Thomas sent word to Alaric within the week, on the theory that an honest enemy deserved an honest account of anything that touched his own household's reputation, and rode out himself to deliver it when the castellan's reply asked, simply, to hear it in person rather than on paper.
They met at the crossroads chapel this time, neutral ground by long habit now, and Thomas watched something harden in Alaric's face as he laid out the whole of it — the fire, the two sets of boots, Corradino's calm insistence that he'd had no part in the burning, only in the watching.
"You believe him," Alaric said, when Thomas finished. "A foreign agent, and you believe his denial."
"I believe a man clever enough to avoid being caught for a year wouldn't leave two obvious trails of pitch-fire evidence for my mapmaker to find in an afternoon. Whoever burned that shed wanted it understood as sabotage. Corradino wanted the opposite — to never be noticed at all." Thomas watched the castellan absorb that, turning it over with the same careful legal patience he'd brought to the court at Whitcombe. "Which means I still don't know who lit it."
"I might." Alaric said it quietly, and there was something in his voice Thomas hadn't heard from him before — not the courteous menace of their first meetings, not even the honest regret of the court, but something closer to genuine alarm. "The Baron has retained men this past season I was not consulted on hiring. Two of them, brothers, taken on for what he described to me only as 'matters requiring discretion.' I assumed, when I assumed anything at all, that he meant simple debt collection among the lower tenants. I did not think to ask further, because I did not think my own lord capable of running a second policy behind the back of the man he'd charged with the March's honest governance."
"You think it's the Baron."
"I think it is entirely possible the Baron grew tired of watching me lose honestly, Lord Thomas, and decided to pursue a method that did not require losing at all." Alaric's jaw was tight, his composure visibly costing him more than it usually did. "I brought your defective grant to open court because I believed the law, honestly applied, was the correct instrument for settling what troubled me about your valley. If my own lord has been burning your property in the dark while I did so, then everything I said to that judge — everything I believed about my own honesty — was worth considerably less than I thought it was."
Thomas hadn't expected sympathy for the man, not after a year of fences and writs and a summons that had nearly cost the valley everything, and found it arriving anyway, unbidden, at the sight of Alaric's genuine distress.
"You didn't know."
"That is not the same as being blameless. I served a man capable of this and told myself, for a year, that I understood the shape of what I served." Alaric was quiet for a long moment, looking out at the crossroads, the chapel, the ordinary spring afternoon entirely indifferent to the crisis unfolding inside it. "I will investigate this myself, Lord Thomas, quietly, and I will bring you whatever I find, regardless of what it costs my own standing to do so. I ask only that you not act on your suspicion until I have had the chance to confirm or disprove it. If I am wrong about the Baron, an accusation now could cost us both something neither of us can afford to lose. If I am right—" He stopped himself, visibly unwilling to finish the thought aloud.
"If you're right?"
"If I am right, Lord Thomas, then the honest war I have been fighting you for a year is about to become considerably less honest, on my own side of it, and I do not yet know what I intend to do about that."
He rode back toward the castle alone, without his usual escort, and Thomas watched him go with the uneasy sense of having gained an ally he hadn't quite earned and couldn't yet fully trust — a man now caught, as much as Thomas himself was, between the enemy he'd expected and the one he hadn't.
Victoria, when he told her that evening, took the news with less surprise than he'd expected. "I wondered how long it would take him to notice," she said. "A man that careful about his own honesty rarely stays blind to dishonesty around him for long, once he starts looking properly. The question now is what he does once he's certain."
"He said he'd bring us what he finds."
"He also said, three seasons ago, that he intended to keep watching until he decided whether we were a danger or simply a fact. Men like Alaric keep their promises, Thomas, which is precisely what makes them useful and precisely what makes them dangerous, depending entirely on which side of the promise you're standing." She looked out toward the darkening ridge road, where the small lights of the towers had just begun their evening watch. "I'd rather have him investigating his own lord than investigating us, at any rate. That much, at least, is progress."