Victoria found the salt problem before Thomas did, which was, he was beginning to admit, how most of the real problems surfaced these days.
"The scrip works because people trust it will buy grain and cloth," she said, spreading her ledgers across the tally-bench with the particular briskness she used when she'd already decided she was right and was only explaining herself as a courtesy. "But grain rots and cloth wears. Silver doesn't need trust — it's simply worth what it weighs. If we're going to run this valley's money on paper instead of metal, the paper needs to be backed by something that keeps."
"We back it with the work. The mills, the wire, the—"
"You back it with things that exist because you keep building them. I want to back it with something that exists whether you build anything ever again." She tapped a column of figures. "Salt. It doesn't spoil. Every household in the Marches needs it every season, war or peace, plague or plenty. If Argenton controls a salt-pan, the scrip isn't a promise about your cleverness anymore. It's a promise about a hole in the ground that isn't going anywhere."
Thomas looked at the figures without really seeing them, still turning over the fact that she had built this argument entirely on her own, in the margins of a ledger, without asking him first. It was, he realized, exactly the kind of thing he kept saying he wanted from her — and it still caught him slightly off guard to receive it.
"There's a brine spring two days south, past the Oakhaven road," she went on. "The monks at the priory hold the rights and don't work it — not enough hands, and the Abbot has no head for it. I want to offer them scrip against a share of the yield."
"That's outside the valley. That's outside anything we can defend."
"Everything we do from here on is going to be outside anything we can defend, Thomas. That was true the day you put a light on that hillside." She met his eyes, unhurried, entirely certain. "I'm not asking your permission. I'm telling you where I'm riding next month, and I need the scrip printed before I go."
He almost argued it further out of habit — the same reflex that made him check a calculation twice even when the first answer had already been right — and then didn't, because there wasn't actually anything wrong with it. It was a better idea than the one he'd have had.
"Take Elias," he said instead. "If there's a road worth knowing between here and a salt spring, he'll want to have mapped it before you've finished the negotiation."
"I intended to. I only told you first because you like to feel consulted." She was already gathering her ledgers, already three steps ahead of the conversation, and it occurred to him — not for the first time, but more clearly than usual — that he had married a woman who ran a shadow country out of the margins of a rent-book, and that the valley's actual government had stopped being a thing he did alone somewhere around the time he'd stopped noticing.