Elias's map of the proposed tower network covered the entire tally-bench by the time the council gathered to review it, a sprawling web of ink lines connecting Argenton to Whitcombe, to the salt spring two days south, to a scatter of smaller villages that had never before had cause to appear on any map at all.
"Twelve towers," he said, tapping each mark in turn. "Eight of them can be built by spring, using timber we already have contracted from the northern stands. The remaining four require sites I haven't yet secured agreement to build upon, since they sit on land belonging to lords who are not, strictly speaking, currently friendly to us."
"Which lords?" Alaric asked, though his tone suggested he already suspected the answer.
"Two are neutral enough — minor holdings, more interested in the toll revenue a tower's traffic would bring than in any old loyalty to the Baron. The third belongs to a man who fought alongside our own former Baron at least twice that I'm aware of, and is unlikely to grant us anything without considerable persuasion." Elias's flat precision didn't waver, though Thomas caught the faint note of frustration beneath it. "The fourth site is the one that actually matters most, and it belongs to no one at all — a ridge two days east that oversees the entire valley approach to Oakhaven itself. Whoever eventually controls that ground controls whether this network reaches the Crown's own road or stops short of it."
Victoria, studying the map with her usual sharp attention, traced the proposed line east with one finger. "If it reaches Oakhaven, what does that actually buy us?"
"Everything," Elias said simply. "A message that takes a rider four days currently reaches Oakhaven in under a day, by relay. A merchant house that hears of a price change in Oakhaven before its rivals do controls the market before its rivals even know there's a market to control. And a Crown that wants word of trouble anywhere along this stretch of the March no longer waits a week to learn of it." He looked around the table. "I am not exaggerating when I say this network, properly built, would make Argenton the most useful piece of ground in this entire March, Crown road or no Crown road."
Wat, listening with his arms crossed in his habitual skepticism, voiced the concern Thomas suspected several others at the table were already turning over privately. "Useful to us, or useful to whoever eventually decides they'd rather own it than rent its use from us? You're describing a thing valuable enough that the Crown itself might one day decide a free town's charter isn't reason enough to leave it in our hands."
"That's always the risk with anything worth building, Wat," Victoria said. "We could have said the same of the scrip, or the medicine, or the wire itself, and yet here we sit, chartered rather than conquered, because we built each of those things carefully enough, and shared their benefit widely enough, that taking them from us became more trouble than it was worth to anyone who might have wanted to try." She turned back to the map. "I'd rather build something valuable enough to attract danger and defend it properly, than build nothing at all and simply wait for danger to arrive regardless."
The council's vote, when it finally came, was not unanimous — Osric the carter abstained, citing honest uncertainty rather than opposition, and Wat's own vote carried an audible grumble even as he raised his hand in favor. But it passed, and Elias left the meeting already sketching timber requisitions with the particular satisfaction of a man who had waited a long while to be given leave to build something at the true scale he'd always imagined.
It was the roads, in the end, that consumed the council's autumn more than the towers ever did — a slow, grinding negotiation with three separate landholders over rights of passage, tolls, and the delicate question of whose men would maintain which stretch of a route that would, if it succeeded, become the single most traveled road in the March within a decade. Victoria handled most of it herself, riding out with Alaric at her side more often than Thomas entirely liked, though he understood, watching her return each time sharper and more certain than she'd left, that this was work she'd been waiting three years to do properly — not defending a valley from those who wanted to take it, but building something that made the whole surrounding country better off for its existence.
He found himself, through the long autumn evenings, increasingly alone with the Codex and the phone both, the valley's growing ambitions slowly outpacing the pace at which any single man's knowledge could keep up with them. He didn't mind it, exactly. He had built the valley, in the beginning, precisely so it would someday no longer need him standing at the center of every decision.
He minded, more, the small, private dread that had settled into him since the night of the charter — the two-day gap in his mother's letters that had never quite left his thoughts, however ordinary every letter since had continued to read. He said nothing of it to Victoria, not yet, telling himself there would be a better season to raise it than the one in which the whole valley was finally, properly, beginning to thrive.