The news of the Baron's own hearing reached the valley by ordinary courier rather than any formal proclamation, which Alaric took, reading it at the tally-bench, as its own small confirmation of exactly how far his former lord had fallen in the Crown's estimation.
"Stripped of the castle and its lands," he said, scanning the brief, unceremonious account. "Not executed — the Crown rarely goes that far with a man of his standing, whatever the offense, when a quieter humiliation serves the same purpose with considerably less mess. He's to retire to a small manor holding in the south, under formal royal oversight, with the March itself reassigned to a lord the Crown considers more reliable." He set the letter down, and something in his weathered, careful face was harder to read than usual. "Sir Roger de Vesci, as it happens. The very justiciar who once stood at Joan's grave and told you plainly what he thought of your town."
"That's a good thing for us."
"It is very likely the best outcome we could have hoped for, Lord Thomas. De Vesci understands this valley's worth better than any lord this March has held in a generation, and he owes his own appointment, in no small part, to the honest case we handed the Crown against his predecessor." Alaric's voice, when it continued, carried something Thomas hadn't quite expected — not triumph, but a kind of tired, complicated grief. "I served that man eleven years. I do not mourn his fall, Lord Thomas. I mourn, a little, the eleven years I spent believing I served someone worth the loyalty I gave him."
Victoria, listening from across the bench, set down her own quill. "You couldn't have known."
"No. But I should have looked harder, sooner, at the gap between the man he told me he was and the man his actions eventually proved him to be. I have thought about that a great deal since Cade and Renfrew's fires, and I have concluded that it is a considerably easier mistake to make than most people admit, and a considerably more dangerous one to leave uncorrected once you've noticed it." Alaric looked at Thomas directly, something almost fond beneath the weariness. "I do not intend to make that same mistake twice, which is, I suspect, why I have found myself considerably more useful to this town's bench than I ever was to that man's castle."
Word of de Vesci's appointment spread through the valley within the day, and the mood it produced was not quite celebration — too much of the last year's grief still sat too close beneath the surface for that — but something steadier, a long exhale the whole town seemed to share without anyone needing to name it aloud. Wat marked the occasion in his own fashion, forging a small iron token that he presented to Alaric without ceremony, a single word stamped crudely into its face: witness.
"For the eleven years you spent serving honestly before you understood who you were actually serving," Wat said, when Alaric asked, baffled, what it was meant to signify. "And for the year since, spent making up for it properly. I don't give out compliments easily, castellan. Consider this the closest you'll get to one from me."
Thomas found himself, that evening, standing again at the garden's edge, the season's first shoots pushing up through soil he'd turned with his own hands three separate springs running now, and thought of the strange, winding path that had carried a frightened, honest enemy into one of the valley's own steadiest pillars. Whatever the falling number eventually cost him, he understood, watching the light fade gold over a town that had survived fire and siege and its own founder's private terror to arrive at this particular ordinary, hopeful evening, that the valley itself had long since stopped depending on any single person's continued presence to keep finding its own way forward.
Victoria joined him there, as she always did, and neither of them spoke for a long while, content simply to stand together in the last of the light, watching a town neither of them had built alone continue, patiently, to become more than either of them had ever quite dared to imagine.