Word from Oakhaven arrived by the fastest courier the Crown's own service could provide, and it was grim enough that de Vesci himself rode out to deliver it in person rather than trust it to any letter.
"The city is stricken badly," he said, dismounting at the gate with none of his usual unhurried calm. "Whole streets closed off, the physicians overwhelmed, the Crown's own household moved to a country manor to escape the worst of it. I've come partly as a courtesy, Lord Thomas, and partly, I confess, out of genuine need. Your midwife's fever book has already saved lives in Whitcombe. I would ask whether Argenton can spare anyone with real knowledge of this sickness to help where the need is now considerably greater."
Aldith, summoned to hear the request directly, didn't hesitate the way Thomas half expected her to. "I'll go myself. I've stood in the middle of it once already, at Millbrook, and I learned more standing there than I ever could from secondhand letters. If Oakhaven needs someone who's actually treated this fever rather than merely read about it, I'm the only person in this valley who qualifies."
"You have a household of your own to consider," Victoria said gently, though Thomas could see she already suspected the argument was lost before she'd finished raising it.
"I have a household, and a valley, and a whole March full of people who'll need this knowledge considerably more urgently if it isn't shared properly. I've spent three years building the Codex on the principle that knowledge kept close does less good than knowledge spread wide, Victoria. I'm not going to abandon that principle now, when the stakes have finally grown large enough to matter most."
She left three days later, better prepared this time than her hurried ride to Millbrook — a full case of the herbs and linens the fever house had refined, careful copies of every relevant Codex page, and Diccon, over her initial objection, insisting on accompanying her rather than remain behind worrying uselessly.
The valley settled into another anxious wait, though this one stretched considerably longer than the eight days Millbrook had cost them — three full weeks, during which sporadic letters arrived carrying grim, exhausting accounts of a city fighting a battle considerably larger than any single village's crisis had prepared Aldith for.
The scale of it is difficult to convey properly, she wrote, in a hand Thomas could see, even on the page, had grown shakier with exhaustion since her departure. I have taught six physicians our methods now, and still we lose more than we save, simply because the sickness reached too many households before anyone understood how to slow it. I do not regret coming. I regret only that I did not understand, until I stood in the middle of it, how much larger this danger truly is than anything our own valley has yet faced.
Thomas read the letter aloud to the council with a growing, cold dread he recognized as an echo of his own private fear — the same helpless watching, the same uncertain waiting for news too large and too distant to properly plan around.
"She'll come home when the worst has passed," Victoria said, though her voice carried less certainty than her words. "She promised me that much before she left. I intend to hold her to it."
Aldith and Diccon returned in the fourth week, both of them hollow-eyed and thin in a way that spoke plainly of everything the letters hadn't fully conveyed, and it was Aldith, once the mandatory quarantine period had finally passed, who gave the council her full, unflinching account.
"Oakhaven will recover, in time. It's already recovering, slowly, now that isolation and clean water have finally taken proper hold among the households wealthy enough to manage them. The poorer quarters fared considerably worse, and I won't pretend that outcome was anything but a failure of resources rather than knowledge." Her exhaustion was plain, but so was the hard-won resolve beneath it. "I've left the Codex's full medical section with six physicians now, properly copied, properly explained. If this fever ever reaches this scale again, in this city or any other, they won't be starting from nothing the way we all were."
Thomas found himself, listening to her account, thinking not only of the plague's terrible cost but of the small, growing quire of memory discrepancies still sitting, unresolved, in his own private accounting — two fears now running in uneasy parallel, one widening across an entire kingdom, the other narrowing, slowly and privately, toward whatever ending still waited for him alone.
"You did good work, Aldith," he told her, once the council had finally dispersed. "Difficult, exhausting, necessary work. This valley owes you more than it will ever properly manage to repay."
"I didn't do it for repayment, Thomas. I did it because I couldn't have lived with myself, doing anything less." She managed a tired, genuine smile despite everything the journey had cost her. "Now, if you'll forgive me, I intend to sleep for the better part of a week, and let someone else worry about the valley's problems for once."