Whitcombe was larger than anything Elias had prepared himself for, and he had prepared himself, by his own account afterward, rather thoroughly.
He'd left before first light on the third day, alone, with nothing but a letter of introduction from Victoria and a purse of scrip he wasn't sure anyone in a proper market town would even recognize. He returned six days later, mud to the knee, his horse blown, and found Thomas and Victoria both waiting at the tally-bench before he'd even finished swinging down from the saddle.
"Tell us plainly," Victoria said. "Whatever it is."
Elias didn't sit, didn't reach for the water someone offered him, simply stood there with the particular flat, exhausted precision he brought to every report, good or bad. "The archive exists. It's held in the undercroft of the collegiate church, three streets from the court itself, and the clerk who keeps it is an old man who has clearly not been asked an interesting question in a decade and was delighted, in a mournful sort of way, to finally have one."
"And the grant?"
"I found it. Or what remains of it." He drew a folded, careful copy from inside his cloak, his own hand, painstaking. "Your original grant was witnessed and sealed properly, three years ago, exactly as your own copy shows. The difficulty isn't the grant itself. The difficulty is the man who witnessed it."
"Who witnessed it?"
"A canon of the collegiate church named Osric, acting for the diocese as the Crown's customary second witness on grants touching Church-adjacent land — which yours does, by virtue of the old tithe boundary running through the lower pasture. Osric died eighteen months ago. And it appears — the old clerk was quite specific about this, once I'd bought him enough ale to loosen the specifics — that Osric's own authority to witness such grants had lapsed the year before yours was sealed, on account of a disputed election within the chapter that was never properly resolved before his death settled the matter by simply removing the question."
Victoria's face had gone very still. "So the second witness on our grant may not have held the authority to witness it at all."
"That is Alaric's argument, as best I can reconstruct it without having read his brief directly. Not that your grant was fraudulent. Not that the Baron didn't intend to give you the land. Only that the paper itself is technically defective, through no fault of yours, in a manner that a sufficiently patient court could use to declare the whole tenure unsettled and start the question fresh — this time, presumably, with the Baron's own interests rather better represented than they were the first time around." Elias finally accepted the water, drank half of it in one motion. "I would not have found this on my own. The old clerk found it, three days into my asking, because he remembered the dispute personally and had simply never had occasion to connect it to a grant sealed a full year later, in a valley he'd never heard of, to a man he'd never met."
Thomas felt the floor of the conversation shift under him in a way the summons alone hadn't quite managed. "Is there anything that fixes it? A second sealing, a fresh witness—"
"There may be," Hamo said, from the doorway, where he'd been listening without announcing himself, drawn in by the sound of Elias's return. "Canon law allows for a defective witnessing to be cured, retroactively, by ratification — a subsequent act by proper authority that confirms the original intent, even if the original form was flawed. If the Bishop's own chancellor were willing to issue such a ratification, citing the grant's long and undisputed use as evidence of its legitimacy, it would very likely close the gap Alaric has found."
"The chancellor who validated our standing through the winter blockade," Victoria said slowly.
"The same. He has already shown, once, that he is inclined to find in your favor when the alternative is disorder in a March he'd rather stay quiet." Hamo folded his hands, and for once there was something almost like satisfaction in his careful voice. "I cannot promise he will do so again. But it is, I think, a more solid ground to stand on than three weeks of Elias's excellent penmanship copied out of a dead canon's disputed election."
Victoria was already moving, already reaching for a fresh sheet, her exhaustion from the last hour's tension visibly burning off into the sharper, more useful fuel of having somewhere to direct it. "Then I'll write to the chancellor tonight, and I'll ask Hamo to help me phrase it in language his own clerks won't be able to pick apart. We have a little more than two weeks before Whitcombe. That's not generous, but it isn't nothing either."
Elias, finally allowed to sit, lowered himself onto the bench with the particular care of a man whose whole body was informing him, belatedly, of six days in the saddle. "For what it's worth," he said, to no one in particular, "the old clerk asked me, as I was leaving, whether the valley he'd been hearing rumors about for a year actually existed, or whether it was simply a story merchants told to make the north sound more interesting than it was. I told him it existed. He didn't quite believe me. I found that oddly reassuring, given everything else I learned this week."
"Why reassuring?" Thomas asked.
"Because a valley small enough to still be a rumor in Whitcombe is a valley Alaric has to work considerably harder to make anyone at court actually care about." Elias closed his eyes briefly, allowing himself, for once, something close to a smile. "Let him prove we're worth destroying. It'll cost him more than he thinks."