the Oakhaven cathedral roof. Three relays, as I said. A shuttered flame at night, the mirror by day. We won't send sentences. We'll send counts — a burn for a wagon-train, two for riders, three for trouble."
"Trouble," Wat repeated, unimpressed. "That's a wide word for a man to bet a tower on."
"It's the only word that travels fast enough to matter." Elias set the mirror down against the tower's base and rubbed his hands together. "A courier can tell you what kind of trouble it was. The fire only has to tell you to start running."
Thomas watched the two of them — Wat testing the brace joints with his boot, Elias already sketching the second hill's platform in the margin of his sightline map — and felt something settle in his chest that the ledger numbers never quite gave him. Numbers told him the wire held. This told him the valley was starting to think in a language none of them had spoken a year ago, and it wasn't his language either. It was theirs now.
He pulled the phone from his tunic out of habit more than need — battery full, signal holding, nothing from the anomaly relay since the day it had gone silent. He put it away without opening the letter that had come that morning. It could wait until the tower was standing.
"Four days, Wat," he said. "I'll find the elm somewhere else if I have to strip it out of the old mill frame."
"You'll strip it out of the old mill frame over my objection, and then you'll come to me in the spring when the flume gears are grinding themselves to powder, and I'll remind you I said so." Wat picked up his mallet. "But aye. Four days."
Victoria found him still standing at the base of the tower an hour later, her breath fogging in the last light. She didn't ask about bales or scrip. She looked up at the half-built frame, at Elias's mirror catching the dying sun, and was quiet for a moment.
"It looks like a gallows," she said finally.
"It's a lighthouse."
"I know what it is, Thomas. I'm telling you what the Baron's men will call it when they see it from the ridge road." She pulled her cloak tighter, watching Wat's men lash the second cross-brace into place. "You've spent a year building things that hide in cellars and undercrofts. This is the first thing you've built that the whole valley has to look at."
He hadn't thought of it that way, and it cost him a moment to answer. "Maybe it's time something did."
She didn't argue the point, though he could see, in the set of her mouth, that she wasn't entirely certain he was right. It was a smaller disagreement than the ones that used to frighten him — no ledgers at stake, no lives — but he noticed it anyway, the way he was starting to notice all the places where she no longer simply agreed.
"Four days," she said, echoing Wat without seeming to realize it. "I'll have the scrip ready to pay the rope-men. Try not to let it fall on anyone in the meantime."