The valley did not panic, which surprised Thomas more than almost anything else about the days that followed.
He had expected fear — had braced for it, in his own quiet way, remembering the winter blockade and the way uncertainty had once made the lower parish brittle and suspicious of everything, including him. Instead he found something closer to purpose. Wat's men worked the trenches around the flume with grim, competent speed, clearing brush and kindling from anything the fire could reach, while Elias's new tower rose on the near ridge in barely four days, built by volunteers who arrived faster than Wat could organize their labor.
It was Old Joan, in the end, who explained it to him, on the third evening, when he found her at the schoolhouse helping Aldith sort clean linen into bundles for wounds that hadn't happened yet.
"You keep waiting for us to be frightened, Thomas," she said, not looking up from her folding. "We were frightened, three years ago, when a stranger showed up claiming to be lord of a manor none of us had ever heard him mentioned for, talking about invisible fire and clean water like a man possessed. We are not frightened of a Baron who wants to burn what we've built since. We know what we've built. He's the one who ought to be frightened, coming here to take it."
"You make it sound simple."
"It is simple, in the way that most true things are simple, once you've lived long enough to stop expecting the world to be complicated on purpose." She set down the linen and looked at him properly, her weathered face steady in the lamplight. "I buried a husband to a fever no one understood, Thomas, in a winter before you or your invisible fire ever came to this valley. I have watched three lords come and go from that castle in my lifetime, each one certain his rule was permanent right up until it wasn't. I am not going to spend what time I have left afraid of a fourth one simply because he's decided to bring soldiers instead of writs. Fear is a poor way to spend an old woman's remaining days, and I intend to spend mine considerably better than that."
He didn't have an answer for her, and didn't try to find one, only stayed a while longer, folding linen alongside her in a silence that felt, despite everything gathering on the horizon, like one of the more peaceful hours of the whole fortnight.
Hamo, when Thomas found him the following day, had turned his own particular skill toward the problem with characteristic thoroughness — a rough count of every soul in the valley, organized by what use each might serve if the Baron's men actually reached the gate, and a careful survey of the undercroft's structure to determine which sections could serve as shelter for those too young or too old to stand a wall.
"I once believed the shape of the world was fixed by God, and that a man's task was simply to accept his place within it," Hamo said, without looking up from his tally. "I no longer believe that entirely. But I have found, to my own surprise, that the habit of careful preparation survives a man's loss of certainty rather better than the certainty itself did. Whatever I believe about the architecture of Heaven these days, I still believe in counting carefully before a storm arrives."
Victoria worked longer hours than anyone, Thomas thought, though she never once said so aloud — moving scrip and grain reserves into the deepest parts of the undercroft, drafting a formal appeal to the Bishop's chancellor documenting the Baron's proclamation as exactly the kind of disorder the chancellor had shown, twice now, a willingness to rule against. She slept less. She said less, some evenings, than Thomas had heard her say in months, exhausted past the point of her usual sharp commentary. But she did not, even once in the whole grinding fortnight, suggest that any of it might be for nothing.
Alaric proved, in those two weeks, to be worth every risk Victoria had taken in sheltering him. He walked the valley's whole perimeter with Wat twice, marking the ground the way an attacking commander would see it rather than the way its own people did, and found three weaknesses none of them had considered — a low stretch of the eastern hedge easily crossed on foot, a blind angle beneath the second tower where a torch-bearer could approach unseen, a gap in the watch rotation at the changing of the guard that a patient enemy might exploit.
"You know him well," Thomas said, watching Alaric mark the last of it on Elias's map.
"I know him well enough to tell you he will not come at night, whatever your instincts suggest. He is not a subtle man, whatever his methods with Cade and Renfrew might have implied. He will come at dawn, in force, expecting the sight of sixty men under his own banner to break your resolve before a single torch is lit. He has never yet needed more than that to win a dispute in this March." Alaric's expression, in the fading light, was unreadable. "I would advise you not to give him the satisfaction of being right."
Thomas looked out at the valley in the last hour of the fortnight's final evening — the towers standing sentinel against a darkening sky, the smoke rising thin and steady from a hundred chimneys that had gone on, against every reasonable expectation, quietly refusing to be afraid — and thought that whatever came at dawn, the Baron would find considerably less breaking resolve than he'd been promised.