The feast day itself brought rain, which everyone in the valley seemed to take as a personal insult to their planning, and it was two days more before the sky finally broke clean and cold and undeniable.
Elias sent word up from the gatehouse before the sun had properly cleared the ridge. "A banner on the ridge road, white and unmarked, riding slow. Six horses. No more than that, and no armor I can see from this distance." A pause, and then, dryer than the situation strictly called for: "It appears he meant what he wrote."
Victoria was already dressed for it — not in her working clothes, but not in anything that could be mistaken for finery either, a deliberate middle ground Thomas suspected she'd chosen the way she chose every other detail of an argument she meant to win. "Six horses," she said, doing the arithmetic instinctively. "One for him, most likely a clerk, and four for escort he's promised won't be armed. That's either very brave of him or very foolish, and I haven't decided which."
"Maybe it's neither. Maybe he actually believes what he wrote."
"Men who believe things still get to be brave or foolish about believing them, Thomas." She checked the small mirror by the door once, briskly, and turned away from it as if annoyed at herself for the vanity. "Where do you want to receive him?"
They had argued this once already, gently, over supper two nights before. Victoria had wanted the undercroft — the heart of the thing, the place that would leave no doubt about the scale of what they'd built. Thomas had wanted the gatehouse courtyard, open air, nothing hidden and nothing looming either. In the end it was Victoria who'd conceded, on the grounds that a man who'd asked to see the valley honestly ought to be allowed to arrive somewhere he could actually breathe.
"The courtyard," Thomas said now. "Same as we agreed."
Wat was already there when they arrived, standing near enough to the gate to be visible, far enough back to make no obvious statement about it, a half-finished blade resting with deliberate casualness across his workbench where anyone could see it without anyone needing to say why. He caught Thomas's eye and gave a single short nod, which was as much reassurance as the morning was going to get from him.
Diccon had been given the task of standing near the schoolhouse door with an armful of vellum — not staged, exactly, but not entirely accidental either, a quiet demonstration of what an ordinary morning in Argenton actually looked like when nobody was performing it. Aldith had refused outright to change her routine at all, on the grounds that a valley pretending to be busier or calmer than it truly was would only prove Alaric right to distrust every report he'd ever received about the place.
"If he wants to see us as we are," she'd said, when Victoria raised it, "then he can watch me change a dressing on a boy's burned hand exactly like I would on any other Tuesday. I'm not putting on a show for a man who's spent a year trying to starve my patients."
Nobody had argued with her.
They waited longer than Thomas expected, the sun climbing while the party made its slow, deliberate way down from the ridge road — slow enough, he realized eventually, that it had to be intentional, a man giving the valley every chance to see him coming and decide, at leisure, whether they trusted what they saw.
Old Joan appeared at his elbow without his noticing her arrival, wrapped in her good shawl instead of her working one, watching the ridge road with the flat, unhurried patience of a woman who had outlived several lords already and expected, privately, to outlive this one too.
"You're standing like a man waiting to be sentenced," she said.
"I don't know what he's going to say."
"No. Nor does he know what he's going to find, which is rather the point of the exercise, isn't it?" She patted his arm once, briskly, in the manner of someone comforting a nervous child at a wedding. "Whatever he decides about you today, Thomas, this valley is still standing, and it'll still be standing tomorrow whatever he writes about it afterward. Try to remember that while you're busy being frightened."
He hadn't realized, until she said it, that he had been.
The banner crested the last rise a few minutes later — plain white cloth on a plain ash pole, carried by a rider Thomas didn't recognize, and behind it, unhurried, unarmored, a man in a dark riding cloak whose face Thomas had only ever seen described secondhand in Victoria's reports and Elias's careful, cataloguing accounts.
Alaric reined in at the milestone rather than the gate itself, and sat there a moment, looking down at the valley spread below him — the towers, the smoke, the ordinary business of an ordinary morning going on entirely without regard for his arrival — with an expression Thomas was too far away yet to read.
Then he nudged his horse forward, toward the gate, toward all of them standing there waiting, and Thomas felt Victoria's hand find his, once, briefly, before releasing it again to stand on her own.
"Here he comes," she said, quietly, and there was no calculation left in her voice at all — only the same plain, unguarded uncertainty Thomas felt himself.