The well at the lower crossing went bad on a Thursday, and by Friday evening half the lower parish had already decided whose fault it was.
Thomas heard about it from Aldith before he heard about it from anyone official — she arrived at the gatehouse out of breath, her apron still damp from the wash-house, with two children trailing behind her who looked more frightened than sick.
"Three families drew water from the lower well this morning and every one of them is retching by noon," she said, without preamble. "I don't yet know if it's the water or something else, but I need you to shut the sluice above that crossing until I do, because half the parish has already decided they know the answer, and the answer they've decided on is you."
"Me?"
"Your wire, your current, your devil's light on the hill. Old Bethun's husband stood in the lane this morning telling anyone who'd listen that the 'unnatural fire in the ground' has poisoned the water same as it poisons a man's sleep, and half the people listening to him were nodding before he'd even finished the sentence." She said it flatly, without any particular anger at the accusation itself, only at the time it was costing her. "I don't care what they believe about your machines, Thomas. I care that three children are vomiting and I don't yet know why, and fear is going to make it harder to treat them properly whichever of us turns out to be right."
Wat's assessment, when Thomas found him at the sluice an hour later, was considerably less patient. "It's not the current," he said, without needing to be asked, already down on one knee at the streambank studying the water itself rather than any wire near it. "Look here." He held up a palmful of the wet gravel, and Thomas could see, even without Wat's trained eye, the faint, sickly sheen across it. "That's not anything of yours. That's tanning-waste, or close to it — lime and rot, the kind of thing that comes off a hide-yard upstream, not off a copper line buried six feet under dry ground on the far side of the ridge."
"A hide-yard where?"
"There's none in the valley proper. But there's a tannery two miles north, just outside the old tithe boundary, that opened not eight months back — new owner, new methods, dumping his waste-lime straight into the feeder stream rather than pit it and let it settle, the way any craftsman with sense would." Wat let the gravel fall back into the water, wiping his hand on his breeches with obvious disgust. "This isn't your devil's current, Thomas. This is an idiot upstream cutting corners on his lime-pits, and every family below him paying for it in their water."
"Can you prove that to a frightened parish faster than Bethun's husband can spread the opposite story?"
"Probably not," Wat admitted, which was, from him, an unusually honest concession. "Fear moves faster than fact. Always has."
It was Hamo, in the end, who found the way through it — not by disputing the rumor directly, but by walking down to the lower crossing himself, in the plain, unremarkable clothes he still wore from his years in the Church, and standing among the frightened families with a patience none of the rest of them could have managed.
"I once believed, as many of you still do, that a light no priest had blessed was an offense against the natural order," he told them, without preamble, in the same flat, unadorned voice he used for his flow calculations. "I nearly died proving myself right, or so I believed at the time. I have spent three years since studying exactly how water moves and exactly how sickness spreads, and I will tell you plainly, as a man who once shared your fear and has since had to unlearn it at some cost to himself: this water is fouled by lime and rot carried down from the tannery upstream, not by anything buried in this valley. I do not ask you to trust Lord Thomas's word for it. I ask you to trust that I once wanted very badly for the current to be the villain, and studied it long enough to be certain it isn't."
It did not convince everyone. Old Bethun's husband, by all accounts, remained loudly unconvinced for weeks afterward, and Thomas understood, listening to Victoria's report of it that evening, that some part of the valley would likely go on blaming the wire for every misfortune that touched it, current or no current, for as long as the wire itself remained a mystery to them.
But it convinced enough. Aldith treated the sickened children with clean water and rest and they recovered within days, precisely as she'd expected once the true cause was known. A formal complaint went, through Victoria's careful drafting, to the tannery's owner and to the manor court that technically held jurisdiction over the feeder stream, demanding a proper lime-pit be dug before the next season's tanning began.
And Thomas found himself, that night, turning over a smaller, colder thought that had nothing to do with lime or rumor at all — that a valley's enemies did not always need to invent a lie when a genuine misfortune, arriving at the right moment, would serve their purposes just as well without anyone having to lift a finger toward sabotage at all. He did not think, watching Wat's certainty and Hamo's patient testimony do their slow work through the parish, that this particular trouble had come from Alaric's hand.
He was considerably less certain it would be the last one that didn't.