Spring came in earnest before the trouble did, which Thomas would later think was almost unfair — three weeks of planting, of the garden going from black earth to green shoots, of letters arriving daily and on time, before the second letter from Alaric arrived to remind him that a peace built on honest admiration was not the same thing as a peace built on anything permanent.
This one came by proper courier, sealed with the Baron's mark rather than Alaric's own, and Victoria read it standing at the tally-bench with her whole body going very still in a way Thomas had learned to recognize as worse than shouting.
"It's not from Alaric," she said. "It's a summons. The Marches' court, sitting at Whitcombe, three weeks from the date of this seal. You're required to answer a claim of unlawful enclosure — that the valley and its works sit on land whose tenure was never properly settled when your grant was first drawn, and that the Baron, as ultimate lord of the fee, is owed a formal accounting of everything built upon it."
"Alaric wrote this."
"Alaric's hand is all over the reasoning, even though his name isn't on the seal. This is exactly what he warned us he'd do, in the letter, if you'll recall — he told you honestly that he believed we owed nothing to the old order, and that he expected we'd eventually feel free of every obligation to it. He wasn't confessing a fear, Thomas. He was telling you his plan." She set the summons down with the particular precision of someone controlling her hands very deliberately. "He's not attacking the scrip anymore. He's attacking the ground itself. If a court rules our tenure was never lawful, every stone we've laid these three years sits on land the Baron can claim was always his."
"Can he actually win that?"
"I don't know. That's what frightens me. I understand ledgers. I understand scrip and discount rates and the slow arithmetic of trust. I do not understand a hundred years of tenure law well enough to tell you whether Alaric has found a genuine flaw in our claim or simply a plausible-sounding one, and the difference matters enormously in front of a judge who owes his position to the Baron in the first place."
Thomas found Hamo in the schoolhouse an hour later, on the theory — correct, as it turned out — that a former monk might know more of Church and Crown law than anyone else in the valley.
"Enclosure claims are common enough," Hamo said, setting aside the flow tables without complaint, apparently relieved to have a different kind of problem to think through. "Land granted informally, or granted by a lord who later dies or falls from favor before the grant is properly recorded — it happens more often than either Church or Crown would like to admit, and it leaves exactly the kind of gap a patient man can drive a legal argument through. I don't know the particulars of your own grant. I do know that if Alaric has found a genuine gap, no amount of goodwill from your visit will close it. Courts rule on parchment, not on character."
"Do we have the original grant?"
"You have whatever the Baron's own clerks recorded three years ago, which is very likely exactly the document Alaric intends to attack." Hamo folded his hands, and for a moment the old scripture-cadence crept back into his voice, though the certainty behind it had long since drained away. "If I may say something that will not be welcome — this is precisely the danger I feared, once, from an entirely different direction. I believed your device was an offense against the natural order because it let you act without asking permission of anyone above you. I was wrong about the nature of the offense. I was not entirely wrong that a man who builds outside the old permissions eventually has to answer to them, one way or another. Alaric has simply chosen the more patient weapon."
That evening, Victoria spread every document the valley possessed across the tally-bench — the original grant, three years of scrip records, the letters from the Bishop's chancellor validating their standing through the winter blockade — and worked past the ordinary hour of sleep, cross-referencing dates and seals with the grim, methodical thoroughness Thomas had only otherwise seen her bring to a genuine crisis.
"I want Elias riding to Whitcombe within the week," she said, not looking up. "Not to the court itself — to the archive that holds the original grant records, if such a thing still exists in any form we can reach before the summons date. If Alaric found a gap, I want to see the exact shape of it before we're standing in front of a judge discovering it for the first time."
"And if there isn't time?"
She finally looked up at him, and there was no comfort in her expression at all, only the flat, determined clarity she brought to a fight she'd already decided was worth having regardless of the odds. "Then we go to Whitcombe anyway, and we make our case with whatever we have, and we find out exactly how much three years of keeping our word is worth in front of a man who's never had to keep his." She closed the ledger in front of her, hard enough that the sound carried across the empty undercroft. "Alaric told us he intended to keep watching until he decided whether we were a danger or simply a fact, Thomas. It appears he's made up his mind rather sooner than either of us expected."
Outside, the spring rain had started again, soft and steady against the shutters, indifferent to the sudden cold that had settled over the tally-bench and everyone gathered around it.