It was Wat, unexpectedly, who came to Thomas a week after Signora Beatrice's departure, carrying the small, private quire he'd dictated to Hamo months before and had refused, until now, to let anyone read.
"I want you to have this," he said, setting it on the tally-bench with the particular gruff discomfort he brought to anything resembling sentiment. "Not to read now. After. Whenever after turns out to mean, for either of us. I've thought about it since that woman left, watching how carefully we all had to work to protect what we've built, and I decided I'd rather you have my words while I'm still certain I mean them, than leave you guessing at what I'd have wanted said."
Thomas didn't open it, respecting the clear weight of the request, though he found himself deeply moved by the gesture regardless. "You don't have to explain what's in it, Wat."
"I know I don't. I'm going to anyway, because I've never been a man who trusted paper to say a thing properly without a voice behind it to make certain it landed." Wat settled onto the bench across from him, his weathered face unusually open. "I wrote about my wife. I've never spoken of her to you, nor to most of this valley — she died before I ever came to serve the old manor, fever, same as claims half the March eventually. I loved her considerably more than I've ever let show, and I buried that love in iron and forge-work for near twenty years rather than risk feeling it again with anyone else."
"I didn't know."
"Few do. I've never seen the use in advertising an old grief to people who can't do anything useful about it." Wat's voice, when it continued, carried something rawer than Thomas had ever heard from him. "I wrote, in that quire, that coming to this valley taught me to feel things again that I'd spent two decades keeping carefully buried. Not just the grief. The whole of it — anger, and hope, and whatever this is I feel watching Diccon marry a girl he loves properly, in front of the whole town, unafraid to let anyone see it. I used to think that kind of open feeling was foolish. I've come to think it's the bravest thing a person can manage."
Thomas found himself without an easy response, moved by an admission he understood had cost the blacksmith more than almost anything else Wat had done in three years of steady, grim competence. "Thank you for trusting me with that, even secondhand."
"I'm not finished." Wat's jaw tightened, and he pressed on before his own reluctance could stop him. "I wrote something else, too. About you. About watching a frightened stranger become the man who built this whole valley, brick by careful brick, without ever once losing the part of himself that still worried more about the people in it than the credit for building it. I've watched a great many men rise to power in my life, Thomas. Most of them lose themselves somewhere in the climbing. You haven't. Whatever that falling number in your tunic eventually costs you, I wanted it written somewhere, in my own hand, that I watched you build something worth the cost, and that I was glad, every single day, to have been standing beside you while you did it."
Thomas felt his own composure waver, something in his chest tightening at the unexpected, hard-won warmth of it. "Wat—"
"Don't." The blacksmith rose abruptly, uncomfortable now that the words were spent, already retreating toward the familiar safety of gruffness. "I've said my piece. I'll not stand here and watch either of us turn maudlin over it. Keep the quire safe. That's all I'm asking."
He left before Thomas could properly thank him, and Thomas sat alone at the tally-bench a long while afterward, the small, private book resting unopened before him, understanding that whatever the falling number eventually took from him, it had already, somehow, given him considerably more than he'd ever expected to receive from a stranger's own careful, guarded heart.