Elias found the second set of tracks four days after the fire, and it took him that long, he admitted, only because he'd spent the first three assuming whoever had lit the dye shed would have had the sense not to come back.
"They came back," he said, spreading a rough sketch across the tally-bench, his charcoal marks precise despite the obvious fatigue in his hand. "Not to the dye shed. To the ridge above the second tower, two nights past, in weather bad enough that I nearly missed the sightline report myself. Someone stood there long enough to leave a clear boot-print in the mud, faced toward the valley, and left again before dawn. Watching, not sabotaging. I don't think they meant to be seen at all."
"The same boots as the fire?"
"The same pattern, near enough that I'd stake my reputation on it, though I can't prove it in a court the way Victoria proved her ratification." Elias tapped the sketch. "Foreign work, same as the horse-tack from the winter. Whoever this is, they're patient, and they're not in any particular hurry to finish whatever they came here to do."
Wat, listening from the edge of the bench with his arms crossed, had less patience for the nuance of it than Elias allowed himself. "Patient men who burn sheds and then stand on hillsides watching the smoke aren't scouting for a market opinion, Thomas. That's a man building a report for someone with the money and the reason to care what's happening in a valley this far from anywhere important. Rome. The Empire. Take your pick — either one would pay well for an honest accounting of a currency that holds its value and a medicine that saves children other physicians can't."
"You think this is about the scrip."
"I think it's about all of it. The wire, the medicine, the paper money — any one of those, properly reported to the right merchant house or the right cardinal's secretary, is worth more gold than this whole valley sees in a year of honest trade. You've spent three years building something extraordinary in a corner of the world small enough that nobody important noticed. That luck was never going to last forever." Wat's single eye held Thomas's without flinching. "The Baron wants your land. Alaric, it seems, wants to be an honest man about wanting it. Whoever burned that shed wants something else — to understand what you've built well enough to take it, or copy it, or sell the knowledge of it to someone who will. That's a different shape of danger than either of us has fought yet."
Victoria, who had been quiet through most of it, finally spoke from where she stood at the window, watching the ordinary business of the lane continue below with an expression Thomas recognized as her working through several unpleasant conclusions at once before committing to any of them aloud.
"If Wat's right, then burning the dye shed wasn't the point," she said. "It was a test. Something small enough to risk, large enough to see how quickly we'd notice, how we'd respond, whether our watch schedule had gaps worth exploiting further." She turned from the window. "That's worse than an enemy who wants to hurt us, Thomas. That's an enemy who's still deciding how much of an enemy they need to be."
Thomas thought of Hamo's flat observation from months before, the sums that didn't care what anyone believed, and found himself wishing, uselessly, that the same cold arithmetic applied here — that he could simply calculate the shape of this new danger the way he calculated a trench's pressure tolerance, and know, with certainty, exactly how much margin he needed to build in before it broke something he couldn't repair.
"Double the tower watch," he said finally. "Every hour, not every two. And Elias — I want you teaching two more men to read a sightline properly. If someone's patient enough to test us once, they'll be patient enough to test us again, and I'd rather have more eyes on the ridge than fewer, whatever it costs us in sleep."
"And the boots?" Wat asked. "The pattern, if we find it again?"
"Then we'll finally have something worth following instead of guessing at." Thomas looked at the rough sketch on the bench — a single print, foreign-made, patient and unhurried, belonging to someone who had stood on his own hillside in the dark and watched his valley sleep without any of them the wiser until four days too late. "I'd rather know exactly what we're facing, Wat, even if knowing it frightens me more than the mystery did."
"That," Wat said, gathering his tools to return to the forge, "is the first properly sensible thing you've said all week."
Outside, the spring evening was settling gold and ordinary over the valley, the smoke rising thin from a hundred chimneys that had no notion at all of the patient, foreign eyes that had lately taken to watching them from the dark.