The town held its first proper fair that same season, an idea that had started, by Victoria's own account, as a practical excuse to draw merchants along the new road and grown, somewhere in the planning, into something considerably warmer than either of them had originally intended.
Wat objected on principle, as he objected to most things that took men away from useful work for an entire day, and then spent a full week beforehand building a proper set of trestle tables anyway, grumbling the entire time that somebody had to make sure the whole affair didn't collapse into the mud the moment it rained.
It didn't rain. The morning came bright and warm, the kind of early-summer day the valley seemed to earn only rarely, and by midday the crossroads had filled with a crowd larger than any gathering Thomas had seen since the charter itself — merchants down from Whitcombe with cloth and spices, farmers from villages the new road had only just begun connecting to the valley's own trade, and the whole of Argenton itself, turned out in whatever finery three years of steady prosperity had allowed them to accumulate.
Diccon, grown taller and considerably more confident than the boy who had once demonstrated buoyancy for a delegation of Archbishop's scholars, spent most of the afternoon trailing after a weaver's daughter named Elsbeth with a devotion so transparent that half the fair seemed to be quietly enjoying the spectacle of it, including, Thomas noted with some amusement, Aldith, who kept finding excuses to station her medicine table within easy sight of whatever the two of them were doing.
"He's going to embarrass himself thoroughly before the day's out," Victoria observed, watching Diccon attempt, with more enthusiasm than skill, to win Elsbeth a ribbon at the archery butts Wat's men had set up.
"Probably. I did worse than that, once, trying to impress a girl who eventually became considerably more terrifying than any archery contest." Thomas caught her eye, and found the small, private joke landed exactly as he'd hoped, the tension of the last weeks loosening, briefly, into something lighter.
Hamo held court at his own small table near the schoolhouse, not preaching — he had long since stopped calling it that, even to himself — but answering, patiently, whatever questions the gathered children put to him about the water and the wire and the strange invisible forces that ran beneath their whole valley's daily life. He seemed, Thomas thought, watching him from a distance, more at peace in that single afternoon than in the whole year that had preceded it.
Elias had set up a small display of his maps, charging nothing for the privilege of looking, though several of the visiting merchants offered good coin for copies regardless, and it was there, standing at his table in the golden afternoon light, that Thomas found himself drawn into conversation with a cloth merchant from a village he'd never heard of, three days south along a stretch of the new road Elias hadn't yet finished properly surveying.
"They speak of you as far as my own village now," the merchant said, studying the map with genuine wonder. "A lord who built a currency out of paper and trust, who healed children the great physicians couldn't save. I confess I expected someone rather grander than a man in a plain tunic helping his own carpenter set up trestle tables."
"I've found grand mostly gets in the way of useful," Thomas said, and meant it more fully than he had in weeks.
The fair ran long into the evening, torches lit at the crossroads as the last of the visiting merchants packed their wagons and the valley's own people settled into the looser, warmer rhythm of a celebration that had, by any measure, exceeded whatever modest expectations Victoria had first attached to it. Thomas found himself, near the very end of it, standing with Victoria's hand in his own, watching Diccon finally, clumsily, successfully make Elsbeth laugh at something neither of them could hear from this distance, and felt, for the length of that single golden evening, the falling number in his tunic recede into something considerably smaller than the whole wide, ordinary, thriving life it was still, for now, allowing him to witness.
"This is what you meant," he said quietly, to no one in particular. "Building the days instead of mourning the ones I'm afraid of losing."
Victoria, beside him, only smiled, and let the music from Wat's makeshift band carry the rest of the evening without either of them needing to say anything further at all.