The second attempt came at the flume itself, and this time the watch caught him.
It was past the middle of the night when Diccon's whistle sounded again, sharper this time, and Wat was first down the slope with a lantern in one hand and a hammer in the other, moving with a speed Thomas hadn't known the older man still possessed. They found the intruder crouched at the base of the flume's main gate, a small barrel of pitch-soaked kindling already wedged against the timber, a striking-iron in his hand not yet used.
He ran. He didn't get far — Wat's boys had learned the eastern slope well enough in three weeks of doubled watch to close it faster than any stranger could clear it in the dark, and they brought him down in the mud within a hundred yards, struggling and cursing in accented but unmistakable March country speech, nothing foreign about him at all.
He gave his name eventually, under considerably less patient questioning than Corradino had received — Osbert, a laborer's son from the Baron's own demesne, hired, he admitted with the particular desperate honesty of a frightened young man well out of his depth, by two brothers he knew only as Cade and Renfrew, "men who do the lord's harder business," paid well and told plainly that the valley's flume was to burn the same as the dye shed had, and that questions about why were not part of the arrangement.
"The Baron," Thomas said, not a question.
"I never spoke to the Baron himself. Only to Cade. He said it came from higher, and I didn't ask higher than that, because a man who asks too many questions of Cade doesn't generally get asked again." Osbert's hands were shaking, whether from cold or fear Thomas couldn't tell. "I needed the coin. My mother's been sick since Michaelmas, and the physician wanted silver I didn't have. I'm not proud of it. I never wanted anyone hurt. Cade said it'd just be timber, no one in it, no one near it at that hour."
Victoria's face, in the lantern light, had gone the particular flat white of controlled fury Thomas had learned to recognize as more dangerous than shouting.
"If that gate had gone up properly, it would have taken the flume-race with it," she said. "And the race feeds the undercroft distribution panel. A fire that size, at that hour, with half the valley asleep above it—"
She didn't finish the sentence, and didn't need to.
They held Osbert overnight under guard, more out of uncertainty than cruelty, and it was Aldith, of all people, who argued for mercy over punishment when the question of what to do with him came before the tally-bench the next morning.
"He's a frightened boy who took coin he shouldn't have taken, not the man who offered it to him," she said. "Hang him, or maim him the way the Baron's own courts would, and you've solved nothing — Cade and Renfrew simply hire the next desperate son with a sick mother, and this valley becomes exactly the kind of place that punishes poverty instead of the men who exploit it. I'd rather you send him home with an honest wage for honest work and a warning he'll actually remember, than turn him into a lesson written in blood that teaches the wrong people the wrong thing."
Thomas looked to Victoria, who was quiet for a long moment before nodding, reluctantly, in agreement. "She's right, though I don't enjoy admitting it while I'm still angry enough to want otherwise. Osbert isn't the war. He's a symptom of it."
They released him at dawn with enough scrip to cover his mother's physician twice over, and a message, memorized and repeated back word for word before he was allowed to leave, meant for Cade's ears rather than his own: that the valley knew now whose hand had truly lit both fires, and that the next attempt would be met with considerably less patience than the first two had been shown.
Wat, watching the boy stumble off up the ridge road, looking more relieved than punished, made no secret of his own opinion on the matter.
"Mercy's a fine thing when it costs you nothing," he said. "I hope it costs us nothing this time. But you've just told the Baron's men exactly how much we know, Thomas, and a cornered dog bites harder than one still stalking, in my experience. If Cade and Renfrew were testing us before, they'll stop testing now and start deciding."
"Deciding what?"
"Whether fire's still worth the trouble," Wat said grimly, "or whether it's time to bring more than two men and a barrel of pitch."
Elias's report from the tower that evening confirmed, with characteristic flat precision, that the boy had not gone home at all. He had turned north, toward the castle road, moving with the particular haste of a man carrying urgent news to someone waiting for it.