A free town, Thomas discovered within the week, required considerably more paperwork than a valley ever had.
The charter demanded a council — five seats, elected rather than appointed, a provision Hamo had insisted upon during the drafting over Wat's initial grumbling that a valley which already trusted its Disciples hardly needed a second body to argue with them. The first vote was held at the schoolhouse on a crisp autumn morning, every household sending at least one voice, and the results, when Diccon finished the count on a slate borrowed from Aldith's own careful hand, surprised no one so much as they seemed to surprise the winners themselves.
Wat took a seat by a wide margin, grumbling the whole while that he had better things to do than sit in judgment of his neighbors' disputes. Aldith took another, unopposed, the whole parish apparently unwilling to imagine the council functioning without her. Victoria was elected a third, though she'd argued privately, the night before, that a council meant to check the valley's original founders oughtn't seat one of them so prominently — an argument the town had simply ignored at the ballot.
The fourth seat went, to Thomas's genuine surprise, to Osric the carter, a quiet, unremarkable man who had done nothing more dramatic in three years than haul grain reliably and complain, occasionally, about road conditions — precisely the kind of ordinary competence, Hamo observed afterward, that a town needed considerably more of than it needed further heroes.
The fifth seat, after some debate, went to Alaric, whose eleven years of understanding exactly how disputes moved through a March court made him, however strange the appointment might once have seemed, the single most qualified person in the valley to chair the town's own new bench.
"I did not expect to spend my retirement judging boundary disputes for the very people I once tried to starve into submission," Alaric admitted, at the council's first proper sitting, with the particular dry humor Thomas had come to recognize as the closest thing the former castellan allowed himself to genuine contentment. "I find I do not mind it nearly as much as I once would have predicted."
Thomas himself held no seat at all, a fact he'd insisted upon from the first drafting of the charter and that Victoria, despite her own reservations about her own seat, had ultimately agreed was the wiser course. "A town founded by one man's knowledge cannot also be governed entirely by that same man's authority," he'd told the gathered crowd, on the morning of the first vote. "I'll answer to this council the same as anyone, on any matter that touches the town rather than the workshop. That's not modesty. That's the only way this actually survives me."
The council's first proper business, once the seats were settled, was mundane almost to the point of anticlimax after a summer of fire and proclamation — a dispute over a shared fence-line between two weavers, a petition to extend the schoolhouse for the growing number of children now arriving from beyond the original valley bounds, a proposal from Elias, delivered with his usual flat precision, to formally fund the tower network's expansion as a public good rather than a private defense.
It was that last proposal that occupied Thomas's thoughts longest, that evening, walking home along the lane in the gathering dark. Three towers had been enough to warn a valley of an approaching enemy. A dozen, properly placed, could carry word the length of the March in a single day — not a weapon anymore, but something closer to what Elias had first imagined it as, back at the base of the very first tower: a nervous system for a whole stretch of country that had never had one before.
He found Victoria in the garden when he reached home, kneeling among the last of the season's tomatoes, and told her as much, watching the idea take shape between them the way their best ideas always had — argued into something sturdier than either of them could have built alone.
"A regional network," she said slowly. "Not just towers. Roads worth traveling faster, salt-backed scrip that merchants two counties over might actually trust, a currency that doesn't stop meaning anything the moment you cross the old tithe boundary." Something sharpened in her expression, the particular light Thomas had learned to recognize as genuine excitement rather than mere calculation. "Do you understand what we could actually build, Thomas, now that nobody can burn it out from under us on a lord's whim?"
"I'm starting to."
"Good." She rose, brushing the dark earth from her knees, and there was something in her voice that carried, for the first time in longer than either of them cared to admit, no trace of the exhaustion the whole long season had cost her. "Because I intend to spend this council's first real term making certain this valley stops being a story people tell about a strange man's inventions, and starts being the center of something considerably larger than either of us ever originally planned."
Behind them, the small light of Elias's near tower burned steady against the darkening sky, and Thomas thought, watching it, that whatever quiet dread the two-days-late letter had left settled in his chest, the valley itself, at least, had never once in three years stopped reaching for more than it had already won