Elsbeth's news reached the tally-bench before Diccon himself worked up the courage to share it properly, Aldith having guessed the truth during an ordinary visit and, with Elsbeth's laughing permission, let it slip to Victoria over a shared afternoon of ledger work.
Diccon found Thomas at the rail yard that evening, still visibly working up to the announcement even though it was clear, from his barely contained grin, that the secret had already traveled well ahead of him.
"Elsbeth's expecting," he said finally, the words tumbling out in a rush. "Come summer, Aldith thinks. I don't — I don't entirely know what to do with myself, Thomas. I've spent three years learning to run a printing press and read a ledger and stand among the Disciples like I belonged there. I don't feel prepared for this at all."
Thomas set down the tool he'd been using to check the rail switch's repaired mechanism, and found himself smiling more fully than he had in weeks, the letter's small, unresolved dread receding, for a moment, beneath the plain, uncomplicated joy of the news. "I don't think anyone feels prepared for it, Diccon. I certainly didn't feel prepared for half of what this valley's asked of me, and I built most of it from nothing at all."
"Did it get easier? Feeling unprepared, I mean."
"No. I don't think it ever gets easier, exactly. I think you just get more practice carrying it." Thomas clapped him on the shoulder, the gesture carrying more warmth than either of them entirely expected. "You'll be a good father, Diccon. I've watched you grow from a boy demonstrating buoyancy for a delegation of scholars into a man half this valley trusts with its own history. Whatever this child needs from you, I don't doubt for a moment you'll find a way to give it."
The news spread through the valley with the particular warm speed of genuinely good gossip, and it was Wat, arriving at the printing press the following morning with a small, roughly forged iron token — a tiny, crude horse, no larger than a thumb — who offered the gesture that moved Diccon more than any words could have.
"For the child," Wat said gruffly, setting it on the press without ceremony. "Every child in this valley ought to have something forged by the man who built its roads, before it's old enough to understand what any of that means. I made one for you, once, though you were too young to remember it. Your mother kept it, before she passed. I imagine it's somewhere in your own belongings still, if you've ever troubled to look."
Diccon, visibly moved, could only manage a rough thanks before Wat waved him off, uncomfortable as ever with open sentiment, and retreated back toward the forge with the particular brisk pace of a man escaping his own soft heart before anyone could properly examine it.
Thomas found Victoria in the garden that evening, the season's first hardy shoots already pushing up through soil that had, by now, seen four full years of careful tending, and told her the news properly, watching her face light with a warmth that briefly outshone even her own careful composure.
"A child in this valley," she said. "Growing up not knowing any world but this one — the towers, the rail line, the Codex already thick with three generations' worth of careful knowledge before they're even born into it." She looked at Thomas, something soft and hopeful in her expression that he hadn't seen in some time. "I find I envy that child a little, Thomas. Growing up inside something already built, rather than having to build it themselves from nothing, the way we did."
"I think they'll build their own things too, eventually. Every generation finds something new to build, even standing on ground someone else already cleared for them." Thomas took her hand, watching the last light fade gold over a valley that had, despite every fear still sitting quietly in his own tunic, somehow found room to keep growing, keep hoping, keep welcoming new life into its careful, hard-won peace. "I like the thought of it, though. A child who'll never know the valley as anything other than exactly this — safe, and thriving, and full of people who love each other enough to keep building it better."
They stood together in the garden a long while, the small, unresolved dread of the letter's wrongness sitting quietly beneath the evening's genuine joy, and Thomas found, for the length of that one hopeful evening at least, that the good news carried more weight than the fear did, however evenly the two of them had learned, this past difficult year, to hold both at once.