The rider carried two letters, not one, and Victoria read them both twice before she trusted herself to say anything aloud.
The first was from the Bishop's chancellor, brief and formal in the way Church correspondence always was, but unmistakable in its substance — a formal condemnation of the Baron's private levy as "an act of disorder unbecoming a lord of the March, undertaken against a tenant whose standing this office has twice now confirmed as lawful," with a further note, added almost as an afterthought and carrying, Hamo assured them, considerably more weight than its brevity suggested, that the matter had been referred to the Crown's own justiciar for the March, "given the gravity of a private army raised without royal writ."
The second letter was from Alaric himself, shorter still, written in a hand that betrayed real exhaustion.
It is done, or as near to done as I can make it from here. The chancellor received your account without hesitation — I believe he had already heard rumors of the muster from other sources before my letter even reached him, and was, if anything, relieved to have formal cause to act on what he'd already begun to suspect. The justiciar's involvement changes the shape of this considerably. A private levy raised without the Crown's leave is no longer merely a matter between you and the Baron. It is a matter of the King's own peace, and the Baron will answer for it accordingly. I do not yet know what that answer will cost him. I suspect, knowing him, that it will cost him more than he believes he can afford to lose.
Wat, listening to Victoria read both letters aloud at the tally-bench, allowed himself something close to a genuine smile — a rare enough sight that Diccon, standing nearby, actually paused his own work to stare at it.
"So the Crown does his job for him, in the end," Wat said. "After all that fire and fence and dead grandmother's-worth of parchment, it's a justiciar three counties away who finally makes him answer for it."
"That's how it was always going to end, if it ended in our favor at all," Victoria said. "We were never going to defeat the Baron with chemistry alone, Wat, whatever the trench-line proved we were capable of. A valley this size doesn't outlast a March lord by fighting him. It outlasts him by being inconvenient enough, and honest enough, and troublesome enough to enough powerful people, that eventually someone above him decides he's more trouble to protect than he's worth."
Hamo, reading over the chancellor's letter a second time with his old scholar's care, offered the driest assessment of the morning. "The Church does not love disorder in a March it depends upon for tithe and travel both. Nor does the Crown, which collects its own revenue more easily from a peaceful shire than a contested one. You did not need either of them to love you, Lord Thomas. You needed them, simply, to find you less troublesome than the alternative. I would call that a considerably more durable foundation than affection would have been."
Thomas found himself, reading the letters a third time in the quiet of the evening, thinking less of the Baron's coming reckoning than of Joan's small plot above the flume-race, and of six frightened boys sent home with scrip instead of scars, and of a fortnight's worth of fire and grief that no chancellor's letter, however favorable, could undo or fully redeem.
"It doesn't feel like winning," he said to Victoria, once the tally-bench had emptied for the evening.
"No. It rarely does, in my experience, once the actual cost of it has had time to settle." She sat beside him, weary in a way that had become, over the last month, more familiar to both of them than either would have liked. "But it is winning, Thomas, whatever it feels like. A valley that started this season facing a summons meant to unmake its very right to exist now has the Crown's own justiciar preparing to hold its enemy to account. That's not a small thing, even if it arrived too late to save Joan, or spare those six boys their scars, or give any of us back the season we spent afraid."
"What happens now?"
"Now we wait for the justiciar, same as we waited for the chancellor, and we keep doing the work that got us here in the first place — the ledgers, the medicine, the wire, the Codex. Whatever the Crown decides to do about the Baron, Thomas, it won't change the fact that this valley has to keep standing regardless. That part was never going to depend on anyone's letter but our own continued effort." She leaned her head against his shoulder, the first fully unguarded gesture he'd seen from her in weeks. "Let the justiciar handle the Baron. I'd rather spend tonight simply being glad we're both still here to hear about it."