The six wounded men from the trench-line remained in the schoolhouse a full week before any of them could be moved, and it was Aldith, working through her own grief with the same brisk refusal to be idle that Joan herself had always shown, who tended every one of them without once asking which side of the fighting they'd been paid to stand on.
"They're not soldiers," she told Thomas, on the third evening, checking the bandaged eyes of the boy who'd nearly died in the mud. "Two of them are barely older than Diccon. Hired for a season's wage, told the valley was a den of witchcraft worth burning, and sent to test their courage against something none of them understood well enough to be properly afraid of. I've spent this whole war treating fear as a kind of sickness, Thomas. I don't intend to stop simply because these particular patients arrived here as my enemies."
The boy, once well enough to speak clearly, gave his name as Osmund, and told a story that echoed Osbert's so closely it made something cold settle in Thomas's chest — a laborer's son, a hard winter, a recruiter's promise of steady coin for a single season's service, no mention made of quicklime or sulfur or the particular horror of a battlefield that fought back on its own.
"I didn't know what we were marching into," Osmund said, his voice still raw from the smoke. "None of us did, save maybe the two Cade brought himself. We were told you'd surrender at the sight of us. Nobody said anything about the ground itself trying to kill us."
Victoria, listening from the doorway, said nothing in the moment, but raised it that evening at the tally-bench with the particular grim clarity she brought to a decision she'd already made and was only now explaining aloud.
"I want to send them home," she said. "All six, once Aldith judges them fit to travel — with an honest wage for the labor they can still perform, and a message for whatever recruiter sends the next batch of frightened boys to burn someone else's harvest. Alaric's right that the Baron won't learn humility from a single defeat. But sixty hired men who hear firsthand, from six of their own who lived through it, exactly what waits for them here — that might do more to end this than any amount of chemistry in the ground."
"You want them as messengers."
"I want them as proof, Thomas, that this valley extends mercy even to men who came here to destroy it, which is a considerably harder thing for the Baron to turn into a proclamation than another burned building would have been." She looked at him steadily. "We buried Joan three days ago. I am not interested in burying anyone else this season if there's a gentler road available that doesn't cost us the valley's safety to take."
They sent the six home a week later, each with an honest wage and a story that would, Alaric predicted with grim satisfaction, spread through the Baron's remaining household considerably faster and more thoroughly than any proclamation could suppress it.
The letter to the Bishop's chancellor took longer to compose than any document Victoria had drafted in three years, weighed and reweighed for every word that might tip a fragile political balance one way or another — a formal accounting of the Baron's proclamation, his private levy, the fires, the siege, and the six wounded men now recovering under the very roof the Baron had sent them to burn.
"He wants disorder in his March even less than he wants to be troubled by us," Hamo said, reading over the draft with his old scholar's care. "A private lord raising a private army against a tenant already confirmed by a King's justice is precisely the kind of precedent every other power in this March — the Church included — has every reason to want stamped out quickly, before some other lord decides it's a workable strategy for his own disputes. I believe this letter will land considerably harder than any of you currently expect."
It was, in the end, Alaric who carried it to Whitcombe himself, riding out three days after the last of the wounded had gone home, with a clarity of purpose Thomas hadn't seen in him since the day he'd first ridden into the valley under a peace banner, asking only to see it honestly.
"I served that man eleven years," Alaric said, before he left, "and told myself, every one of them, that the March was better governed for my service to him. I intend to spend whatever service I have left making certain it's better governed without him, if that's what justice ultimately requires." He looked at Thomas, and there was something almost like gratitude in his tired, steady face. "Thank you for giving me somewhere to stand while I worked that out."
"Thank you for standing with us when it mattered."
Alaric rode north toward Whitcombe with the letter sealed carefully against his chest, and Thomas watched him go, thinking of Joan's small plot above the flume-race, and of a fortnight's worth of grief and fire and mercy that had, somehow, left the valley standing at the end of it — bruised, and grieving, and considerably less innocent than it had been a month before, but standing all the same.