The royal seal arrived on a gray morning in midwinter, carried by a rider whose formal Crown livery drew half the town into the lane before he'd even finished dismounting, and Victoria's hands, breaking it open at the tally-bench, were steadier than her face let on.
By order of His Majesty's own household, Lord Thomas of Argenton is summoned to attend the court at Oakhaven, there to give personal account of the town's charter, its currency, and its governance, before such lords and officers of the Crown as His Majesty shall appoint to hear it. Attendance is required within forty days of this seal.
"They've never asked this of us before," Thomas said, reading it a second time over her shoulder. "The chancellor confirmed us. The justiciar confirmed us. Why does the Crown itself need to hear it again?"
"Because the chancellor and the justiciar are the King's officers, not the King's own attention," Alaric said grimly, having been summoned himself the moment the seal's arrival reached the forge. "A charter this unusual — a free town built on a stranger's inventions rather than a merchant guild's accumulated wealth — was always going to draw the Crown's direct notice eventually, whatever local officials had already settled the matter. I would not read this as hostile, necessarily. I would read it as curiosity that has finally outgrown its patience for secondhand reports."
Victoria's expression, weighing the summons against everything the winter had already cost the town in careful diplomacy, settled into the sharp, determined clarity Thomas had learned to trust above almost anything else in her. "Forty days is not generous, but it's enough, if we leave within the week. You'll need proper dress for a royal court, Thomas, which I don't believe exists anywhere in this valley at present, and you'll need to be coached, thoroughly, in exactly how much of what you know to say aloud in a room full of men who have every reason to want to learn it for free."
"You're not coming."
It wasn't quite a question, and Victoria's answer, when it came, carried no hesitation at all. "Someone has to remain and govern a town that just spent a whole season building a regional network valuable enough to attract Rome's own attention, Thomas. The council can manage the ordinary business. It cannot manage a genuine crisis without someone at its center who understands every thread currently in motion, and that, for better or worse, is still me." She met his eyes steadily. "I trust you to represent us honestly at Oakhaven. I need to trust someone to keep the valley standing while you do."
Thomas felt the old, familiar unease return at the prospect — not of the court itself, though that alone would have been daunting enough, but of the journey, the distance, the days he would spend beyond the reach of the induction loop that had kept his phone at a steady, unbroken hundred percent for longer than he could easily remember being without it.
He said nothing of that particular worry aloud, not yet, though he suspected, watching Victoria's face carefully as she began already listing preparations, that some part of her had already guessed at it and was choosing, for now, to let him raise it in his own time.
Hamo, consulted for his knowledge of court protocol gleaned from his years within the Church's own hierarchy, proved unexpectedly useful in the frantic week of preparation that followed — coaching Thomas through the particular formal cadences expected of a man addressing lords rather than tenants, the precise etiquette of when to speak and when silence carried more weight than any argument could.
"You are not going to Oakhaven to defend yourself, Lord Thomas," Hamo told him, on the final evening before departure, with the particular patient clarity he brought to every genuinely important lesson. "Your charter is already settled in law. You are going to be looked at, carefully, by men who will decide, based entirely on what they see in you, whether Argenton is a curiosity worth encouraging or a danger worth quietly strangling before it grows any larger. Answer every question honestly. Volunteer nothing you are not asked. And remember, whatever grandeur the court presents you with, that you have already survived considerably worse than a room full of curious lords."
Thomas packed lightly the following morning — a change of clothes, the Codex's own summary pages copied in Victoria's careful hand for reference, and the phone, tucked against his ribs exactly as it had been every day for three years, its battery reading a steady, unbroken hundred percent that he understood, with a cold certainty he hadn't quite voiced to anyone, would not remain unbroken for long once he rode beyond the induction loop's reach.
Victoria walked with him to the gate, Elias and Alaric and a small honor guard of Wat's best men already mounted and waiting, and held his face in both hands a long moment before releasing him.
"Come home," she said simply.
"I will."
"I know you will." She stepped back, already composing herself into the steady, capable regent the town would need in his absence, though something in her eyes, watching him mount, betrayed how much the composure was costing her. "Just don't let Oakhaven convince you that you're smaller than you actually are, Thomas. You've built something extraordinary. Remember that, whatever grand room they eventually put you in to prove it."
He rode out through the gate with the towers standing sentinel on either side, the valley's whole careful, hard-won world receding slowly behind him, and felt, for the first time in longer than he cared to admit, the particular hollow uncertainty of a man riding directly into the one kind of distance his three years of careful building had never once had to test.