Victoria had never much cared for problems she couldn't measure, and it was this, more than the fear itself, that kept her awake long after Thomas had finally fallen into an exhausted, uneasy sleep beside her.
She had spent three years learning to read every kind of danger the valley had thrown at them — the weight of a bad harvest, the true intent behind a lord's careful letter, the precise moment a frightened crowd tipped from grumbling into something considerably more dangerous. She had built her entire usefulness to this town on the conviction that any problem, examined closely enough and honestly enough, eventually yielded a number a person could plan around. Alaric's honesty had a number. The Baron's patience had a number, even if it had taken her most of a year to calculate it correctly. Even grief, she had discovered in the raw weeks after Joan's death, had a shape that eventually, however slowly, resolved into something bearable.
This had no number she could trust. Nineteen, the screen had shown her, and then nothing further — no unit, no scale, no honest accounting of what nineteen actually meant against whatever total the thing had started from. She had asked Thomas twice, gently, whether he understood the mechanism any better than she did, and both times his answer had been the same helpless shrug that told her, more clearly than any words could have, that the man she had built a town beside for three years was every bit as lost in this particular dark as she was.
She rose before dawn, unable to properly rest, and sat a long while in the cold kitchen with a single candle, doing the only thing she knew how to do with a fear this large — trying, uselessly, to break it into pieces small enough to solve.
If the number reached zero, what happened. She did not know. Neither did he.
If it happened without warning, what would she need to have already prepared. A council capable of governing without him — that, at least, she had already built, seat by careful seat, though she had never once, drafting the charter, imagined she might need it for quite this reason.
If he simply vanished one ordinary morning, mid-sentence, mid-breath, what would she tell their town. What would she tell herself.
She had no answer for that last question, and it was the not-knowing, more than any other piece of it, that finally undid the careful composure she'd maintained through every crisis the valley had yet handed her — sitting alone in the dark kitchen with a candle guttering low, Victoria allowed herself, for the first time since the night Thomas had shown her the falling number, to simply cry, quietly, without anyone there to see it, because a woman who had spent three years being strong for an entire town occasionally needed, in the smallest hours of the night, to be nothing more than a frightened wife instead.
She did not tell him, the next morning, how badly the night had gone. She rose with the sun as she always did, dressed, and went to the tally-bench, because the alternative — sitting still, waiting, watching him for signs of a decline she couldn't measure or prevent — was a kind of surrender she refused to offer either of them.
Aldith found her there an hour later, and read something in her face that made the midwife set down the basket she was carrying and simply sit, uninvited, at the bench across from her.
"You don't have to tell me," Aldith said. "But I've buried enough grief in this valley now to recognize the look of a woman carrying one before anyone else knows it's there."
Victoria considered denying it, out of long habit, and found, to her own surprise, that she didn't have the strength to bother. "Thomas is dying, Aldith. Slowly. Something in him — not his body, not any illness you'd recognize — is running out, and neither of us knows how much time it leaves him, or what happens when it's gone."
Aldith didn't flinch, didn't press for details Victoria wasn't yet ready to give. "Then you'll do what every person in this valley who's ever loved someone facing an ending they can't stop has always done," she said simply. "You'll keep living beside him as fully as you can for as long as you have, and you'll let the not-knowing be someone else's burden to share, instead of carrying the whole of it alone. That's not a cure, my lady. I don't have one to offer you. But it's the only remedy I've ever found that actually helps."
Victoria looked at her a long moment, and found, in the plain, unadorned honesty of it, something closer to comfort than any calculation she'd managed alone in the dark kitchen that morning.
"Don't tell the council," she said finally. "Not yet. I don't want this town governing itself around a fear that might never come to pass."
"I won't." Aldith reached across the bench and took her hand, the same steady, unhurried gesture Victoria had watched her offer a hundred frightened patients over three years. "But you're not carrying it alone anymore either, my lady. Whatever else happens, I want you to remember that much."