Sir Roger de Vesci visited the valley properly for the first time as its new March lord in early spring, and the difference between this visit and his first, Thomas thought, watching him dismount at the gate without ceremony, could not have been more complete.
"I find myself in the odd position," de Vesci said, once the formal courtesies had been exchanged, "of governing a March whose most remarkable holding I already know rather better than most of my other tenants, having stood at an old woman's grave here before I ever held the authority to properly protect it." He looked around at the gathered welcome — Wat, Alaric, Victoria, the whole council assembled with considerably less anxiety than the Baron's own arrival had once produced. "I confess I find it a considerably more pleasant duty than I expected, riding out to see a town that greets me as an ally rather than a threat."
The council meeting that followed was, by any measure, the easiest formal negotiation the valley had yet conducted — de Vesci arriving not to extract concessions or test loyalty, but to genuinely understand what the town needed from its new lord, and what it might, in turn, offer the wider March that had spent so long treating it with suspicion.
"I've heard of your fever preparations," he said, when Aldith presented the council's careful protocols. "I would ask, if you're willing, that you share them with the rest of my holdings as well. I lost two tenants to an unexplained fever last autumn, in a village considerably less prepared than yours to recognize the danger."
"We'd share them gladly, my lord," Aldith said. "I only wish we'd had them ready sooner ourselves."
Alaric, who had spent the visit largely quiet, watching his old adversary's replacement with the particular careful assessment of a man who had learned, painfully, not to trust a lord's good manners at face value, finally spoke as the meeting drew toward its close. "You govern differently than the man you replaced, my lord, if I may say so."
"I govern differently because I watched what his manner of governing eventually cost him," de Vesci said plainly. "A lord who treats his most productive tenants as threats to be contained rather than resources to be supported ends up, eventually, exactly where he ended up — stripped of everything, replaced by someone with better sense. I do not intend to make the same mistake, castellan, whatever it costs my own pride to learn from another man's failure rather than my own."
He stayed through the evening, sharing an unpretentious supper with the council rather than demanding any grander welcome, and it was Thomas, walking him back to his waiting escort at the end of the visit, who finally raised the question that had been sitting quietly at the back of his own thoughts through the whole friendly exchange.
"You could have simply confirmed our charter and left us alone, my lord. Most lords in your position would have. Why come yourself, twice now, rather than govern from a distance the way custom would allow?"
De Vesci considered the question a long moment before answering, his weathered face thoughtful in the fading light. "Because I have sat in judgment of enough disputes in this March to understand that the lords who govern well are the ones who understand, firsthand, what they're actually governing — not merely the parchment record of it, but the people, the ground, the particular texture of a place's own hard-won character." He mounted his horse, looking down at Thomas with something that might almost have been genuine respect. "You built something remarkable here, Lord Thomas, out of nothing but careful work and honest dealing. I would be a poor lord indeed if I governed it from a comfortable distance, never troubling to understand what made it worth protecting in the first place."
He rode out into the gathering dusk, his modest escort trailing behind him, and Thomas stood at the gate a long while afterward, thinking that whatever the falling number eventually cost him, the valley had, at least, finally found itself under the stewardship of a lord who understood exactly what it had taken to build something worth this much careful protecting.