The fever reached Millbrook, a small weaving village two days south along the new road, in the first hard frost of early winter, and it was the village's own reeve, remembering Aldith's careful letters from months before, who sent word north before the sickness had spread beyond its first few households.
Aldith rode out herself within the hour, against Thomas's initial objection and Victoria's carefully reasoned one, taking only Diccon and a small supply of clean linen and the herbs that had eased their own two early cases years before.
"Someone who actually understands this fever needs to see it firsthand," she said, already mounting before either of them could finish arguing. "I can write instructions from a safe distance forever, Thomas, and instructions written blind help less than instructions written by someone who's actually stood in the room with it. I'll keep my distance from anyone already sickened, and I'll come home the moment I've learned what I need to learn. I am not going to hide behind our own fever house while an entire village burns through what little we know how to teach them."
She was gone eight days, and the valley spent them in a state of tense, quiet dread that Thomas recognized, uncomfortably, as an echo of the fear he'd carried privately for the better part of a year now — waiting, helpless, for news of something too large and too uncertain to properly plan around.
She returned gaunt and hollow-eyed, having slept little in the whole eight days, and it was three more days before she trusted herself close enough to the rest of the valley to report what she'd learned, insisting on her own quarantine at the fever house despite showing no symptoms herself.
"Twelve dead, of forty stricken," she told the council, once the waiting period had finally passed. "Considerably better than it might have been, I believe, though I have no clean way to prove that against what would have happened without any intervention at all. Isolation helped. Clean water helped. The herbs eased suffering more than they cured anything outright, which matches what we already suspected from our own two cases years ago." Her voice, still rough with exhaustion, carried a hard-won, weary authority that hadn't been there before the journey. "I've written everything I learned into the Codex. Every detail, every failure alongside every small success. I don't have a cure, Thomas. I don't believe anyone in this Kingdom has a cure. What I have is a considerably better understanding of how to survive it, and I intend to make certain this valley has every scrap of that understanding before it ever needs it firsthand."
Wat, listening with visible relief that she'd returned at all, voiced the practical fear that had clearly been building in him through the whole anxious wait. "You could have died out there, Aldith. Twelve households, and you rode straight into the middle of it."
"I could have. I very nearly convinced myself not to go, that first hour, out of exactly that fear." Aldith met his eyes steadily. "I decided the risk was worth it, Wat, because I've spent three years building this town's knowledge instead of hoarding it, and I wasn't prepared to let a village two days south die in ignorance simply because I was afraid of what I might learn standing close enough to actually help them properly."
Thomas found himself, listening to her account, thinking of his own private fear — the falling number, the quiet dread of an ending he couldn't fully see coming — and understood, watching Aldith's exhausted, hard-won composure, that she had just demonstrated the same lesson Hamo had once counseled him toward, in a form considerably braver than his own quiet, private reckoning had yet managed.
"You didn't have to go yourself," he told her privately, after the council had dispersed. "You could have sent the knowledge without risking yourself alongside it."
"I could have. I don't think it would have helped as much, or taught me as much, or meant as much to the families I sat with in their worst hours." Aldith's exhausted face carried something Thomas recognized, uncomfortably, as a mirror of his own resolve. "You've spent this whole year learning to build the days instead of mourning the ones you're afraid of losing, Thomas. I went to Millbrook because I decided the same lesson applied to me. If this fever ever reaches our own gate properly, I'd rather have stood close enough to it once already to know what I'm actually facing, than meet it here for the first time with nothing but secondhand letters to guide me."
Thomas held onto that, watching her finally head home to a well-earned rest, and thought that whatever the coming winter still held in store for either of them, the valley had, once again, proven itself carried forward not by any single person's careful planning, but by the quiet, stubborn courage of the people who had chosen, again and again, to meet its dangers honestly rather than from a safe and comfortable distance.