Alaric was gone considerably longer than any of them expected, and the summer that stretched out in his absence became, in its own quiet way, one of the gentler seasons the valley had known in three years.
Wat finished the rebuilt dye shed properly, this time with a second wall of stone rather than timber, on the grounds that a valley that had been burned twice already owed itself at least one wall the next spark couldn't easily take. Elias's third tower rose on schedule, and with it a fourth, further south, until the sightline chain reached nearly to the Whitcombe road itself — not for war this time, he was careful to note, but for trade, so that a merchant's wagon delayed on the southern route could send word ahead before its lateness cost anyone a wasted day.
Aldith's fever book grew by another two dozen pages, and the second, plainer quire she'd begun after Alaric's first visit — the one meant for outsiders rather than initiates — found its first real use when a physician's apprentice from Whitcombe, having heard rumors of the valley's medicine through six recovering soldiers' scattered testimony, arrived unannounced one morning asking, humbly, whether he might be permitted to learn.
Hamo taught him for three weeks before pronouncing him, with characteristic dry understatement, "not entirely hopeless," and the young man left in high summer with a copy of Aldith's plainer quire and a promise to write back honestly about what worked and what didn't in a town considerably larger and dirtier than Argenton had ever been.
Thomas spent most of the long, warm evenings in the garden, which had gone, by midsummer, from careful rows of green shoots to a genuine, tangled abundance that surprised him every time he walked its length — beans climbing the trellis Wat had built without being asked, the first tomatoes ripening slow and heavy on vines that had needed considerably more tending than he'd expected when Victoria first pressed her thumb into the black spring earth.
He thought of Joan often, tending it. He had taken, without quite deciding to, the habit of setting aside the first ripe fruit of anything new for her plot above the flume-race, a small, private ritual he never mentioned to anyone and suspected, from the careful way Victoria never commented on the extra basket he carried up the hill each week, that she understood anyway.
The letters kept arriving, daily and on time, and Thomas found himself, as the summer wore on, thinking of them less as a countdown and more as simply a part of the valley's rhythm — his mother's ordinary, comfortable nothing arriving each evening like clockwork, a garage roof long since fixed, a neighbor's dog grown from puppy to nuisance, the small unremarkable texture of a life continuing three hundred years and an entire world away, utterly unaware of everything its distant reader had survived to keep receiving it.
It was Diccon, of all people, who first spotted Alaric's return, from his post at the near tower on a hot afternoon in late summer — a single rider, unescorted, moving with the particular unhurried pace of a man carrying news he'd decided not to rush.
Thomas met him at the gate himself, and read the answer in Alaric's face before a single word had passed between them — not the guarded neutrality of bad news carefully softened, but something closer to the tired, genuine satisfaction of a man who had spent a long summer arguing a case he believed in and finally won it.
"Well?" Thomas asked.
Alaric dismounted slowly, his travel-worn face breaking, for the first time since Thomas had known him, into something that was unmistakably a smile.
"Ready your bell-ringers, Lord Thomas," he said. "The Crown has granted the petition. Argenton is to be chartered, sealed, and confirmed within the fortnight, at a formal proclamation to be read at the crossroads chapel before the whole March. You have spent three years defending a valley that belonged, technically, to someone else's grant." He held out a sealed document, travel-creased but unmistakably genuine, the royal wax still intact. "As of the King's own seal upon this parchment, it will finally, entirely, belong to itself."