The reply came up the ridge road on an ordinary Tuesday, carried not by a rider in the Baron's colors but by a boy from the crossroads tavern who'd been paid a penny to run it the last mile, which Victoria took, when she heard it, as its own small piece of information.
"He didn't send it through his bailiff," she said, turning the sealed square of vellum over in her hands before breaking it. "That means he doesn't want it read by anyone else along the way. Whatever he's written, he's written it for you alone."
The seal was the same — the Baron's own signet, not the castellan's mark — but the hand inside was shorter than Thomas had expected, and plainer.
Lord Thomas — I accept your invitation, and your terms. I will come under a banner of peace, unarmed but for what courtesy requires, on the first clear day after the Feast of Saint Agatha. I ask only this in return: that I be permitted to see the valley as it is, not as it is arranged to be shown to me. I have spent a year reading reports of what you have built. I find I no longer trust the reports, mine or anyone's. — Alaric, castellan.
Victoria read it twice before she set it down. "That's not the letter of a man planning an ambush."
"No."
"It's also not the letter of a man who's decided to like us." She tapped the last line. "He wants to see the valley as it is. That's not curiosity, Thomas. That's a man building a case, one way or the other, and he's telling you plainly that he intends to trust his own eyes over anything either of us says to him at the table."
"Then we show him the valley as it is."
"All of it?"
"All of it. The undercroft, the grid, the schoolhouse, the Codex if he asks to see it. If he's finally decided to judge us on what we've actually built instead of what the Baron's clerks have told him, I'd rather he judge it honestly than judge a performance." Thomas folded the letter carefully, the way he'd learned to fold things that mattered. "We don't have anything to hide from a man willing to look at it properly. We only have things to hide from one who's already decided what he'll see before he arrives."
Word moved through the valley faster than either of them could have managed it themselves, the way word always did, and by the time Thomas reached the forge that afternoon Wat already knew, and had opinions ready the way he always did.
"You're letting the man who tried to starve us walk through the gatehouse unarmed," Wat said, not looking up from the join he was hammering. "I've built walls my whole life, Thomas. I understand why a man wants an enemy where he can see him instead of guessing at him from a distance. I don't understand why you'd hand him the tour."
"Because a wall only works if the man on the other side of it believes it's worth respecting. Right now Alaric respects us the way a man respects a fire he hasn't been burned by yet — from a distance, and without much conviction. I'd rather he leave here believing something true, even if some of what's true makes him more dangerous, than keep believing whatever half-truths his clerks have been feeding him."
Wat considered that, the hammer pausing mid-stroke. "And if what's true makes him decide to burn the whole valley down properly, now that he knows exactly where to put the torch?"
"Then at least I'll have been wrong for a reason I can live with, instead of hiding something out of fear and having it found anyway." Thomas met the blacksmith's eye. "You don't have to agree with me, Wat. I'm not asking you to stand down the watch. I'm asking you to let him see the forge along with everything else, if he asks."
"I'll let him see the forge." Wat resumed his hammering, harder than before, which was as close as he came to conceding a point he still didn't like. "But I'll be standing in it when he does, and I'll have this in my hand the whole while." He held up the half-finished blade. "Politeness has its limits, Thomas, and mine end at the gatehouse door."
Elias, when Thomas found him at the base of the near tower that evening, took the news with his usual flat, cataloguing calm, already turning it into a problem of logistics rather than nerves.
"I'll have both towers manned the whole day, and Wat's boy watching the ridge road from first light," he said, sketching a rough timeline on the corner of his sightline map without being asked. "If he comes with more men than he's promised, we'll know an hour before he reaches the first milestone. If he comes alone, as written, we'll know that too, and you can decide how much of a welcome that earns him."
"You don't seem worried."
"I am not paid to be worried. I am paid to know things before they happen, which is a different discipline entirely, and considerably more useful to you tonight than worry would be." He rolled the map, tucking it under his arm. "For what it's worth, Thomas — a man who writes that he no longer trusts his own reports is a man who has already started arguing with himself. That argument is usually easier to win than the man's original position was."
Thomas walked back down from the ridge in the last of the light, the valley spread out below him exactly as it had been every evening for months — the grid holding, the towers steady, the smoke rising thin and ordinary from a hundred chimneys that had no idea a stranger's judgment was coming to walk among them in a fortnight's time. He found that he wasn't afraid of it, not exactly. He was something closer to what Elias had described in himself: a man who had finally stopped guessing at an enemy from a distance, and had started, instead, waiting to find out.