The Baron's response to his castellan's defection came not as a letter but as a proclamation, nailed to the door of the crossroads chapel where every merchant and tenant in the lower parish would find it within a day, and read aloud, by the time Thomas heard of it, in three separate market squares.
Elias brought a copy back himself, having ridden out at first light the moment word reached the tower. "He's declared Argenton in open defiance of lawful tenure, notwithstanding the court's ruling at Whitcombe," he said, spreading the proclamation across the tally-bench. "He claims the ratification was procured through undue influence over the Bishop's chancellor, and that a March lord retains the right to defend his fee against tenants who have, in his words, 'suborned his own household into treachery.' He's calling for a muster. Not a formal siege under royal writ — he doesn't have standing for that, not after Whitcombe. A private levy of his own retainers and whatever hired men Cade and Renfrew can gather, marching under his own banner rather than the Crown's."
Victoria read the proclamation twice, her jaw tightening with each line. "He's not even trying to hide it as law anymore. This is naked force, dressed up in just enough legal language to give his own men something to tell themselves while they do it."
"How many men?" Thomas asked.
"Elias's contacts in the lower parish put it at perhaps sixty, gathering at the castle over the next fortnight," Alaric said, and there was something grim and knowledgeable in his voice that none of the rest of them could match — eleven years of understanding exactly how the Baron's household moved when it moved for war. "Sixty is not an army capable of taking a fortified March town. It is more than enough to burn an unwalled valley that has never had to defend itself against anything larger than a fence dispute."
The room was quiet for a moment, the weight of the number settling over all of them differently — Victoria already reaching for her ledgers, calculating what could be moved and stored against a siege; Wat's jaw setting into the particular grim stillness Thomas had learned meant he was already redesigning something in his head; Elias simply watching, cataloguing, waiting to be told where he was needed.
"We're not a castle," Thomas said finally. "We don't have walls."
"No," Alaric agreed. "But you have something the Baron has never had to plan against, because nothing like it has ever existed in this March before. You have towers that will see him coming three hours before his own scouts reach your gate. You have chemistry I watched frighten a Church envoy simply by being described secondhand. And you have three years of goodwill among every tenant and merchant between here and Whitcombe who has profited from your scrip and been healed by your medicine — men who will not thank the Baron for burning the source of their own prosperity, whatever proclamation he nails to a chapel door."
"That's not the same as walls."
"No. It is something considerably harder for a man like the Baron to plan around, which may prove more valuable than stone." Alaric looked at each of them in turn, and Thomas saw, for the first time since his arrival, something steadying in the former castellan's posture — a man returning, however painfully, to work he understood. "I know how he musters, how he marches, how impatient he grows when a campaign costs him more than he expected. I spent eleven years learning his weaknesses in service to his strengths. I would be glad, now, to put that knowledge to entirely the opposite use."
Victoria set down her ledger, and Thomas watched her make the shift he'd seen her make before, from fear into the sharper, more useful clarity of a woman with a problem she intended to solve. "Then we have a fortnight. Wat, I want every trench and terminal that can be covered, covered — I don't want a torch finding anything flammable within reach of the flume or the undercroft. Elias, I want both towers manned around the clock and a third built if there's time, closer to the castle road, so we see him coming before his own vanguard sees us. Aldith needs to know to prepare for wounded, whatever any of us would rather not think about yet."
"And the chemistry?" Wat asked, looking at Thomas directly.
Thomas thought of the careful, deliberate line he had drawn for himself three years ago — knowledge kept back not from cowardice but from conscience, weapons he had refused to build because a valley at peace had no need of them. He thought, too, of sixty men marching under a banner that had already tried twice to burn his people in their sleep.
"We defend the valley," he said. "Nothing more than that. I won't build anything meant to chase a retreating man down and kill him for the sport of it. But if the Baron intends to bring fire to my gate, I intend to make certain he regrets it before he's within a hundred yards of anything he came here to burn."
Nobody in the room argued with him, and in the silence that followed, Thomas understood, with a clarity that settled cold and certain in his chest, that the honest war Alaric had once fought with parchment and patience was well and truly over, and that whatever came next would be measured in considerably harder currency than ledgers and legal argument.