The idea of the charter came from Hamo, of all people, three weeks after the justiciar's visit, in the middle of what had started as an ordinary evening review of the Codex's newest pages.
"You keep speaking of your standing as though it were a thing to be defended," he said, setting aside the flow tables he'd been correcting. "A grant confirmed, a tenure ratified, a court case won. All of that is merely the absence of a particular danger, Lord Thomas. It is not the same as possessing a standing of your own that no future Baron, however patient or however reckless, could threaten in quite the same way again."
"You're talking about a charter."
"I am talking about precisely that. A free town, chartered by the Crown itself, holds its own courts, sets its own tolls, answers to the King's law directly rather than through the intermediary hand of whichever lord happens to hold the surrounding fee. It would not make you untouchable — nothing in this March makes any man entirely untouchable. But it would mean the next Baron who takes that castle inherits a neighbor with his own standing under the law, rather than a tenant he can threaten with a summons whenever his patience runs short."
Victoria, listening from across the tally-bench, set down her own quill slowly. "That's not a small thing to ask for, Hamo. Charters aren't granted lightly, and they're never granted cheaply."
"No. They are granted, as I understand the custom, in exchange for an annual fee farm paid directly to the Crown rather than to any lord, and a formal commitment to maintain the King's peace within the town's own bounds without requiring the Crown's own soldiers to enforce it." Hamo folded his hands. "Given what this valley has already demonstrated about maintaining its own peace — chemistry against a private army, mercy for six frightened boys, a Codex that would make any chartered guild in the March proud to claim it — I do not believe the Crown would find the arrangement a difficult one to justify to itself."
It took the better part of two months to draft the petition properly, Victoria and Hamo working late into most evenings over language precise enough to survive a Crown clerk's scrutiny, while Alaric, drawing on eleven years of understanding exactly how such petitions moved through the March's tangled administration, advised on which officials to approach first and which to save for later, once momentum had already gathered behind the request.
Thomas found himself, through most of it, less useful to the actual drafting than he was to the harder work of explaining, patiently and repeatedly, to a valley still recovering from a siege, exactly what a charter would mean for the people who'd have to live under its terms.
"It means we pay the Crown directly instead of the Baron," he told a gathering at the schoolhouse one evening, Wat and Aldith and a dozen others crowded onto the benches meant for smaller bodies. "It means we hold our own court for small disputes instead of riding to Whitcombe for every stolen chicken. It means the next lord who takes that castle can't simply decide, on a bad season's whim, that our tenure needs revisiting again."
"And it means more taxes," Wat said, ever the skeptic. "Don't dress it up prettier than it is, Thomas. The Crown doesn't grant a free town out of admiration for our fine ledgers. It grants it because it profits handsomely from a chartered town that no longer needs a lord's private army to keep peaceful, and it will collect that profit every single year, charter or no charter, war or no war."
"That's fair. It is a cost." Thomas met his eye across the crowded room. "But it's a cost we choose, Wat, paid to a Crown three counties away that has shown, this past season, at least some interest in seeing us survive. That's a different arrangement than paying a Baron close enough to burn our sheds whenever he decides he'd rather not pay at all."
Wat considered that for a long moment, and then gave the short, grudging nod that Thomas had learned, over three years, to trust as more meaningful than any louder endorsement. "Then I'll not stand against it. But I want it written plain, Thomas, in whatever language Victoria and the monk manage between them, that this valley's own council has final say over its own tolls and its own courts. I've spent three years watching men who write things down decide, later, that the writing meant something other than what we all agreed to at the time. I'd rather that particular mistake not happen to us."
"It's already in the draft," Victoria said, without looking up from her page. "Word for word, Wat. I promise you."
The petition went north with Alaric a fortnight later, carried personally rather than trusted to any courier, and Thomas watched him go with the same uneasy, hopeful weight he'd carried through every other waiting season this valley had endured — the sense, now familiar enough to have become almost comfortable, of a fate decided somewhere far away, by men who had never once walked the ground they were being asked to judge.