Alaric's letter arrived four days later, shorter than any he had sent before, and in a hand that betrayed, in its uneven pressure and crossed-out corrections, considerably more agitation than its careful wording admitted.
Lord Thomas — I have confirmed it. Cade and Renfrew are retained directly by the Baron's privy purse, outside my own authority as castellan, and have been since shortly before your grant defect was first discovered. I do not yet know if the Baron ordered the fires specifically, or gave the two men license broad enough that they chose the method themselves. I intend to find out, and I intend to confront him with what I know, though I do not yet know what such a confrontation will cost either of us. I ask that you hold whatever anger you have earned a little longer, until I have had my own reckoning with the man I have served honestly for eleven years, believing him to deserve it.
Victoria read it twice, standing at the tally-bench with the particular stillness she reserved for news that frightened her more than it satisfied her.
"He's going to confront the Baron directly," she said. "Alone, most likely, given how he's written this. That's either the bravest thing I've ever heard of a castellan doing, or the last mistake he ever makes."
"You think the Baron would move against him?"
"I think a lord who has spent a year running a second, dishonest policy behind his own castellan's back is not a lord who reacts well to being found out by the very man he was hiding it from." She set the letter down carefully. "Alaric has spent this whole conflict believing his honesty was a strength the Baron valued, even when it cost the Baron ground he wanted. He is about to discover whether that was ever actually true."
They heard nothing further for six days, which Thomas spent in a state of low, grinding unease that made even the ordinary rhythm of the undercroft feel fragile — every report from Elias's towers scrutinized twice, every unfamiliar shape on the ridge road watched until it resolved into something harmless.
Alaric arrived himself on the seventh day, unannounced, without escort, on a horse ridden hard enough that it was blowing badly by the time he reached the gate. He looked, Thomas thought, like a man who had aged a decade in a week.
"I confronted him," Alaric said, before Thomas had even finished crossing the courtyard to meet him. "Three days ago. I told him what I knew, and I told him I intended to bring it before the Marches' court myself, as a matter of the March's own law, regardless of whose retainer paid for it." He laughed, short and entirely without humor. "He did not deny it. He told me, quite plainly, that he had grown tired of watching me lose to you honestly, and that a March lord who cannot secure his own land by whatever means necessary is not fit to hold it. He dismissed me from his service that same afternoon."
"He dismissed you."
"Stripped of my castellany, my retainer, and any standing I once held in his household." Alaric's voice was steady, but something in his eyes had gone raw in a way Thomas hadn't seen even at their first meeting under the peace banner. "I have served that man honestly for eleven years, Lord Thomas, and I discover, in the space of a single conversation, that honesty was never the quality he valued in me. It was simply the quality that had, until now, proven convenient."
Thomas didn't know, in that moment, what a man said to another man who had just lost everything for the crime of telling the truth. Victoria, arriving beside him, seemed to know better.
"Then you have nowhere to go," she said, not unkindly, "and a great deal of knowledge about a man who has just tried to burn my valley twice. I would call that, on balance, a fair trade for a man in your position."
"You would take me in. After everything."
"I would take in anyone who's just proven, at real cost to himself, that his word means more to him than his own comfort." Victoria's expression was unreadable, weighing something Thomas couldn't quite follow. "I don't offer that lightly, castellan. But I don't imagine the Baron intends to let this rest quietly either, now that his own man has turned against him. If he was willing to burn a dye shed to test us, I doubt he'll hesitate much longer before trying something considerably less subtle. If that's coming, I would rather have you inside our walls, with everything you know about his methods, than standing alone on a road with nowhere left to belong."
Alaric looked between them for a long moment, and something in his exhausted face shifted — not relief, not yet, but the first cautious loosening of a man who had spent a week bracing for a door to close, and found instead one standing open.
"Then I accept," he said quietly, "on the condition that I am given work, not charity. I have spent eleven years managing a March I no longer serve. I would rather put what I know to use than sit idle while you decide what to do with me."
"Wat needs another set of hands who understands a ledger and a legal argument in equal measure," Victoria said. "I imagine he'll find something for you to do, castellan, whether either of you enjoys the arrangement at first or not."
For the first time since he'd ridden into the courtyard, something that might almost have been a smile crossed Alaric's tired face. "I imagine he will."