Lord Rathbourne had not answered a single one of Elias's letters in four months, and it was Alaric, reviewing the stalled negotiation over the tower site on his land, who finally proposed the obvious, uncomfortable solution.
"He fought beside the old Baron twice, as I told you when this began," Alaric said, spreading Elias's survey map across the tally-bench. "He will not answer letters from a valley he still privately considers an upstart's fiction, however much the Crown itself has since confirmed otherwise. He will, however, answer a visit from someone he cannot simply pretend not to have received."
"You want to go yourself."
"I want you to come with me, Lord Thomas. Not for negotiation — I can handle terms and tolls well enough on my own by now. I want him to look at the man he's been ignoring and understand, in the way only a face-to-face meeting ever truly accomplishes, that the valley he's dismissed as beneath his notice is considerably more than the rumor he's decided to believe instead."
They rode out three days later, a small enough party not to alarm anyone — Thomas, Alaric, and Elias himself, who insisted on coming to defend his own stalled survey work in person rather than leave it to secondhand argument. Rathbourne's hall, when they reached it, proved considerably shabbier than its lord's reputation for stubbornness had led Thomas to expect — a minor holding, its roof patched more than once, its lord himself a heavyset, weathered man in his sixties who received them with the particular wary courtesy of someone who suspected he was about to be asked for something he didn't want to give.
"The upstart lord himself," Rathbourne said, by way of greeting, settling into a chair that had clearly seen better decades. "I confess I expected someone rather more impressive, given the stories."
"I've found impressive mostly gets in the way of useful, my lord," Thomas said, echoing, without quite meaning to, the same line he'd offered the cloth merchant at the fair.
Rathbourne's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "That's a more honest answer than I expected from a man who supposedly speaks with the voice of some hidden power." He gestured for them to sit. "I fought beside your former Baron twice, and watched him lose both fights he actually needed to win, and I have no particular love left for the man or his memory. I have simply found, in my considerable experience of new lords with grand promises, that the ones who come asking for a piece of my land rarely leave my land better for having taken it."
"I'm not asking for your land, my lord. I'm asking to build a single tower on a ridge you're not currently using, in exchange for toll revenue on every message that passes through it, and priority access to a road network that will, within two years, make this holding considerably easier to reach than it's ever been in your lifetime." Thomas met the old lord's skeptical gaze steadily. "I understand you have no reason to trust my word alone. I'd ask you, instead, to send someone of your own choosing to see the valley itself before you decide. Let your own eyes report back to you, rather than a stranger's rumor."
Rathbourne considered that for a long moment, his weathered face unreadable, and it was Elias, unable to contain himself any longer, who finally spoke.
"I have surveyed twenty miles of this March in the last two years, my lord, and I will tell you plainly that your ridge is the single best sightline in the whole stretch. I do not flatter lords for sport. I am telling you the honest truth of your own land's worth, because I would rather you understand what you're actually sitting on than continue believing it's worth nothing simply because no one troubled to survey it properly before now."
Something in the mapmaker's blunt, uncalculated sincerity seemed to land where Thomas's own careful diplomacy hadn't quite managed to reach. Rathbourne studied Elias a long moment, then gave a short, gruff laugh.
"You, at least, I believe." He waved a hand, dismissive in the manner of a man who'd finally decided a matter was settled and saw no further use in dwelling on it. "Send your engineers. Build your tower. I'll want the toll terms in writing, properly witnessed, and I'll want your mapmaker back within the year to survey the rest of my holding besides — if it's worth as much as he claims, I'd rather know the truth of it than keep guessing."
They rode home in good spirits, the negotiation's sudden, unexpected ease settling into something like relief, and it was Alaric, watching Elias ride ahead of them still visibly pleased with himself, who offered the observation that stayed with Thomas longest on the ride back.
"You've built something in that man that neither charters nor titles ever could, Lord Thomas," he said. "A mapmaker who tells a suspicious old lord the plain truth of his own land, and is believed for it, is worth considerably more to this valley's future than any diplomat I could have trained in eleven years of court service."