The dye works burned three nights later, and there was nothing accidental about the way it started.
Thomas woke to the bell before he woke to the smell of smoke, Wat's own signal hammering out across the valley in a pattern he'd never had cause to use before, and by the time Thomas reached the lower sheds the whole eastern wall was already gone, the vats of scarlet dye boiling over into the gutter in long, obscene streaks that looked, in the firelight, unsettlingly like blood.
Wat had a line of buckets going before Thomas even arrived, shouting names and positions with none of his usual dry patience, and it was another hour before the fire gave up enough ground for anyone to stop and look properly at what had caused it.
"There," Wat said, once the worst of it had died to smoking char, pointing to the base of the collapsed wall with a grim, certain finality. "Two points of catch, not one. A fire that starts by accident starts in one place — a dropped lamp, a spark from the vat fire itself. This started in two places at once, on opposite sides of the shed, close enough together in time that whoever lit them barely had to hurry between." He crouched at the nearer scorch mark, sifting through the ash with the same careful attention he'd given the poisoned gravel three nights before. "And here — pitch. Someone brought their own kindling. The dye shed doesn't keep pitch on hand. There'd be no reason to."
Victoria arrived as he said it, still in her nightclothes under a hastily thrown cloak, and Thomas watched her take in the two scorch marks, the smell of pitch beneath the smoke, and go very quiet in the particular way that meant she was already several steps ahead of whatever anyone else was about to say.
"This isn't Alaric," she said.
"You're certain?"
"I'm not certain of anything except that it isn't his method. Alaric fights with parchment and patience — a summons, a canon's lapsed authority, a slow siege on our tenure that he can defend honestly if it ever comes to it. A man who writes to warn you, in his own hand, that he intends to keep watching rather than acting does not then sneak out in the night and burn a dye shed. It gains him nothing he couldn't gain more cleanly through the court, and it risks everything he's spent a year building toward with the Baron — a reputation, however grudging, for honesty." She looked at the ruined shed, and something in her voice went colder than the fire's ashes. "This is someone who wants us to think it's Alaric. Or someone who doesn't care whose name gets blamed, so long as the damage is done before the Whitcombe court can even convene."
Elias, summoned from the tower before dawn, confirmed within the hour what Wat's instinct had already suggested. "Two sets of footprints in the mud behind the shed, both leading back toward the ridge road rather than from anywhere inside the valley proper. Neither set matches boots I recognize from any household here." He crouched at the clearest print, measuring it with a length of cord out of long habit. "Whoever it was knew the tower schedule well enough to come between watches. That's not a stranger's luck. That's a man who's been watching us as carefully as I've been watching him."
"The stranger's horse," Victoria said slowly. "The one with the foreign tack, from the winter. Elias always thought whoever left it hadn't gone far."
"I thought exactly that, and said so, and then months passed without incident and I let myself believe I'd been wrong." Elias's flat, cataloguing calm had a harder edge to it than Thomas had heard from him before. "I was not wrong. I was simply patient in the wrong direction."
They lost the dye shed entirely, and three months of contracted color-work besides, and it was Old Joan, arriving with the dawn to see the damage for herself, who said the thing none of the rest of them had yet allowed themselves to say aloud.
"You've all been so busy watching the Baron's man and his parchment," she said, wrapping her shawl tighter against the smoke-stained morning air, "that none of you thought to ask who else in this wide world might want to see you burn. Alaric wants your land, and he's told you so honestly enough that I almost trust him for it. Whoever did this wants something else entirely, and hasn't troubled to tell you what." She looked at the ruined shed a moment longer, her weathered face unreadable. "That's a more dangerous kind of enemy than a man who writes you letters first, Thomas. Mind you don't spend so long watching the ridge road that you forget to watch behind you as well."
Nobody had an answer for her. Thomas stood in the ash and the fading smoke, thinking of a riderless horse with foreign tack, of Wat's old warning about men who counted rather than robbed, and understood, with a coldness that had nothing to do with the morning air, that the valley now had at least two enemies where he had spent the winter preparing carefully for only one.