The council met within the week to hear Aldith's requests, and Thomas watched her lay them out with a thoroughness that reminded him, uncomfortably, of Victoria's own careful preparations before the siege.
"I want a separate building," she said, spreading a rough sketch across the tally-bench. "Not the schoolhouse, not the undercroft — somewhere apart, that we can close entirely if a fever like the one in Whitcombe ever reaches us here. I want it stocked with clean linen, with the herbs that seemed to ease the two cases we treated before, and with nothing else that the rest of the valley might need urgently enough to risk crossing a quarantine line to reach."
Wat, listening with his usual skepticism tempered by what Thomas recognized as genuine concern, raised the practical objection first. "That's a fair amount of timber and labor for a sickness that hasn't yet reached our own gate."
"It is. I'd rather spend the timber now and never need the building at all, than need it desperately in a season when there's no time left to build it properly." Aldith met his eyes steadily. "You built a trench of quicklime for an enemy that hadn't yet arrived either, Wat. I'm asking for the same courtesy against one considerably harder to see coming."
That settled it more thoroughly than any further argument could have, and the building went up within a fortnight, plain and sturdy on a rise well apart from the main cluster of the town, close enough to reach quickly and far enough to close off entirely should the need ever arise.
Hamo, drawing on both his old Church training and his newer habit of careful record-keeping, proposed the second measure — a formal watch, modeled loosely on Elias's tower rotation, in which every household reported, weekly, any fever or unusual illness among its members, whether serious or not.
"Most will be nothing," he acknowledged, presenting the plan to the council. "A child's ordinary summer cough, an old woman's winter chill. But if the fever Aldith fears does arrive, I would rather have a full season of ordinary reports to compare it against, so the first true case stands out clearly rather than vanishing into the ordinary noise of a valley's usual small complaints."
Victoria, reviewing the whole plan with her usual careful eye, added the third measure herself, quietly, over supper that evening rather than in open council.
"I want the road watch extended," she told Thomas. "Not for enemies this time. For travelers. If a caravan comes up from the south carrying more than cloth and spices, I want to know before it reaches the crossroads, not after half the valley's already traded with it."
"You're describing a quarantine before we've had a single case."
"I'm describing exactly what Aldith and Hamo have already been describing, Thomas, in the language I happen to think in rather than the language they do." She looked at him, and something in her steady, determined face carried the same weight he'd seen in her the night she'd first learned of the falling number. "We had warning about the fire, and used it. We had warning about the siege, and survived it. I don't intend to waste the one piece of warning we've somehow been given about something this much larger, simply because it hasn't yet arrived to frighten us properly."
Thomas found himself, working alongside Wat's crew to finish the fever house's roof two days later, thinking less of his own falling number than he had in weeks — the wider, colder shape of Aldith's fear crowding out, for once, the private grief he'd been carrying since Oakhaven. He understood, hammering shingles into place beside men who had once built a trench to burn an invading army, that the valley was doing now, calmly and methodically, exactly what it had always done best: preparing honestly for a danger it couldn't yet fully see, rather than waiting, frightened and unready, for the danger to announce itself on its own terms.
He hoped, watching the last shingle settle into place, that it would prove enough. He understood, with the same cold clarity that had followed him since the first falling number, that hope alone had never once been sufficient protection against anything the world had yet thrown at this valley, and saw no particular reason to expect this danger would prove the exception.