Nothing came from Whitcombe for eleven days, and Thomas spent most of them in the strange, suspended quiet of a valley that had survived a siege and now had nothing to do but wait for the next verdict to arrive.
The dye shed was rebuilt within the first week, Wat's men working the new timber with the particular grim determination of people who understood, better than anyone, that idle hands healed slower than busy ones. The trench-line at the hedge was filled in and reseeded, though Wat left the near stretch bare for a season, unwilling, he admitted quietly to Thomas one evening, to plant anything atop ground that had so recently been made to burn.
Aldith's schoolhouse settled back into its ordinary rhythm of scraped knees and winter coughs, though she'd begun, in the weeks since Joan's death, keeping a fresh page in her quire specifically for what she called "the valley's grief" — not remedies this time, simply a record of who had lost whom, and what small things had seemed to help. Children recover from fear faster when given a task, she'd written, in her small careful hand, the first evening after the funeral. Old women recover slower, and sometimes not at all, and there is no remedy for that worth pretending to have found.
Thomas found himself returning to the garden most evenings, the shoots Victoria had first coaxed from the black spring earth now grown tall enough to need thinning, and it was there, on the ninth evening of waiting, that his phone buzzed against his ribs with the small, familiar weight of his mother's daily letter.
He read it standing among the rows, the ordinary words washing over him with a comfort he hadn't let himself feel properly in weeks — a leak finally fixed in his father's garage roof, a neighbor's new dog, nothing of any consequence at all, which was, he had come to understand, exactly why he needed it. The letter had come on time. It always came on time now, had come on time every single day since that first unremarked lateness back in the thaw, and he found himself, standing in the darkening garden, almost grateful for its perfect, unbroken punctuality — a small, steady thing in a season that had otherwise offered him very little steadiness at all.
Victoria found him there, as she so often did, and read something in his face that made her ask, gently, what he was thinking.
"That it came on time," he said. "The letter. I keep waiting for it not to, ever since that one evening back in the thaw, and it just — keeps coming. Every day. Like nothing's changed at all."
"Would you rather it had?"
"No." He said it more quickly than he expected to, and found, turning the thought over properly for the first time in weeks, that he meant it. "I think I'd rather have this — Joan gone, the dye shed burned and rebuilt, six frightened boys sent home with scrip instead of scars — and still have one thing in my life that hasn't asked anything of me in return. I don't know what that says about me."
"It says you're tired, Thomas, and that you've earned the right to be." Victoria settled beside him among the rows, her shoulder finding his the way it always did. "We buried someone we loved this month. We nearly lost the valley twice over, first to parchment and then to fire. I don't think wanting one small, unchanging comfort in the middle of all that makes you selfish. I think it makes you the same man who once told me a garden was worth planting even with a Baron's men still marching toward the gate."
They sat together in the cooling evening a long while, and it was full dark by the time Elias's runner arrived from the ridge road, breathless, carrying word that a rider under the Bishop's own colors had been sighted on the approach — the first sign, after eleven days of silence, that Whitcombe had finally reached a verdict on everything the valley had sent north to be judged.
Thomas rose from the garden rows with dirt still on his hands, Victoria beside him, and felt the old familiar knot of uncertainty return to his chest even as some quieter, steadier part of him — the part that had just spent an ordinary evening among growing things with the woman he loved — refused, for once, to let the fear take hold entirely.
"Whatever it says," he said, "we'll still be standing tomorrow to answer it."
"We will," Victoria agreed, and took his dirt-stained hand in her own without hesitation, "and that, Thomas, is very nearly the whole of what this valley has ever actually needed to win."