Alaric's promised letter took eleven days to arrive, which Victoria noted, over supper, with the particular satisfaction of a woman who enjoyed being right about the pace of other people's caution.
"A man who writes in eleven days is a man who drafted it four times before he trusted a single sentence," she said, breaking the seal at the table rather than waiting for the privacy of the tally-bench. "Alaric doesn't strike me as someone who wastes a fortnight on anything he hasn't already decided. He wasted it because he kept changing his mind about what to admit."
She read it once in silence, and then read the middle portion aloud, her voice carefully flat in the way she used when she wanted Thomas to hear the words without her own opinion of them attached first.
I have made my report to the Baron as I said I would, and I have made it honestly, though I confess it cost me something to write a document that will please him less than the one he was expecting. I told him the scrip is sound, that the medicine is real, and that the valley cannot be starved into submission because it no longer depends on anything he controls. I told him also — and this is the part I suspect will trouble your household as much as it troubled me to set down — that a place which owes nothing to the old order will, in time, feel no obligation to preserve it. I do not say this as a threat. I say it because I believe it is true, and because you asked me, once, to judge you honestly rather than kindly. I intend to keep doing both.
Victoria set the letter down. "That's not a peace, Thomas. That's a very well-mannered warning."
"It's also not a lie."
"No. It isn't." She said it without much comfort in her voice. "That's what troubles me about him more than anything Wat's ever said. If he were simply an enemy, I'd know exactly how much of what he says to trust. He's not. He's an honest man who's decided, correctly, that everything we've built is a slow-moving argument against everything he's spent his life serving. Honest enemies are so much harder to plan against than dishonest ones."
Wat, when Thomas found him at the forge the next morning, had considerably less patience for the nuance of it.
"He called my blade fine work and my valley a threat to the natural order, in the same breath, more or less," the blacksmith said, testing a fresh edge against his thumb. "I've met men who lied to my face with more consistency than that."
"You don't think he meant the compliment?"
"I think he meant both things at once, which is worse. A man who hates you cleanly is easy to plan for. A man who admires you and distrusts you in the same sentence — that's the kind who ends up doing the most damage, because he never quite decides which feeling to act on until it's too late to plan around." Wat set the blade down, unfinished, and looked at Thomas with more gravity than he usually allowed himself before midday. "You did well enough yesterday, all the same. I'll not pretend otherwise. But don't mistake a man's good manners for the end of the argument, Thomas. You've only just started having it out loud instead of by fence and writ."
The valley itself, in the days that followed, seemed to settle back into its ordinary rhythm with a speed that surprised Thomas more than anything Alaric had said — the same smoke, the same looms, the same evening tally at the bench, as though a castellan's first visit to the heart of their whole enterprise were simply one more Tuesday to be absorbed and moved past. Only Aldith's schoolhouse carried any visible trace of it; she'd begun, unbidden, keeping a second, smaller quire beside the fever book, this one recording nothing but ordinary remedies explained in plain, simple language — in case, she'd told Victoria, when asked, someone from outside ever wants to learn it properly instead of merely watching it happen.
Thomas found himself, that evening, standing at the edge of the garden plot Victoria had cleared back in the first good week of the thaw, the black earth finally soft enough to take a seed. He hadn't planted anything yet. He wasn't sure, standing there in the last of the light, that he'd fully believed until this moment that the valley would still be here to grow anything in, come summer.
Victoria found him there, as she so often did, and didn't ask what he was thinking, only stood beside him and looked at the same turned earth.
"We're still standing," she said finally.
"We are."
"Then plant something, Thomas. Whatever else Alaric writes to the Baron, whatever the Codex ends up recording about all of this — a valley that's too afraid to put a seed in the ground because a man on a horse might come back is not a valley that's actually won anything." She crouched, without ceremony, and pressed her thumb into the soft earth to test its give. "Spring's coming whether he approves of us or not. I'd rather meet it with something growing."
He knelt beside her, and for a while neither of them said anything further, the two of them simply working the cold, patient ground together while the light went from gold to gray to the first honest dark of the season — a small, unremarkable thing, and, Thomas thought, exactly the kind of ordinary victory the valley had spent three years quietly, stubbornly earning.