Corradino returned in high summer, this time announced well in advance and welcomed openly at the gate, carrying a formal proposal from his house sealed with considerably more ceremony than his first unwilling visit had ever involved.
"My employers wish to establish a permanent trading factor here," he said, laying the document across the tally-bench with the particular careful pride of a man delivering news he genuinely believed in. "Not merely occasional caravans. A standing arrangement — Argenton's scrip accepted at fixed exchange in three of our house's own ports, and in return, first right of purchase on anything new your Codex produces that might interest a wider market. Medicine, chiefly. My house has already lost two factors to fever in Genoa this past year alone."
Victoria read the terms twice, her expression carefully neutral in the particular way Thomas had learned meant she was already three steps into a negotiation she hadn't yet spoken aloud. "First right of purchase is not the same as exclusive right. I want that distinction written plainly, Corradino, or I want no arrangement at all."
"I expected you would." Something that might have been respect crossed his composed face. "My house understands the difference, my lady. We are not asking to own your knowledge. We are asking to be first in line to benefit from it honestly, which I believe is a rather different proposition than the one your other watchers came here hoping to steal."
Hamo, reviewing the medical clauses with his old scholar's care, raised the concern none of the rest of them had yet voiced aloud. "A fever remedy shared with Genoa will not remain Genoa's secret for long. Word travels along trade routes considerably faster than either of us can control, once it begins moving at all."
"That's precisely the point, Hamo," Thomas said, understanding it fully himself only as he said it aloud. "I've spent three years arguing that knowledge freely shared outlives knowledge hoarded. I can't make that argument honestly to my own valley and then refuse it the moment it means sharing with a stranger city three hundred miles away. If Genoa's physicians save children the same way Aldith saves ours, that's not a loss to us. That's the whole point finally working the way I always hoped it would."
Victoria looked at him for a long moment, something warm and complicated in her expression. "You've changed since Oakhaven, Thomas. I don't mean the fear. I mean this — the ease with which you just gave away something most lords would have hoarded jealously for the advantage of it."
"Maybe I've stopped believing I have unlimited time to hoard anything." He said it plainly, without the weight it might once have carried, and found, watching her absorb it, that the honesty between them had grown easier the more they'd practiced it these past difficult months. "I'd rather this valley's knowledge outlive me spread wide than die with me guarded close."
They signed the agreement three days later, Corradino's own careful hand witnessing the seal alongside Victoria's, and it was Aldith, informed of the medical clauses once the ink was dry, who offered the reaction Thomas found himself thinking of longest.
"Children in Genoa I will never meet, saved by a book I helped write," she said, turning the news over with visible wonder. "I used to think my whole use in this world was the patients standing in front of me. I'm only now understanding how much further a well-kept record can actually reach."
Corradino left the following morning with the signed agreement carefully sealed against his chest, and Thomas watched him go, thinking not of trade routes or exchange rates but of a fever book grown from a midwife's careful shorthand into something that would soon, if all went as hoped, be saving lives in a city none of them had ever seen — a small, quiet kind of permanence that no falling number in his own tunic could ever fully undo.