The King's justiciar for the March arrived at Argenton himself before he ever set foot in the Baron's castle, which Alaric — riding in a day ahead of him to give the valley fair warning — considered the single clearest sign yet of how the whole matter was likely to resolve.
"His name is Sir Roger de Vesci," Alaric said, dismounting stiffly after a hard ride from Whitcombe. "I've met him twice in eleven years of service, both times over disputes considerably smaller than this one. He is not a man who enjoys travel, or ceremony, or, from what I recall of him, very much of anything beyond a well-argued case. That he chose to see the valley with his own eyes before summoning the Baron to answer for it tells you he does not intend to take either side's account at face value."
De Vesci proved, when he arrived the following morning with a modest escort of six men, to be exactly as unceremonious as Alaric had promised — a lean, gray, unhurried man who declined every offer of formal welcome and asked, instead, to see the trench-line where the fighting had actually happened, and the schoolhouse where the wounded had been treated, and finally, at his own quiet request, the small plot above the flume-race where Joan had been laid to rest.
He stood at her grave a long while, saying nothing, and it was only afterward, walking back down toward the tally-bench, that he finally spoke his mind on the matter plainly.
"I have adjudicated a great many disputes in this March, Lord Thomas, and I have learned to distrust any account that arrives too neatly in one party's favor. Your wife's ledgers are the most thorough I've reviewed in a decade of circuit work. Your Codex — I am told you keep such a thing — is, by every account I gathered on my ride in, treated by the valley itself as a genuine record rather than a monument to your own cleverness. And an old woman is dead in her own shelter, of nothing more than the strain of keeping frightened children calm during an attack she never provoked." He looked at Thomas directly, his expression unreadable. "I do not need a chancellor's letter to tell me what happened here. I need only stand in the ground where it happened."
"What will you do about the Baron?"
"I will summon him before the Crown's own court at Whitcombe, on a charge of raising a private levy without royal writ — a charge, I should tell you plainly, that carries considerably more weight than your own enclosure dispute ever did. Tenure law is a matter of custom and interpretation, arguable from several honest angles. Raising an army without the King's leave is not arguable at all. It is either done, or it is not, and I have six wounded men's own testimony, taken separately and matching in every particular, confirming that it was."
Victoria, standing beside Thomas, allowed herself the first fully unguarded relief Thomas had seen from her in the whole long month since the siege. "And the valley's own standing?"
"Confirmed, formally, beyond any further challenge — I intend to see to that personally, given how thoroughly the Baron's own actions have settled the question of whether this valley deserves the Crown's protection rather than its suspicion." De Vesci allowed himself, for the first time since his arrival, something that might almost have been the ghost of a smile. "I will tell you honestly, Lord Thomas, that I have never in my career seen a tenant defend a disputed claim so thoroughly through simple, patient competence. Most men in your position would have met the Baron's fire with fire of their own devising from the very first summons. You met it, instead, with ledgers, and medicine, and mercy for six frightened boys who had every reason to expect none. That is not merely why you've won. It is, I suspect, why half this March already believes you deserved to."
He left the following morning, his modest escort trailing behind him toward the castle road, and Thomas watched him go with the strange, hollow feeling of a man who had spent a season bracing for catastrophe only to find, at the end of it, something that looked remarkably like vindication.
"It's really going to end," he said, half to himself.
"It's going to end the way it should have ended from the very first summons, if the Baron had ever once been willing to let law settle this instead of fire." Victoria's hand found his, steady and certain in a way it hadn't been in weeks. "Whatever comes of the justiciar's court, Thomas, this valley has already proven the only thing that ever truly mattered. It proved it could survive being tested by everyone who doubted it — the Baron, the Church, the Crown itself — and still be standing, honestly, at the end of the trial."
Behind them, the towers stood steady against the pale morning sky, and the smoke rose thin and ordinary from a hundred chimneys that had, against every reasonable expectation of the season just passed, gone on quietly refusing to be extinguished.