The second letter from the physician's apprentice in Whitcombe arrived in early autumn, and this time Aldith read it alone in her own small room before she trusted herself to share its contents with anyone else.
She found Thomas and Victoria at the tally-bench that evening, her composed professional stillness visibly costing her more than usual to maintain. "It's spread beyond the river quarter," she said, without preamble. "Two more villages along the Whitcombe road, and word — secondhand, uncertain, but consistent enough across several sources that I don't think it's simply rumor — of similar cases further south, closer to Oakhaven itself."
"How bad?" Thomas asked, though some cold, certain part of him already suspected the answer.
"Worse than our own two early cases. The apprentice writes of entire households lost within a fortnight, in the worst instances. He asks again for guidance I don't fully have to give him — we know how it presents, a little of how it spreads, almost nothing about how to actually stop it once it takes hold properly." Aldith's hands, folded carefully in her lap, betrayed a tremor she was otherwise managing to suppress. "I've written back everything I know. It isn't much. Clean water, isolation of the sick, burning rather than burying what the sickness has touched most heavily. I don't know if any of it will actually matter once it reaches the scale he's describing."
Victoria's expression had gone the particular flat, determined stillness Thomas recognized from every crisis she'd ever faced. "We keep our own preparations exactly as they are. The fever house, the road watch, the weekly reports. If it reaches us, I want us meeting it with everything we've already built, not scrambling to build it in the panic of the moment."
"And if it doesn't reach us?" Diccon asked, having arrived partway through the conversation, Elsbeth beside him, both of them visibly frightened by what they were overhearing.
"Then we've spent a season's labor on preparation we didn't strictly need, and I will count that a fair trade against the alternative every single time." Victoria's voice carried no room for argument. "I would rather this valley be the place in this whole March that survived because it was ready, than the place that mourns, afterward, everything it could have done differently."
Thomas found himself thinking, in the days that followed, of a lesson half-remembered from a different world — plague years that had emptied whole cities, changed the shape of entire kingdoms, and he understood, turning the fragments over in his own uncertain memory, that he possessed knowledge here that could matter more than anything he'd yet built, if only he could recall it clearly enough, and share it honestly enough, before the sickness arrived at their own gate to test every preparation they'd made against it.
He spent three evenings in the undercroft, writing everything he could remember into a new section of the Codex — imperfect, uncertain, hedged with every caveat his own fading memory demanded, but offered honestly regardless, in the hope that even incomplete knowledge, carefully shared, might prove better than none at all.
Hamo, reviewing the new pages with his old scholar's care, offered the assessment that stayed with Thomas longest that difficult season.
"You write with more uncertainty here than I have ever seen from you, Thomas," he said. "Every other section of this Codex speaks with the quiet confidence of a man who has already tested what he's recording. This reads like a man grasping at half-remembered fragments, terrified of getting something wrong that matters more than anything he's gotten right before."
"That's exactly what it is."
"Then I would ask you to write the uncertainty plainly alongside the knowledge, rather than trying to disguise it as confidence you don't actually possess. A physician who trusts an uncertain remedy as though it were certain does more harm than one who says, honestly, 'I am not sure, but here is what little I know.'" Hamo's steady, patient gaze held his. "You have taught this valley, for three years, that honest uncertainty serves better than false confidence. I would ask you to trust that lesson now, when the stakes are higher than they have ever been."
Thomas took the counsel to heart, rewriting the pages with every caveat properly, plainly stated, and found, doing so, that the honesty cost him less comfort but offered, in its place, something considerably more valuable — the quiet, hard-won conviction that whatever came for the valley next, it would meet an honest accounting of what its people actually knew, rather than a false certainty built to comfort rather than to genuinely protect.