The physician's apprentice who had studied under Hamo the previous summer sent his first proper letter in early autumn, and it was Aldith who read it aloud at the schoolhouse, her voice growing steadily more careful as she worked through its contents.
Your remedies have served well here in Whitcombe, the young man had written, and I have taught two other apprentices what you showed me, so the knowledge no longer rests with me alone. I write now, though, not to report success, but to ask a question I do not know how to answer myself. Three households near the river quarter have shown a fever these past two weeks that matches nothing in your book precisely — slow onset, rose-colored marks upon the chest, a wasting decline that has, in two of the three cases, ended in death within the month. I recall you once mentioned, in passing, that Argenton had seen something similar and thought it worth watching closely. I would be glad of whatever guidance your own experience can offer, as I confess this fever frightens me more than any I have yet treated.
Aldith set the letter down, and the schoolhouse, crowded that afternoon with parents and children both, went very quiet.
"That's the fever," Thomas said, before he could stop himself. "The one you and I found two winters ago. The old man near the mill, the weaver's daughter."
"The very same, by every detail he describes." Aldith's face had gone carefully composed, the particular flat stillness Thomas recognized from every genuinely serious crisis she'd ever faced. "Both our cases recovered, eventually. His have not, in two instances out of three. I don't know whether that means Whitcombe's version is simply crueler, or whether we were fortunate rather than skilled the first time, and haven't yet met the fever in its truest, most dangerous form."
Hamo, listening with his old scholar's care, voiced the fear none of the rest of them had yet named aloud. "You believe this is the beginning of something larger."
"I believe I don't know enough to say either way, and that not knowing frightens me considerably more than a clear answer would." Aldith looked around at the gathered crowd, and made, visibly, the decision to speak plainly rather than soften what she didn't yet understand. "I want every household in this valley to tell me immediately if anyone shows a fever with marks like these — not wait, not hope it passes on its own. I would rather chase down twenty false alarms than miss the one that matters."
Thomas found himself walking to the garden that evening with a different weight settled over him than the one he'd been carrying these past months — not his own falling number this time, but something wider, colder, a shape he half-recognized from a lesson learned in a different life, in a different world, about a sickness that had once emptied whole cities before anyone understood how to stop it.
Victoria found him there, as she always did, and read the trouble in his face before he'd said a word.
"You know what this is," she said. "Properly. Not just the symptoms Aldith's already recorded."
"I think I might. I'm not certain. I never was certain, even at home — it was history to me there, something read about rather than lived through, and the details blur more than I'd like to admit." He looked at her, and found the honesty came harder this time than it had with Genoa, or with the anchor's falling number, because this fear touched not only him but every soul in the valley he'd spent three years learning to love. "If it's what I think it is, Victoria, it's not a fever that stays contained to a single river quarter in Whitcombe. It's the kind that moves through a whole kingdom, given enough time and enough crowded roads to travel along."
Victoria was quiet a long moment, and when she finally spoke, her voice carried the same steady, determined clarity she'd brought to every crisis the valley had yet survived. "Then we have warning that most of this Kingdom won't get, Thomas. That's not nothing. That's considerably more than most places will have when it reaches them." She took his hand. "Whatever it is, we'll face it the same way we've faced everything else. Together, and honestly, and considerably better prepared than the fear alone would have you believe."
He held onto that, watching the last light fade over a valley that had survived fire and siege and a founder's own private terror, and hoped, without quite believing it yet, that preparation would prove enough against a danger considerably larger than any single Baron's private army had ever managed to be.