He was smaller than the letters had made him.
Thomas had built an image of Alaric out of a year of secondhand reports — a shape more than a man, all legal maneuvering and patient siege-craft, the kind of adversary who existed mostly as a pressure felt through Victoria's ledgers and Wat's grumbling. The man who dismounted at the gate was ordinary-sized, gray at the temples earlier than his years should have allowed, with the particular stillness of someone who had trained himself, long ago, never to let his face give away a negotiation before he'd chosen to end it.
He handed his reins to his own clerk rather than to anyone from the valley, a small, deliberate courtesy — I will not make your stable-hands responsible for my horse — and crossed the last few yards on foot, alone, the escort holding back exactly as promised.
"Lord Thomas." His voice was quieter than Thomas expected, and entirely without the sneer Wat had always mimicked when relaying the castellan's letters. "I've spent a year addressing you through parchment. I find I don't know, now that I'm here, whether the title is even the correct one to use."
"It's not, particularly. I'm not sure any title fits what I actually am here."
"That," Alaric said, "is the most honest answer anyone in your valley has given me since this began." He glanced past Thomas, taking in the courtyard — the forge smoke, the schoolhouse, Diccon still standing with his armful of vellum trying not to look as though he was standing there on purpose. "You said in your letter I could see the valley as it is. I intend to hold you to that. I would ask, if it doesn't offend your wife, that we begin with her ledgers rather than your machines. I've heard a great deal about your wire and your water-wheels. I've heard almost nothing honest about the money."
Victoria, who had been standing a half-step behind Thomas with the particular composure she wore like armor, didn't so much as blink at being addressed directly. "It doesn't offend me in the least, castellan. I've been waiting a year for someone from the Baron's household to ask me an honest question instead of writing me a threat."
"Then we understand each other already, on at least one point." Something in Alaric's expression shifted, very slightly — not quite a smile, but the ghost of one, gone before Thomas could be certain he'd seen it.
They walked the tally-bench first, Victoria laying the ledgers open without hesitation — the scrip issuance, the discount rates, the slow, steady conversion of the lower parish from silver to paper. Alaric read with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who had clearly spent years learning to find the lie buried in an honest-looking column, and found, by his own visible surprise, none.
"This is not what I was told," he said finally.
"What were you told?" Thomas asked.
"That you had debased the currency of the March with worthless paper backed by nothing but your own claims, and that the parish would starve the moment you stopped propping the fiction up by force." He closed the ledger, carefully, and looked at Victoria rather than Thomas when he spoke again. "Your discount rate has held steady for four months. That is not the behavior of a fiction, my lady. That is the behavior of a currency that has found something real to stand on."
"Salt," Victoria said simply. "A spring two days south, and the trust of a priory that took our paper before anyone forced them to. You're welcome to verify it yourself. I'll give you the route."
"I may take you up on that." He said it the way a man agrees to a term he intends to actually use, not the empty courtesy Thomas had half expected.
They walked the undercroft next, and here Alaric slowed, his composure cracking for the first time — not into fear, Thomas thought, watching him, but into something closer to the specific vertigo of a man confronting a fact too large to file under anything he already understood. He stood a long while before the walnut rotor, watching it turn, saying nothing.
"My grandfather fought at Poitiers," he said eventually, apropos of nothing Thomas could immediately place. "He used to say a battle was decided in the first hour, by whoever understood the ground better than the other man. I have spent a year believing I understood this ground — your ground — better than you did, because I had law on my side, and tenure, and the weight of a hundred years of custom." He turned from the rotor to look at Thomas directly. "I no longer believe that. I don't yet know what I believe instead. But I no longer believe that."
Wat was waiting at the forge, exactly as promised, the half-finished blade resting where anyone could see it, his single eye following Alaric's every movement with open, unapologetic suspicion. Alaric noted the blade, noted Wat's stance, and inclined his head slightly — an acknowledgment, not of threat, but of the blacksmith's right to make one.
"You don't trust me," Alaric said to him directly.
"No."
"Good. I'd think less of the man who let me in here unwatched." He studied the half-forged blade a moment longer. "That's fine work. I've seen the Baron's own armorer produce worse."
Wat grunted, which from Wat was practically an embrace, and said nothing further.
It was Aldith, in the end, who unsettled Alaric more than anything else in the valley had managed — not because she performed anything for him, but precisely because she didn't. She was mid-dressing on a boy's burned hand when they reached the schoolhouse, and she didn't stop, didn't look up beyond a brief, assessing glance at the castellan standing in her doorway, and continued the work with the same brisk, unhurried competence she brought to every ordinary Tuesday.
"This is the medicine you've heard rumors of," Thomas said quietly, letting her work rather than interrupting it.
Alaric watched for a long moment — the clean linen, the careful hands, the boy's face slowly losing its fear under her steady, unbothered attention — and said nothing at all until they were well clear of the room.
"I have watched men die of wounds smaller than that boy's, for want of exactly that kind of care," he said finally. "I do not know what to do with the fact that you have built it here, in a valley the Crown does not even properly tax, while men in the Baron's own garrison still die of the same small wounds every winter."
"You could ask us to teach it."
"I could." He didn't commit to it, but he didn't dismiss it either, and Thomas understood, watching him, that this was likely the closest thing to a concession Alaric was capable of making on his first day. "I came here today prepared to write a report confirming everything I already believed, Lord Thomas. I find myself, instead, in the uncomfortable position of having to write one that admits I was wrong about most of it."
"Not all of it?"
"No. Not all of it." They had stopped near the gate again, the light going long and gold, his escort waiting patiently with the horses. "You have built something extraordinary here. I will say that honestly, in writing, to the Baron himself. But you have also built it entirely outside the law that has held this March together for a hundred years, and extraordinary things built outside the law have a way of becoming a law unto themselves, whether their builder intends it or not. I do not yet know if that is a danger or simply a fact. I intend to keep watching until I do."
"That's fair."
"It is the most I can honestly offer you today." He mounted his own horse this time, without waiting for his clerk, and looked down at the valley once more — the smoke, the light on the flume-water, the ordinary, unshowy business of a place that had simply gone on being itself the entire time he'd walked through it. "I will write to you again. Properly, this time — not threats, and not tenure-law. I find I have questions that will take longer than an afternoon to ask."
He turned the banner-bearer back toward the ridge road without further ceremony, and Thomas stood at the gate with Victoria beside him, watching the small white flag recede up the frozen track, until Wat's voice broke the silence from somewhere behind them.
"Well," the blacksmith said, setting down his blade at last. "That could have gone considerably worse."
"It could have," Victoria agreed, and there was something in her voice — not quite relief, not quite triumph, but close kin to both — that Thomas hadn't heard from her in a very long time. "It could have gone considerably worse than that."